Few Equals

“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” — 1 Timothy 1:15 (KJV)

John Bunyan was born in 1628 in Elstow, a village near Bedford in the middle of England. His father mended pots and pans for a living, and Bunyan never pretended his family was anything special: “my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land.” His parents sent him to school long enough to learn to read and write, and then, he admits, “I did soon lose that little I learned.”

He wrote this book in 1666, from a prison cell in Bedford, for the people who had come to faith through his preaching. He called it Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and it is one of the most honest books any Christian has written about the inside of his own head. He promised to tell it straight, with no fancy style: “God did not play in convincing of me, the devil did not play in tempting of me, neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit.” So, he said, he would “be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was.”

As a boy, by his own account, he was a champion swearer. He had “but few equals, especially considering my years, which were tender, being few, both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God.” And yet at nine or ten he was having nightmares about devils trying to drag him away, and lying awake terrified of the day of judgment. He was so scared of hell that he wished “either that there had been no hell, or that I had been a devil,” because then at least he would be the one doing the tormenting. That is a strange, dark thought for a ten-year-old. He told it anyway.

The nightmares faded, and so did the fear. “My pleasures did quickly cut off the remembrance of them, as if they had never been.” By his late teens he was “the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company, into all manner of vice and ungodliness.” He couldn't stand religion. Watching someone read a Christian book felt to him “as it were a prison.”

Still, something in him expected more of believers than he expected of himself. Once, when he heard a man known as religious swear an oath, “it had so great a stroke upon my spirit, that it made my heart to ache.”

Several times he nearly died. He fell into a creek of the sea and “hardly escaped drowning.” He fell out of a boat into the river at Bedford. He stunned an adder with a stick, forced its mouth open, and pulled out what he took to be its sting with his fingers. As a teenage soldier in Parliament's army during the English Civil War, he was picked to go to a siege, but another man asked to go in his place. “Coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot into the head with a musket bullet, and died.”

Bunyan's verdict on all of it is short: “Here, as I said, were judgments and mercy, but neither of them did awaken my soul to righteousness.” Close calls don't change a heart on their own. Plenty of people walk away from a crash or a scare and go straight back to how they were. He did.

Notice two things about how this book begins. First, Bunyan does not make himself look good. He is writing to people who look up to him, and he opens with his swearing and his nightmares. Second, the fear he felt as a child did not make him good. Fear can make you miserable without making you different. What finally changes Bunyan is not terror but grace, and this whole book is the story of how long it took him to believe that grace was for him.

One thing to do this week: think of a close call or a real scare in your own life. Write down one sentence about it, and then answer honestly: did it change anything in me, or did I go straight back? There's no wrong answer. Bunyan's honesty starts with exactly that kind of question.