Restless Until It Rests in Thee

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. PSALM 116:7

The Confessions opens not with Augustine but with God. “Great art Thou, O Lord,” it begins, taking its words from the Psalms, and before a single fact of his life has been told, Augustine has set down the sentence that explains all the others: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” He was in his forties when he wrote it, a bishop looking back on thirty years of searching. He had tried nearly everything the ancient world could offer a clever young man — learning, reputation, pleasure, friendship, philosophy, a fashionable religion — and none of it had let him rest. The sentence is not a pious decoration. It is a conclusion, reached the hard way.

Made for God

Notice where the sentence begins. It does not begin with our restlessness; it begins with our making. Thou madest us for Thyself. Before we are sinners, before we are seekers, we are creatures, and we were made with a direction built into us. We are not simply made by God; we are made for Him. He is not only our origin but our end, the place where our nature is meant to arrive.

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. REVELATION 4:11

This means that the longing in the human heart is not an accident or a disease. It is a sign of what we are. The Preacher saw it long before Augustine.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. ECCLESIASTES 3:11

The word translated world there carries the sense of the everlasting. God has set something of eternity in the human heart, and nothing that is merely temporal will fill the space. That is why the richest people are not the most content, why the most admired are often the most anxious, why a person can have everything he wanted at twenty and find at forty that he wants something else. We keep trying to fill an infinite space with finite things. Augustine’s claim is simple: the space has a shape, and the shape is God.

Broken cisterns

The Confessions is, among other things, a long catalogue of the places Augustine tried to rest. As a boy he wanted to win at games and to be praised. As a student at Carthage he wanted to be loved, and to love. As a teacher he wanted fame; at Milan he wanted a post at court, a good marriage and money enough to live well. None of these things was evil in itself. Augustine was never a Manichee about creation after his conversion; he insisted all his life that the world God made is good. The trouble was not that the things were bad but that he asked them to be God. He asked a friend, a career, a woman, an idea to give him what only God can give, and each in turn failed under the weight.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. JEREMIAH 2:13

Near the end of the tenth book Augustine gathers this up in one of the most beautiful passages he ever wrote. “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new!” he says; he had been searching outside while God was within. “Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.” He had been plunging into the fair things God had made and missing the One who made them fair. It is worth sitting with that. The things we chase are not ugly. They are beautiful, and that is exactly why they are dangerous: they are lovely enough to be mistaken for the Loveliness they point to.

The rest that Christ gives

If the heart was made for God, then the only cure for restlessness is to come to Him. Augustine did not find this out by philosophy. The Platonists, he says in Book VII, showed him something of God’s being, but they could not show him the way home; they saw the country from afar but did not know the road. The road is Christ.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. MATTHEW 11:28

There is a great difference between being told where rest is and being given it. The Lord does not say, I will show you where rest may be found. He says, I will give it. The restless heart does not reach God by climbing; it is brought home by the One who came down. That is why Augustine’s great sentence is addressed to God, not to the reader. It is a prayer. He did not argue himself into rest; he confessed his way into it.

Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. JOHN 4:13–14

Restlessness that remains

It would be wrong to take Augustine’s sentence to mean that a converted person never feels restless again. He did not think so, and his life shows otherwise. The tenth book of the Confessions, written years after his baptism, is full of his present struggles — with pleasure in food, with the praise of men, with curiosity. He had come home, but he had not yet arrived. There is a restlessness that belongs to sin, the heart’s flight from God, and there is a restlessness that belongs to hope, the heart’s longing for more of Him. The first is cured by conversion. The second is only deepened by it.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. PSALM 42:1

The Psalmist who wrote that was not unconverted. He was thirsty because he had tasted. That is the holy restlessness Augustine never lost, and it is why the Confessions ends, thirteen books later, with a prayer for the Sabbath rest that has no evening. The full repose the first paragraph promises is still to come.

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. HEBREWS 4:9

Why it matters now

Our age has its own ways of silencing the heart’s question. We are busier and more distracted than Augustine could have imagined; we can fill every silent moment with noise. But the question does not go away because we refuse to hear it. It turns up at three in the morning, at a graveside, on the day we finally get what we wanted and find it is not enough. Augustine is a good companion at such moments, because he does not despise the longing. He honours it. He tells us it is the memory of home. And he tells us that the God we are longing for has been seeking us far longer than we have been seeking Him.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Make a list of the places you have tried to find rest in the last year. Beside each, write honestly what it gave you and what it could not give.

2. Choose one good thing you have been asking to be God — a relationship, a career, a comfort — and tell God plainly that you will not ask it to carry that weight any more.

3. Set aside ten minutes of silence each day this week, without a phone or background noise, and notice what your heart asks for when it is not being distracted.

4. Read Matthew 11:28–30 each morning and come to Christ with whatever is heaviest that day.

5. Learn Augustine’s sentence by heart and pray it back to God when restlessness comes.

A PRAYER

Lord, You made me for Yourself, and I have tried to rest everywhere but in You.

I have asked Your gifts to be my God, and they have failed me, as they were always going to.

Thank You that You did not leave me to my broken cisterns, but came to me in Christ and offered me living water.

Give me rest in You today, and keep me thirsty for more of You, until the day I rest in You for ever. Amen.