The following message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. Good morning. Let's go ahead and start in prayer, or with prayer. Holy Father, again, we thank you for this time that we can come and gather together. We thank you for this day, Lord, that we can be with one another and hear your word and be able to participate, God, with your people and singing your praise. Hearing prayers, Lord, to you, and Lord, to spend the day being blessed, Lord, by being part of your family. God, we ask that you would, Lord, help us this day. We pray that you would open up our ears and our eyes and our hearts, God, to receive what you have for us. We pray for this morning, God, as we go through the book, Pilgrim Progress, and we ask, God, that you would use it. Lord, we ask that you'd help me to be able to speak things clearly and truly, and Lord, we ask for your blessing upon this time, and we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So we are going through Pilgrim's Progress, which is something really unusual for us, not just to be going through the book of the Bible, and so unusual that I'm thinking it's probably the only time we've done something like this, but anyway, right? Okay, so anyway, Daniel started last week with the introduction, and today the topic was to go to the Wicket Gate, through the Wicket Gate, up to it, but this is divided into two sections for us who are teaching it, and I have it this week, and then Brian has it, and so I was thinking, that's kind of weird. And so I was like, what do you do? Do you cover the same material that Brian's going to cover next week? And I was like, oh, that's really awkward. So I'm not sure. So anyway, instead of me going all the way up through the wicket gate, I thought what I would do is take a detour, hopefully not through Bypass Meadows, but anyway, to maybe talk a little bit about the structure of the book and how Bunyan wrote it and how that actually works for us to understand things. So we will eventually get to Mr. Worley Wiseman and the Wicked Gate, but I'll leave most of that for Brian for next week to cover. So again, the book opens with the narrator. He's lying down in a den to sleep, and he dreams a dream. And of course, lying down in a den, it's John Bunyan, and he's in prison. He's in prison for preaching the gospel. So he's, again, it's an allegory, right? So he's explaining these things, but he's giving us the picture of it as he tells the story. So he lies down in the den, and he dreams a dream. And it gives us the opening literary framework of the book, which is a dream vision. That's what the book is. So if you're like genre and stuff, literary dream vision is what Pilgrim's Progress would be. Of course, it's allegory and other things, too. But he's dreaming a dream, and as he dreams a dream, he unfolds for us what he wants us to know. So right away he starts out with the first person. He's dreaming the dream and he's telling the story, right? He's saying, I went and I was lying down in a cave or in a den and I dreamed a dream. So that's first person and he's telling the story. But he's gonna do something and it's just a literary device and it's pretty interesting. He's gonna switch pretty quickly from first person. I saw this, I saw this, I saw this. to actually the third person with people talking in it, right? So it's gonna go from Bunyan saying, I saw this, to Christian now talking, and Christian's wife talking to him, and Christian's children talking to him. And what that does, if you think about it, it's in the book when you read it, or any book for that matter, these things are subtle. But they actually are very, very profound literary devices. And what this does is it actually transports us from just listening to a story to being in the story. Right, so now somebody's not just telling me a story, but has, now I'm, in a sense, I'm right alongside of them listening to the conversation. So I'm no longer just listening to a story told to me, but I'm actually part of the story. For those of you who like to read, you know, this is one of the great experiences about reading, and it's certainly one of the great experiences about reading fiction, is after a bit, as you get into the story, you actually feel like you're in the story. You start to read it, and you start to enjoy it, and you start, not like you think I'm right next to him, but your whole emotions and your mind and everything is now, you're there in the story. You're in it, and it's not just instruction now, it's not just a pedagogical exercise, or it's not just didactic, but he's teaching us, he's teaching us this way. I'm there. And I'm listening to it. And of course, with Pilgrim's Progress, the imagery is just so good that it moves your heart, right? It moves your heart in many ways, but as Christians, it's gonna move our heart because as Bunyan's speaking, again, he's speaking, it's very much autobiographical. So as he's going through these things, and he's bringing in these characters, and he's bringing in these situations, your heart resonates with it. You start to think, oh yeah, that's me, or yeah, that's someone I know, or that's a situation I've been in, or that's how I feel right now. So Bunyan wants to engage us that way, right? This is what he's trying to do. He's trying to teach us he was a pastor, Actually, at the time that he's writing Pilgrim's Progress, he's combating certain things that, you know, that we might combat like as just, you know, get up and give a sermon or something, and of course he did. He was a great preacher, but in this case, he's combating these things in a different way. So, as we go through, he wants to teach us of how Christianity or how Christ impacts our life from the very beginning all the way to the end, right? This is the story, this is the pilgrimage. This is what it looks like. This is what it looks like to come under the conviction of sin. This is what it looks like to be converted. This is what it looks like to traverse the path, the