I believe God gets most glory in the world

when we maintain our stability of faith and our joy of faith

when we have nothing to maintain that faith anymore

but God alone.

Then he really gets glory.

What sustains your faith when everything is stripped away?

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper looks at the hardships of John Bunyan

to reveal how suffering rightly teaches us to depend on God alone.

This biographical message was originally delivered at the 1999 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors.

In 1672, 50 miles northwest of London in Bedford, John Bunyan was released from 12 years of imprisonment.

Near the end of that imprisonment, he wrote an add-on to his spiritual autobiography

called Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which he had written sometime earlier.

He quoted 2 Corinthians 1-9, which says, we had this sentence of death in ourselves

that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.

And then he wrote this.

This scripture, I was made to see that if ever I would suffer rightly,

I must first pass a sentence of death upon everything that can be properly called a thing of life.

Even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyment, and all as dead to me

and myself as dead to them.

And the second was to live upon God that is invisible.

He discovered that if he's to suffer rightly,

he must live no longer upon wife or children or health,

...