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."