narrow pathway all the way to the celestial city. So this is his story, and as he does it, he's really gonna teach us a lot. He's gonna teach us about law and gospel. Right in the beginning here with Mr. Worley Wiseman, we're gonna encounter, and we already have a really profound theological truth, right? We're encountering them. sometimes pretty clearly, other times more subtly, but nevertheless, Bunyan is trying to teach us, and he's trying to teach us not just, if I could say it this way, not just simple things, okay, but he's trying to teach us very, very deep, rich things. And so we're gonna encounter law and gospel. We'll encounter things like the order of salvation. Okay, which theologians will write pages and pages and pages and pages about in big books to explain the order of salvation, and then they'll come along and some of them will write big books to explain why there is no order of salvation, right? And so Bunyan, though, will cover this territory in ways that we can actually understand it. Again, I mean, everybody here is intelligent. We would understand it reading a big book, too. But it kind of grasped our hearts, again. It grasped us in a way so that as we're getting the truth in, we're getting it into, it's almost like feeding the whole man. And of course, that's what stories do, right? Stories teach us that way. We're gonna learn about justification. And throughout the book, we're gonna learn about justification and sanctification and what that looks like. What's the distinction? Of course, they're inseparable, but what's the distinction? And then one of his big themes is perseverance. And can a Christian lose his salvation? And for those of you, again, familiar with John Bunyan, you know he struggled with assurance of faith. It was very, very difficult. He took a long time after his initial conversion to actually come to a place where he felt settled in his faith. So that is something, again, that for most Christians, if you or I, if we didn't experience that maybe early on, certainly for most of us, there comes a point in your life where you start, you know, you go through a trial or something happens and you start to think about these things. Well, Bunyan is writing from personal experience, but he also has the ability to explain flat out right. So when he's telling his story, your story's in there. And when he talks about what it's like to not have assurance, but he does it in this way that is through his characters, and he's expressing these things, again, your heart can be really moved at times, in fact, at times terrified. We're gonna encounter characters that will sometimes make us think, oh no, that sounds like me, and I sure hope it isn't me, right? You know, wow, that sounds just like me. And it can actually be terrifying. And of course, he goes along with other things, just what temptation looks like. And so Bunyan is gonna, the whole scope, right? from beginning to end, and what it looks like for someone to come to Christ, and what it looks like for that person to walk in grace, and what it looks like, ultimately, for Christ to carry him across, right? So again, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory, but actually you're gonna see a whole bunch of literary genres, right? So you're gonna have spiritual autobiography or biography. And again, if you know anything, if you've read anything about Bunyan himself, besides Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Bounding to the Chief Sinner is what I'm thinking of primarily. He was an open book as far as his life and as far as just trials and things that he went through. And so you're gonna see that throughout this book. You're gonna see things, again, where it's like, oh, that's him, right? That's exactly what he went through. And again, but the idea, well, it's common to all Christians, right? Not in the specific, obviously. But all Christians encounter these things. All Christians encounter Mr. Worldly Wiseman, right? There's not a Christian who doesn't encounter him and encounter him daily, right? It's just when we picture him as Mr. Worldly Wiseman, it's like, oh, okay, maybe I should be a little more careful. with what I watch, you know, or what I'm doing because maybe this guy is sneaky and maybe he's trying to, you know, get his way into my life and get me going where I should not go. Of course, it's a conversion story. It's a great conversion story. After the Interpreter's House, we're gonna read how Christian loses his burden. And I first read Pilgrim's Progress, I think, when I first became a Christian some 50 years ago or something, a long time ago. And that part is just, you just cannot read it. I don't think, it's just hard to read, or maybe in a setting like this is we read it not so much, but by yourself just reading, and to read Christian loses burden. It brings you to tears, and I mean you just think about God's grace in your life, and you just think about what it is to lay down your burden at the cross, and the way he pictures it, and because he's been carrying the burden for so long. and that when it finally falls off, and it falls off because he sees the cross. And again, you're encouraged, you're blessed, and sometimes I've read it and I've been convicted. Like, where am I at? What am I doing that this isn't moving me? Right? What am I doing that I can read this now and not be moved like I was moved at another point in time? Again, it's a dream vision. It's a travel story, interestingly enough. It's a character sketch. And I did a little bit of research, but I want to hold it. It could be one. I think they think it's one of the first books in the English language that actually develops a character sketch of people. in a way that Bunyan does it. So he actually develops these characters and we begin to know them and see them. It's kind of interesting. In that sense, even though it's pre-modern, it's a psychological narrative in that sense. And what do I mean by that? He's not putting you down on a