Augustine of Hippo

I recently read Augustine's Confessions, and I can see why it is a classic. If his books are anything like him, he must have been an approachable, honest, and humble guy. Part of the reason classics have lasted for so long is that they speak to the human condition in some way, and a couple of passages in particular really struck me as "classic" when I read through this text. Augustine was a HUMAN, and he struggled with exactly the same things in the 400s that we struggle with today.


Does This Sound Like You? :

"I was astonished that although I now loved you and not some phantom in your place, I did not persist in enjoyment of my God. Your beauty drew me to you, but soon I was dragged away from you by my own weight and in dismay I plunged again into the things of this world. The weight I carried was the habit of the flesh. But your memory remained with me and I had no doubt at all that you were the one to whom I should cling, only I was not yet able to cling to you." (VII.17)

It strikes me that this is the condition of the entire American church today, and in this passage is the biggest reason that I enjoy the ministry of John Piper. Do I enjoy God? I mean really enjoy spending time in His presence, serving and worshiping Him, and obeying him? Here is where Augustine finds peace:

"I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is a man, like them, and also rules as God over all things, blessed for ever. He was calling to me and saying I am the way; I am truth and life. He it was who united with our flesh that food which I was too weak to take; for the word was made flesh so that your Wisdom, by which you created all things, might be milk to suckle us in infancy. For I was not humble enough to conceive of the humble Jesus Christ as my God, nor had I learnt what lesson his human weakness was meant to teach. The lesson is that your Word, the eternal Truth, which far surpasses even the higher parts of your creation, raises up to himself all who subject themselves to him. From the clay of which we are made he built for himself a lowly house in this world below, so that by this means he might cause those who were to be made subject to him to abandon themselves and come over to his side. He would cure them of the pride that swelled up in their hearts and would nurture love in its place, so that they should no longer stride ahead confident in themselves, but might realize their own weakness when at their feet they saw God himself, enfeebled by sharing this garment of our mortality. And at last, from weariness, they would cast themselves down upon his humanity, and when it rose they too would rise." (VII.18)

And again, "I was quite certain of these truths, but I was too weak to enjoy you. I used to talk glibly as though I know the meaning of it all, but unless I had looked for the way which leads to you in Christ our Saviour, instead of finding knowledge I should have found my end. For I had now begun to wish to be thought wise. I was full of self-esteem, which was a punishment of my own making. I ought to have deplored my state, but instead my knowledge only bred self-conceit. For was I not without charity, which builds its edifice on the firm foundation of humility, that is, on Jesus Christ?" (VII.20)

How often we lose track of Jesus! It was Jesus who saved Augustine from his pride and finally gave him lasting joy. If you are a sinner today, He is your only refuge. God is a consuming fire who burns up his adversaries: why not come to Him today? I think even Christians need to be constantly reminded that Christ is our only hope and joy - anything in His place brings only multiplied sorrows. His yoke is easy and his burden is light!

Been A While...

Wow. September 27th is the last time I posted anything here. Obviously that whole Romans thing didn't work out :) -- don't get me wrong, I still read through the book a couple of times, but I clearly don't have the endurance to do any kind of regular updates about stuff. In the future, if you read this blog (I know a couple poor souls out there do), don't expect too many updates!

I did feel like doing an update, though. Mostly for Daniel, but a little bit because I feel guilty about having people check this every once and again only to see the same-old same-old. Ergo my thoughts: it is late and this post will probably contain a great deal of rambling. I am not really looking to a lot of scripture here, I just want to spout off a little.

(1) For those of you who don't know, I worked for Costco from the beginning of November to the end of December. I pulled carts around in the parking lot and I put groceries in boxes. Sometimes I removed boxes from carts. It felt like four months instead of two, but I learned a TON. Literally a ton. I thought I would post what I learned, partly so I won't forget it. It has been amazing to see my own heart in the past couple of months, and I wouldn't trade this time for anything. God has used it to teach me a lot about myself and about Himself.

-- Pride. I am a very proud person, but I never really saw it in its ugliness until I worked at Costco. The STRANGEST thing happened, and it happened over and over again. It went like this: First, I would see someone that I know who would be shopping at Costco. This happened all the time, because everyone shops at Costco. Literally everyone. After seeing this person, assuming I saw them from a distance and they didn't see me, my immediate instinct was to AVOID them. I was ashamed to work at Costco, because I have a degree, and because people who have degrees don't work at Costco unless it is in the corporate offices. If I did not avoid the person (I didn't always try), I found that my inclination -- my overwhelming desire -- was to EXPLAIN myself. I wanted to tell the story of how I got to the Costco parking lot, wearing an orange vest and a nametag. Costco was my "post-college relax" job, I was looking for a "real" job, etc. I felt like I had to explain myself so I wouldn't be judged.

I realized really quickly that there are a couple of angles to this. The first is that I felt like Costco was a bad job. Don't get me wrong, I do think it is vastly under my potential (when I was interviewing for the seasonal job the interviewer lady asked me, "and you want to push carts?!?"), but it really isn't a bad job. In fact, it is a really great gig. One of the managers there (he has been there five years) double-majored at the UW. Another gal I worked with had just graduated. In short, there is no shame in working for Costco: a lot of their employees are continuing their educations while they work their way up internally, learning about retail and customer service. Most non-student-types are there because it is their career, and are looking for nothing more than to move up in the company. This has a great deal to do with the fact that the money is really good for what it is. I really can't imagine what upheaval my heart would have experienced had my job been at McDonald's or Safeway or something else.

