You Must Read (John Bunyan) -F. Cook

With Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658 and Charles II established on the throne in 1660, such preaching quickly aroused the antagonism of local magistrates and clerics alike. In November 1660 [John] Bunyan was arrested, brought to trial and imprisoned for lay preaching and for refusing to worship at a local parish church. From the age of thirty-two until he was forty-four, he languished in Bedford Jail, rat-infested, crowded, stinking, and cold, having to leave his wife and his four small children without support.

…Yet these very circumstances have given us today the priceless heritage of Bunyan’s writings, enriching and encouraging generations of the Lord’s people. Yet it was not easy….

But in spite of his suffering John Bunyan gives us a key to his endurance – a most vital key for our day:

I was made to see that if ever I would suffer rightly I must first pass a sentence of death upon everything that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all as dead to me and myself as dead to them.

On its own this would seem a somewhat negative concept, but Bunyan hastily adds his secret of endurance, for instead of these human comforts he was learning ‘to live upon God that is invisible.’ And the reward was great, for as Bunyan discovered through his twelve long years of imprisonment,

He [God] can make those things that in themselves are most fearful and terrible to behold, the most pleasant, delightful and desirable things. He can make a gaol more beautiful than a palace… He can so sweeten our sufferings with the honey of his word… and [make it] so easy by the spreading of his feathers over us that we will not be able to say that in all the world a more comfortable position can be found.

Taken from You Must Read: Books That Have Shaped Our Lives (Banner of Truth, 2015), Chapter 2, “The Works of John Bunyan” by Faith Cook, pp.11-12.