couch necessarily. He's telling you about his inner. what he feels on the inside. Augustine's Confessions was the first, we would call, psychological book that way, where someone actually started to tell you what they felt like on the inside with these things. Well, Bunyan, of course, is doing this all the way through. And it's not just therapeutic in the sense like we think about it, but because he's opening up his insides for us, in a sense, again, that's something that we can, Not every point, not every character, but certainly, as you go through Pilgrim's Progress, there will, without a doubt, be parts that just will, you'll just go, you'll just either go, wow, that's just so good, or wow, that's kind of scary again, you know, because he writes, he writes, He writes in a way where he's, again, he's not just talking about like some type of easy believism, right? Certainly not that at all. He goes into what it's like to actually struggle the whole way. The genres and his writing style, they enable him to present all these topics in a way that's accessible, that we can understand it. It helps us, touches our souls. So again, there's just so many. when he loses his burden is one, but the other, there are a couple ones, but two of them I wanna bring out, and one of them is when Christian finally crosses the river. So Christian gets, you know, he finally will finish his journey, right, before he finishes his journey. He's on this side of the river, and the river symbolizes death, right, and the celestial city's on that side. And it's now time to enter the river and cross over, and he's entering with his friend, hopeful has been with him the whole time. And as you're going across the river, for the one, the river is like, you know, not very deep. And so he's walking and he's making his way across. But for Christian, he starts to he starts to lose his footing a little bit. And Bunyan describes it that the water's getting deeper, and in fact, it's coming up, and he starts to be afraid. And again, it comes out his fear, right? His lack of assurance and his fear of, am I really saved? Am I really saved? Right up to the very end. And so his partner, his friend, his companion, is trying to encourage him, and he's saying, don't worry, don't worry, it's okay, it's okay, the ground's good, the ground's solid, you'll be able to make it. And of course Christian the whole way is like, no, I know you can make it, I know the ground's good for you, I know that the gates will be open for you, I know that you'll make it across, but I'm not going to be able to. And he draws it out, It's one of the longer sections that he does, but as he draws it out, you begin to think about, he's afraid. Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna make it right up to the very, at the very end when I'm crossing the river? And now I'm afraid. I'm afraid, am I really, am I really one of God's elect in a sense? You know, am I really one who will make it across? But the way he does it, is to show you a man struggling to get across this river as the water's getting higher and higher and higher. And of course, as the water's getting higher, that's not encouraging him, right? It's like, again, so you could, I mean, think about how he does this. It's like, okay, hey, you're a Christian, you believe in Jesus, it's gonna be okay. well, okay, except for now the water's here, okay? And then that's, well, now the water's here. And so he's afraid. And yet, when he has the point where he begins, he puts his foot on solid ground. Right? And at that point, you're just, boom, you know, whatever's going off. It's so good. But I have sat with people in the hospital who are dying, saints in the hospital, and read that passage to them. And it was a privilege and an honor to do it. And it was so powerful. And I've been with Brian on one occasion where he read it to one of the saints that was in this church here that was going home to be with the Lord. And I mean, now yes, it's not scripture, don't get me wrong, and we read scripture to people all the time, and it's scripture, it's God's word, right? I'm not making that comparison or contrast, but I'm saying, at certain times, sitting with a saint who's ready to cross over, and maybe has some fear, and you read that, it's just, again, all I could think of when I was listening to Brian read it, I was thinking, Lord, why would you bless me? you know, to be here and to hear that, right? And it was just so powerful. So Christiana is the same thing, and I've used this for like, I think, Ricardo's funeral service and others, where she gets, she's waiting to go over, and she gets the announcement, and it says, today, you know, today, good lady, your master is awaiting, right? And again, it's hard for me to even talk like that, but when you're talking to saints, in a funeral service, and you start to read that passage. Everybody, everybody says, wow, that's what's gonna happen for me, right? There's gonna be a day where I'm gonna get the role, and it's gonna say, today is your day, right? But that day is gonna be the great day, right? Today, your master expects you to be in his presence, arrayed in robes, of glory and righteousness, right? And you read that and you just go, okay, I'm ready to go out this week and live for Christ, right? I wanna do something for Jesus today, right? In a really good way. So again, he does this and he's writing for us, but a lot of it has to do with his own struggles. He had a hard time. Not every Christian has a hard time, but many Christians do, and every Christian has some period of a hard time. I would think if we went through life and never had any difficulties, well, you know, the scripture actually warns us that that's not a very good thing to have happen to you, right? that in fact the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and he chastens those who are his, and if we went through all of our life without any difficulty, the Bible says that actually would be a sign of maybe not