Put On the Lord Jesus
Romans 13:11–14,
“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. 12 The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
And it was this passage of God’s word that once changed a man’s life forever — his name was Augustine; he was from North Africa; he lived from the year 354 to 430; and the story of his conversion is the story I wanna tell you this morning as we kick off our new series, “How God Changes a Life.”
The plan for this series is to look at four examples throughout church history of when God transformed someone’s life through the power of his word.
And the reason we’re doing this is because we believe that God still does this kind of life-changing work today — my prayer has been that we as a church would be inspired by God’s work in the past so that we would expect that same work in the present.
And if you’re here and you’re not yet a Christian — if you’re here and you need your life to change — first, I want you to know I’m glad you’re here, and you’ve come to the right place. Whatever you’ve got going on, I can almost guarantee that Augustine’s situation was worse. Let me tell you his story in three parts …
We’re gonna look at Augustine’s context, his crisis, and his change.
Part One: Context
And we start with the context, or the setting, because this is where every good story starts. The question here is: What kind of world did Augustine live in?
Augustine was born in the year 354 in North Africa, which was part of the Roman Empire. This was about 40 years after the Emperor Constantine became a Christian and legalized Christian worship. Up until Constantine, Christians were a persecuted minority, but under his protections the gospel began to spread and the church began to grow. But the world was still a big mess — you could call it a world of conquest and confusion.
Conquest
It was a world of conquest because there was constant fighting and enemy invasions, thanks to the barbarians. Now the word “barbarian” is a word in the New Testament. It was the Greek word for Gentiles outside the Greek-speaking world — these were Gentiles who spoke their own languages and maintained their own culture.
Now as the Roman Empire expanded, Roman armies conquered a lot of these barbarian tribes, but over time these barbarians starting fighting back. A couple of names you’ve probably heard before are the Goths and Vandals (the Vikings came a few hundred years later). But the Goths and Vandals were Germanic tribes who fought against Rome.
For example, in 410 (when Augustine was 56 years old), the Visigoths sacked Rome (which was a big deal — no foreign army had invaded Rome in over 800 years). This shook the whole world.
Then in 430, the year Augustine died, the Vandals laid siege to the City of Hippo where Augustine lived. So while Augustine was on his deathbed, there was an invading army literally outside the walls of his city.
And this was his life. This was the world as Augustine knew it — what he would later call the City of Man. It was a world full of conflict and war — Augustine’s hope was not in politics.
Confusion
But then, at the same time of these physical threats, there were also layers of ideological confusion. There were all kinds of different worldviews and philosophies and Christian heresies. And one place where all this stuff was most obvious was in the biggest city of North Africa — the city of Carthage.
Augustine moved there when he was 17 years old to go to college and study philosophy; it was one of the wealthiest cities in the ancient world; it was a bustling place. And this is where Augustine went off the rails.
He later described the city as a “seething cauldron of shameful sex.”
So while he was being indoctrinated with all kinds of junk intellectually, he was also indulging in sexual sin. He would go to church, but it was because he was trying to pick up women. He ended up getting a woman pregnant and they had a son, and then spiritually, he went all-in with a cult called Manichaeism. Manichaeism is too much to explain now, but it was basically a fusion religion that was a mix of Buddhism and Bible heresies and other stuff. And it was super weird (They believed tiny particles of Divine Light were trapped inside material things). They rejected the Old Testament, but they did respect the letters of Paul in the New Testament (that’ll be important later).
But suffice to say, Augustine was confused. He was lost — and I mean bad lost.
Like, if you think you have a past … Augustine was a sexually deviant, heretical college philosophy student. He was a very long way from Jesus. But … he had a Christian mother.
Christian Mother
Augustine’s mom was a woman named Monica, she’s a big part of his story. We know a lot about her because Augustine wrote a lot about her. He admired his mom deeply. She was a Christian, from a Christian family (she married a man named Patrick, who was a pagan; he didn’t become a Christian until right before he died). But Monica raised Augustine in Christian truth, even though he rejected it for years. … His mom never gave up on him.
She prayed for him a lot, and she bugged him a lot. I think she would classify as an ancient helicopter mom, but in the best kind of way. When she found out he had embraced Manichaeism, Augustine said she wept for him “more than mothers weep for their children who die” (and he knew that because she probably told him).
There’s one story of Monica where she kept insisting with a local pastor to meet with Augustine. The pastor wouldn’t do it because Augustine wasn’t interested. But Monica kept on and on with the pastor … Did you call him? Did you meet with him? Have you seen him? She’d beg this pastor through tears.
