I'll turn please to the book of Romans and Romans chapter 13. And today and next week we want to think about Augustine and next week I want to think about Augustine as he thought about history and politics but today his life and This passage is bound up with both subjects because it's at the end of this passage the words that we will read from verse 12 to 14 that was instrumental in his conversion. Romans 13 then reading from verse 1 all the way through to the end of Romans 13. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, then be afraid, for he does not bear the sword, in vain, for he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore, one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason, you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them, taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. I would not want anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Besides this, you know the time that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone, the day is at hand, so then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the arm of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarrelling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. So, as I said, we want to consider the life of Augustine this morning, and the chapter we've actually gotten to in Timothy Paul Jones is a chapter in which he really looks at a variety of figures. It's chapter four, Servant Leaders or Leaders of Servants, and he looks at about six figures in this chapter, a couple of them Quite briefly, Ambrose of Milan, who is critical in the conversion of Augustine. He is the preacher under whom Augustine starts to go back to church after many years of wandering. And then John Chrysostom. Chrysostom is not his last name, actually. Chrysostom is a nickname that was given to him. In Greek, it means golden mouth. And because he was such a powerful preacher, based in Constantinople. Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril's a complicated figure. He was the leading bishop in Alexandria during the crisis over the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. How are the two persons, or rather the two natures, God and man, in the one person, to be understood? How do they relate to each other? Cyril was a key figure in that, but Cyril also is a figure that's implicated in a number of areas of actual violence in the city, seeking to rid the city of first of all the Jews and then pagans. And you're starting to see some disturbing elements that come into the life of the church. Leo the Great, Leo's the Bishop of Rome and he is a critical figure again in that whole controversy about who is the Lord Jesus Christ, how is he both God and man, and he writes a very important letter in that regard, which we'll look at. But he also is the first Bishop of Rome who we can describe as a Pope. And one of the questions I get invariably is, when did the Roman Catholic Church start? Over the years I've gone back and forth on a variety of answers to that question. It's a very important question because the Roman Catholic Church argues it's there right from the beginning. And I've recently been involved in writing on this whole area of the early church and I've been getting people emailing me about they can't figure out how I can read the early fathers and not be a Catholic. And my kind of off-the-cup remark to that, I can't believe how these people can read the Fathers and still be a Catholic. Because Catholicism, it isn't there in the way that these people would argue. And so when did the Roman Catholic Church begin is a question I get a number of times. In recent days, I've actually almost leaned towards the position that the Roman Church doesn't start until the time of the Reformation. And that sounds quite shocking. But it's the Council of Trent in the 1540s that lays down positions which they're not going to compromise on. But if I were to push it back, I would say it's beginning with Leo. Because Leo is the first bishop of Rome to claim that Matthew 16, the privileges given to Peter in Matthew 16 are inherited by his heirs, and he is an heir. because Peter is the first Bishop of Rome, which is a debatable issue, and his heirs receive all those privileges. And Leo is the man who lays the groundwork for the medieval papacy. But the other critical element of the Church of Rome is the doctrine of transubstantiation, and that is not dogma until 1215. And even in the high Middle Ages, around the time of the 1200s, You have people disputing the authority of the Pope. There were some followers of Francis of Assisi in southern Italy built a town and over the, it was a walled city, a walled town, and over the gateway coming into the town they had put in car stone, the Pope is the Antichrist. And they were never kicked out of the Roman Church. So it's intriguing. It's an intriguing question. But we're going to look at Leo later in the month of April. And then one of my favorite early figures in this period is Patrick. And he's not the Patrick of shamrocks and green beer and all those St. Patrick's Day parades. He's a very, very different figure once you start to read his writings. And so this month, actually, what I want to do is I want to look at Augustine and then Leo and then Patrick. And then we'll see how we are because in May, we want to switch to a different topic to some degree. Anyway, today and next week, we're going to look at Augustine. And he picks up