being in Christ, and that's not a sign of God's disfavor. And yet, as we're in it, as we're going through it, you certainly do feel like, oh, maybe I am in a place of God's disfavor. Well, Bunyan knew that, right? So C.S. Lewis, Another one, a person, probably most people familiar, he said, the trouble with having a good imagination, and I'm paraphrasing him, the trouble with having a good imagination and the ability to write is everybody thinks that you actually know what you're talking about, right? And if you've read Lewis, you know that, right? I mean, you go, man, that guy really knew his stuff, right? And he's going, yeah, actually, I just had a good imagination, right? I could write that, okay. Well, Bunyan knew what he was talking about. Bunyan isn't just, okay, I can read the scriptures, or I can look at other people's lives, and I can, in some way, you know, have some idea of what's going on, and I'm able to articulate these things in a way that people can understand. No, Bunyan actually knew. I mean, he is like, you know, do you know what it's like to stand underneath the mountain, Mount Sinai, and have it feel like it's gonna fall on your head? And he's like, I know exactly what that feels like. I know exactly what that feels like. But he also knew what it was, and as we go through the book again, to know the comfort of God, and to know God's grace in your life. So we know, okay, we know all kinds of ways. You know, I was thinking I could get up here today and, you know, I would have had to memorize some type of complex mathematical equation and I could have said it and maybe Nathan and a few other engineers would have gone, ooh, you know, that's really cool, you know? I mean, like, wow, you know? And the rest of us would have gone, you know, like, huh, right? But when you tell a story, Everybody, everybody knows, everybody's, wow, I'm into that. And I mean, it doesn't matter. You're like with Brian, it's like it has to be a Western or something, but I mean, still, you tell a story, you tell a story, and people understand. It opens up our hearts, right? And we know, so we don't, it's not just this, right? It's this. You're learning or understanding, you know? in ways that you're not necessarily thinking about it, that you're doing that. But again, of course we do this with our kids, right, from the very beginning. How do we teach our kids? Right, well, there's some just instruction, but there's a lot of storytelling. And when you sit down at night, or with me, when my wife sat down at night talking to the kids or reading to the kids, she's reading them stories. Now, reading the Bible, but the Bible is one big story, I would argue. but reading them stories, right? Because that's how God made us. God put us in his story, and we're made to understand these things. So Leland Ryken, the subject of literature is human experience rendered as concretely as possible, which I just think that's an interesting way to put it. Literature and human experience rendered as concretely as possible. In other words, he's arguing that the best way, the most concrete way, that's a, right now I'm talking, there's nothing concrete in a sense about that, right? I mean, you can't see little words come out, you can hear them, and they touch your ears and all this kind of stuff. But he's saying, no, when you get it right, Right, when you use a metaphor, or when you use a simile, or when you use literature in some way that you get it right, there is nothing more concrete than that. I mean, that hits people, you know, like a proverbial ton of bricks, right? Okay, that's how concrete it is, right? And that's really how, by and large, that's how we learn, that's how we understand things. So, he goes on, he says, literature exists to make us share a series of experiences, and literature appeals to our image-making and our image-perceiving capacity. And then here, he goes, the subject of literature is the universal experience, and the truth that literature imparts is truthfulness to life knowledge in the form of seeing things accurately. Again, I love that, that that's, That's how we see things accurately. Again, if thinking about, you know, physicists or something like that, you know, may be able to observe things, may be able to put things down. Equations are kind of interesting because they're symbols, right? So, it's not, oh, that's scientific. Oh, well, it's a symbol. You know, you can't communicate apart from using symbols and metaphors and analogies and things like that. Everything we learn, we learn this way, right? So that this guy Leland Ronkin is saying, this is the way that we see things accurately, right? So, Niels Bohr, quantum physics. guy or whatever, and Albert Einstein. Okay, they have this big controversy. Is it quantum or is it relativity? And they go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Quantum has won out so far as how people are doing stuff today. But nevertheless, the fact is, those guys were brilliant, and they're seeing something about the universe. And they don't really know what they're seeing for how brilliant they are. And they can't, it's like, is it this way, is it this way, is it this way, is it this way? And Boers ends up, you know, I don't know that much about quantum, but the idea that it seems as if something can be, a particle can be here and can be there at both the same time and in the same way, which seems to violate the laws of contradiction, but nevertheless, that's what they're seeing, right? And he comes up with his dictum for every, Every great truth is also a great untruth or no truth. Okay, well that's just stupid, okay. So you don't know that way. Okay, I don't care how brilliant you are, you don't know that way. It's just not how we know, okay? We know differently. He knew differently, Einstein knew differently. When they're trying to explain their theories, they can only explain them by using analogy or metaphor or things like this, right? This lady, Elizabeth Sillow, metaphor is one