John Bunyan took the psalmists call in Psalm 66:16 as his own.

Come and hear, all you who fear God,
and I will tell what he has done for my soul.

With that in mind, Bunyan composed his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, or, a Brief Relation of the Exceeding Mercy of God in Christ, to His Poor Servant, John Bunyan. He wrote the first edition after being in prison for five years, and his final adds and edits were made near the end of his twelfth year in prison. Though he hadn’t been called officially as the pastor in Bedford, he had been preaching and taking more leadership for a couple years prior to being arrested. His wrote this book for those in the flock he cared about, especially to encourage those with doubts about salvation and struggles of assurance.

Grace Abounding reminds us of Augustine’s Confessions. Though Bunyan’s book isn’t in the form of a prayer, it does relate his intense struggles with unbelief as well as his slavery to sin. Bunyan’s tormented conscience also reminds the reader of Martin Luther, who, not coincidently, Bunyan refers to, and took Luther’s commentary on Galatians as a great comfort. Perhaps most of all, “grace abounding to the chief of sinners” channels the apostle Paul’s testimony in 1 Timothy 1:15.

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. (KJV)

Like Luther, like Augustine, like Paul, Bunyan knew himself a great sinner who needed a great Savior. Also like them, Bunyan received great grace and was used by God to make a great impact on his generation and generations to come.

We’ll see both grace abounding in Bunyan’s history and grace abounding through Bunyan’s hardships.

Grace Abounding in Bunyan’s History (Timeline)

It’s challenging to get Bunyan’s timeline straight.

Grace Abounding is an unsatisfactory document for the biographer. It is a spiritual autobiography, describing the events which led up to Bunyan’s conversion. The chronology is at best imprecise, at worst chaotic. Any references to external events in Bunyan’s life during this period are quite accidental. (Hill, 63)

John Bunyan was born November 28, 1628, in the small village of Elstow, England. (About 50 miles from London. Less than a century after William Tyndale, and only 17 years after the King James Version was published). The Bunyan family had lived in Bedfordshire since at least 1199. We know very little about his parents except that his “father’s house [was] of that rank that is the meanest and most despised of all the families in the land” (GA, Works, 6), a fact affirmed by his father’s occupation of tinker. A tinker, or brasyer, was a metal worker, using hammer and forge as his tools. He would travel the countryside fixing farm equipment, such as plows and harnesses, or kitchen utensils, such as pots and pans. The name “tinker” comes from the sound made as the man walked between jobs with his tools and supplies on his back. “A tinker was an emblem of lower-class non-respectability and immorality” (Hill, 135).

Bunyan had virtually no formal education. “It pleased God to put into [my parents'] hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write; the which I also attained, according to the rate of other poor men’s children” (GA, 6); maybe he spent 2-4 years in study. But he went on to say, “to my shame, I confess, I did soon lose that little I had learned, and that even almost utterly” (GA, 6), and joined his father as a tinker.

The first bitter taste of suffering we know about is the death of his mother when he was 15 years old (in 1644). His 13 year old sister died a few months later, and the only thing that seemed to make those burdens worse was that his father remarried only one month later. Bunyan was not a believer, and no doubt resented his father.

As soon as he was able, he joined the Parliamentary army in nearby Newport Angell. He was 16 years years old and served until the army was disbanded three years later. The military exposed him to new people and new ideas. It also exposed him to danger and death. Bunyan provides a sense of how close to the action he was with a story of trading guard duty shifts with another soldier. “When I consented, he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot into the head with a musket bullet, and died” (GA, 7).

He moved back to Elstow and married within a couple years, though we never learn the name of his wife. Presumably John looked forward to the comforts and joys of marriage after his difficulties, but within a year their first daughter was born, Mary, who was blind. It’s hard to imagine the struggle and stress of caring for a blind child in 1650, and the maturity required of a 22 year old.

His first wife brought very little with her into the marriage. “This woman and I, came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both” (GA). But what she did bring proved very precious. She possessed two books, inherited from her father: The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent and The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly. She often spoke of her father’s great Christian example.

Around this time Bunyan began to experience violent conviction. He looked back on his earlier years with grief. “I had but few equals…both for cursing, swearing, and blaspheming the holy name of God….Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company, in all manner of vice and ungodliness” (GA, 6). Very Augustinian. Though he may have been exaggerating the extent of his wickedness, we do know from other sources that he was known around town as a fantastic swearer.