Augustine on pages 53 to 55. And he begins with the little paragraph there, the park, the hippo, and the city of God. and talks a little bit about Augustine's conversion, and his backgrounds, and then some of his thinking. And particularly the whole idea of the city of God, and that's what I want to look at next week. Augustine's life spans, we actually know more about Augustine than any other figure in the ancient church. We know the exact date of his birth, November the 13th, 354. We don't know the exact date of birth of virtually anybody else in the ancient world. As you know, we don't know the exact date of our Lord's birth. It's not December the 25th. We have adopted that as a convenient date. That only comes into the Church in the late 300s. And then we know the exact date of his death, August the 30th, 430. And it's quite amazing that we know those two points of reference in his life. His exact date of his birth, his exact death. Knowing the exact date of his death is not as extraordinary as knowing the exact date of his birth. And we know an enormous amount about Augustine, partly because We have an enormous number of letters that have survived of him. And only about 25 years ago, there was a discovery of about 30, 40 letters that was made. Nobody read these letters for about a thousand years. They were stuck in somebody's library. I think it was in Vienna, and somebody discovered them. We have an enormous amount of his books. He wrote in the vicinity of 230 books, and we have about 225. Which is absolutely astonishing. We have very little he didn't write. So we have this enormous body of literature from him. And the reason why we know how many books he wrote is that about two years before he died, he re-read everything he wrote. And he had a book called Reconsiderations. And he listed every book he'd ever written. And he said, I no longer agree with this. Wish I'd said this better. Yeah, I think this is great. Love it. And so we've got a kind of complete catalogue of his books, and so we can compare alongside that what we have. And he dominates the entirety of the next thousand years after his death in terms of his thinking. Either you like him, or you don't like him, or you Influenced by him to some degree in this area or you're reacting against him in another area. You cannot understand the Middle Ages, which Lord Willing will get to. You can't understand the Middle Ages if you don't understand Augustine. In fact, you can't understand the Reformation to some degree if you don't understand Augustine. Somebody said the Reformation is two sides of Augustine fighting each other. It's Augustine who believes in the sovereignty of grace fighting the Augustine who could say outside the visible church, there is no salvation. And the Roman Catholic Church obviously used that. To the Reformers, you break with us, you're cutting off the hope of salvation. And his thinking stretches down to the present day. One example, I didn't know this at the time. My mother was raised Roman Catholic. She came from a very large, typical Irish Catholic family. She was determined, because of her own personality, et cetera, not to have a large number of children, and so she committed a venial sin and couldn't receive the Mass. And the venial sin was she used contraception somewhere regularly in the 60s, so she wouldn't have a child, and she couldn't receive the Mass. And she was eventually converted, and my father, who's still a very strong Catholic, had the priest come in her last days and he performed the last rites, where they give you an extreme unction before you die, which if she had been capable of responding to him, probably would have denied that she wanted that. But where did that come from, that the idea of the contraception is a sin in the eyes of God? Well, it's Augustine. Augustine argues that position. And so it's interesting how his reach comes all the way down to the present time. He is an enormously influential figure. So we want to think then a little bit about Augustine today in terms of his life. We'll see how far we get. I definitely want to get to the time that he writes his confessions, which is 397 to 401. And we'll see if we can do his whole life in one fell swoop. If not, then we'll We'll pick up next time. Timothy Paul Jones begins his account with the conversion of Augustine, which took place in the 380s. This is page 53. The young man, this is under the heading, the park, the hippo, and the city of God. The hippo is the city of hippo. Hipporegius. And it's not the hippopotamus that we think of when we see the word hippo. The young man staggers through the park, a dismal and restless void, gnawing at his innermost self. He dropped his book on a bench and stumbled on. Lord, he sobbed, how long, how long? Suddenly, he heard a child singing, pick up read, pick up read. He rushed back to the bench. When he opened his book, one passage seized his eyes. And it's Romans 12. And let us walk properly in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh. Instantly, the young man later wrote, light entered my heart. And the man's name, he would pronounce it Augustine, but there's a great debate and I think I'm influenced by the British pronunciation, Augustine, because whenever I'm in the States and I say that name, I've been corrected a number of times. No, no, it's Augustine. Well, anyway, whatever. Where the journey to faith began. Monica, Augustine's mother, was a Christian, always