of the vital and basic powers of human thinking, a power which works by means of constant play, which the mind signals out and matches figures perceived, invented, and inherited. It assumes that all thought works in some such fashion. So again, when people are writing, whether they think about it or not, the assumption is all thought works in some such fashion. That is, thought is never, despite its appearance, a detached activity or product of the brain, never just simply that, right? nor even a soul and pure relationship between intellect and phenomena. God has made us in his image, and so we perceive, but we perceive through the imagination. We make connections that obviously animals can't make. We make connections. We see things and we make connections. And these connections are made not through a simple deduction, you know, da, da, da, da, da, da, but through our imagination. We perceive something and we see something else and now we're connecting the dots and then in a sense we kind of go back and try to figure out what it was we saw. So Francis Bacon, depending on who you talk to, blamed with bringing in modernity, I guess, wrote, for all that concerns, he's criticizing, for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similes, treasuries of eloquence, and the like emptiness, let it be utterly dismissed. So here, he's trying to be the pure scientist, and this, you know, Bacon was one, Hume kind of another, you get later on, you get these guys with the analytics school and stuff like this, and it's like, oh, okay, no language makes sense, everything is nonsense, unless it's just a definition or a statement of fact. And so this is how we really know, this is how language really works. Take away all the imagery, take away any way that we would dress up language and knock it down to it's either just gotta be a definition or it's just a pure statement of fact and that's the only reality. Well, of course, that statement is not a definition nor a statement of fact. These guys, they were the proverbial fools, right? So smart that they were foolish. God didn't make us that way. He made us in his image. He made us in his image, and so no matter how technical we're getting with something, or maybe more along the ethical lines or something, no matter what it is, the way that we understand things is we understand them through our imagination. And by that I don't mean make-believe, I mean we connect dots. Even that, what's that? It's a metaphor, right? When people get up and they go, oh, we're just wired that way. Okay, well, that's a metaphor, right? We aren't wired that way. We're actually not just wired things. We're embodied creatures in the image of God, and so we can actually perceive, right? We can understand things about reality. So again, C.S. Lewis said, if we're going to talk about things that are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. So I was, with Ingrid, we were riding around, and I listened to the stuff that drives her nuts, but nevertheless, it was, the guy was talking about, what's his name? I can't remember his name. He was a 15th century composer and praetorius. And actually, we sing one of the hymns, so he didn't write the words, but he put everything together, and it's called, Low, How a Rose Ear Blooming. And I think we sung it here, it's in our hymn book. It's beautiful, it's just beautiful. But what I didn't know was the rose air blooming, we sing it, I think we've sung it at Christmas, and that's when people mostly sing it. A rose air blooming is a picture of Christ's birth, right? And you listen to the song, and then you hear that, and you're like, oh, that's just too cool, right? I mean, that's the kind of stuff that's just neat. But what's really neat is this. That's human imagination, but there's a reality to that. Why did God make flowers? Well, I'm sure God has a million and one reasons. but he made flowers so that we would be able to see something beautiful and perceive something about Christ, and look at a flower. Okay, the whole material world exists for the glory of God and the person of Jesus Christ. In one sense, again, Lewis says, in one sense, the whole world's a metaphor, right? The whole world is teaching us something about God, and if our eyes were open, we'd see more. My personal thought of that is when we get into the new heavens and new earth, our eyes will be open. And one of the glories is we're just gonna see, look at that, look at that, look at that. It's all pointing to Christ, it's all pointing to Christ. But think about this, a rose blooming, again, Dan's like, we're Baptists, we couldn't do that. You can't make those kind of comparisons, because you're gonna go, huh, right? But this guy didn't have a problem with it. And you go, a rose ever blooming is about the Christ child. a year ago. Oh man. I mean, so we're driving down the road, and of course Ingrid appreciates beauty and music, and I'm just not that way, but nevertheless, I appreciate it in her, and she's really like, oh that's just so beautiful, right? And again, my point is that You not only are touched, just emotionally, you start to learn stuff. You start to understand things better. The idea, too, for us, I mean, I think the Bible's put together this way. When we went through the Psalms, we saw Psalm 1, and Psalm 1 is about the righteous man, but what's the righteous man look like? A tree, what? Yeah, which is a metaphor. Because he's not a tree. But he's saying something, and it's very profound. If God wanted to picture righteousness. He'll do it like this. He's gonna put a tree by streams of water. And every human being, except for the fact that we're fallen, but apart from that, every human being would be able to look at that, not just because that's beautiful, not just because that's pretty, though it is, but there would be something about that that would teach you about righteousness, right? You'd go, That. And of course, righteousness is what? It's a forensic term. It has to do with legal