Finally, this pastor told her:
“It is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”
He told her to keep praying. And she did. Monica was an amazing woman, and we all should be grateful for her.
And moms in the room, be a great mom like Monica.
In our cultural moment, motherhood is scorned. Understand that abortion is not just an attack on children, it’s an attack on motherhood too. We see this everywhere. Right now something like half the country is defending a woman who viciously murdered her three children.
That’s an attack on motherhood. And it’s demonic. And we should stand against it with everything we’ve got. One way to do that is: Moms, be great. Be like Monica.
Our world needs great mothers — and if they’re not coming from the church, it’s not happening. Moms, you have such a high calling! You’re making a difference in the world. Be great.
Monica was a crucial part of Augustine’s context, and her influence was part of what brought him to a crisis.
Part Two: Crisis
Augustine was smart and he was really good with words. He ended up moving to the city of Milan to become a professor of rhetoric. This was a highly esteemed vocation, and he was living high on the hog. He was moving up the social ladder until he met the pastor of the church in Milan, a man named Ambrose.
Augustine would go to church to hear Ambrose preach, and although he still didn’t believe, he asked a lot of questions. Eventually, Augustine got connected with Ambrose’s mentor, a man named Simplician. And Simplician started mentoring Augustine — and this is pretty fascinating — he inspired Augustine with stories of other people’s conversions.
One story he told him was of a man who was a philosopher in Rome, who was also from Africa, and this man been drawn to Christianity. Apparently this man read the Bible often and came to consider himself a Christian, but he didn’t get baptized (because he thought it was too embarrassing).
But then he finally became ashamed that he was ashamed, and he got baptized and declared himself to be a Christian openly. Simplician told Augustine this story (and I imagine he kept clearing his throat the whole time). And this story had an impact on Augustine right as he entered into the darkest time of his life in December 384.
Going by his own account, it sounds like he suffered from what we’d call a depression. He was full of despair and doubts. His pursuit of knowledge and prestige, and all his sexual immorality, had left him unfulfilled. He was not happy with his life — which was right. He should not have been happy with his life. There is a such thing as a holy misery. Maybe that’s something his mother had prayed for … Y’all ever heard anybody pray like that?
I heard people pray that way when I was growing up. I’ve been in prayer meetings before when somebody would share about a lost family member, and they want God to save them so badly, and so people would pray:
God, make so-and-so absolutely miserable until they turn to Jesus!
God, don’t let them get any rest! Torment them in their dreams! — until they trust Christ!
Maybe Monica prayed like that. Because Augustine was in a crisis.
The way he was living wasn’t working. He was lost and he knew it.
And that’s the only condition for a changed life — it’s not enough to be lost, you gotta know you’re lost. You have to know you need help. Augustine knew.
Part Three: Change
Augustine tells this story in a lot of detail in his autobiography, Confessions. I’ll try not to get too much in the weeds, but it happened like this:
It’s a normal day in Milan, and Augustine has a couple of his friends over. (And these are intellectual-types who like to study and share what they’ve learned.) And one of these friends finds a copy of Paul’s letters in a stack of Augustine’s books, and he’s surprised by this, and so he starts telling Augustine and this other friend about how he had heard that there were a bunch of these men, not far from Milan, who had converted to Christ and their lives had completely changed. They had renounced their careers in the imperial service and committed themselves to studying Scripture and living a quiet life.
Well this story wrecks Augustine. After the one friend left, Augustine is overcome with emotion and says to his closer friend who was still with him:
What is wrong with us? What is this? What did you hear? Simple folk are taking heaven by storm while we clever people without a heart wallow in the materialist world of flesh and blood. (Confessions, 8.19, Chadwick’s translation, p. 26)
Then Augustine goes outside to a garden, to be alone. But his friend is so worried about him, he follows him outside. And Augustine is struggling. He’s having some kind of breakdown. He’s weeping and just a mess and then he hears the voice of a child, chanting: “Take up and read; take up and read.”
He hears this, and then he gets up and runs to his copy of Paul’s letters. He grabs them and opens to a random page and he reads the first thing he sees … which was in Romans 13 …
“… not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” (vv. 13–14)
And that was it! Augustine was born again. Later he wrote,
No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended — by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart — all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (8.29)
And … he lived happily ever after. … Not quite! (It never works that way in this world. This is the City of Man.) Augustine had become a Christian — he was 32 years old and his life had been changed — but the change was only beginning.
