Let's pray.
Oh Father, I pray that we mean what
we say.
I will suffer not to hide Thee, not,
I ask, beside Thee.
There is a savage necessity in the Christian
life to wage war against the hiddenness of
Your glory.
Pluck out an eye, if you must, to
get to heaven and see God.
Cut off a hand, if you must, to
wean yourself off lower pleasures and fix yourself
on endless ones.
And I pray that You would make warriors
of us all, make savages of us, if
we must be, in order not to let
television or food or internet or the praise
of men hide Thee.
And I pray that You would use Augustine's
life and thought to sharpen our sword.
In Jesus' name I pray.
We heard this morning that the unthinkable happened
in 410 A.D., namely that Alaric and
the gods came against Rome and sacked it.
St. Jerome was in Palestine at the time,
and he said, if Rome can perish, what
can be safe?
Well, Rome didn't perish immediately.
Sixty-six more years until the last emperor
was dethroned by the Germans.
And the shockwaves in that 410 event crossed
the Mediterranean very quickly.
Augustine was fifty-five years old.
In the prime of his ministry, he would
go on ministering the Word for another twenty
years in Hippo, just southwest across the sea
in present-day Algeria, for another twenty years.
But it was shocking, though it wasn't the
end yet.
And as you heard this morning, it did
unleash the city of God, in which his
own philosophy of history over against the possible
demise of Rome was developed for about twenty
years of writing.
August 28, 430, he dies.
And just as he's dying, 80,000 vandals,
as they were called, were coming across the
north of Africa, where they had invaded through
Spain, and the city in which he was
living and ministering was under siege.
In other words, these times in which Augustine
lived were tumultuous times, and between the shifting
of whole civilizations.
In those last months, as he saw the
vandals coming, he had heard that two other
Catholic bishops had been tortured to death in
other cities as they came, as the vandals
came.
And when his own elders counseled him with
the words of Jesus, flee to another city,
he said, Let not one dream of holding
our ship so cheaply that the sailors, let
alone the captain, should desert her in a
time of peril.
But strangely, he died four months before the
city was overrun and completely sacked by the
vandals.
And I just want to insert a preliminary
parenthetical exhortation to courage.
My friend John Enzer came from Boston to
talk about pro-life issues two weeks ago
at our church, and he pointed out to
me something I'd never noticed before, and I'll
point it out to you.
In Revelation 21.8, in the list of
things that will be passed into the lake
of fire, the first sin on the list
is cowardice.
Take that home, brothers, and open your mouths.
That's a parenthesis.
I will not forsake this ship.
But the Lord took him.
He had been bishop in Hippo since 396.
Five years before that, he had been appointed
priest and elder and had preached.
So approximately 40 years now, he had been
serving this one church in Hippo, shepherding God's
little flock there and defending the faith, and
had become known all over the empire, in
the Christian church anyway, as a God-besotted,
biblical, articulate, persuasive defender of the faith against
Manicheism and Donatism and Pelagianism.
Those were the three big false teachings as
he saw them in his day, and he
wrote on all of them.
He was an unbelievable controversialist for all the
mysticism in him.
We'll say more about that later on.
Just before he died, he handed over the
reins to Heraclius, his associate, because he was
an old man now.
He died when he was almost 75, and
Heraclius picked up the administrative duties.
And on the day when Heraclius was installed
as co-adjutor bishop, there was a great
ceremony.
And Augustine took his seat in the cathedral,
the throne, where he sat to preach.
He sat to preach for 40 years.
The people stood, and he sat.
I think that would really settle some pastors
down to take content seriously instead of motion.
It would be really hard for me.
I'm glad that's not in the Bible.
Heraclius stood in front of him to preach
the sermon at this retirement of their beloved
bishop.
And overwhelmed with a sense of inadequacy, he
said, The cricket chirps, the swan is silent.
So if you wondered where the title came
from, that's where it comes from.
The cricket chirps, the swan is silent.
If Heraclius had known what we now know
about the next 16 centuries, he wouldn't have
said that.
Because the swan is not silent today.
He never has been silent for 1600 years,
and he was not silent.
He had several more years to go when
this man was installed, and some of his
great work was done right up to the
end.
The man's influence is simply incalculable, as you
know.
Adolf Harnack said that the greatest man the
church has possessed between Paul and Luther is
Augustine.
Now, Harnack was German.
He had to say Luther.
But others have said things differently than that.
For example, Christian History magazine, without any qualification
or hesitation, said, this was written just a
few years ago, After Jesus and Paul, Augustine
of Hippo is the most influential figure in
the history of Christianity.
Benjamin Warfield argued in his writings on Augustine
that he entered both the church and the
world as a revolutionary force and not merely
created an epoch in the history of the
church, but determined the course of its history
in the West up to the present day.
He said he had a literary talent second
to none in the annals of the church.
Then he added, the whole development of Western
life in all its phases was powerfully affected
by his teaching.
Now, one of the most remarkable things about
his influence is that it has flowed into
remarkably contradictory camps.
So, for example, he is revered as one
of the greatest, if not the greatest, father
in the Roman Catholic Church.
And Warfield said, Augustine gave us the Reformation.
Now, that's odd.
He said that, quote, not only because Luther
was an Augustinian monk or that Calvin quoted
Augustine more than any other theologian, but because
the Reformation witnessed the ultimate triumph of Augustine's
doctrine of grace over the legacy of the
Pelagian view of man.
Both sides in the controversy, the Reformers and
the Counter-Reformation, appealed on a huge scale
to the texts of Augustine.
There are unresolved issues in Augustine.
One way of putting it that Warfield did
use was, the Reformation was the triumph of
Augustine's view of grace over Augustine's view of
the church.
I don't want to make much of that,
but something like that is probably the case
because as I read his views on sacraments
and baptism, I cannot put them together with
some other things that he says, but that's
for another time.
I'm not expert enough in Augustine to resolve
those things.
There are reasons for why Augustine has had
such phenomenal impact.