As he thought about his sin, he couldn’t escape his tormented conscience and fear of God’s just judgment. He knew enough Scripture to fight himself for only so long, as the passages of law and condemnation won out over passages of grace and forgiveness.

This is why he came to love Luther so much. He went in search of someone older, someone who understood his pain.

I did greatly long to see some ancient godly man’s experience, who had writ some hundreds of years before I was born….After many such longings in my mind, the God in whose hands are all our days and ways, did cast into my hand, one day, a book of Martin Luther; it was his comment on the Galatians–it also was so old that it was ready to fall piece to piece if I did but turn it over….I found my condition, in his experience, so largely and profoundly handled, as if his book had been written after my heart….I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians, excepting the Holy Bible, before all the books that I have ever seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience. (GA, 22)

Yet he continued to struggle for at least four of five more years. A few of us read through Grace Abounding together, and I admitted that I was growing weary of his cycles. Every time it seemed he turned a corner, or finally got his head above the waters of despair, he’d plunge down again, over and over and over. But God was preparing him, and somewhere during this time he was genuinely converted.

Bunyan joined the Bedford church in 1655. His soul conflicts didn’t go away, but he did enjoy more of grace, and within a couple years, he was invited to speak. He began preaching in small meetings and in country settings. His fervor for the preaching task was only exceeded by his fervor for men to believe in Christ.

His wife died in 1658, leaving him to care for four children. In 1659 he married again. 1659 is pivotal in English history, and is a decisive turn in Bunyan’s testimony. In 1659 Oliver Cromwell died. Cromwell was the Lord Protectorate of the English Commonwealth, a republic that was largely tolerant of religious freedom. There had been an ongoing battle between Parliament and monarchy. Before Cromwell, Charles I, the king and proponent of the Church of England, was opposed and then beheaded. But when Cromwell died, and when his son Richard replaced him and couldn’t hack it, Parliament invited Charles II back from France. So monarchy was restored in 1660, and with the Restoration came new laws that prohibited any non-conformity with the state church.1

It became illegal to preach without a state license and conduct meetings without the Book of Common Prayer. Anglicanism was religion, external and ceremonial, but not gospel. Bunyan had no appreciation for externals and went on preaching. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1660, less than one year after remarrying, with his oldest daughter 10 years old.

In his prison account, Bunyan relates how Elizabeth, his wife, went before the court to plead for her husband’s release. We usually focus on the guys more than their wives, so it won’t hurt to take a moment and share some of his Elizabeth’s courage.

“Would he stop preaching?” “My lord, he dares not leave off preaching as long as he can speak.” “What is the need of talking?” “There is need for this, my lord, for I have four small children that cannot help themselves, of which one is blind, and we have nothing to live upon but the charity of good people.”
Matthew Hale, with pity, asks if she really has four children being so young. “My lord, I am but mother-in-law [stepmother] to them, having not been married to him yet full two years. Indeed, I was with child when my husband was first apprehended; but being young and unaccustomed to such things, I being smayed at the news, fell into labor, and so continued for eight days, and then was delivered; but my child died.”
Hale is moved, but other judges are hardened and speak against him. “He is a mere tinker!” “Yes, and because he is a tinker and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.”
One Mr. Chester is enraged and says Bunyan will preach and do as he wishes. “He preacheth nothing but the word of God!” she says.
Mr. Twisden, in a rage: “He runneth up and down and doeth harm.” “No, my lord, it is not so; God hath owned him and done much good by him.” The angry man continues, “His doctrine is the doctrine of the devil.” She replies, “My lord, when the righteous Judge shall appear, it will be known that his doctrine is not the doc- trine of the devil!” (The Hidden Smile of God)

Since he had limited freedom in prison, he wrote about the leaving of his family from visits.

But notwithstanding these helps, I found myself a man, and compassed with infirmities; the parting with my wife and poor children hath oft been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from my bones, and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of those great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries and wants that my poor family was to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my hear that all I had besides; O the thoughts of the hardship I thought my blind one might go under, would break my heart to pieces. (GA, 47-48)

He was released briefly in 1666, then taken back for another six years. He wrote nine books during the first six years, but only two that we know of during the second stint. Perhaps he was busy making boot laces to help support his family (Brown, 166). “Or was it that he was become more broken-spirited and for a time at least had lost something of his elasticity of mind” (Brown, 182).