He baptized, and then soon after became a monk, and eventually became a pastor and later he became one of the most important theologians in church history. And as a theologian one of the most enduring impacts he made was related to the doctrine of conversion.
Heart Transformation
When Augustine read Romans 13:13–14, he had read it before that day in Milan. He had read the words and understood Paul’s command, but he lacked the ability in himself to obey it. He had been a divided man.
He respected the commands of the gospel, at least with his mind — he knew chastity was a good thing — but he didn’t really desire to live that way. His heart wasn’t in it.
During his wayward years, he had actually prayed to God, “Grant me chastity, but not yet.”
That’s how Augustine had felt about all six of the prohibitions in Romans 13:13.
The apostle Paul says in verse 11 that because of where we are in redemptive history — because Jesus has lived, died, and rose again, and because he’s coming back — it’s time to wake up and get your life in order.
That means you stop living a certain way. Paul names six sins (it’s not a comprehensive list, but it’s a good list to stop doing). Verse 13, Paul says:
No more orgies and drunkenness — stop the slosh parties.
No more sexual immorality and sensuality — stop all fornication.
No more quarreling and jealously — stop despising your neighbor.
This is group-think sin, sexual immortality, and hatred of others.
It’s fascinating that this list from the First Century world remains a list of besetting sins in our 21st century world … just like it was in Augustine’s 5th century world — and look: it’s all gotta stop. All of it.
But how?
By putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.
And this is is where Augustine has so much insight.
As a theologian, he stressed that our problem as sinners is that we have disordered loves. Our problem is not simply a lack of love for God, but it’s that we love lesser things more than God. And we desire and pursue those lesser loves.
His biographer Henry Chadwick says it like this:
[Augustine’s] repeated point is that the object of our love, whether high or low, is the magnet irresistibly drawing us on.
He’s saying we are all led by our loves, and left to ourselves, this is a bad thing. Because left to ourselves, apart from the grace of God, our loves are broken! — they’re all out of whack and so they lead us down all these dead-end roads.
If you follow your unconverted heart, you will not end up happy. Augustine had been there and done that. It does not work! And we know it doesn’t work!
And this is why we need a transformation of the heart! We need God to change us from the inside-out. We need to turn from seeking inferior mirages of beauty to seeking supreme beauty which is God himself.
Augustine put it like this. He writes,
How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose! . . . You [God] drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and you took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure … you who outshine all light … you who surpass all honor . . . O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation. (Confessions 9.1)
Do you see what he’s saying? The sinful, lesser things his heart pursued were not merely taken away — they were replaced by God himself, and God himself became his joy.
Augustine wrote:
Do not think you are dragged to God against your will.
The mind is drawn by love which is the source of inexpressible pleasure. There is a pleasure of the heart whose sweetness consists in the bread of heaven … Give me a lover, he feels what I am talking about. Give me a man in a state of desire, of hunger, a traveller thirsty on a desert road who is sighing for the spring at his eternal home; give me a man like that, he knows what I mean. (Chadwick, 156ff)
This is the same insight we read 14 centuries later from the Scottish pastor Thomas Chalmers. He calls this the “expulsive power of a new affection.” A greater love conquers the lesser loves.
See, we put on the Lord Jesus Christ because we want to. Because we have found in Christ a greater joy than the fleeting pleasures of sin! And that’s the miracle. That is the grace of God working through the word of God. This is a changed life.
Look, it doesn’t mean as Christians we never sin again, but it does mean that we have a truer joy that triumphs over sin.
Christian, I want you to know what Paul says in Romans 6, that sin does not have dominion over you!
In Christ, you have power over sin because you have the power of a superior pleasure. And that’s the only way you’re gonna win this battle in the world. You will never love your sin less until you love Jesus more because you know Jesus better. So know him — Know Christ. Seek Christ. Rest in Christ.
And may your hearts be restless — miserable, tormented — may our hearts be restless until we find our rest in Christ.
That’s what brings us to the Table.
The Table
I realize this morning we are coming from all kinds of different places.
Again, if you’re here and you’re not a Christian, I’m so glad you’re here.
This morning I invite you to put your faith in Jesus. Right now, turn from your sin and put on the Lord Jesus Christ. He will change your life.
And church, brothers and sisters in Christ, we’ve trusted in Jesus. Let’s rest in Jesus this morning. We’re not searching anymore. We’re not lost. We’re home. Let’s rest in the love of Christ for us this morning as we remember his gospel.