This biography here, written by a man named
Augustine, although it's written Augustino Trappe, called Saint
Augustine, Man, Pastor, and Mystic, where you can
find a lot of very personal, this is
kind of an anecdotal biography, a lot of
personal things which are interesting.
I like them as well, as long as
I'm showing you books.
Let me just go ahead and show the
rest.
This is the main one I've leaned on
and probably is esteemed as the modern biography
that is most authoritative, Peter Brown, Augustine of
Hippo.
It's a very, very good biography in my
judgment.
And, of course, this is his autobiography up
to age 32, which are formative years, but
the confessions have, I probably in my talk
here quote from the confessions more than anything
else.
And they have this same edition of The
City of God in the bookstore, unless they're
all gone, but you can check those out.
This is a good translation.
I think you should read these in a
modern translation.
I have this thing about modernizing the Puritans.
I don't like that.
I don't like updated English versions of Jonathan
Edwards or Owen.
But I do like, if you've got to
translate from Latin, do it in the contemporary
idiom.
Don't enshrine anybody's old translation of Augustine.
So I enjoyed reading this one, remembering how
I'd read as a 19-year-old at
Wheaton the Confessions of Augustine in another kind
of English.
In this one, Augustino Trappe, he said something
very, very good to explain his influence.
Augustine was a philosopher, theologian, mystic, and poet
in one.
His lofty powers complemented each other and made
the man fascinating in a way difficult to
resist.
He is a philosopher, but not a cold
thinker.
He is a theologian, but also a master
of spiritual life.
He is a mystic, but also a pastor.
He is a poet, but also a controversialist.
Every reader, thus, finds something attractive and even
overwhelming.
Depth of metaphysical intuition, rich abundance of theological
proofs, synthetic power and energy, psychological depth shown
in spiritual ascents, and a wealth of imagination,
sensibility, and mystical fervor.
Now, I found that quote accurate and unexaggerated
from my exposure to Augustine over the years.
So we all must, who undertake to say
anything about this man, insert a disclaimer.
Benedict Groeschel has written the most recent that
I know of, 1996, the most recent treatment
of his works.
And he went to Villanova University in his
researches where they have the Augustinian Heritage Institute
and was overwhelmed that there is a library
of works by Augustine.
Works on Augustine fill a library.
And then he was exposed to the computer
five million word disks that Augustine wrote.
And, of course, he inserted his disclaimer.
I wish I had jotted down in my
readings.
I only remember reading it and I didn't
take a note on it that somebody, even
in Augustine's own day, said, anybody who claims
to have read all of Augustine is a
liar.
Here's what Groeschel says.
I felt like a man beginning to write
a guidebook of the Swiss Alps.
After 40 years, I can still meditate on
one book of the Confessions.
It's divided into 13 books.
On one book of the Confessions, during a
week-long retreat and come back feeling frustrated
that there is still so much more gold
to mine in those few pages, I, for
one, know that I shall never in this
life escape from the Augustinian Alps.
Well, that's true.
Nevertheless, people visit the Alps.
And so we're going to visit the Alps.
And I just take heart from the fact
that one can go to the Alps and
spend an hour there and benefit from it
and not have exhausted the Alps.
So that's where we are.
If you ask now, well, suppose I want
to spend a little more time in the
Alps when you're done, where should I go?
Well, I would say, as virtually everybody else
would say, start with the Confessions.
If you've never read Augustine's Confessions, you should.
David Wells told me at supper last night
he assigns this in his class on spiritual
classics or classics of the Western heritage or
whatever the class is called.
And anybody that leaves that book out of
spiritual classics would, of course, be committing an
error.
Start there.
Then the other four big books, famous books
are, number one, On Christian Doctrine, which he
wrote between 397 and 426.
The Enchiridion, On Faith, Hope, and Love, which
Warfield says is his most serious attempt to
systematize his thought.
On the Trinity, written over another 25-year
period, which gave definitive formulation to the Trinity
for years.
And then The City of God, which he
spent about 29 years writing.
No, no, no, no, not 29 years.
From 413, I was doing my math wrong.
From 413 to 426, 13 years.
So let's go on a little short tour
here.
I'm very eager to get to my thesis,
but I want also to weave it into
his life, so I'm torn as to how
to proceed, but I'll weave them together the
best I can.
What I have seen and what I want
to preach when we get to it is
tremendously important, I believe, for our day.
For me personally, it's tremendously important, and I
think the Lord is putting together a conference
here with what David Wells is saying, what
Alistair Begg said this morning, and what I'm
about to say that has a coherency about
it, though perhaps some apparent tensions in it
that will be very good for us to
think through.
I titled this, The Power of Pleasure in
the Life and Thought of St. Augustine.
I might have called it the sovereignty of
joy in the life of Augustine, or the
place of sovereign joy in the exposition and
defense of evangelical Calvinism, or if I wanted
to be really at home, I would say
it's about the Augustinian roots of Christian hedonism,
which in fact it is, and it is
a delight to me to find my own
tree planted in such deep soil.
But let's go to the life first.
Augustine was born November 13, 354.
His father, Patrick or Patricius, was a middle
-income farmer, not wealthy, scraped together money to
give him the best education he could in
rhetoric, first in Madalra, 20 miles away from
Bagas, where he was born, which is south
of Kipo in northern Africa, in Algeria today.
Then, between the ages of 17 and 20,
he was educated in Carthage.
His father was an unbeliever until the year
of his death, and he died when Augustine
was 16 years old.
His mother, Monica, is very famous because of
her relentless prayer for her lecherous son.
And I'm not sure that she did the
best job she should, rearing him.
He said, As I grew to manhood, I
was inflamed with desire for a surfeit of
hell's pleasures.
My family made no effort to save me
from my fall by marriage.
Their only concern was that I should learn
how to make a good speech and how
to persuade others by my words.
So, poor Monica.
She's included in that, as is his father.
Then he said particularly about his father, My
father took no trouble at all to see
how I was growing in your sight, O
God, and whether I was chaste or not.
He cared only that I could have a
fertile tongue.