things. Look at a tree, plant by streams of water and go, righteous? And yet God's saying, yeah, righteous. So again, that's how God's teaching us with things. So what is a metaphor? With a metaphor, something is something. Similarly, something's like something. An analogy explains one thing being like another helps us to understand it. So we're talking about God, all God talks is analogical, right? In other words, everything with us, with God, it's not unifical, it's not one for one. and it's not being the same thing. It's something, okay? So when we talk about the love of God, I know that when I know love, I know you know love, and in knowing that, I know something of the love of God. I don't know it in a one-for-one correspondence, but I know something real and true about it. So, that's how those things work. Again, a metaphor, I'll just quote this, a word or phrase is used not literally, but as a representation for vivid effect In other words, the word or phrase denotes an object that suggests a similarity that is not literal. Again, we know it, but we know it through our imagination. An allegory is an extended metaphor. Okay, it's just a story. It's a story told as one big metaphor. It's a story told as a metaphor, right? So again, C.S. Lewis, a good allegory exists not to hide, but to reveal and to make the inner world more palatable by giving it an imagined, and he uses concrete embodiment too, a good allegory, which is just the opposite of when people criticize allegory, because it's not real. "'Cause it's all make-believe "'cause it doesn't do anything." And here's Lewis, says, a good allegory actually makes something concrete. So reading Spurgeon today, and this is one example of stuff that we read all the time. We, all of us read stuff like this. But he was talking about prayer. And he said this, okay. If our prayers had less of the tail feathers of pride, and more the wing of faith, they would all be the better. Okay, now who here didn't get that? Right? I mean, it's like, okay, whether it's like I didn't really care about, everybody knows what he's talking about, right? There's a, the tail feathers of pride, that your prayers have the tail feathers of pride, and they're really not gonna make it up there, right, in a sense. I mean, that's the picture. But the wings of faith, well, they're gonna soar, right? And you can read something like that and go, that's a pretty cool picture, or that's just a real homey picture, or whatever. But nevertheless, everyone here grasps what he's getting at, right? And probably grasps it better than if I would just say, oh yeah, by the way, let me just stop for a second. Don't be proud when you pray, be humble. Okay, well that's true too, but you'd go, okay. So Bunyan, This is one way it works. Okay, how does all this work? How does metaphor and all this stuff work in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress? One of the ways it works is, then this is interesting. I think I got this from Leland Rankin. He avoids giving us visual descriptions of his characters. Isn't that interesting? Do you think you know the characters in Pilgrim's Progress? I want to say anybody who's read it go, yeah. He doesn't tell you this guy was short, this guy was tall, this guy had a big beard, this guy had no beard. By and large, he doesn't do that. He doesn't do it that way. He achieves the portrait by, how? Mr. Really Wise Man. Now, I don't know what your picture of Worley Weisman is, but I've got a pretty clear picture of what he looks like, right? And he didn't have to tell me anything. I wanted, and I'm getting closer, but listen to this, another really, really, really, really great writer. And listen how he does it, because they do it two different ways. I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays. He says, since they have become rare and shy of the big people, as they call us, they are, or were, a little people, about half our height, smaller than the bearded dwarfs, Hobbits have no beard. There is little or no magic about them except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you or me come blundering along making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They're inclined to be fat in the stomach. They dress in bright colors, chiefly green and yellow, wear no shoes because their feet grow naturally leathery soles and thick worm-brown hair like the stuff on their heads, which is curly. They have long, clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep, fruity laughs, especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it. That's a description, okay? I think I know what a hobbit looks like. But you know what he takes the rest of the book developing? Is that Frodo is courageous. that Bilbo is brave. And I saw like, we're gonna be introduced, well, I think it's in the second book, Mr. Great Heart, who's their guide. And as I was reading this, I just think, oh, what a funny contrast. Because Bilbo really is brave. And he really is courageous. But if I had this description early on in the book, and then they go, Christiane and her kids need a guide, and they go, oh, we know, just, we're gonna send. Frodo. Mr. Great Heart, and out comes this little fat guy with his thing, and goes, don't worry, I'll be your guide, right? And you're like, you go, you go, no way, right, no way. Well, Tolkien has to develop his character all the way through, and he does, it's just wonderful, he does, right? And he does it on purpose. Frodo is braver than Bromir, who's this big, giant man who ends up being a traitor, right? I mean, but he's a soldier, but who's the braver one? Well, actually, Frodo, right? But Bunyan does it just like this. Mr. Great Heart. Okay, I know what that guy looks like right now, okay? I mean, I know what he looks like, right? Mr. Worley Wiseman, again, I know what he looks like. He paints his picture simply by telling you who they are on the inside. And as you know who they are on the inside, you fill in the outside stuff. And