Jails were run by private citizens, and the conditions depended chiefly on the person in charge. In the 17th century “insanitary conditions, lack of heating, and overcrowding, led to jail fever and other diseases.” 40 persons were killed in the Bedford jail in 1665 due to the plague. (Hill, 121)

Cynical pooh-poohing of painful facts on the one side is just as foolish and as needless as eloquent declamation on the other. Bunyan himself never whines over his sufferings; he was too manly for that. He deliberately made his choice, and as deliberately he accepted the consequences of his choice. (Brown, 165)

He wasn’t a celebrity prisoner. He was a “mechanic-preacher,” a man who worked with his hands six day a week. He wasn’t yet the pastor of the church in Bedford, so even though he had the support of the church, he (and his) family weren’t cared for as if he were their leader.

Eventually, the laws relaxed with the “Declaration of Religious Indulgence” in 1672 and Bunyan was released. Shortly afterward he was officially called as pastor in Bedford where he served the next 16 years. He went back to prison in the winter and spring of 1676-77, significant because he probably wrote, or at least finished, The Pilgrim’s Progress during that time. His remainder of his life was filled with preaching (as far away as London), writing, and serving.

That’s a quick pencil sketch of Bunyan’s history.

Grace Abounding through Bunyan’s Hardships (Trials)

John Bunyan was a clay pot, and having received his ministry by the mercy of God, he did not lose heart in his hardships. His weakness and troubles, as he served his flock and proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord, showed that the surpassing power belongs to God.

Like any pastor, his life was filled with ironies. For example, it is sort of ironic that the man who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress never traveled out of his home country and probably never journeyed more than 50 or so miles from his home town.

But there are bigger and more consequential ironies, gospel ironies, that as Bunyan focused on unseen things, grace was seen spreading all over the place.

1. Out of Bunyan’s limited education spilled literary genius.

For a man who learned only the basics of reading and writing, he didn’t do too poorly. There are at least 58 books authored by Bunyan, of all sorts. He wrote allegories such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Holy War (the conflict between God and Satan over the town Mansoul, with its Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate, Nose-gate, and Feel-gate. Though initially captured by Diabolus, it is regained by the assault of King Shaddai through the victorious campaign of his son, Emmanuel), The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (a contrasting journey with Pilgrim). He wrote poetry and children’s books. He wrote doctrinal papers defending truths such as justification by faith alone and clarifying his views on baptism. Most of his writings were practical expositions for the growth of his sheep, taking a single verse and exploding for 150 pages (like many Puritans).

We’ll look at it in detail tonight, but The Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the most well-known and highly-esteemed work of English fiction EVER! Many consider Bunyan be be the father of the novel. Not a novel, but of the novel genre!

It’s impossible to know for sure, but it seems to me that maybe Bunyan read 100 books in his life. His first wife brought two. In prison, according to a friend who visited, Bunyan only had a Bible and a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Brown, 159). He knew no Greek or Hebrew. He hardly every quoted anyone. He said, “I never endeavored to, nor durst make use of other men’s lines” (GA, 43). “I have not for these things fished in other men’s waters; my Bible and Concordance are my only library in my writings” (Brown, 364) “If he had read as much as other men Bunyan might have written as little” (Hill, 143).

Yet he was prolific, profound, and picturesque. His language is colorful and unmistakable. One editor of his works commented,

He spoke as he felt; and, while he copied no sentence from others, no man that ever wrote has been so copied from by others. (Offor, GA, fn)

That’s not to say that everyone appreciated Bunyan. He was a tinker, and not accepted by most among the cultured crowd. He seems to defend not only his style (of allegory) in The Pilgrim’s Progress, but even his usefulness as an author. One book written against him was titled, Dirt Wip’t Off: or a manifest Discovery of the Gross Ignorance, Erroneousness, and most Unchristian and Wicked Spirit of one John Bunyan, Lay-Preacher in Bedford.2

Nevertheless, God uses the foolish to confound the wise, and much grace spilled of of this tinker.

His college was a dungeon, his library the Bible, and he came forth with gigantic powers to grapple with the prince of darkness. No human learning could have so fitted him for this terrible and mysterious warfare. (Offor, GA, 41 fn)

2. Out of Bunyan’s soul conflicts spilled spiritual comforts.

Perhaps the only way to penetrate deeper into Bunyan’s tormented conscience than reading Grace Abounding is to see Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress as a personification of Bunyan. Fear of destruction and fear of God gripped Christian. That’s what motivated him to escape the City of Destruction.