But he left for Carthage when he was
17, and his mother, waking to the danger
evidently, said to him that he should not
commit fornication and, above all, not seduce a
man's wife.
And this is what he said, I went
to Carthage where I found myself in the
midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.
My real need was for you, my God.
He's writing this at age, what's 397, 354
from 397, 43.
My real need was for you, my God,
who are the food of the soul.
I was not aware of this hunger.
I was willing to steal and steal I
did, although I was not compelled by any
lack.
I was at the top of the school
of rhetoric.
I was pleased with my superior status and
swollen with conceit.
It was my ambition to be a good
speaker for the unhallowed and inane purpose of
gratifying human vanity.
So, lust, theft, and conceit.
He took a concubine when he was 16
and lived with her for 15 years and
had a son by her, Aediodus, which means
gift of God.
To put his life in a nutshell from
that early schooling in Carthage on, he was
getting trained in rhetoric to be a teacher
and so for 11 years, 19 to 30,
he taught rhetoric.
First in Carthage, then Rome, then Milan and
was basically a school teacher for young, aspiring,
well-to-do Roman boys.
And the next 44 years, he was a
bishop.
So, you could sum his life up to
say he spent 11 years as a profligate
and 44 years as a celibate.
Because once he was cured, he went all
the way with Chastity and would never come
near a woman.
And women were forbidden from entering the monastery
where he lived next door to the bishop's
house or to the church.
Now, here is an interesting thing.
His conversion did not happen nearly as suddenly
as it's made out often.
We have to make things simple when we
are telling little stories and sermons and whatnot,
but I was surprised that this was a
very long, drawn-out, agonizing thing.
For example, in Carthage, when he was 19
years old, he read for the first time
Cicero, specifically the Hortensius.
And this had an effect on him, which
was a kind of first conversion.
Cicero was a total pagan.
No Christ in it.
But, he says, it altered my outlook on
life.
It changed my prayers to you, O Lord,
and provided me with new hopes and aspirations.
This is 11 years before his conversion.
All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm.
My heart began to throb with a bewildering
passion for wisdom and eternal truth.
I began to climb out of the depths
into which I had sunk in order to
return to you.
My God, how I burned with longing to
have wings to carry me back to you,
away from all earthly things, although I had
no idea what you would do with me,
for yours is the wisdom.
In Greek, the word philosophy means love of
wisdom, and it was this love that the
Hortensius inflamed in me.
Now, that sounds really good.
But he lived with his concubine, and he
was a pagan for another 11 years.
But what had happened was, he experienced by
the providence of God, a lifting out of
the groveling of lust in Carthage, at least
to the level of caring about some truth
issues.
So, don't begrudge pagan conversions to paganism.
Don't begrudge that.
That can be used of the Lord in
the university.
If you see a guy move out of
living with his girlfriend to start reading Plato,
rejoice!
Don't give him any encouragement that that's salvation.
But it might become salvation because it did
for Augustine.
Well, he fell in with the Maniches, and
I don't want to take you through that
long deal of 11 years of trying to
understand this dualism and all that.
When he was 29, big jump now, he
went to Rome.
But in Rome, these boys, these students, he
did not like.
They were very misbehaving, and so he looked
for another place to teach as soon as
he could.
And in God's providence, he said, the Lord
transferred him to Milan, north of Rome, Milan,
Italy.
And there two things happened.
He discovered the Platonists, and he met Ambrose,
the bishop.
These are awesome things, as he describes them,
because the Platonists were his second conversion.
He discovered Plotinus.
Who cares and who knows about Plotinus?
Died in 270, a neo-Platonist, recovering the
vision of Plato's ideas and forms.
Remember from college philosophy classes?
And he fell absolutely in love and appropriated
this Platonism into his search for wisdom so
that it stamped him for the rest of
his life.
A lot of people write off Augustine today
because they just say he's just distilled Christianized
Platonism, which I think is a mistake.
And he met Ambrose, this godly, truth-speaking
bishop.
Peter Brown, this biographer here, says that the
discovery of Plato and Plotinus did nothing less
than shift the center of gravity of Augustine's
spiritual life.
He was no longer identified with his god,
as in Manichaeism.
This Platonic god that he now met was
utterly transcendent.
So that's a next stage in his moving
toward Christianity.
Now you can hear the influence of his
Platonism as he diagnoses, in those days, his
own condition.
Here's the way he described it.
I had my back to the light, and
my face was turned toward the things which
it illumined.
Remember the story of the cave in Plato.
So that my eyes, by which I saw
the things which stood in the light, were
themselves in the dark.
This is a Platonic analysis of his lost
condition at that moment.
Now here's the final move to closing with
Jesus.
Ambrose was 14 years older than Augustine and
preached Sunday after Sunday.
And he began to go.
In fact, he became a catechumen, committed him
to nothing.
It was a thing to do.
The aristocracy in Milan were all Christian.
His mother had arrived on the scene and
was trying to finagle a marriage for him
so he'd get out of this concubinage with
this woman who was below him in social
class.
It was just easy to do.
So he signed on and started going to
church, and this is what he said.
In Milan, I found your devoted servant, the
Bishop Ambrose.
At that time, his gifted tongue never tired
of dispensing the richness of your corn, the
joy of your oil, and the sober intoxication.
Now, just stop there.
This man is brilliant.
The sober intoxication.
You just fly over things like that way
too fast.
If you read, David Wells said, like, he
has a hard time getting his students to
read this book slow enough.
I had to read, I did not see
that until I typed it.
Sober intoxication.
That's all over the place in Augustine.
Powerful use of language here.
One of the things we're going to address
now, we will again tonight, we will again
tomorrow, is what David Wells said last night
about this other worldview over against the therapeutic,
psychologized, man-centered worldview.
He used the words, I think, clear, winsome,
powerful must be this worldview presentation.
Augustine will help you, brothers, as does C
.S. Lewis.
Anybody who's lasted centuries will help you in
this, to find language to commend God.
Now, I stopped in the middle of the
sentence.
