The Preacher Who Chose His Cell

For twelve years, John Bunyan sat in Bedford Jail. His crime was preaching without a license. The authorities offered him freedom repeatedly — all he had to do was promise to stop preaching. His wife Mary, who was blind, pleaded with the courts on his behalf. His children went hungry. Yet Bunyan's conscience before the Almighty would not let him bargain away his calling.

From that cold stone cell, Bunyan did something extraordinary. He wrote. And what poured from his quill became The Pilgrim's Progress, a book that would guide millions of souls from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. His imprisonment became his pulpit. His chains became ink.

Peter writes that Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. And even in death, Christ went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison. The gospel cannot be contained by bars or stone or grave.

Bunyan understood this. "I am verily persuaded that God is with me," he wrote from his cell. His was the very thing Peter describes — the pledge of a clear conscience toward God, an inner freedom no jailer could revoke.

Baptism, Peter reminds us, is not about washing the outside clean. It is the response of a conscience made right with God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And when our conscience rests in that finished work, even a prison becomes a cathedral.