The second angle here is that I subconsciously DEVALUE people based on where they work. It was weird to feel like people were looking down on me because my job was to push their carts around, but I realized that I do the same thing to others all the time. I see myself as intelligent, educated, and therefore important, so that when I go to the gas station or to the grocery store, I look down on the people who work in those places. I ask myself, though rarely in so many words, "what did this person do to end up here? Did they drop out of high school? Do they lack initiative? How can they do this every day of their lives?" I condescend to people who are not walking around in the halls of a university, or who do not like talking about metaphysics or cosmology, or who don't yearn to transform the world in their day-to-day lives. I think we all condescend to those around us because it makes us feel bigger. I find, however, that as a follower of Jesus I have no right to look down on anyone. Ever. With humility of mind I should consider others better than myself: I ought to look not only to my own interests, but also to the interests of others, and my attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. Being found in appearance as a man, He became obedient to death, even death on a cross! This is hard because we are so hard-wired for selfishness that we hardly even see it when we are proud and selfish. Oh, how we need to pray for God's grace!

I think it might be interesting to do a Bible study on pride. A cursory word search of "pride" in the Word of God turns in tons of results. God cares about this. He will not despise a broken and contrite spirit.

-- Wealth. I don't ever think I will own a luxury vehicle, ever. Cars are tools to be used, and they cost money. How can anyone justify buying a BMW or Lexus SUV? Praise God for the time I spent at the UW, time I spent realizing that Christ was not a Republican in an SUV. I think God cares way more about the way we use our money - our own, personal, where-it-hurts-money - to fix injustice and poverty in the world than he does about supply-side economics. I finally just read Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz, and he is right: "We don't need as much money as we have."

-- Health: At Costco I was essentially paid to work out. It was pretty nice, especially when I would walk the couple of miles to work instead of drive. On those days I probably walked 10 miles, most of the time carrying around massive loads of carts. One of the really interesting things I found while working there, however, was how many people smoked cigarettes. Lots of people still smoke. A surprising number, it seemed to me: even people that you wouldn't peg as smokers were smoking like chimneys at Costco. The more I think about it, the more I think that smoking is a spiritual issue. Sure, there are plenty of folks who smoke and are not controlled by the habit, much the same way folks drink (I think of Donald Miller, for example, or JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis or GK Chesterton or CH Spurgeon or many of my friends). But I felt like at Costco, smoking was a release for people. They get stressed out, so they smoke. They need somewhere to go, and cigarettes are always there to calm their nerves. I am sure this could unfold into a huge discourse about how the body and the soul are intertwined and about how modern medicine treats our base physiology but not our spirit, but I don't really want to talk about that. I just think it is interesting, is all, because cigarettes are so obviously detrimental to health, and because "the body is not made for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." (1 Cor. 6:13). Our bodies are meant, as John Piper says, to "make God look precious."

(2) It is 2008 now. That's crazy. I was talking to a friend recently, and for some reason felt compelled to mention how clearly I remember 1995. I was in 4th grade, the Mariners won the AL West (I went to a game where Tino Martinez hit a home run in the bottom of the 9th to beat the A's 9 to 8), there was a big earthquake in Japan, Bill Clinton was president and the Unibomber was doing a bunch of stuff. Crazy. That was 13 years ago. I have been a guitar player for 12 years now.

(3) With the new year I am always tempted to make resolutions, and then I always do, but then I always break them by the middle of January or so. Especially if the resolutions have to do with dealing with my sin in some sort of legalistic way: I almost always watch the show or waste the time or do the thing that I said I wouldn't watch or waste or do. It is exactly like wanting to do a blog about the book of Romans: my intentions are good, but I am relying on my own strength and my own willpower to do some enormous "deed" that, even if I could pull it off, would serve far more to puff me up than to humble me and make me more teachable. My heart is not changed.

I would LIKE to make resolutions, sure. I really want to read more (I think 52 books in a year would be a pretty neat goal- one per week), and specifically I would like to read through the Bible, which I have never done. I tried it my freshman year in college and got bogged down in Ezekiel or somewhere. I would like to start volunteering my time and energy with the poor and the destitute. I would like to reestablish a clarity of purpose in my life towards which I can move and plan, and I would like to improve on my friendships and build community where I already have it. But I don't think these things will ever really happen unless they are accompanied by a change in my passions. We all do what we love doing.

Therefore my resolution this year is to learn to pray. One of the lessons I learned this past year is that if you love someone, you will yearn to spend time with them, talk to them, and get to know them better and better, day by day, deeper and deeper. It will pain you to be unfaithful to them in thought, word, or deed. If I love Jesus I will therefore want to "pray without ceasing," 1 Thessalonians 5:17. I am going to pray that God would change my heart. I really struggle sometimes because I feel like I have to pick myself up by my own bootstraps, but I can't. Only God can raise the dead. Only He can melt my hardened heart and turn it into repentant clay. Augustine once prayed in his Confessions, "I have no hope at all but in thy great mercy. Grant what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt." I am learning what it means to "call upon the name of the Lord," Romans 10:13. God commands things from us that He must grant to us -- this is one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith. I think a good first step is a humble reliance on Him through prayer, so that is where I think I'll start.

God bless if you made it this far... ! I just realized it is 3:30 in the morning. I should probably go to sleep. Thanks for soaking up my incoherencies. Owen