in deep travail for her son's salvation. As a teen, Augustine had dismissed Christianity as crude and simplistic. He explored every possible path to find pleasure and truth, and then he associated himself with the Manichaeans, a Gnostic-like sect. Augustine could not become a full Manichaean unless he rejected sex, though a request that Augustine found to be impossible. Lord, he prayed, make me chaste, but he quickly added, not yet. And what he's done there is he's summarized very quickly the early part of Augustine's life, really up to the early 380s. And as he says, Augustine's mother was a believer, Monica. By her name, Augustine's born in North Africa. And when Augustine was born in North Africa, the North Africa was a bit of a backwater in the Roman Empire. The Romans had been there for the best part of 600, 700 years. It was thoroughly Romanized. But it was not an important area. And Augustine, driving Augustine all of his life, will be the desire for fame. And one of the things that you'll want to do is very quickly get out of North Africa. And his mother, Monica, the Monica is not a Latin name. It's not a Roman name. And if you see it and you were living in that period of time, you'd know that she wasn't probably a Roman by her ethnic background. And she's probably a Berber, which are the native people of North Africa. And his father, though, was a Roman. And his father's name is Patricius, which is the same name as Patrick, really. Patrick's Latin name is Patricius. And his father's a pagan. And his grandparents, Augustine doesn't tell us about his grandparents, but his grandparents are probably pagans on both sides. His maternal grandparents probably arranged the marriage of their daughter. And probably when she was about 12. The normal age for engagement in the Roman world was 12 to 14, with marriage following from 14 through 16. And as I've said before, there's no teen years in this world. There's no teenage years until probably the early 20th century. The teenage years are an invention to some degree of the 20th century culture. And it doesn't mean that people didn't go through the interesting. And to be honest, I'm glad I'm long through them. That's one period of my life I would not want to go through again. Those interesting years of teen and all the physical, emotional, intellectual changes that take place in that period of time. Obviously, men and women went through those. I mean, our physical structure, et cetera, et cetera, hasn't changed, but the sort of world that teenagers inhabit in our culture didn't exist. You know, the prolonged, the long period of adolescence, which is now apparently we're told is occupying many 20-year-olds. And this is a world in which you hit your teen years, unless you're extremely wealthy, you're going to be married and you're out to work. And her marriage was probably arranged because almost from the beginning of their marriage, she's a believer, he is not. How did she come to faith? We don't know that. He doesn't tell us. Augustine, she has a number of children. There is a brother, Navigius. There is a sister, Despite all we know about Augustine, we never learn his sister's name. He lived within a few hundred yards of his sister most of his life. And his sister becomes a believer. She starts a home in which live a number of women who have devoted themselves to the life of the church, etc. Augustine never tells her her name. And she's involved in his life, but he doesn't tell us her name. And that's an important point, which I'll come back to. And is Augustine the eldest child? We don't know. And as he's growing up, what he remembers is his mother's prayers for his salvation. In one of his earliest books, he will say, it was through your prayers that God saved me. His family is a split family. He talks about this in all this detail, by the way, is from his book, The Confessions. And if you ever want to read, and I would recommend reading some of these early Christian books, if you want to read, the first place to begin in the early church books is The Confessions. It's a tremendous book. You won't agree with everything in it. What the book is, is a prayer to God. The word confession in Latin means prayer or praise, actually praise. And it's praising God for his salvation. And what he does is he goes back and he rethinks his whole life about how God was there. It's a very profound meditation on his life. And his father, and he describes there something of the quarrels between his father and his mother. His father took a number of opportunities, it's quite clear that Augustine lays this out, to kind of thwart his mother's desires for a son, that he become a believer. And his father wanted him to get a much better life than he did. His father was a minor official in the Roman bureaucracy. His father wanted him to get a fine education, which would open the doors to all kinds of opportunities. And so, he uses all of his wealth to to educate Augustine. When that runs out, he contacts a man named Romanianus who lived in the same town, a place called Tigast, which today is in Algeria, a place called Souk Arras in Algeria. And this man becomes Augustine's patron and he funds the latter part of his education. And he also is what Timothy Paul Jones notes there, he was a mannequin. And we'll get to that in a minute. When Augustine was 17, in the year 371, Augustine's born in 354. In 371, he goes away to university in Carthage. And he tells