Let's go back.
At that time, his gifted tongue never ceased
dispensing richness of your corn, oh God, joy
of your oil, the sober intoxication of your
wine.
Unknown to me, it was you who led
me to him so that I might knowingly
be led by him to you.
That's also typically Augustine.
So his Platonism liberated him from a mere
quest for wisdom in the manatee heresy of
being identified with God in a great dualism
in the world to a transcendent God who
he suddenly felt scandalized by in the Word
made flesh.
Utterly un-Platonic.
This is why I said those who think
he's just warmed over Platonism are not getting
it.
Because Platonism undergoes a radical criticism by the
Incarnation in Augustine's own life.
So Ambrose is preaching and he says, I
was all ears to seize upon his eloquence.
I also began to sense the truth of
what he said, though only gradually.
I thrilled with love and dread alike.
I realized that I was far away from
you and far off.
I heard your voice saying, I am the
God who is.
I heard your voice as we hear voices
that speak to our hearts.
And at once I had no cause to
doubt.
Now that was not his conversion.
He just knew there's a God out there.
He's transcendent and I've got to discover this
personal transcendent God this Ambrose is preaching.
That's where he was now.
I was astonished, he says, that although I
now loved you, I did not persist in
the enjoyment of my God.
Your beauty drew me to you, but soon
I was dragged away from you by my
own weight and dismay.
With dismay, I plunged again into the things
of this world as though I had sensed
the fragrance of the fair, but was not
able to eat it.
Now in that sentence, I want you to
notice the phrase, I did not persist in
the enjoyment of my God, because right here
we begin to see the categories in which
Augustine is framing his quest and the interpretation
Augustine is going to put upon his conversion
and the theology of grace that he draws
from it, just like the Apostle Paul put
on his own conversion and the theology of
grace that grew out of that stunning event
on the Damascus Road.
He now conceived of his quest as a
life in search of a firm, unshakable enjoyment
of God.
And that's going to be utterly determinative in
his thinking about everything else, including his battle
with Pelagianism near the end of his life,
which is what I hear David Wells talking
about.
I'll try to say more about that in
a minute.
But now it wasn't intellectual anymore what he's
being held back by.
There's one thing, sex.
So wake up now.
One thing is keeping him back, lust.
I was still held firm in the bonds
of a woman's love.
I began to search for a means of
gaining the strength I needed to enjoy you.
You see the issue he's shaping for us?
Sex enjoyment or you enjoyment.
That's the issue for Augustine.
But I could not find this means until
I embraced the mediator between God and man,
Jesus Christ.
His mother, who had prayed for him all
her life, all his life at least, came
to Milan, 385, the spring of 385, began
to arrange this marriage for him with a
girl who was two years too young to
marry.
I assume that puts her at about 14
or something.
He's 30 or 31 here.
And he is pressured to let this concubine
go.
And he sends her away after 15 years,
back to Africa, and will never live with
her again.
Never in five million words does he name
her.
The woman with whom I had been living
was torn from my side as an obstacle
to my marriage, which he never consummated.
He never did get married.
And this was a blow which crushed my
heart to bleeding, because I loved her dearly.
She went back to Africa, vowing never to
give herself to any other man.
But I was too unhappy, too weak to
imitate this example set by a woman.
I took another mistress without the sanction of
wedlock.
Talk about bondage.
You got bondage in your church, in your
life?
There's hope.
So the day came.
Let's go to the day.
This is the day that everybody knows about.
And this day is more complex, too, than
I thought it was.
But I don't have time for that complexity.
What happened in the morning determined what happened
in the afternoon.
And all we know about is what happened
in the afternoon.
But in a nutshell, in the morning there
was a visitor who told a story about
Antony, a monk in Egypt.
And as the story was being told about
this monk in Egypt, who with his disciples
had heard of the gospel, had stripped themselves
of all concubinage and all sexual lust and
all possessions, and sold themselves out to the
monastic way of poverty and celibacy and service,
and went to Egypt in missionary labors, caused
his heart to burn and to smite himself
because he was in the bonds of lust,
as he heard the story, and hated himself.
Hated himself because of these stories that he
was telling, that he was hearing from the
visitor in the morning.
This is the most important day in his
life.
It is one of the most important days
in church history.
O Lord, my helper and my redeemer, I
shall now tell and confess to the glory
of your name how you released me from
the fetters of lust, which held me so
tightly shackled, and from my slavery to the
things of this world.
If you don't have time to read it,
just read book eight.
Just read book eight in the Confessions.
There was a small garden attached to the
house where we lodged.
I now found myself driven, this is the
afternoon now, by the tumult in my breast
to take refuge in this garden where no
one could interrupt that fierce struggle in which
I was my own contestant.
I was beside myself with madness that would
bring me sanity.
I would, now there it is again, I
was beside myself with madness that would bring
me sanity.
Sober intoxication, mad sanity.
Don't miss this.
Don't miss the power of this in your
reading and your preaching.
Arrest people.
Get people with your language.
Labor to find language in the twentieth century
worthy of God.
I was frantic, overcome by violent anger with
myself for not accepting your will and entering
into your covenant.
I tore my hair.
I hammered my forehead with my fists.
I locked my fingers and hugged my knees.
I was held back by mere trifles.
He began to see at this point the
beauty of chastity.
Now this is the miracle of deliverance.
It's the same story that was told in
Leadership Magazine eighteen years ago.
How many of you read that article?
You remember that one?
The older guys maybe read it.
You got to see something more powerful, more
beautiful, more enjoyable, more delightful, more thrilling, more
satisfying than masturbation and the internet and the
concubine and the weekend fling.
It's just got to ravish you.
And it did.
He began to see chastity.
Listen to this description.
I was held back by mere trifles.
They plucked at my garment of flesh and
whispered, Are you going to dismiss us from
this moment?
We shall never be with you again forever
and ever.
That's exactly the way pornography talks.
Never again.
Can you say never again to me?