Bunyan was convinced he had committed the unpardonable sin. He was overwhelmed with guilt and sure he was beyond God’s saving reach for about five years. He was ignorant about the Bible had virtually no spiritual guidance. Some of his greatest enemies were “phantoms of his own heated imagination, the result of his own misinterpretation of the book of God” (Brown, 59)

But, soul conflict is better than no conflict.

If it is distressing to feel discontent with one’s self, it is dangerous to feel content; aspiration and not self-complacency is the law of a healthful life; and He who was leading Bunyan by a way that he knew not, mercifully shook him out of this unwholesome self-satisfaction. (Brown, 62)

Simple, Sloth, and Presumption couldn’t be wakened from sleep, with fetters on their heels. “Simple said, ‘I see no danger.’ Sloth said, ‘Every fat must stand on his own bottom.’ And so they lay down to sleep again.” (TPP, 43) That said, how one resolves their soul conflict makes a huge difference.

I had seen some, who, though they were under wounds of conscience, then they would cry and pray; but they seeking rather present ease from their trouble, than pardon for their sin, cared not how they lost their guilt, so they got it out of their mind; and therefore, having got it off the wrong way, it was not sanctified unto them; but they grew harder and blinder, and more wicked after their trouble. (Grace Abounding, #86)

Both the struggles, and the resolution of his struggles in Christ, were necessary. Without the internal struggles, he might have been harsh and impatient with others who struggled. Without the resolution in Christ, he could offer no actual help beyond commiseration.

God prepared Bunyan thoroughly before using him greatly. His “overwhelming horror of sin was accompanied by pity for the sinner…[he] again and again expresses pity and desire to help: his contempt is reserved for the hypocritical” (Hill, 270). Many of his books were written to comfort and encourage weary, wounded souls. While he was in prison, a lady was sent to him for counsel since she was stricken in her conscience.

Like the apostle Paul, the God of all comforts enabled Bunyan to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which was comforted by God (2 Corinthians 1:3-7). Much grace and comfort spilled out of this once-troubled soul.

3. Out of Bunyan’s long imprisonment spilled larger (and lasting) influence.

We probably wouldn’t be talking about John Bunyan or reading his material with such care apart from his long imprisonment. It is the severe degree of separation from his family, the steep, voluntary cost he paid for the gospel, that makes his story so compelling.

His imprisonment brought insight for later ministry. Much of what he had to say was learned during that time, as his character was tempered in the trial.

I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the Word of God as now; those Scriptures that I saw nothing in before, are made in this place and state to shine upon me. (GA, 47)

His imprisonment emboldened his convictions for ministry. When he thought he might get out near the end of 12 years, he said,

If nothing will do unless I make of my conscience a continual butchery and slaughtershop, unless putting out my own eyes, I commit me to the blind to lead me, as I doubt not is desired by some, I have determined, the Almighty God being my help and shield, yet to suffer, if frail life might continue so long, even till the moss shall grow on mine eyebrows, rather than thus to violate my faith and principles. (A Confesion of my Faith, and a Reason of my Practice, quoted in John Brown, John Bunyan, 231)3

His imprisonment built a platform for ministry. He knew that how he did not shrink back would be witnessed.

When I have [preached], it hath gone to my heart to think the Word should now fall as rain on stony places, still wishing from my heart, O that they who have heard me speak this day did but see as I do what sin, death, hell, and the curse of God is; and also what the grace, and love, and mercy of God is, through Christ, to men in such a case as they are, who are yet estranged from him. And, indeed, I did often say in my heart before the Lord, That if to be hanged up presently before their eyes would be a means to awaken them, and confirm them in the truth, I gladly should be contented. (GA, 42)

He had much opportunity to shepherd and preach in jail, as members of his church joined him often, the number reaching as high as 60 (Brown, 156-157). But his influence extended outside the walls. It is a gospel irony that putting a man in prison cell opens up the world to him. Again, he is like Paul, who though he was in chains, knew that the word of god is not bound (2 Timothy 2:9). Bunyan’s enemies, intending to suppress his voice by putting him in prison, accomplished the opposite.

Grace spilled to locations and generations as his pot was put up in prison.

4. Out of Bunyan’s daily deaths spilled eternal lives.

Abounding afflictions, endured for Christ and His elect, spread abounding grace in the gospel, that when believed, brings life. It’s a gospel irony that hurting brings healing, suffering produces strength, and death brings life.