us that before he went, his mother gave him two very explicit instructions. Number one, do not commit fornication. Number two, do not commit adultery. And university now and then, there are significant differences. In those days, there's no centralized bureaucracy. There's no centralized body. What you did was you'd go to an area of a town where a university was. The teachers would rent rooms in that area. You would turn up at the rooms. You'd agree to a set price to pay the teacher. You'd pay the teacher directly. And then you'd get instructed in that subject, et cetera. And some things, though, have not changed. And I was at the Mac campus the other day. I'm there quite frequently because of the library. And I was reflecting on the interesting social arrangement that universities are, that we put into a complex like that 20, 15,000, 20,000 young men and women, late teens, early 20s, with absolutely no moral guidance. And we're surprised at what happens at these places. It's bizarre from one standpoint. I mean, I've spent my whole life in the academic world, and obviously I I think very highly of it in some senses. But in other senses, there's a weirdness to that. And some things have not changed. And the drinking, and the sexual immorality, and the pranks. And Augustine was definitely involved in two of them. The sexual immorality and the pranks. He talks about, he joined a group called the Evasores. And it sounds like some sort of intellectual group until you translate it into English. And the word means the smashers. And you might think of a punk rock group or something like that. And these were the group of guys who used to go around in the university in Carthage. And they'd wait until a class had started. Then they'd burst into the room and cause chaos, yelling at the professor, overturning tables, et cetera, et cetera, and then run out. And I mean, they're 17, 18-year-olds, you know? And as I said, some things have not changed. And Augustine's involved in this group for about a year. He will talk about them later when he's a professor and they disrupt his lectures and how he felt about it then. And he's involved to some degree in sexual immorality. And it is wrong to think, and I've heard this a number of occasions, It's wrong to think that his entire life from 17 to this conversion at 32 is just one long litany of immorality. Because within a year, he settles down. He meets a woman. He never tells us her name. And he moves in with her in what we've described today as a common-law marriage. And he is, quote-unquote, faithful to her all through their relationship. And he never tells us her name. And he will have a son by her. He tells us the son's name, Adiodatus, which means gift from God, or gifted from God. And he never tells us her name. And one recent biographer, a man named Gary Wills, has said he doesn't tell us her name because she becomes a Christian later, and she joins one of the Christian churches in North Africa, and he doesn't want to embarrass her. So he doesn't tell us her name. I think that's very plausible. But I'm not sure where he's getting that from. I've never seen any primary source evidence to support that. And he will live this woman. When his mother eventually will force him to break this relationship, he will say how it smote him to the heart because he loved her dearly. And the relationship he's entered into is a typical relationship of middle class and upper class males in the late Roman world. in which before they settled their career, which normally would happen in their mid to late twenties, they would usually take a woman as basically a partner for sex, usually from a lower class, always from a lower class, and then when they hit their mid-twenties and their career was settled, they would literally kick the woman out and marry somebody of their own class. And this was regarded as something that men did. I'm not talking about Christians, obviously, but pagan men regularly did. And Augustine is simply aping or following the pattern of his culture. So, by the early 370s, by 372-373, that early spurt of immorality has really kind of passed and he's settled down with this one woman. He also reads a book. He reads a book by a Roman philosopher called Cicero. And we don't actually have the book today. The book doesn't exist. We have excerpts from the book that are quoted. And the book was an urging people to study philosophy to find wisdom. And he talks about how suddenly all of his desires for typical, the youthful desires that he'd been indulging, immorality and so on, all lost their flavor. and he was hungry for wisdom. So, those two events take place in the year 372, very early on, and he'll begin to think then about where he can find wisdom. He rejects Christianity. By this point in time, he knew how... I mean, he's brilliant. He's one of the great geniuses of the history of the church. And he knows something of his own intellectual brilliance not tempered by humility. He looks at the church. There's no one in the church that he figures can come anywhere near close to his brilliance. And particularly, what he sees in the church are two classes of people. No offense. One class are slaves. He's not a slave. Christianity is for slaves. And then women. He's a typical Roman male. This is before his conversion, and women are intellectually inferior to males. Christianity might suit them, but him? No. And he doesn't encounter anybody in North Africa