And while I stood trembling at the barrier
on the other side, I could see chaste
beauty of continence in all her serene, unsullied
joy as she modestly beckoned me to cross
over and to hesitate no more.
She stretched out loving hands to welcome and
embrace me now.
The battle is down to just two things.
Which is more beautiful?
I flung myself down beneath a fig tree
and gave way to the tears that now
streamed from my eyes.
In my misery I kept crying and crying.
How long shall I go on saying tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow?
Why not now?
Why not make an end of my ugly
sins at this moment?
Some of you are saying that perhaps right
now.
All at once, and I may be this
for you, all at once the sing-song
voice of a child in a nearby house.
Whether it was the voice of a boy
or a girl, I cannot say.
But again and again it repeated the refrain,
take it and read, take it and read.
At this I looked up thinking hard whether
there was any kind of game in which
children used to chant words like these.
But I could not remember even hearing them
before.
I stemmed my flood of tears and stood
up, telling myself that this could only be
a divine command to open my book of
Scripture and read the first passage on which
my eyes should fall.
That's what he said.
So I hurried back to the place where
Elipius was sitting, seized the book of Paul's
epistles, opened it, and in silence I read
the first passage on which my eyes fell.
Not in reveling, in drunkenness, not in lust
and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries, rather
arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Spend no more thought on nature and nature's
appetites.
Romans 13.
I had no wish to read more and
no need to do so, for in an
instant as I came to the end of
the sentence it was as though the light
of confidence flooded my heart and all the
darkness of doubt was dispelled.
Praise God.
Now, I want very much to launch into
my exposition of this interpretation of his conversion
as it gets unfolded in his theology of
grace and joy, but I think you should
hear the rest of his life quickly.
44 years in a flash, because it's pretty
simple.
As most pastors' lives are, we get up,
we go to work, we preach, we go
to bed, it's a pretty simple life.
He was baptized the next Easter, 387, by
Ambrose.
His mother dies that autumn.
A very happy woman, very happy and ready
to go.
At age 34 he returns to Africa, goes
back to Thagash, his hometown, wants to set
up a monastery.
He has sworn off marriage, he's sworn off
sex.
He's going to be a monastic, literary, philosophic,
knower of God, dispenser of truth through whatever
means God allows.
And it was not meant to be.
There's a lot of parallels with Calvin here,
if you read the story.
He discovers Thagash is not a very good
place for a monastery.
It's off the beaten track, and if you're
going to have any impact and bring other
monks into your monastery, have an influence and
amount to be priests in churches, you better
get to a big town.
So he looked for a town where they
already had a bishop, so that he would
not be conscripted.
And he chose Hippo, where there was a
good, solid bishop named Valerius.
And he moved his monastery to Hippo.
And almost immediately he miscalculates.
And like Calvin, a thousand years later, he
is forced into the priesthood.
At the end of his life, here's the
way he describes it.
He stands up and preaches to his people,
A slave may not contradict his Lord.
I came to this city to see a
friend whom I thought I might gain for
God, that he might live with us in
the monastery.
I felt secure for the place already had
a bishop.
I was grabbed.
I was made a priest, and from there
I became your bishop.
And so like so many people, it seems,
who left a mark on the church, he
was catapulted out of a life of contemplation
into a life of action.
He would visit jails to protect prisoners.
He would intervene in criminal disputes, because in
Hippo, the bishop was granted civil authority to
settle all the civil disputes for those who
were members of the church.
And he groaned that his mornings were spent
doing what Jesus wouldn't do, who made me
a, you know, judge over you.
And they said, settle accounts, and oh, my
brother and I can't figure out this inheritance,
and Jesus wouldn't touch it.
Well, Augustine touched it week after week after
week, and he groaned like many of us
groan under certain aspects that are necessary in
the ministry.
Forty years of service to this church, biblically
saturated priests turned out of his monastery, changed
the face of North Africa, vigilant over his
personal life, a vegetarian diet, except when the
guests came, poverty.
When he came to the end of his
life, there was no will because there were
no possessions.
He held everything in complete commonality.
He had no money to will to anybody
when he died.
He had his own books, and he had
his clergy, and he had his monastery.
Those were his legacy to the world.
Now, what's the point that I would like
to develop my thesis?
And here's what it is.
R.C. Sproul is right, I think, that
the church today is in a Pelagian captivity.
I would add, here's my prescription, I don't
know whether he would agree with this, that
the cure, let's say a piece of the
cure, is for the Reformed community to recover
a healthy dose of Augustine's doctrine of sovereign
joy.
My assumption is that too much Reformed thinking
and preaching and worship in our day has
not penetrated to the root of how grace
actually triumphs through joy in believers' lives.
And therefore, our Reformed thinking and writing and
preaching and worshiping is only half Augustinian and
half biblical and half beautiful.
It isn't beautiful to people.
Let me try to unpack that.
Pelagius was a British monk who lived in
Rome.
He was there when it was sacked, he
had to leave.
He taught, though grace may facilitate the achieving
of righteousness, it is not necessary to that
end.
Grace is not necessary to making right choices.
He did not believe in the doctrine of
original sin, and he believed that human nature
was at its core irreducibly good and we
are able to do everything we are commanded
to do.
And therefore, Pelagius and Augustine were on a
collision course because when he read the Confessions,
this sentence infuriated him.
Give me the grace, O Lord, to do
as you command, and command me to do
what you will.
O holy God, when your commands are obeyed,
it is from you that we receive the
power to obey them.
Well, Pelagius went ballistic at this sentence because
it was an assault on human goodness, it
was an assault on the freedom of the
will.
In his judgment, it was therefore an assault
on responsibility and the whole moral fabric of
the world would unravel if Augustine had his
way in this assessment of his own conversion
and experience with God.
Well, now Augustine had not come to this
conviction quickly, namely that anything good he does
is a gift from God.
He had not arrived there quickly.
I walked into a bookstore at Hope College
and saw the book by Augustine on the
freedom of the will.
I said, Oh good, I've got a lecture
on this in a year.
So I picked it up and started reading
it.
