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.

And in that ad on he said something from which I take the title of this message.

He quoted 2nd Corinthians 1- 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.

There's the phrase that I chose as the title for the message.

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 but upon God. He must live upon God. And how good it would be if we could learn to live upon God before we have no choice but to live only upon God.

For the day will come when this mortal nature will fail

and the doctor will say there is nothing more we can do.

And at that time you may be old enough to have outlived your wife and children

and have nothing to live upon but God. And so it would be good. It would be good to

learn this. I think he spent his life learning it from his early married life

until he died when he was 60 years old in 1688. So I come to Bunyan with some predispositions about suffering. What has gripped

me most about Bunyan in the six or eight months that I've been reading is his suffering and how he

suffered and how he responded to his sufferings and I want to know how to learn

...