It isn’t only the one time event of death, it is the dying process. It is death by a thousand paper cuts, daily deaths and sacrifices. “Life from death” is one of God’s unseen promises, but it is a crucial promise that enables us, like Bunyan, not to lose heart.

Bunyan suffered. He sacrificed. Even the occasion of his physical death demonstrates the reality to the very end. He didn’t die a martyr’s death. He wasn’t burned at the stake or beheaded. He had traveled to London, and took a preaching assignment, the main reason for his trip was to help reconcile a son to his angry father. He wasn’t ministering to a crowd of thousands, or hundreds; it was two men. Returning to the place he was staying from an outer borough, pouring rain soaked him, he got sick, and died of fever, August 31, 1688. He was alone; his family probably didn’t even know until he was dead. He was buried in Bunhill Fields (the Dissenters’ cemetery) alongside John Owen.

The point is, out of Bunyan’s weak and afflicted clay pot sloshed abounding grace, grace that increased the thanksgiving of many to the glory of God (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:13-15). He endured by living on unseen things.

John Owen, a contemporary, a fellow non-conformist, and friend of Bunyan, when asked by King Charles why he, a great scholar, would go to hear an uneducated tinker preach said,

Could I posses the tinker’s ability for preaching, please your majesty, I would gladly relinquish all my learning. (Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: Life and Work of John Owen, 162)

Conclusion

I understand that I’ve presented a lopsided perspective on Bunyan. There must also be some bad things. It’s has to be true; he was a sinner. There are times he seems a bit defensive about his lack of education and acceptance.4 He battled pride. There are times I wonder if he was as winsome as he could have been with his enemies, though he was so tender and appealing to broken hearts that he couldn’t be called gruff. He may have had an overactive imagination, much like Martin Luther, when it came to exaggerating his sin. Of course, without that imagination, we may not have The Pilgrim’s Progress. He may not have treated the women around him as kindly as he could, yet we also don’t read about sexual failure.

It’s tempting to study a life, ministry, and influence like Bunyan as if he were in a glass case. But of all the biographies we’ve considered, Bunyan is proof that God doesn’t need great men to work with.

Let all men therefore prize a little with the fear of the Lord; gifts indeed are desirable, but yet great grace and small gifts are better than great gifts and no grace. (Grace Abounding, #305)

He makes great heroes from uneducated, sinful, broken men who surrender to Him and bank on His promises. Men who would rather have Jesus than anything this world affords. Men and women like Mr. and Mrs. Bunyan who live on unseen things.

Augustine of Hippo may be the most important man in church history. German historian, Adolf Harnack, called him the greatest man “between Paul the apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian church has possessed” (quoted in Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, 24). Of course, Luther himself was an Augustinian monk for many years, and my personal hero, John Calvin, quoted Augustine no less than 342 times in the fifth and final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. B.B. Warfield summarized Augustine’s impact as follows:

His direct work as a reformer of Church life was done in a corner, and its results were immediately swept away by the flood of the Vandal invasion…[but] it was through his voluminous writings, by which his wider influence was excited, that he entered both the church and the world as a revolutionary force, and not merely created an epoch in the history of the Church, but has determined the course of its history in the West up to the present day. (quoted in Piper, 24-25)

We owe much of our thinking and theology to Augustine, in particular, “our developed anthropology and soteriology, our understanding of the Bible’s teaching on the relations between human sin and divine grace” (Nick Needham, “Augustine of Hippo: The Relevance of His Life and Thought Today”, 39). We stand downstream in the torrent of his teaching on original sin and the sovereignty of God.

There are a few reasons, however, that understanding his life and thought is difficult for us. First, Augustine lived from AD 354-430, so we are removed almost 1600 years from his culture, language, and experience.

Not only does the time gap present us with challenges, but also the volume of his writings is overwhelming. Few can claim to have read everything written by him, and none can claim to read everything written about him. There are more than five million words in his recorded works (remarkable considering he had no computer, or electricity). There are approximately 3500 word in this message, so it would take 1428.5 messages added together to reach five million words (or, a little less than four and a half years straight of snow retreat with six sessions a week). Benedict Groeschel, a Catholic historian, wrote an introduction to Augustine’s life and said,

I felt like a man beginning to write a guidebook of the Swiss Alps….After forty years I can still meditate on one book of the Confessions…during a week-long retreat and come back feeling frustrated that there is still so much more gold to mind in those few pages. I, for one, know that I shall never in this life escape from the Augustinian Alps. (quoted in Piper, 45).