who is a male Christian who thinks That's what he's looking for. And also, he's got some major problems. He's got major problems. When he hears Genesis read, particularly, Genesis 1 to 3, it's very interesting how that's a watershed text. And the question is, where did evil come from? You suddenly got, in Genesis 3, Satan, but where did that come from? And nobody asks in North Africa, and the church can give them an answer. And so, it's interesting. Now G.K. Chesterton, who is a very interesting writer of the 20th century, has said, and I think rightly so, that if men won't believe the truth, they'll believe anything. And so he ends up rejecting the truth in Christianity, and he joins a cult which Timothy Paul Jones describes on the top of page 54, the Manichaeists. And they were Gnostics. The Manichaeists came from a Persian named Mani, who died in the late 270s. He was crucified in Persia by the Persian government. And he promulgated a sect, never caught on in Persia, caught on in the late Roman Empire, very popular in the late Roman Empire, a very strongly ascetic sect. You committed yourself to a very strict regimen of various ascetic practices. One of them was vegetarianism. And you didn't eat meat. Meat was damaging to the soul. You wanted to eat lots of vegetables, particularly two types of vegetables, as we'll get into in a minute. He also argued that there had been, in God, some sort of disturbance. So bits of God got broken off and lodged in human bodies. That's your soul. And also bits of God got lodged in cucumbers and melons. This is true. And that's why you wanted to eat lots of cucumbers and melons, because they kind of got there was more divinity in them. And this is, I'm not joking, when you hear this you think, this is completely wacko. But it's not. And as I said, if G. K. Chester is right, if you don't believe the truth, you believe anything. And I mean, off to the side, in our culture, a lot of people we walk around with believe that something came out of nothing. It's philosophically ludicrous. The idea that at one point there is absolutely nothing, nothing, and then suddenly there is the potentiality for everything we see. It doesn't make any sense logically. But as I said, if you don't believe the truth, you'll believe anything. And obviously by this, the other requirement of the group was not to be involved in a marital relationship. And so Augustine is never a full member of the group. He asks the Manichaeans where did evil come from, and he's told that there's a man named Felix, who is the head guy in that area of the world, of the Manichaean communities, and when Felix makes a visit to Carthage, where Augustine was living at the time, he'll be able to explain everything to Augustine. Finally, Felix comes somewhere around 381, 382. Augustine spends a couple of hours with him and realizes the guy's a complete idiot. And it was one of these like moments when the penny drops and Augustine realizes he's been had for like about 10 years. He's been following this group who claimed of all these insights and wisdom and he suddenly realizes this key leader is just an idiot. And by that time, Augustine's father dies. His mother is deeply upset about the woman he's living with. Eventually, though, she moves to live with Augustine. She's living with Augustine in Carthage. By 3D3, Augustine wants to go to Rome. He's fed up with the situation in Carthage. He's got students. He's, by this time, got the equivalent of a PhD in rhetoric. He's got students, but they never pay their fees. He's not getting the fame he thinks he deserves. So he's going to go to Rome. And Rome had a magical name to it. I know when people get PhDs from places like Oxford and Cambridge, you just hear that and it's kind of a, oh, it's magical. The reality is we thought it's just as good, maybe better education over here. But the idea of getting a PhD from Cambridge or Oxford, Rome had this magical name about it. And so he goes to Rome. He gets to Rome. And he gets a lot of students, wealthy students. But they don't pay their fees either. And then he falls sick. And he nearly dies. And he lands in Rome at the worst time of the year. He lands there in the middle of the summer, which is the worst time of the year. Because the place was originally built, a lot of Rome was built on marshes. And it was still the breeding ground for mosquitoes and diseases like malaria. He actually contracts something, probably something like malaria, which nearly kills him. And then he finds out about a job. By the way, he's left his mother back in North Africa. She doesn't want to leave, and so he has to lie to her. He actually has a whole chapter in which he describes his lying to his mother, booking passage on a ship. His mother's absolutely heartbroken. She's convinced the only way God is ever going to save him is she's got to be around him. He's got to be regularly there, so she's sharing the gospel with him. And Augustine would say, he's got this fabulous statement, you did not answer her immediate prayers, that Augustine did not leave her sight, that you might answer her deeper prayers. Because he gets to Rome, it's a disaster, he finally hears about a position in Northern Italy, in Milan, and he goes to teach in Milan. And he gets to Milan, and he hears that there is a Christian preacher named Ambrose. Now, Augustine is teaching rhetoric, and rhetoric is the highest subject in the Roman system of education, and