Take Up and Read

“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” — Romans 13:14 (KJV)

When Pontitianus left, Augustine turned on Alypius, half shouting. “What ails us?” Ordinary people with no education were giving their lives to God, while the two of them, with all their learning, were still stuck. His face said more than his words. Then he rushed out into the small garden of the house where they were staying. Alypius followed and sat down quietly near him.

What happened in that garden is the centre of the whole book. Augustine was at war with himself. He found it strange: he could tell his hand to move and it moved at once, but he couldn't get his own will to do what his will was telling it to do. “The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is resisted.” The reason, he decided, was that he only half wanted it. A divided will is a weak will.

His old habits were still pulling at him, “muttering as it were behind my back.” He imagines them whispering: “Dost thou cast us off? and from that moment shall we no more be with thee for ever?” And underneath them a deeper voice: “Thinkest thou, thou canst live without them?”

On the other side he pictured a dignified, joyful figure he called Continency, surrounded by young men and women, widows and older people who had found self-control, not by their own strength but by God's. She seemed to say, “cast thyself fearlessly upon Him, He will receive, and will heal thee.”

The storm broke. Augustine moved away from Alypius so he could cry alone, threw himself down under a fig tree and wept. “How long, how long, 'to-morrow, and tomorrow?' Why not now? why not is there this hour an end to my uncleanness?”

Then he heard it. From a house nearby, a child's voice, boy or girl, he couldn't tell, chanting over and over: “Take up and read; Take up and read.” He tried to think whether children sang that in some game, and couldn't remember any. He remembered how Antony had been converted by hearing a Gospel verse read aloud as if it were spoken to him. So he stopped crying, went back to where Alypius was sitting with the book of Paul's letters, opened it, and read the first words he saw:

“Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence.”

“No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”

He marked the page and calmly told Alypius. Alypius asked to see it and read the next line, “him that is weak in the faith, receive.” He took that for himself, and joined Augustine without any fuss. It was the summer of 386, and Augustine was thirty-one.

Then they went inside and told Monica. Augustine writes that “she leaps for joy, and triumpheth, and blesseth Thee.” God had given her more than she had asked for. Her son was now standing “in that rule of faith,” exactly where her dream had shown him, years before.

Don't take the wrong lesson from this. The point isn't to wait for a mysterious voice or to open the Bible at random for instructions. That verse landed because Augustine had been reading, listening, arguing and being prayed for for years. The garden was the end of a long road. But the moment of surrender was real, and it came when he stopped saying “tomorrow” and said “why not now?”

One thing to do this week: read Romans 13:8–14, the passage around Augustine's verse, slowly, twice. Then pick one practical way to “make not provision for the flesh”: remove one thing that makes your “not yet” easy.