The other difficulty is that, among those five million words, it is possible to find things that contradict, and some that we would say are clearly unbiblical. For example, I hate Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of numerous Old Testament passages (for example, his approach to the narrative in Genesis). Worse than his hermeneutic, Augustine seems to have attributed special, if not saving power to baptism. We do not agree with him here at all.

But for all that, I am convinced, as much as ever, that we need Augustine for our souls and for our churches, which in turn would change our culture. I’ll explain why I think he’s so helpful and try to make my case as we follow two lines of thought this morning, the chronology of his life and the confessions of his life.

The Chronology of Augustine’s Life

In one respect, Augustine’s life was typical. He was born, lived like a sinner until God saved him at age 32, then he became a pastor, and shepherded the same flock until he died. On the other hand, Augustine lived no homeschool or Christian school life. And as is the case for every Christian, God’s work in his life through people and providence is a cause for praising God’s grace. Let’s take a jet tour of his 75 years and then come back to why he’s so valuable.

354 – Thagaste

Augustine was born November 13, 354, in Thagaste, a small city in northern Africa. His father, Patricius, was a poor, unbelieving farmer, though his mother, Monica, was a devoted Christian in the Catholic church (since that was the only orthodox church). His father didn’t profess faith until one year before he died when Augustine was 16, but Augustine later lamented that his father

did not care what character before You I was developing, or how chaste I was so long as I possessed a cultured tongue–though my culture really meant a desert uncultivated by You, God. (Confessions, II. iii.)

366 – Madera

From 366 to 369, between the ages of 11 and 15, Augustine was sent away for schooling in Madera, about 20 miles from Thagaste. His father wanted his son to have the best education possible; education was the only way out of poverty for a young man like Augustine. He was “acutely anxious to be accepted, to compete successfully, to avoid being shamed, terrified of the humiliation of being beaten at school” (Brown, 35). After those three years, he spent a year at home (370) before leaving for more school.

371 – Carthage

Carthage was the big city. Boys from small towns all over northern Africa came to study, and to play, in Carthage. Augustine came to Carthage as a 17 year-old full of lust.

I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust….My real need was for You, my God, who are the food of the soul. I was not aware of this hunger. (Confessions, quoted in Piper, 47)

Augustine discovered the theatre in Carthage, and wrote “it was a world ‘full of reflections of my own unhappiness, fuel to my raging fire’” (Brown, 39). His only shame was that he wasn’t as bad as his friends.

I went on my way headlong with such blindness that among my peer group I was ashamed not to be equally guilty of shameful behavior when I heard them boasting of their sexual exploits….I went deeper into vice to avoid being despised, and when there was no act by admitting to which I could rival my depraved companions, I used to pretend I had done things I had not done at all, so that my innocence should not lead my companions to scorn my lack of courage, and lest my chastity be taken as a mark of inferiority. (II. iii.)

He took a concubine, who we might call a live-in girlfriend, or more palatably, a mistress, and lived with her for 15 years. It was socially acceptable, but never acceptable to his mother. In five million words he never mentions her name, even though she bore him his only son, Adeodatus.

Augustine was a slave to the praise of men and the love of women. For all his external success and advancement, a dissatisfaction grew within him.

373 – Thagaste/Carthage

He went home to Thagaste for a couple years to teach grammar, then returned to Carthage for nine years (374-383) to teach rhetoric. During this time Augustine became part of a religious cult, the Manichaees. Basically, these followers of Mani were dualists who believed in an eternal battle between the spirit that was good and the flesh that was evil. This temporarily soothed Augustine’s guilty conscience, because Manichaeism claimed sin wasn’t really the person’s fault, it was his body’s fault. Manichaeism was so heretical that Augustine’s mother didn’t even let him back in the house.

Ironically, he grew tired of the apathetic, out of control, rebellious students in Carthage.

383 – Rome

He moved to Rome when he was 29, believing that there were better students there. He was wrong. The students would skip out on the teacher before the final class and their tuition was due.

384 – Milan

Desiring to get away, burnt out by pathetic students and the politics of Rome, he moved to Milan after only one year. Most significantly, he met the bishop, Ambrose. Augustine was enthralled with Ambrose’s teaching style as well as his explanation of parts of the Bible Augustine had misunderstood. Now 30 years old, Augustine realized many of his previous objections to Christianity were wrong.