it's the ability to speak in public. And you had to utilize all that you had learned to that point in time. all the literature you had studied, all the history you had studied, because you have to be able to persuade people, argue cases. It was vital for lawyers, vital for anybody involved in politics. It's very interesting. Most of the early Christian leaders we know about, most of them were rhetoricians. And Augustine hears of this brilliant preacher named Ambrose. Well, that's what he does for a living. So he goes to the church. And he starts to realize, this man is absolutely fabulous in his preaching. And he starts to go regularly. And he talks about how God was calling him, but he was too far away, he said, to hear. And he starts to listen to what Ambrose is talking about. And Ambrose preaches a series of sermons on Genesis 1 to 3. And he allegorizes part of it. And Augustine would eventually have problems with allegory as a way of interpreting the text, but it draws him. He gives explanations which make sense to Augustine. At the same time, his mother's tracked him down. We've got no idea. It's very interesting how his mother turns up. How do you find somebody in a world in which there are no telephone directories, no telephones, no internet, no telegraph? All you got to do is write letters. She must have been writing letters, although there is indications that she was illiterate. Anyway, she turns up, cracks him down, turns up in Milan. He's renting a house. To give you some idea how wealthy he is, the house has a garden in it. And probably only 1-2% of Romans had gardens. Now, he doesn't own the house. He's renting it from a North African. But it gives you some idea of the amounts of money that he's earning at this point in his life. His mother turns up. He's living with this woman he doesn't name. Adiodatus, his son. Novigius, his brother, is there. His mother turns up. He's always got friends in his life. There's two friends, Olypius and Avodius. It's not clear exactly what they both do for a living. The impression you get is they're kind of sponging off him. They both get converted and end up bishops in the church. And this is the scene then that's set in the summer of 386. And he's 32 years old. And a fellow North African named Pontikianus comes to visit him this particular summer. And Pontikianus has got some business. with Augustine regarding the university. Ponticianus was in the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire. He was a believer. And when he comes in and he's talking to Augustine in probably what we would describe as the atrium, the central courtyard of their house, he notices that Augustine has got a book on a table and he picks it up And he's surprised to find it's a book of Paul's letters. And he tells Augustine, he says, I'm very surprised to see you reading this. He says, I thought it would be a book of rhetoric. And he says, have you heard the story about Antony? And you remember last week or the week before last, we talked about Antony, how he gave up everything to become a monk. And he begins to tell him the story of Antony, and Augustine, God begins to speak to Augustine, and Augustine relates all this. He said, as he's telling the story, I'm beginning to think, you know, here's a man, he has nowhere near the advantages I have, and he gives up everything to follow Christ. He said, I've been looking for wisdom now, at this point it goes back at least 14 years, and I'm no further ahead. And he said, Pontikians is describing what Antony did, his commitment to a monastic life. He said, you are turning me around to look at myself, and what did I see but I saw a body that was filled with sores and filth and pus. He's describing his inner self. And he describes how a battle began to rage in his soul. The man, Pontigianus, finishes his business, leaves, but Augustine is there alone with one of his friends, Olypius, and a baffle is raging in his soul, because he said, there came to me all those sins which said to me, if you follow this path and become a Christian, you'll have to say goodbye to us forever. What were they, he says, O Lord? They were things that are too despicable to name. And he said, I had prayed once, O Lord, make me chaste. Timothy Paul Jones' quote says, make me chase, but not right now. And finally he says, I was going to burst out in tears. He said, Olypius knew by looking at my face what was going to happen. He said, I had to go out into the garden by myself. And he throws himself down on a tree and just begins to weep uncontrollably, asking God, how long, O Lord, will I delay entering into your covenant? And here's a child, and this is going on, there's a child in a nearby garden, garden singing, and again, Timothy Paul Jones picks that up at the bottom of page 53. Pick up and read, the Latin is puli legit. And Augustine stops weeping and thinks, what kind of refrain in a child's game is puli legit? Pick up and read. And you can imagine scholars have had a heyday with this one. There have been all kinds of articles, I don't know if books, but written of exactly what did he hear? Was it some sort of voice of God? Was it an actual child? I think it's an actual child the way he describes it. Was it a game? What kind of game has pick up and read? Anyway, he hears this. He said, I took it as a divine command to go back and to pick up the book and to read. And he picks up the false letters. And the first passage he reads, the