We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags.
Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.
Isaiah 64:6

Read: Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 3:1-8
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 1 part 1

Relate: There is a man in a field, and he is reading. That doesn’t sound like the opening of one of the greatest books ever written, but it is. John Bunyan drops us immediately into the middle of a crisis. It is not a crisis of circumstance, but one of conscience. Christian (though he hasn’t yet been named) stands in tattered garments with a crushing weight upon his back. A book is in his hand, and he cannot stop weeping. He has read something he cannot unread. He has seen something about himself, and about the city in which he lives, that he cannot unsee. The burden he carries is not metaphorical window dressing. It is the full, unbearable weight of a man who has finally understood what his sin actually is.

What strikes me most about this opening image is how profoundly countercultural it is. This is true both in Bunyan’s seventeenth century and in ours. We live in a world that desperately wants to assure us that we are fine. Our flaws are merely quirks. Our failures are just learning experiences. Our guilt is just the hangover of an outdated religious system trying to control us. But Christian’s rags tell a different story. They say something is seriously wrong. They say that the way things are is not the way things ought to be. They say that the man wearing them knows it. There is a strange, holy courage in that kind of honesty. Most of us spend enormous energy making sure our rags do not show.

React: Bunyan was writing from prison when he penned these words, and it shows. He had no interest in comfortable half-truths. The man in rags is every one of us who has ever sat alone at 2 AM and known, in the quiet honest darkness (or perhaps not so quiet), that we were not okay. The good news is that Bunyan doesn’t leave us there. The burden is real, but the burden is not the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning. We cannot be saved from something we don’t believe we need saving from. The rags are not the problem. The rags are the diagnosis. And a correct diagnosis, however painful, is always the first step toward healing.

Respond:

Dear God,
Have mercy on me, oh God, according to Your unfailing love. Sometimes, I cannot make that cry in sincerity because I do not truly recognize the severity of my situation. I don’t really understand the depths of my depravity without You. Give me, give us, a better understanding of our sin. So that we can better understand how amazing Your grace is.
Amen.