I said, Howie, what is this?
I don't want a lecture on this.
He wrote that book four years after his
conversion and radically changed his mind from what
that book said.
So be careful claiming what Augustine thinks about
this or that.
When he wrote his confessions, he had settled
the matter differently and deeply and unchangeably in
his own mind.
Now, this paragraph that I'm about to read
here, in my judgment, for me and my
theology and my ministry and my life, is
the most important paragraph I've ever read in
Augustine.
Here it is.
During all those years, where was my free
will?
What was the hidden secret place from which
it was summoned in a moment so that
I might bend my neck to your easy
yoke?
How sweet all at once it was for
me to be rid of those fruitless joys
which I had once feared to lose.
You drove them from me.
You who are the true, the sovereign joy.
You drove them from me and you took
their place.
You who are sweeter than all pleasure, though
not to the flesh and blood.
You who outshine all light, yet are hidden
deeper than any secret in our hearts.
You who surpass all honor, though not in
the eyes of men who see all honor
in themselves.
Oh Lord, my God, my light, my wealth,
my salvation.
There's a theology in that quote.
It's called Christian hedonism.
I call it Christian hedonism.
Nobody else calls it that.
And you don't have to call it Christian
hedonism, but I hope you believe it.
You drove them from me.
You are the true, the sovereign joy.
There's the missing piece in contemporary Reformed preaching.
Augustine's understanding of grace is this.
Grace is God's giving us sovereign joy in
God that triumphs over the joy of sin.
That's grace in the thought of Augustine.
I'll say it again.
Grace is God's giving us a sovereign joy
in God that triumphs over the joy in
sin.
In other words, God works deep in the
human heart to transform the springs of joy
so that we love God more than we
love sex or anything else.
Now Mark, here's another problem with contemporary American
Christianity.
Loving God in Augustine's mind is never reduced
to deeds of obedience or acts of willpower.
How common that is in our day.
Love is commanded so it can't be an
emotion.
Love is an act of will.
Love is obedience to God.
Oh, for Augustine in our day.
Here's his definition of the love of God.
I call charity the motion of the soul
toward the enjoyment of God for his own
sake and the enjoyment of oneself and one's
neighbor for the sake of God.
Joy is the essence of love.
And for American Christianity, it's a caboose.
No wonder our Reformed thinking and preaching is
unappealing.
We don't get grace.
Grace is the giving of a sovereign joy
that triumphs over all competitors.
Loving God, for Augustine, is always conceived essentially
as delighting in God above all things and
in other things for the sake of God.
He loves thee too little, O God, who
loves anything together with thee which he loves
not for thy sake.
That is a revolutionary sentence.
I read that years ago, and it just
blew me away.
I like my wife.
She's here somewhere.
I like Canada.
I could idolize my family.
My four boys are a treasure to me.
And better that they die than that I
love them more than God or love them
for any reason but for God's sake.
That's Augustinianism at its core.
Now, Augustine analyzed his own motives down to
the root.
He saw this as a universal.
Every man, he said, that's a quote.
This is not John Piper.
This is Augustine.
Every man whatsoever his condition desires to be
happy, there is no man who does not
desire this, and each one desires it with
such earnestness and that he prefers it to
all other things.
Whoever, in fact, desires other things, desires them
for this end.
And this desire, this delight, this longing for
happiness governs the will.
Now, here's the catch.
The delight that the will always follows we
do not determine.
And Pelagius smelled it and hated it.
Here's the quote from Augustine.
Who has it in his power to have
such a motive present to his mind that
his will shall be influenced to believe?
Who can welcome in his mind something which
does not give him delight?
But who has it in his power to
ensure that something will delight him will turn
up?
Or that he will delight in what does
turn up?
If those things delight us which serve our
advancement towards God, that is due not to
our own whim or industry or meritorious works,
but to the inspiration of God and to
the grace which He bestows.
In other words, converting, saving grace is God's
giving delight in God, holiness, Christ, Scripture, the
beauty of holiness and glory.
Suddenly, you see and love and cherish and
revel and long for them.
Where'd that come from?
Now the will will move with it.
But before that's given, the will's going back
to the Internet and the magazine and the
concubine and the television and the family.
He concludes this way.
A man's free will indeed avails for nothing
except to sin if he knows not the
way of truth.
And even after his duty and his proper
aim shall begin to become known to him
unless he also take delight in and feel
a love for it, he neither does his
duty nor sets about it nor lives rightly.
What more could I ask from Augustine?
Now in order that such a course...
This is still Augustine.
Now in order that such a course may
engage our affections, God's love is shed abroad
in our heart, not through the free will
which arises from ourselves, but through the Holy
Ghost which is given to us.
He wrote to Simplician at the end of
his life, 427, three years before the end
of his life, in answering this question about
free will, in answering this question, I have
tried hard to maintain the free choice of
the human will, but the grace of God.
He was asked by Paulinus.
Now picture this.
He's 72.
He's supposed to retire at 65.
You don't take on Pelagius at 70, which
he did.
It was the last battle he fought.
You give that to younger people.
That's your job.
But he did.
And Paulinus, his friend, said, Augustine, why?
You're an old man.
Lay it down.
That's my paraphrase.
But here's a non-paraphrase answer quoted from
Augustine.
Why?
First and foremost, because no subject gives me
greater pleasure.
For what ought to be more attractive to
us sick men than grace, grace by which
we are healed?
For us lazy men than grace, grace by
which we are stirred up?
For us men longing to act than grace
by which we are helped?
Now what makes that answer so compelling and
so powerful is that the healing, stirring, helping,
enabling grace, I call it future grace, is
the giving of a compelling, triumphant joy.
Grace governs life, even the life of a
70-year-old man, by giving a supreme
joy in the supremacy of God and His
glory and His sufficiency and His beauty and
His treasure which triumphs over all other things.
And when you see a Pelagius coming along
undermining that grace and that gift, even at
70, you go to battle.
This is why the concept of Christian freedom
is so radically different from Augustine.
