Take Up and Read

Today's Scripture

These are the verses that ended Augustine's long war with himself. Read them as he first read them — like a letter addressed to you.

Romans 13:13-14 — "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

Ezekiel 36:26 — "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh."

2 Corinthians 5:17 — "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."

The Big Idea

The most famous conversion scene in Christian history is not a story about a man finally trying hard enough. It is a story about a man collapsing — and grace meeting him on the ground. Augustine did not climb up to God. God came down to Augustine, through a child's voice and an open book. Conversion is not an achievement of the will. It is a gift to the will.

Reflection

The most honest prayer he ever prayed

By the summer of 386 AD, Augustine had run out of excuses. He knew Christianity was true. The arguments were over. The Manichees had failed him, the philosophers had taken him only partway, and Ambrose's preaching had answered his objections one by one. There was nothing left to figure out. There was only something left to do — and he could not do it.

He could not let go of his old life. Years earlier, he had even prayed about it, and his prayer is one of the most honest sentences ever written:

"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." — Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII

Chastity and continence are old words for sexual purity and self-control. Augustine wanted them — someday. Just not today. You know this prayer, even if you have never prayed it in those words. It is the snooze button prayer. I'll forgive her — eventually. I'll quit — after this week. I'll get serious about God — once things settle down. We do not usually refuse God outright. We reschedule him.

Then a visitor named Ponticianus told Augustine a story about ordinary, uneducated men who had read the life of a saint and immediately given everything to follow Christ. Augustine was shattered. He turned to his friend Alypius and burst out:

"The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we with our learning, and without heart — see where we wallow in flesh and blood!" — Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII

All his education, all his brilliance — and people with none of it were sprinting past him into the kingdom. Knowing the truth, it turns out, is not the same as surrendering to it.

A child's voice and an open book

Augustine rushed into the garden of the house where he was staying, in agony. He describes his old pleasures plucking at his sleeve like old companions, whispering: Are you really going to dismiss us? From this moment, forever? The struggle became unbearable.

"I flung myself down under a certain fig tree, and gave free rein to my tears... And I heard from a nearby house, a voice like that of a boy or a girl, I know not which, chanting and repeating over and over, 'Take up and read. Take up and read.'" — Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII

He could not remember any children's game with those words. So he took them as a command from God. He picked up the book of Paul's letters lying nearby, opened it at random, and his eyes fell on Romans 13:13-14 — "not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

It was as if Paul had been reading his mail for thirty years.

"I had no wish to read further, and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away." — Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII

Notice the means God used. Not an angel. Not a vision. A child's voice, a borrowed book, one sentence of Scripture. John 6:44 explains what was really happening under the surface: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." Augustine thought he had been searching for God all those years. He discovered that God had been drawing him the whole time.

Fifteen centuries later, another brilliant, reluctant professor felt that same pull. C.S. Lewis described the months before his own conversion at Oxford:

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet." — C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Lewis called himself the most reluctant convert in all England. Augustine would have understood perfectly. Neither man found God the way you find a parking spot. Both were found — the way a lost sheep is found.

Grace does what willpower cannot

Look closely at the verse that broke through. Paul does not say "try harder." He says "put on the Lord Jesus Christ." That is clothing language — being wrapped in something that comes from outside you. Augustine's divided will could not stitch itself back together. It needed to be covered, clothed, given something it did not have.

This is exactly what God had promised centuries before through the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel 36:26 — "I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." Count the times God says I will. He does not say, "Soften your own heart." He says, I will do the surgery.

Paul says the same thing about the whole of salvation. Ephesians 2:8-9 — "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." Grace is a churchy word with a simple meaning: a gift you did not earn and could never pay back. Augustine became the church's great teacher of grace because he had lived the experiment. He had tried earning, striving, postponing, and white-knuckling. None of it worked. Then God gave.

Tim Keller compresses the gospel — the good news about what Jesus has done — into one sentence Augustine would have loved:

"We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

Both halves of that sentence came true in the garden. Augustine saw the full ugliness of his divided heart — and in the same instant, the full sufficiency of Christ. Romans 5:6 puts it plainly: "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." Not for the strong. Not for the people who finally got it together. For the weak, at the right time — which, for Augustine, was a summer afternoon in Milan.

And the God who starts this work does not abandon it halfway. Philippians 1:6 — "He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." The garden was not the finish line of Augustine's story. It was the starting line of a work God promised to finish.

The sweetness on the other side

What was life like the morning after? Augustine had spent years terrified of this surrender. He assumed that giving up his old pleasures would feel like amputation — that he would limp through the rest of his life missing them. Here is what he actually found:

"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, you who are sweeter than all pleasure." — Augustine, Confessions, Book IX

Read that twice. The things he feared to lose became a joy to lose — because God did not leave a hole where they had been. He took their place. This is the secret the snooze-button prayer never lets us discover: we delay surrender because we think God will take and not give. Augustine found that God takes the lesser to give the greater.

The psalmist knew this pattern long before: Psalm 40:1-3 — "He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock... He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God." Notice the order. First the rescue — he drew me up. Then the song. Rescued people sing.

One of those rescued people was John Newton, a slave-trading sea captain whom grace chased down in a storm. His song became the most famous hymn in the English language:

"Amazing grace! — how sweet the sound — that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see." — John Newton, 'Amazing Grace'

Lost, then found. Blind, then seeing. Newton's grammar is Augustine's grammar — and Paul's. 2 Corinthians 5:17 — "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." Augustine did not get an upgrade. He got a resurrection. The old restless man under the fig tree passed away. Someone new stood up.

That is the gospel hiding in this garden. You cannot convert yourself, and you were never asked to. The same God who used a child's chant and a random page to reach the most stubborn man in Milan is not stumped by whatever garden of indecision you are sitting in today. He has already done the heavy lifting — a cross, an empty tomb. What remains is to take up and read, and let him do what your willpower cannot.

Going Deeper

Do what Augustine did — literally. Find a quiet spot, open your Bible to Romans 13:13-14, and read it out loud, slowly, twice. Then finish this sentence in writing or in prayer: "Lord, the thing I keep telling you 'not yet' about is ______." You do not have to fix it today. Just stop rescheduling the conversation. Hand the thing itself to the God who gives new hearts, and ask him to begin.