again, it's one of the great things of his book, right? So again, Appliable, who we came across last week, you know who he is because, you know, the way he is, he quickly changes his mind, right? He's influenced by everything. And you have a picture in your mind. Obstinate, you have another picture in your mind. You know, you picture Jason Kelsey or somebody big with a big beard, right? You know, he's obstinate, right? And Appliable, probably not so big, you know? So anyway, that's how he's doing this thing. So Leland Ryken again says, that's only the beginning of the Bunyan magic. His characters are multidimensional, in the sense that nearly all of them represent three things simultaneously. I'm sorry, I butchered that. He's saying all of his characters represent three things. They are personality types, individuals with the propensity towards a trait, and we know it by the name that he's given them, such as talkative. They are social types, people who have a certain effect as they mingle. Talkative gets on people's nerves because he's talkative, right? And they all of them embody a moral or spiritual quality, right? All of them do. Again, the moment talkative, I'm not thinking I'm a real spiritual person, right? I'm just not. I already know. I already know how he's gonna be. And of course, he'll play his part out, but the thing is, he's painting these really deep or richly colored characters, but he does it just like this, pliable, talkative, right? And again, one of the things it does is, depending on how you read stuff, some of them remind you of other people. Again, Mr. Great Heart, I've had the privilege of knowing a lot of Mr. Great Hearts, or at least a few in my life. These are guys that you just go, man, I'm glad that I came in contact with them. So, it's kind of like that. Sometimes, though, it just reminds you of yourself. So, Mr. Ready-to-Halt, Mr. Feeble-Mind, Mr. Despondency, his daughter Much-Afraid. Again, not that every Christian goes through this all the time, but Christians do go through this. The idea that much afraid, and you know, not every single Christian in this room knows that, but most Christians in this room know what it's like to feel at least some point in your life like much afraid, or Mr., you know, hopefully not too many, Mr. Ready to Halt, but I'm sure there's been times where it's like, oh, you know, life just seems real hard, and more, God seems real distant, you know, God seems real far away. And again, but then other ones were maybe not so much reminding you of people that you know that might do that, but how you want to be. I don't want to be much afraid. I do want to be Mr. Great Heart. I see myself more as much afraid and not so much as Mr. Great Heart, but I aspire to Mr. Great Heart. And it actually, again, when I read about him, there's something, as I read the character, I'm like there's something in me that's moved in that sense, right? This is what writing literature does to you, you're moved that way. And you're like, oh God, help me be more like that and help me be less like the other thing. So all of that to get to where we left off last week. But I won't be like Brian and Daniel, I won't keep you up here for another hour after that. Say, that was just the introduction. Yeah, well, what, we got eight minutes? Don't worry, I can give you a whole hour's worth of stuff in eight minutes. So, Christian, the slave despond, and he encounters Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who hails from the town of Cardinal Policy. And so, with the introduction of the Slav despond into the story, we meet another motif that's gonna pervade the story, and that's physical places symbolize moral, spiritual reality. That's the other thing, he doesn't use characters, he uses the places that they're in, and they're telling us about the spiritual aspect of that. So the village called Morality symbolizes the attempt to gain salvation by good behavior, or by good works. The house of legality is an extension of that mindset. Mr. Legality's in here. The gate towards Christian aspires is also symbolic. And he's going to the Wicket Gate. And what does Wicket Gate symbolize? Well, that's gonna be an interesting one, okay. But as is with the rest of the book, it's just so much you can relate to. So he just gets out of the slough of despond. Like, just gets out of it. And you would think, learned his lesson. But Bunyan is writing like he's writing to people who are just like him. And so what happens? Mr. Worldly Wiseman comes along. And what does Christian do? He listens. Okay, how many people have done something like that, right? I mean, God just delivers me. I was just in trouble. My folly caught up with me. God was gracious to me. He brings me out of it. I take two steps and I go, oh, maybe I should go in that direction, right? Or, oh, maybe I should go in that direction. And it's like you read this and you go, Yeah, that's me, all over, right? It's like that's me. But of course, Bunyan's not ever left alone in this, and this is the other thing. It really is grace abounding to the chief of sinners. Bunyan makes the wrong step, listens to Mr. Worley Wiseman, but God is with him, and God keeps him, right? The idea of perseverance is all the way through here, God keeping his people. So, a little bit of background, too. Mr. Worley Wiseman is because, as he's writing this, he's also a pastor, right? He's in prison, at times he gets to go out of prison, gets to preach in churches, but he has a pastor's soul. There was a thing going around, interestingly enough, latitudinarianism, okay? Broad tent. Christianity, which some of the Anglicans were getting into, and as they got into it, well, how can you make broad-tent Christianity? What do you have to downplay if you want to include everybody into the Christian thing? What do you have to downplay? Yeah, what? Did you say something, Pat? You have to downplay doctrine, right? I mean, what separates us from other, from heretics? Doctrine. If you wanna include