Get this now.
This is just another piece that blows your
mind away and shows you how far our
whole discussion today is from where He was.
Oh, how we need to bathe ourselves in
the old people.
We are fish swimming in alien waters and
we can't imagine air from 1600 years ago.
Listen to this.
Augustine said, Christian freedom is not the freedom
to choose.
It's the transcendence of choice.
Meaning, it is no ideal for Augustine to
stand with Pelagius in sovereign, autonomous equilibrium between
good and evil and be able to go
this way or that way.
Augustine regards that as the disintegration of the
will.
Freedom is when we are so ravished in
the truth that our minds perceive it holy
for what it is and our delights and
affections embrace it so holy for what it
is.
There is no choice left.
That's freedom.
That's heaven.
That's where we're going.
To argue that we should all try to
cultivate a philosophy and a theology which will
help people stand in sovereign, autonomous equilibrium with
their supposed free will between good and evil
as though that is a noble human thing.
Let us say it is simply not Augustinian.
You can draw your own judgments about whether
it's biblical or not and you should right
now simply say if you have any doubts
about this, he's not quoting much scripture, and
that's right, I'm not.
I'm giving you this man's great vision.
I have written a few things about the
scriptures to try to give grounding to these
things, but Augustine does well.
So, life's quest, what is it?
What's life all about now?
If this is grace, if this is the
sovereignty of grace flowing through sovereign joy liberating
us from the power of alternative gods and
pleasures, what is life all about?
This is his answer, quote, The whole life
of a good Christian is a holy desire.
The whole life of a good Christian is
a holy desire.
The key to Christian living is passion, desire,
hunger, longing.
So, one of the reasons these things are
incomprehensible in our churches is that our people
have so shriveled in their capacity to feel
desire that a talk like this absolutely makes
no sense.
It's a foreign language.
Listen to the way he describes it.
It was true in his own day, so
don't feel hopeless about the 20th century or
21st.
He said, The soul of men shall hope
under the shadow of thy wings.
They shall be made drunk with the fullness
of thy house and of the torrents of
thy pleasures.
This is Augustine.
The torrents of thy pleasures thou wilt give
them to drink.
For in thee is the fountain of life
and in thy light do we see light.
Give me, this is still a quote, Give
me a man in love.
He knows what I mean.
Give me one who yearns.
Give me one who's hungry.
Give me one far away in the desert
who's thirsty and sighs for the spring of
the eternal country.
Give me that sort of man.
He knows what I mean.
But if I speak to cold men, he
just does not know what I am talking
about.
The remedy for this condition of cold men,
cold Reformed men, or cold Arminian men or
women, is number one, prayer and utter dependence
upon God, and two, displaying God himself more
infinitely desirable than all other things in creation
to our people.
It is not an accident that every sentence
in this book is addressed to God.
This is a prayer.
Did you know that?
The confessions are a prayer.
Every sentence is to you, O Lord.
350 pages of prayer.
He told his autobiography to God.
Why?
It stands on almost every page.
I am utterly dependent in everything on you.
That's what this book symbolizes.
It is a prayer because he is totally
and utterly dependent on God for the joy
which will liberate him from the bondage of
sex, which was his downfall until he was
32 years old.
His mother, of course, is famous for praying
for him when he wasn't praying for himself.
O Lord, that I may love you freely,
for I can find nothing more precious.
Turn not away your face from me, that
I may find what I seek.
Turn not aside in your anger from your
servant, lest in seeking you I run towards
something else.
You see, I feel this so deeply, don't
you?
I get up in the morning and there
is in me prone to wander.
Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the
God I love.
And therefore, what do you do?
You cry out in prayer, Don't let me
go!
Don't let television get the upper hand.
Don't let food get the upper hand.
Don't let sex get the upper hand.
Bind me to you, O God, with a
sovereign joy.
Anything else is legalism.
There are a lot of bound up people
in the world, preaching.
A lot of bound up reformed people getting
a lot of bound up reformed Calvinist lemon.
Because they don't understand that the bondage is
released by a sovereign joy.
Which overcomes everything else.
And the last thing I said was displaying
God.
This is a challenge to us, brothers.
A challenge.
Do you want souls?
You want conversions, I mean real conversions.
Listen to Augustine.
If you delight in souls, love them in
God, draw as many with you to Him
as you can.
You yourself, O God, are their joy.
Happiness is to rejoice in you and for
you and because of you.
This is true happiness and there is no
other.
The only evangelist who is going to produce
this kind of Christian is an evangelist who
loves God like this.
And then loves people in God.
So we got to find words, brothers.
And let me read you some words from
Augustine.
I don't have a pastor except my staff
who pastors me and loves me.
But there's no older man that I can
go to when I have a...
I'm the oldest guy on the staff now.
It used to be.
I'm three days older than David Livedly.
So I go to David.
And we have a good brotherly relationship.
I have to go to these guys.
Augustine, Edwards, Luther, Calvin.
I have to because the stuff that's being
written about God, by and large today, doesn't
come near to what I'm about to read
you.
So listen.
This is what we have to do.
What do I love when I love my
God?
Not the sweet melody of harmony in song.
Not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices.
Not manna or honey.
Not limbs such as the body delights to
embrace.
It is not these that I love when
I love my God.
And yet, when I love Him, it is
true that I love a light of a
certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food,
an embrace.
But they are of the kind that I
love in my inner self when my soul
is bathed in light that is not bound
by space.
When it listens to the sound that never
dies away.
When it breathes the fragrance that is not
born away on the wind.
When it tastes food that is never consumed
by the eating.
When it clings to an embrace from which
it is not served by fulfillment of desire.
This is what I love when I love
my God.
You are ever active.
You always are at rest.
You gather all things to yourself though you
suffer no need.
You grieve for wrong but suffer no pain.
You can be angry and yet serene.
Your works are varied but your purpose is
one and the same.
You welcome those who come to you though
you never lost them.
You are never in need but you are
glad to gain.
Never covetous yet you exact a return for
your gifts.
