Wilt Thou Leave Thy Sins?

“Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” — Isaiah 55:7 (KJV)

At about twenty Bunyan married. He doesn't tell us his wife's name, and nobody now knows it for certain. They were so poor they didn't have “so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.” But she brought two Christian books her father had left her, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety, and the two of them sometimes read them together. She often told him what a godly man her father had been.

It didn't reach his heart, but it gave him a taste for religion of the respectable kind. He went to church twice a day, “and that too with the foremost,” and sang and prayed with great devotion, “yet retaining my wicked life.” He was so impressed by the church building, the priest and the robes that he could have lain down and let the priest walk on him. He even asked his father whether their family might be descended from the Israelites, God's chosen people, hoping that would make him safe. His father said no.

Then one Sunday the parson preached about keeping the Sabbath, and about the wrong of spending it on sport. Sunday was exactly when Bunyan did his worst. He went home “with a great burden upon my spirit,” feeling, for the first time he could remember, what guilt was. It lasted until about lunchtime. “But oh! how glad was I, that this trouble was gone from me, and that the fire was put out, that I might sin again without control!”

That same afternoon he was playing a game called cat, a bit like a mix of cricket and rounders, where you hit a small piece of wood with a stick. He had just hit it once and was about to hit it again when, he says, “a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?'” He dropped the stick and looked up, and it seemed to him that he saw Jesus looking down at him, very displeased.

You would expect that to be the turning point. It wasn't. Straight away a different thought fastened on him: it was too late. Christ would never forgive someone like him. And if he was going to be lost anyway, why stop? “I can but be damned, and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins, as to be damned for few.” So he went back to the game and told nobody. For about a month after that he threw himself into sin as fast as he could, “lest I should die before I had my desire.”

Bunyan was sure this kind of hopelessness is far more common than people realise. He calls it a temptation that is “more than usual amongst poor creatures than many are aware of”: a quiet, settled feeling that there is no hope for you, so you may as well keep going the wrong way.

That is worth stopping on. “It's too late for me, so why bother?” sounds like being realistic. It's not. It is despair pretending to be honesty, and it always pushes you further into the very thing you wish you could leave. If you have ever thought, “I've already blown it, so I might as well keep going,” you have heard the same lie Bunyan heard on that Sunday afternoon. The voice he heard asked him a real question, and a question means a door is still open.

One thing to do this week: next time you catch yourself thinking “I've already ruined it, so what's the point,” stop and do one small right thing anyway: switch it off, walk away, send the apology. You don't have to fix everything. You just have to refuse the lie that it's too late.