"He who would valiant be
Gainst all disaster
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master
There's no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal stories
Do but themselves confound
His strength the more is.
No Foes shall stay his might,
Though he with giants fight:
He will make good his right
To be a pilgrim
Since Lord, Thou doest defend
Us with Thy Spirit,
We know we at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away!
I'll fear not what men say,
I'll labor night and day
To be a pilgrim
Twenty years or so ago it was said that the seventeenth century tinker turned preacher John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was....next to the Bible....the biggest selling book of all time. I don't know if that is still the case.....but it still is the case that Bunyan's book has never been out of print since originally published in 1678!
Charles Spurgeon has stated that he read The Pilgrim's Progress one-hundred times over his life. I would think that there must be a correlation between that and that he is called....the Prince of Preachers. I know that I have listened to over a hundred Spurgeon sermons over the past few years because I listen to them three and four times a week....along with three and four Martyn Lloyd-Jones sermons....many of them three and four and five times each.
I'm not going to estimate other than to say the I have read The Pilgrim's Progress many times....and listened to it on tape many times....and listened to Derek Thomas lectures on the entire book many times....and watched the few animated films on it many times.
It is said that Field Marshal Bernard 'Monty' Montgomery carried the book with him while soldiering throughout WWII....along with of course the Bible. Margaret Thatcher requested that the hymn To Be A Pilgrim....using Bunyan's words....put to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams....be played at her funeral....of which you can easily Google.
Unfortunately we as a church are not really into reading old books like The Pilgrim's Progress today....or the great Puritan literature....or even biographies of great pilgrims of the church. I am in Barnes & Noble probably fifty times a year....as it is almost a weekly trip that I make....and each time I am in the....Religion....section.....formerly called the....Christian Literature....section. In the average B&N there are probably hundreds if not a thousand 'Christian' books. These are the books that we read today....light....therapeutic....fanciful....egregiously speculative at times....with C. S. Lewis always at least represented....along with a small handful of other books that might actually have edifying merit or the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is just who we are today. For every book like R. C. Sproul's The Holiness of God....or Packer's....Knowing God....there are hundreds of books like.....The Shack....or....a book on someone's trip to heaven,
OK.....I've gone further in this than I intended.....for what I wanted to do was bring up one passage of The Pilgrim's Progress. In this passage.....Christian and Hopeful....are nearing the end of their pilgrimage. Christian looks upon the rocky path that is ahead and cannot see a problem with hopping the fence and following along on soft grass rather than rocky ground. Well the two paths paralleled each other for a while but then the two pilgrims....soldiers for Christ....took some bad advice and got lost. Some people today have a winter home in Florida. Well I have a timeshare so to speak....and I have gone there at times during the winter of my mind. It's called....Doubting Castle....and is run by an ogre called Giant Despair. It's not a place where one doubts the central beliefs of the gospel....but where one doubts that God....for one reason or another....will save him out of this despair.
If you have never stayed at Doubting Castle then I would think that you are one of the fortunate few. The advertisements for the grassy meadows or the sandy beaches were great....but it always turns out to be a nightmare.
So Christian and Hopeful found themselves in that dungeon because of Christian's mistake in choosing to follow a smoother path....and they thought that they would never get out. Giant Despair tried to get them to take their own life....but Christian remembered a promise. Maybe it was....."I will never leave thee or forsake thee."? It could have been any one of many promises that we may memorize but never bring to mind when needed.
Are you in that Doubting Castle right now? Is Giant Despair beating you? Well if you would look in the direction from which you came....way off in the distance....you might see the smoke from your hometown of the City of Destruction....burning? If you look in the direction where you were headed....you might spy out the Celestial City.....and see it brighter than it has ever looked to you?
Didn't your pastor tell you this? Didn't he warn you to stay on the straight path? You have a key....so use it....and when you get back on the path that you should have been on....read Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress....and if your pastor isn't preaching like this....then Google Spurgeon or Martyn Lloyd-Jones....or John Piper....and listen to their sermons until you find a pastor who does know Bunyan's description on directions to the Celestial City.
Note: The title of this post is a play on words from a 1974 John le Carre' spy novel....Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