You release us from our debts but you
lose nothing thereby.
You are my God, my life, my holy
delight.
But is this enough to say of you?
Can any man say enough when he speaks
of you?
Yet woe betide those who are silent about.
Is that a mandate to preach or what?
If it's true as R.C. Sproul says
that we have not broken free from the
Pelagian captivity of the church then we should
pray and preach and write and teach and
labor with all our might to break the
chain that holds us captive.
Sproul said we need an Augustine.
This is a quote from the Table Talk.
We need an Augustine or a Lutheran to
speak to us anew lest the light of
God's grace not only be overshadowed but be
obliterated.
And I say, yes, but we also need
tens of thousands of ordinary pastors like you
and me who are ravished with the extraordinary
sovereignty of joy in God.
We need to rediscover Augustine's peculiar slant.
I believe a very biblical slant on grace.
Grace is the free gift of sovereign joy
in God that triumphs over and breaks the
bondage of sin in our lives and in
our people's lives.
We need to rethink Reformed soteriology so that
every limb and every branch in this tree
is coursing with the sap of Augustinian delight.
We need to understand and make clear that
total depravity is not just badness.
It's deadness to joy.
It's blindness to beauty.
We need to see that unconditional election means
that the completeness of our joy in Jesus
was planned for us before the foundation of
the world.
We need to see that limited atonement is
the assurance that is indestructible, that joy in
God will infallibly, let me say it again,
that Christ's infallible work on the cross will
secure joy for us infallibly forever.
It will not be taken away.
We need to see that irresistible grace is
commitment and power and love that God has
towards us to be sure that we will
not stay in the bondage of suicidal pleasures.
Irresistible grace is God's way of saying, I
have something better for you.
Can we preach it that way?
Why does it have to become so controversial
that call on my free will instead?
Well, who cares if you've got joy on
the other side, infinite and eternal, absolutely ravishing
forever and ever and ever.
And we need to say that perseverance of
the saints is the almighty work of God
through all the affliction and suffering of the
ministry so that we will not be lost
to an inheritance of pleasures at God's right
hand.
That's the missing note, I think.
Why is it missing?
This is my closing question to you.
It's missing, is it missing?
Because pastors have not experienced it.
I mean, you will not go home on
Sunday and preach these things unless it happens
to you.
Can we say these words?
How sweet all at once it was for
me to be rid of those fruitless joys,
which I had once feared to lose.
You drove them from me.
You who are the true, the sovereign joy.
You drove them from me and took their
place.
Oh Lord, my God, my light, my wealth,
and my salvation.
Or are we in bondage to television, food,
sleep, sex, money, human praise?
Just like everybody.
If so, then let us repent and fix
our faces like flint toward the word of
God with the prayer, Oh Lord, open my
eyes to the sovereign sight that in your
presence is fullness of joy and at your
right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Father, I pray that you will not just
instruct us, but awaken us.
The need is so great in our hearts,
in pastors' hearts.
They can't preach this if they don't taste
it.
God, we're desperately, desperately dependent on you.
This is what Augustine discovered.
He could not create joy.
You did.
Would you do it again in these hours
together and for a lifetime and in our
people for the sake of the nations and
the glory of your name?
I pray through Christ.
Amen.
We have about seven minutes for questions.
Yeah.
The question is, in Book 10, this is
devastating.
He walks through the senses, the eyes, the
ears, the taste, sexuality, asking whether it is
possible to experience joy in any of those
without becoming idolatrous.
And he is incredibly suspicious of music in
church.
I wish I got big circles around it
somewhere, but he does, thankfully, come out by
saying, for now, and tentatively, I think it's
probably permissible to have music in church.
It's very tentative whether music should be allowed
in church for Augustine.
I would say that let us be biblical
and not Augustinian.
The Psalms do virtually reverberate with music.
So I would have to toss Psalm 150
out of my Bible or do some kind
of dispensational thing that says the New Testament
rejects the Psalms at that point.
I think most people say that.
I'm not going to go that direction, and
therefore I will not renounce music.
However, the balance to strike is to create
an awareness in our people that there is
an infinite qualitative difference between spiritual delight in
God and the good feelings we get from
a good tune.
And that is frightening, because I think that
there are thousands of churches that have never
even posed that question, and if they've posed
it, haven't made the distinction, and therefore are
counting as engagement with God through spiritual affections
what is in fact what Edwards would call
the moving of animal spirits and fluids.
Now, I personally like to have my fluids
moved, and therefore I run a great risk
here and am working with Chuck all the
time, our worship leaders and our staff, just
saying this is the danger.
Let us seek not to avoid good tunes
that we all like, but rather teach our
people to with the eye and the ear
of the heart to hear the music of
truth and beauty in God.
And there's no—I can't give you four ways
to do that.
That's a miracle, that's regeneration, that's sanctification, that's
God's work.
I can describe it in words, but I
can't make it happen.
And we need to point it out so
that our people will cry out for it.
They'll come in, they'll sit down in these
pews next Sunday, and they'll have an awareness.
That's a beautiful prelude.
Oops, what am I supposed to do with
that prelude?
I am supposed to let it be a
vehicle by which my mind is drawn up
to God who created those patterns, and therefore
what a God it must be who has
created this.
There's a—I don't have it in here, I
don't think, but there's a quote from his
seeing of the ocean.
Yeah, yeah, here.
Just use the ocean here as music.
There is a grandeur of the spectacle of
the sea itself as it slips on and
off its many colors like robes, and now
is all shades of green, now purple, now
sky blue, and all these are mere consolations
for us unhappy, punished men.
They are not the rewards of the blessed.
What can these be like, the rewards of
the blessed, then, if such things here are
so many, so great, and of such a
quality?
That's the way to handle beauty.
If these things here are so great and
so wonderful.
He even praised the intellect of pagans.
He said if pagans can rise so high
with their intellect and cause us to stand
in awe of the intellect with which they
defend their heresies, should we not marvel at
the God who created them?
So, he did have a place for all
the senses and all of the intellect.