everybody into it, what do you gotta downplay? You gotta downplay doctrine, right? So Bunyan's actually facing this. Well, what's the one doctrine that they're all gonna downplay, right? They have to downplay the cross, they have to downplay, and what are they gonna actually start to talk about? Morality. Okay, here's, you know, What separates Christians from heretics or from false things is Christ and the grace of Christ and all of Christ, right? And justification being all of Christ. What does every human being have in common? Self-righteousness, right? We can all keep certain laws that we wanna keep. So what he found himself in historically was having to combat this idea of emphasizing morality. So it's not just a story, it is, and it's a story that's universal in the sense that we can relate to it too, but it's a story that's actually taken place in his time. He's actually thinking, my people are listening to these things, how can I get my people to stop listening to these things? Again, he was a great preacher, so he believed in the word of God, but as he's writing this book, really right away, Oh, let's bring in Mr. Worldly Wiseman, because that's who my people are starting to listen to. And I don't want them to listen to him, so let's paint a picture of what that's like. So this guy comes in, and it's actually, there was a, a book written earlier that had a character, Sir Mr. Worley Wise, and some people think that Brynjolf's character is based on him, but more likely, he actually bases the character on a real person who was one of the main advocates of this broad-tent Christianity. And so he makes him Mr. Worley Wise, because he's going, you, right, you're Mr. Worley Wise. But in any case, The idea here is what's going on with Christian, and again, brings out the idea of perseverance and spiritual despair, right? The Christian persevering and the Christian undergoing spiritual despair. So Bunyan, again, struggled, struggled greatly, right? And so here, he has his Christian, again, struggling, and he's struggling greatly, so. He comes and he's standing under the mountain, and there's real significance to that, too. And God sends him help, right? The idea, too, of this perseverance, boy. or in spiritual despair, main theme, okay, we're gonna encounter that. Pretty soon here, we're gonna encounter the man in the iron cage. And if you've read the book, he is the scariest person in the whole book. There is no one as frightening as the man in the iron cage. And he's completely given over to spiritual despair. And yet, Christian, underneath the mountain, with the law coming down, is given under spiritual despair. When he goes up the hill of difficulty and loses his role, loses his assurance, right, spiritual despair. When he's in Downing Castle with giant despair, he loses his assurance and stuff. And the key, the key to, is this, God always brings, usually in the form of another person, but when they're in the prison, he just remembers, he tells his friend, oh, look, I forgot I had a key. It's the promises of God. Remember, Daniel's taking us through the slough of despond, and the guy that's helping him says, why didn't you walk on the rocks? And he goes, what rocks? He goes, well, the promises of God, right? This is key throughout. Spiritual despair is real. God doesn't let his people go. God brings people into people's life, and God's promises are the only way out. The man in the iron cage is a difficult guy, but he's refusing to listen to the promises of God. When he quotes scripture, all he quotes are the judgments of God. He doesn't say anything about the promises. Everyone that gets out, everyone that gets out of spiritual despair, It's because they rely on the promises of God. And not in themselves, but relying on the promises of God. Well, Oh, okay, let me do this. You won't get to it unless you read book two, but one of the great passages on perseverance is much afraid. So again, we brought up how you cross the river in order to enter into the celestial city, and for some, that's very difficult. For Christian, it was very difficult. Much afraid, who's been much afraid through the whole journey, who has to have basically everyone help her along and carry her along. When it comes time for her to cross over the river to go to the celestial city, it says the river dropped to where it barely came up to her ankles. And what a picture of grace that is, right? And she actually sings a song. She sings a song about it, about how God in his grace drops a river down for those who need the river dropped down all the way. And it's just this wonderful picture of perseverance. Every single pilgrim makes it across. Every single one who's actually has entered in through the right way and has their seal and their school, every single one makes it across. It doesn't matter if it's Mr. Great Heart or if it's Little Much Afraid or Mr. Halting or Mr. Feeble Mind. We all, we all get across, right? So, I'm gonna end with this, and Brian will pick it up. The Wicked Gate, a little bit of controversy. And why would the Wicked Gate be controversial? Has anybody picked up on that? What's he have when he comes to the Wicked Gate? A burden. What's he have when he goes through the Wicked Gate? What's the Wicked Gate? Thought it was maybe salvation. How come he still has a burden? Well, we'll leave that for Brian to figure out for you guys. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you again. Thank you for your grace in our lives, and as we go through the book, we pray that our hearts would soar with the idea of how good you are and how faithful you are. We pray for this day, and again, we thank you, Lord, and ask that you would bless us and cause our lips and our hearts to be open to praise to our God. In Jesus' name, amen. We hope that you were edified by this message. For additional sermons as well as information on giving to the ministry of Grace Community Church, please visit us online at gracenevada.com. That's gracenevada.com.