A Tinker’s Pilgrimage

A Tinker’s Pilgrimage

He wrote a classic of devotional literature.

FOR A century after it was first published, one book’s popularity was exceeded only by that of the Bible. Yet its author was a tinker—a mender of pots and pans. Who was the country tinker whose story continues to inspire generation after generation?

When John Bunyan was sixteen, his mother and sister died within a three month span, and his father remarried. Unable to deal with the upheaval, he began acting out in what he would later term “wild and willful ways.”

Bunyan owned no books before he was married, but his wife’s dowry consisted of two Puritan books. Although she was a Christian, Bunyan was an unbeliever.

One Sunday afternoon with his friends on the village green, Bunyan heard a voice from heaven ask, “Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or keep thy sins and go to hell?” Bunyan “looked up to Heaven, and it was as if I had . . . seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me.”

Bunyan became severely depressed as a result of the vision. Feeling he might as well “be condemned for many sins as few,” he spent the next month indulging in selfish pursuit. Then his feelings shifted, and he pursued righteousness with equal vigor. “Our neighbors,” he wrote, “did take me to be a very godly man, a new and religious man . . . and indeed so it was, yet I knew not Christ, nor grace, not faith, nor hope.”

Working as a tinker, Bunyan often overheard a group of women discussing the Bible. He later wrote, “I thought they spoke as if joy did make them speak. . . . They were to me as if they had found a new world.” Irresistibly drawn by their conversations, one day he marveled “at a very great softness and tenderness of heart, which caused me to fall under the conviction of what by Scripture they asserted.” Shortly thereafter he put his trust in the Lord Jesus as his Savior.

Bunyan’s path after his conversion, however, was neither smooth nor straight. He struggled with assurance of salvation, his daughter’s blindness, poverty, his wife’s death, and his desire to preach the gospel when it was forbidden by law. In 1660, remarried and the father of six, John Bunyan was imprisoned for preaching in public without a license. He had been unable to get a license because he had little education and disagreed with the Church of England.

Intermittently in and out of prison for twelve years, he made shoelaces in his cell to support his family and spent many hours writing. His manuscript began, “As I was walking in the wilderness of this world . . . I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book and read therein, and as he read, he wept and trembled . . . and broke out with a lamentable cry saying, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’” The manuscript, entitled Pilgrim’s Progress, told the story of Pilgrim’s quest to answer that question.

First licensed for print on February 18, 1678, Pilgrim’s Progress is the best known of the fifty-eight books Bunyan wrote. It remains in print three hundred years later and has been translated into more than two hundred languages.

Bunyan died ten years later. In the words of Pilgrim’s Progress, “Now at the end of this valley was another, called the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Christian must needs go through it, because the way to the Celestial City lay in the midst of it.”

Reflection

John Bunyan would probably be considered a most unlikely person to write a devotional classic. How do you think he was able to do it? Has God ever enabled you to do something beyond your abilities? God has the power to stretch any of us beyond what we think we can do.

I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need.

Philippians 4:13