book was open to Romans 13, verses 12 to 14. He said, I came to the end of the passage, and the light of confidence has flooded my heart, and you converted me to yourself. He goes in, tells his mother. His mother is absolutely overwhelmed. She would die within a couple of years. She dies on the way back to North Africa at the port of Ostia, but she has seen her son come to Christ. And he gives up his career. And by the way, the one thing I had missed out, his mother had actually forced him. The one area of sin in his mother's life is she had forced him to give up his common law wife, about two years before his conversion. Then when they get to Milan, and he's going back to church, and she's thrilled. Now she tells him, you can settle down and actually have a real marriage. What she should have done, was, you need to marry this woman you've been living with. You've got a son by her. Instead, she acquiesces to the typical Roman view and she arranges a marriage with a young woman in the church who was of Augustine's same social class. And the young woman probably was around 12 or 13. Augustine's around 51. And Augustine tells us His common-law wife was kicked out of the house. She goes back to North Africa. Augustine's got a whole paragraph on how devastated he was, because he said, I loved her dearly. She went back to Africa, vowing never to give herself to another man. He says, though, I was too weak to follow her example. And he takes another mistress. And it's that that makes him realize that his real problem, that's what happens on that day of conversion, his real problem is not an intellectual issue. And over the years, you know, you've encountered people who've got problems with Christianity, and they often have all kinds of intellectual issues. The real problem is a bondage of the will, and a bondage of affections. It's men and women, their wills are in bondage, and they love sin. And the intellectual issues, they're not minor issues, but they're not usually the major, major issue. The intellectual issues are there because of the bondage of the will. And Augustine realized that his will was in bondage and his affections were mired in sin. And that was the real issue. And so all of that, and forgive me all that background there, and so he is converted in the summer of 386. A year later, he's baptized. And you can still go to Milan, and you can see the baptistry he was baptized in outside the cathedral. And it's a baptistry as deep as this. Nobody was baptized in this period of time without being immersed in water. And he starts, he goes back to North Africa. His mother dies on the way back in Austria. And he goes back to North Africa, and he's going to start a Christian commune, kind of like Francis Schaeffer Le Brie. You know, a think tank and he's going to write books. And that lasts for three years. And then he goes to the city of Hippo on one particular day where he goes to convince a friend to come and join him in this Christian community and God lays hold of him. And he's in a church, he's in the church of Hippo and the Bishop Valerius, who is a Greek, doesn't speak Latin that well. And he's wrestling with his preaching, because he's having to preach in a language that's not his own. And they've just lost an elder, and he sees Augustine in the congregation that morning. And at the end of the service, after the service is over, he says, now, we're pleased and thrilled to have Augustine with us today. As you know, as brothers and sisters, we've lost recently one of our elders, and we need another elder. Who among you would like to have Augustine as our elder? Apparently the whole place roared, yes, I don't know if they raised their hands, and they grabbed Augustine, hauled him up to the front, laid hands on him, and ordained him. And this did happen. There are other examples of this. The one favorite example is one that happens in Hippo a number of years later, when the guy came from Italy. They needed an elder, they lay hold of him, ordain him, and as soon as the hands are off him, the guy runs to the door and they never see him again. Augustine just breaks down and weeps. And it's not the normal way we call pastors, but Augustine realizes that his desire to kind of be in an intellectual bubble, God has different plans for his life. He asks Valerius, can you give me a year to study the Word of God? And from the mid-390s onwards, probably 393, 394, his main role in life is preaching the Word of God. And we'll look at some of the books he writes next week. The one I want to focus on is The City of God, because Augustine's life coincides with the collapsing of the Roman Empire. And we want to think about what Augustine says about how to face a catastrophe like that. Any questions before I conclude? Okay, let's pray. Father, we thank you for those who have gone before us, for the evidence that you are a God who has saved men and women, out of this world, brought them to a living faith and then used them in your service. We thank you for this man, recognizing areas of weakness, but we thank you for the grace that saved him and used him as a servant in those days long ago. We take comfort in the fact that you saved sinners and that the drawing of men and women to the Lord Jesus Christ is your great work. And we ask that you would hear the prayers of your people for the salvation of those we love, for the salvation of sinners. Even this day, O Lord, we ask for Jesus' sake. Amen.