Give What Thou Enjoinest

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:13

In the tenth book of the Confessions, confessing his present struggles with temptation, Augustine prays a short prayer four times over. “Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.” Command what You like, Lord, only give me what You command. It sounds like a simple prayer of dependence, and it is. It also turned out to be one of the most contested sentences in the history of the church. Augustine later recorded that when it was quoted in Rome in the hearing of a British monk named Pelagius, Pelagius objected to it with some heat. The long quarrel that followed shaped Western theology for the next fifteen hundred years.

What Pelagius feared

Pelagius was a serious and moral man. He was troubled by the slackness of Roman Christians who excused their sins by saying that human nature was weak. God, he argued, would not command what we cannot do. If He tells us to be holy, we must be able to be holy. Our nature, created good, is still able to choose good; grace helps us, by giving us the law, the example of Christ and the forgiveness of past sins, but the choosing is ours. To pray, Give what Thou enjoinest, seemed to him to cut the nerve of moral effort.

It is worth taking Pelagius seriously, because his instinct is alive in every generation. It is the instinct that says, God helps those who help themselves. It is the instinct of every religion of self-improvement. And it seems so reasonable. Surely a command implies an ability?

The will that destroyed itself

Augustine’s answer came out of his own experience and out of Paul. He had known what was right for years and could not do it. His will was not free in the sense Pelagius imagined; it was chained. In the Enchiridion he puts it with stark clarity. Man was created upright, with a will free to choose good; but it was “by the evil use of his free-will that man destroyed both it and himself.” As a man who kills himself was alive when he did it but cannot then give himself life again, so the will that turned from God cannot turn itself back.

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

This does not mean that fallen people have no will, or that they are forced to sin. We choose freely what we want. The trouble is what we want. The slave of sin is free to sin; he is not free to love God, because he does not want to. The bondage is in the heart’s desires, and no command can change desire. The law, Augustine says in the Enchiridion, without the Holy Spirit through whom love is poured into our hearts, “can command, but it cannot assist.” It shows the target; it does not give the strength to hit it.

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him. JOHN 6:44

Grace that goes before

So grace, for Augustine, cannot be merely help offered to a will that is already willing. It must go first. It must make the will willing. In one of the finest sentences in the Enchiridion he takes two verses from the Psalms — that God’s mercy shall meet me, and that His mercy shall follow me — and draws out their meaning: “It goes before the unwilling to make him willing; it follows the willing to make his will effectual.”

The God of my mercy shall prevent me. PSALM 59:10

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. PSALM 23:6

To prevent, in the old English of the King James Bible, means to go before. This is prevenient grace: the grace that is there before we turn, that causes us to turn. Augustine drew the practical point himself. Why, he asks, are we taught to pray for our enemies, who plainly do not want to live a holy life, unless it is that God may work willingness in them? Every prayer for the conversion of another person is a confession that God can change a will from the inside.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. EZEKIEL 36:26

Nothing we did not receive

This leaves no room for boasting, and Augustine intended that. Even faith itself, he insists in the Enchiridion, is the gift of God, and he quotes Paul’s words to prove it.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. EPHESIANS 2:8–9

He does not say good works do not matter. He says they are fruit, not root. Eternal life may rightly be called a reward of good works, he says, but the good works were themselves given, so that “man’s good deserts are themselves the gift of God,” and when they are crowned with eternal life, it is simply grace given for grace. The verse he returned to again and again in these controversies was Paul’s question to the proud Corinthians.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? 1 CORINTHIANS 4:7

Honest questions

Augustine’s teaching on grace is among his greatest gifts to the church, and it is at the root of the Reformation’s rediscovery of salvation by grace alone. But it must be received with care at two points.

First, in his later writings he pressed his logic into a doctrine of predestination that many who love his teaching on grace find hard to square with the whole of Scripture. In the Enchiridion he reads Paul’s statement that God will have all men to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) to mean either that no one is saved unless God wills it, or that God wills to save people of every rank and kind, rather than every single person, and he speaks of God making, out of one heap of perdition, one vessel to honour and another to dishonour. Scripture does teach God’s sovereign choice; it also teaches His sincere love for the world and His free offer to all. Hold both, as Scripture does, even where Augustine’s system seems to let one swallow the other.

Second, Protestant readers should know that when Augustine speaks of justification he usually means God making the sinner righteous by pouring love into the heart, not chiefly God declaring the sinner righteous for Christ’s sake. The Reformers drew on his doctrine of grace while making a sharper distinction here than he did. Both Catholics and Protestants have honestly found themselves in him, and both have had to go beyond him.

What no reader should lose is the prayer at the heart of it all. Give what You command. It is not a counsel of laziness. It is the only prayer that makes holiness possible.

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. JOHN 15:5

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name a command of God you have been trying to keep in your own strength and failing. Turn it into Augustine’s prayer: give what You command.

2. Look for the traces of prevenient grace in your own story — ways God was drawing you before you wanted Him — and thank Him for them.

3. Pray this week for someone who plainly does not want God, asking that He would work willingness in them.

4. Catch yourself the next time you take credit for a spiritual strength. Ask, what have I that I did not receive?

5. Where a hard doctrine unsettles you, write down the Scriptures on both sides and hold them together before God rather than choosing one.

A PRAYER

Lord, You command me to love You with all my heart, and I cannot do it by myself.

Give what You command, and command what You will. Go before my unwilling heart and make it willing; follow my willing heart and make it strong.

Take away all boasting from me. Everything I have that is good, I have received from You.

Keep me abiding in Christ, for without Him I can do nothing. Amen.