During his time in Milan, his mother had arranged a marriage for him. In her eyes, this would make Augustine proper. In his eyes, it was a way to advance his career. He sent his concubine back to Africa, though he said, “this was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding. I loved her dearly.” (quoted in Brown, 88). He got for himself another. He was unwilling to let loose of, and unable to escape, his lusts.

That is until 386. We’ll come back to cover his conversion in a couple minutes, but after getting saved, Augustine returned to Thagaste in 388. His mom died in 387, and soon after, his son died.

391 – Hippo (Regius)

He wanted to start an monastery now that he was a Christian. Hippo was a fairly large city, and more importantly, the church already had a bishop, so Augustine figured he would be free from public responsibility. Much like John Calvin, however, he was soon pressed into the role of assistant bishop (396), and five years later he became the primary bishop, and served the church in Hippo for almost 40 years until his death in 430.

For a number of years, he spent his mornings arbitrating legal cases. I can’t imagine how much I would hate that; Augustine hated it too.

Augustine would visit jails to protect prisoners from ill-treatment; he would intervene, tactfully, but firmly, to save criminals from judicial torture and execution; above all, he was expected to keep peace within his ‘family’ by arbitrating in their lawsuits. Augustine would listen for hours while families of farmers argued passionately about every detail of their father’s will. (Brown, 195, 226)

He was heavily involved in writing against the Manichaean heresy, and during the last few years of his life, he debated Pelagius over the issue of man’s depravity and the place of God’s grace. Augustine himself listed over eighty heresies he had fought against (Brown, 35-56).

Possidius, a friend of Augustine, wrote about him as a “man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence in the financial stewardship of his see” (“Augustine,” Wikepedia, accessed January 3, 2009.)

Personally, I tend to think he was a bit of a momma’s boy. I also suspect that after salvation, he fell a little too far toward the “fasting” side and missed out on the “feasting” side of enjoying God’s gifts to His people. Yet I have come to love Augustine as a tenacious pastor and a prolific author, who wielded a worldview always ready to magnify God, and who had remarkably great optimism regarding God’s work in and through the church. He was constantly trying to resolve tensions that were within himself, learning and making progress till his death. He loathed his sin, lauded grace, and loved God’s Word.

In [Augustine] we discover heart and mind married in an intimate union where deep, thoughtful theology, rooted in Scripture and never afraid of condemning error, nonetheless burns and sings with a spiritual vibrancy that makes most modern piety seem pale and sickly by contrast. (Needham, 43)

But the reason I find him so compelling, the reason I think God graciously chose to use him as an instrument to change the world, is because he saw sin for what it really is. He loathed his sin and lauded God’s grace.

The Confessions of Augustine’s Life

Augustine intended for the Confessions to be much more than an autobiography. He wrote this book at the age of 43, and it covers the first 33 years of life up to his conversion.

The entire book is a prayer to God, and contain , as we might suspect, his confessions of sin. Augustine is not the hero, or even the main character of the story. He portrays himself as wicked, and when doing well, the he directed the credit away from himself. In his Retractions (written near the end of his life around AD 426/427 to correct or annotate his previous works),

The thirteen books of my Confessions whether they refer to my evil or good, praise the just and good God, and stimulate the heart and mind of man to approach unto Him.

In a letter to his friend Darious (429),

Accept the books of my Confessions which you have asked for. Behold me therein, that you may not praise me above what I am….If there is anything in me that pleases you, praise with me there Him whom I wish to be praised for me–for that One is not myself. Because it is He that made us and not we ourselves; nay, we have destroyed ourselves, but He that made us has remade us.

The Confessions were, therefore, primarily about God, not Augustine.

[It is the very purpose of this book] to give the impression that Augustine himself was a weak and erring sinner, and that all of the good that came into his life was of God…this whole account of his life history…up to its crisis in his conversion is written…not that we may know Augustine, but that we may know God: and it shows us Augustine only that we may see God. (BB. Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine, vol. 4 in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991) 267).

Augustine’s intimate love for God emerges in little phrases like, “God of my heart,” “God my sweetness,” “[God] my late joy.” (Brown, 167) The Confessions narrate the change in Augustine’s heart (Brown, 169), and exhibit the enormous difference between confessions that focus on God and confessions that focus on self.

