And all nations will hate you because you are my followers.
But everyone who endures to the end will be saved.
matthew 10:22

Read: Matthew 10:22-39, Luke 9:57-62
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 1 Part 5

Relate: Christian runs. Bunyan tells us he ran, and he ran, and he didn’t look back. His neighbors called after him. Some laughed. Some demanded he return. Two of them, Obstinate and Pliable, actually gave chase. Still he ran, his fingers pressed to his ears, crying, “Life! Life! Eternal life!” There is something both heartbreaking and electric about this moment. He is leaving everything: his home, his wife, his children, his neighbors, the familiar streets of the only city he has ever known. All of it is receding behind him with every step. He is not running from nothing. He is running from everything. And he is running toward a gate he has never seen, because a man he barely knows pointed toward a light in the far off distance.

React: The flight from home is the moment where Bunyan’s allegory becomes unmistakably personal. We do not leave the City of Destruction by accident. We do not drift toward the narrow gate. At some point, there is a moment of decision. Sometimes it is dramatic, sometimes quiet. But we must all at some point stop looking back and start looking ahead. Where what we are running toward becomes more real to us than what we are leaving behind. When God called me to Himself, I was so young I had no idea of anything theological beyond, “I am a sinner. Jesus is not. That is why I need Him.” When God called me to Turkiye, I had no idea what I was doing or where I would end up. I just knew He said go. So I went. The geography differs; the journey is the same.

I think it’s also worth noting what Christian is not doing as he runs. He is not running perfectly. He is not running with all his theology sorted out. He is not running because he has argued himself into intellectual certainty. He is running because he has read something in a book that terrified him, and because a man has pointed him toward a gate, and because somewhere in the core of him something has come alive and will not let him stand still anymore. This is not a tidy conversion narrative. It is not a clean decision card handed to a counselor after a well-organized altar call. This is the raw, terrified, glorious beginning of a soul in motion toward God. God, who loves motion toward him, is already preparing the road ahead. 

Respond:

Dear God,
I have to admit. When I read that Christian ran with fingers in his ears, I had to think, “How childish.” But You call us to come like children. You said that the childlike will be greatest in the Kingdom. Give me the singleminded trust and confidence in You that I once had as a child.
Amen