The Bible Opened to Suffering People

It only makes sense that if much of the Bible was written by suffering people, then suffering people would have insights into the word that non-sufferers would not.  This was true for Bunyan.  I can only imagine what it must have been like for Bunyan to sit in his prison cell and read Paul's letters that were written from prison.

"I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the Word of God as now [in prison].  Those scriptures that I saw nothing in before were made in this place and state to shine upon me.  Jesus Christ also was never more real and apparent than now.  Here I have seen Him and felt Him indeed.... I have had sweet sight of the forgiveness of my sins in this place, and of my being with Jesus in another world.... I never knew what it was for God to stand by me at all times and at every offer of Satan to afflict me, as I have found Him since I came in hither."

The Smell of Affliction

Piper writes about Bunyan's suffering and how it influenced his writing.  It has caused me to wonder what my preaching and teaching would smell like if someone were to listen to it a few hundred years from now.

"The smell of affliction was on most of what Bunyan wrote.  In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons the Puritans are still being read today with so much profit is that their entire experience, unlike ours, was one of persecution and suffering.  To our chipper culture this may seem somber at times, but the day you hear that you have cancer, or that your child is blind, or that a mob is coming, you turn from the light books to the weighty ones that were written on the precipice of eternity where the fragrance of heaven and the stench of hell are both in the air."