3 posts tagged Augustine

“The key to Christian living is a thirst and a hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small. The desperation to be ravished for the sake of worship and holiness is unintelligible. Here’s the goal and the problem as Augustine saw it:

“The soul of men shall hope under the shadow of Thy wings; they shall be made drunk with the fullness of Thy house; and of the torrents of Thy pleasures Thou wilt give them to drink; for in Thee is the Fountain of Life, and in Thy Light shall we see the light? Give me a man in love: he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns; give me one who is hungry; give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal country. Give me that sort of man: he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about…”

These words from Augustine should make our hearts burn with renewed longing for God. And they should help us see why it is so difficult to display the glory of the Gospel to so many people. The reason is that so many do not long for anything very much. They are just coasting. They are not passionate about anything. They are “cold” not just toward the glory of Christ in the Gospel, but toward everything. Even their sins are picked at rather than swallowed with passion.”

– John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy

I’m reading through John Piper’s book “The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin.” I’ve been particulary moved by what unworthy giants these men are, and how their impact has rippled for thousands of years. My title is taken from the preface:

At the age of seventy-one, four years before he died on August 28, A.D. 430, Aurelius Augustine handed over the administrative duties of the church in Hippo on the northern coast of Africa to his assistant Eraclius. Already, in his own lifetime, Augustine was a giant in the Christian world. At the ceremony, Eraclius stood to preach, as the aged Augustine sat on his bishop’s throne behind him. Overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy in Augustine’s presence, Eraclius said, “The cricket chirps, the swan is silent.”

If only Eraclius could have looked down over sixteen centuries at the enormous influence of Augustine, he would have understood why the series of books beginning with The Legacy of Sovereign Joy is titled The Swans Are Not Silent.For 1,600 years Augustine has not been silent. In the 1500s his voice rose to a compelling crescendo in the ears of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Luther was an Augustinian monk, and Calvin quoted Augustine more than any other church father. Augustine’s influence on the Protestant Reformation was extraordinary. A thousand years could not silence his song of jubilant grace.

I can only pray, by God’s grace, to be a cricket amongst swans as I strive to do all things to honor King Jesus.