Our congregation emphasizes a believer’s spiritual experience – the way a person comes to Christ, loves Christ, and lives out of Christ.  This is relatively uncommon in the confessing church today where there tends to be more of an emphasis on programs and social action.  While emphasizing spiritual experience is vital, we must not forget the call to public, holy living.  John Bunyan captures the price of this public confession of the faith in his depiction of Christian and Faithful in Vanity Fair.  The following is an excerpt from a commentary on The Pilgrim’s Progress by George Cheever.

Bunyan would show, by the treatment of the pilgrims in Vanity Fair, that this hatred is not gone out of existence.  He would show that the Christian life is not a pilgrimage merely of inward experiences, but that they who will live godly in Christ Jesus are a peculiar people, and must, in some sort or other, suffer persecution.  They are strangers in a strange country.  The world, its spirit, and pursuits, are foreign from and hostile to their habits, inclinations, and duties as children of the Saviour.  To be conformed to the world is to depart from the way of life; the whole race of genuine pilgrims must therefore be a strange and singular people, a people of nonconformists, whose deportment rebukes and reproves the world, and convinces it of sin.  It does this just so far as they live up to the rules of their pilgrimage. (Underlying added for emphasis)

This is a helpful corrective to one of the downfalls of an experiential emphasis – we must not be self-examining at the expense of public distinctiveness in our ungodly age.  Our inward concerns must not lead us to a private religion but push us forward in the conflict with the ungodliness of our age.  The cost is not insignificant but the reward is lasting!