Here’s another talk I gave recently if you’d like to hear me discuss my take on the doctrine of sanctification. What role does the Law play in sanctification? How do we put sin to death? How do we become more holy? Listen and you’ll hear what I believe to be the Bible’s answer:
Tag: John Bunyan
It Bids Me Fly and Gives Me Wings
Run, John, run. The law commands but gives neither feet nor hands. Better news the gospel brings; it bids me fly and gives me wings.
-John Bunyan
Make Your Soul a Library of Christ
Someone told me an interesting story the other day that goes like this: Someone came into my place of work distressed (I was not present at the time). The man was noticeably crying. He asked a clerk if she had a Bible. He said he was in desperate need of one at the moment. She happened to have a Gideon New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs (I don’t call them Bibles) tucked away in her desk, and so she gave it to him.
Fast forward a few hours to that evening as I am reading Thomas Watson’s book, The Bible and the Closet. Watson observes that some people only want to read the Bible when they are sad and in need of encouragement. He writes,
…When they are sad, they bring forth the Scripture as their harp to drive away the evil spirit…
The lesson is simple: the music needs to be playing all the time. He mentions the phrase of Jerome concerning Cecilia, that she “had by much reading of the Word, made her heart the Library of Christ…” He continues,
Were the Scriptures confined to the original tongues, many would plead excuse for not reading; but when the sword of the Spirit is unsheathed, and the Word is made plain to us by being translated, what should hinder us from a diligent search into these holy mysteries?
Feast on the Scriptures now before the famine comes. Let your mind be formed through much reading of the Scripture that it may be the Library of Christ. Be determined, as Spurgeon says, to ‘bleed Bibline’:
I would quote John Bunyan as an instance of what I mean. Read anything of his, and you will see that it is almost like the reading the Bible itself. He had read it till his very soul was saturated with Scripture; and, though his writings are charmingly full of poetry, yet he cannot give us his Pilgrim’s Progress—that sweetest of all prose poems — without continually making us feel and say, “Why, this man is a living Bible!” Prick him anywhere—his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the Word of God. I commend his example to you, beloved.
From the Concept to the Image: What Allegory is For (C.S. Lewis)
My daughter and I have been reading The Pilgrim’s Progress together. I knew that C.S. Lewis had written an essay about it, so I decided to check it out. One piece of gold from the essay is Lewis’ description of allegory – more specifically, how he believed one should read allegory. He was adamantly against taking to time to stop and dissect the allegory. Here’s a snippet I thought worth sharing:
This stupidity perhaps comes from the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated; as if, having grasped what an image (as we say) ‘means’, we threw the image away and thought of the ingredient in real life which it represents. But that method leads you continually out of the book back into the conception you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse. We ought not to be thinking, ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.
C.S. Lewis, The Vision of John Bunyan, from Selected Literary Essays, p. 149
I don’t know if I am totally tracking with Lewis here. I had to think about this one a bit. But I think his point could be summarized in this way:
A bad reading of allegory is seeing an allegory for humility, stopping, and saying, ‘the author is talking about humility. Let’s discuss what we know about humility.’ That would be going ‘out of the book.’ Instead, as you read, and you come to this allegory for humility, it should lead you to say, ‘Ah, that is what humility is like.’ You are taking what you know and bringing it with you into the reading in order that your knowledge may be enriched, or, I suppose you could say, that you might receive new light on that knowledge. I think that is an excellent way of approaching allegory.