On the first page of Confessions, he swiftly and succinctly summarizes man’s greatest joy, and the reason why men so often fail to experience that joy.

You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You. (I. i.)

Men are made by God to worship Him, not out of duty, but for their delight. Our Creator formed us in this . The Confessions contains Augustine’s personal testimony of his restless heart’s journey to God. It is the story of empty, yet enslaving sinful pleasures that kept him from the greatest pleasure, God. It recounts the increasing misery and unhappiness of his soul with “ferocious honesty” (Brown, 171).

As he grew from infancy into boyhood, he noted

I myself was meanwhile dying by my alienation from You, and my miserable condition in that respect brought no tear to my eyes. (I. xii.)

He had heard the truth, but he was indifferent and ignorant, a slave to “seductive delights” (I. xv.). He also understood that it was part of God’s judgment to let men remain in blindness, “By Your inexhaustible law You assign penal blindness to illicit desires” (I. xviii.), yet those the Lord loves, He disciplines. “There can be no surprise that an unhappy sheep wandering from Your flock and impatient of Your protection was infected by a disgusting sore” (III. iii.).

But he still could not escape his lust. “The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved” (II. ii.).

I was in love with love, and hated safety and a path free of snares….I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became. So my soul was in rotten health. (III. i.)

Sin makes a person stupid. Even though the further one moves away from God, the more miserable he becomes, he also becomes less interested in returning to God. God gave Augustine what he (thought he) wanted in order to make him more miserable.

I aspired to honors, money, marriage, and You laughed at me. I those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties; that was by Your mercy–so much the greater in that You gave me the less occasion to find sweet pleasure in what was not You. (VI. vi.)

I was full of my punishment, but I shed no tears of penitence. (VII. xx.)

God was systematically showing him what sin really looks like.

You took me up from behind my own back where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself, and You set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping myself. If I and You once again placed me in front of myself; You thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity and hate it. I had known it, but deceived myself, refused to admit it, and pushed it out of my mind. (VIII. vii.)

He was a slave to his sin, until God saved him. In Milan, at the end of August, 386, he and a small group of friends hosted a Christian man, Ponticanus, who told Augustine and his friend Alypius about the monks in Egypt and of their founder, Saint Anthony. While Augustine listened, his heart burned with guilt and he withdrew into a garden beside the house.

I threw myself down somehow under a certain fig tree, and let my tears flow freely. Rivers streamed from my eyes, a sacrifice acceptable to You, ad (though not in these words, yet in this sense) I repeatedly said to You: ‘How long, O Lord? How long, Lord, will You be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities.’ For I felt my past to have a grip on me. It uttered wretched cries: ‘How long, how long is it to be?’ ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow.’ ‘Why not now? Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?’

As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again, (Tolle lege, tolle lege) ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’ At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children’s game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find….So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’ (Romans 13:13-14).

I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. (VIII. xii.)

God can even use the “bulls’-eye” approach to Scripture reading. The journey of his restless heart finished as God granted him repentance and faith. So he would say,

You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, You put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after You. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for You. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is Yours. (X. xxvi.)

Conclusion

Augustine had a powerful and profound impact because he accurately identified the real problem, in his own heart and in the church. The problem was not low self-esteem or bad parents; the problem was sin. He also accurately understood the solution to the problem was not more of the world, but more of God. He saw sin, not only as an offense before God, but as an obstacle between he and God. Sin lied to him, telling him that it was good. God helped Augustine see sin for what it is, and that God Himself was his best good.

We need Augustine’s insight on the misery of sin so that we too can see it for what it really is: a hindrance not only to holiness, a hindrance not only to heaven, but a hindrance to happiness in God. Augustine hated sin because it spoiled his delight in God. That is the kind of person God uses to change the world.

A few years before his death, on September 26, 426, a large congregation gathered as Augustine was to install his successor, Eraclius. After the decision had been officially recorded, Eraclius stood forward to preach, while the old Augustine sat behind him on his raised throne. “The cricket chirps,” Eraclius said, “the swan is silent” (Brown, 408). Just the opposite has been true for 1600 years. We should thank God for His loud voice through Augustine.

We know now, after 1600 years, that Augustine’s conversion was monumental in Church history. I can’t think of anything he would celebrate more, than if someone here repented, by God’s grace, from their sin like he did. We may not affect the church for two more millennia, but angels will rejoice in heaven as eagerly as when God called Augustine’s restless heart back to Himself.