Take Up and Read

Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. EPHESIANS 5:14

By the summer of 386 Augustine’s mind had been won. He no longer believed the Manichees. The Platonists had taught him to think of God as spirit; Ambrose had shown him that the Scriptures were deep and true; he had heard the Christian faith explained and could find nothing against it. And still he did not come. Book VIII of the Confessions is the story of why, and it is one of the most honest accounts ever written of a soul that knows the truth and cannot bring itself to obey it.

Only not yet

Augustine had been praying, after a fashion, for years. As a young man, he tells us, he had asked God for purity, and added a qualification: “Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.” He feared, he says, that God would answer too soon and cure a disease he wanted satisfied rather than removed. It is the most quoted prayer in the Confessions, and the reason is that almost everyone recognises it. We want to be holy — eventually. We want to follow Christ — once we have finished this, sorted that, enjoyed a little more of the other.

To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. HEBREWS 3:15

When God called him, Augustine says, he had nothing to answer but those dull and drowsy words, “Anon, anon,” “presently,” “leave me but a little.” But presently had no present, and his little while went on for a long while. There is a whole theology of delay in that sentence. The word not yet sounds modest and reasonable. It is in fact a refusal dressed as a postponement.

For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 CORINTHIANS 6:2

The chain of habit

Why could he not simply decide? Augustine’s answer is one of his most important contributions to Christian understanding. The will, he saw, is not a free-floating switch that we can flip whenever we choose. It has a history. Our past choices build it into a shape. He puts it in a sentence that has become a classic of the moral life: he was bound, “not with another’s irons, but by my own iron will.” The enemy had held his will and made a chain of it. And he describes how the chain was forged, link by link: “For of a forward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom; and custom not resisted, became necessity.”

Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. JOHN 8:34

This is profoundly true, and it is a warning to every young reader. The sins we indulge today are not only today’s sins. They are the forging of tomorrow’s chains. What begins as a choice becomes a habit, and what becomes a habit feels at last like a necessity — something we cannot help. We did it to ourselves, and we cannot undo it ourselves. That is exactly the condition from which Christ came to set people free.

Two wills at war

The Manichees explained the inner struggle by saying that there were two souls in a man, one good and one evil. Augustine, having felt the struggle himself, rejected that. There were not two natures in him, but one will divided against itself. “Thus did my two wills, one new, and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual, struggle within me,” he says, “and by their discord, undid my soul.” He wanted to want God, and he did not wholly want Him. The mind commands the hand to move, and it moves; but when the mind commands itself to will, it does not obey, because it does not command with its whole self.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. ROMANS 7:19

Augustine found himself in Paul’s words, and he found his way out in Paul’s cry.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. ROMANS 7:24–25

The voice in the garden

The end came suddenly. A visitor named Pontitianus told Augustine and his friend Alypius about Antony of Egypt, who had given up everything to follow Christ, and of two court officials who had read Antony’s life and done the same on the spot. Augustine was stricken. Unlearned men were taking heaven by force while he, with all his learning, wallowed in flesh and blood. He rushed into the garden of their lodging, Alypius following, and the storm broke. He flung himself down under a fig tree and wept, crying, How long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now?

Then he heard from a neighbouring house a child’s voice, chanting over and over, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” He could not remember any children’s game with such words. He took it as a command from God to open the book and read the first passage he found, remembering that Antony had been converted by hearing a single verse of the Gospel. He went back to where Alypius sat, picked up the letters of Paul, and read in silence:

Let us walk honestly, as in the day; 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, to fulfil the lusts thereof. ROMANS 13:13–14

“No further would I read; nor needed I,” he says: at the end of the sentence a light, as it were of serenity, flooded his heart, and all the darkness of doubt vanished away.

What the garden teaches

It would be a mistake to make a method of this, as though believers should open the Bible at random and take whatever verse they find as God’s instruction. What happened in the garden was not magic. It was the end of a long work of God that had been going on for years — through a mother’s prayers, a bishop’s preaching, a friend’s example, the story of Antony. The child’s voice was simply the moment when God said, now.

And note what the verse actually said. It did not offer Augustine a feeling or an experience. It commanded him to put on a Person. He had been trying to become chaste by his own strength and had failed for years. The answer was not a better effort but Christ Himself, put on like a garment, making no room for the old desires. What his will could not do, grace did.

If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. JOHN 8:36

He went straight to tell his mother. She leapt for joy, he says, and blessed God, who is able to do far more than we ask or think. She had asked for a Christian son. She had received a son who would give up everything for Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Is there an area of your life where you are praying, in effect, “only not yet”? Name it before God today.

2. Trace one habit that now feels like a necessity back to the choices that forged it. Confess the choices, and ask Christ to break the chain.

3. Identify one provision you are making for the flesh — a place, a device, a relationship, a routine — and remove it this week.

4. Read Romans 13:11–14 each morning for a week, and consciously put on the Lord Jesus Christ as you dress.

5. If you are still standing on the edge of faith, ask yourself honestly: why not now?

A PRAYER

Lord, I have said “not yet” to You more times than I can count, and called it caution.

I am bound by chains I made myself, and my will is divided against itself. I cannot set myself free.

But You have said, now is the day of salvation. Let it be today.

I put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Make no room in me for what You hate, and make me wholly Yours. Amen.