New Life Ministries

Saint Augustine is without
doubt one of the most, if not the most, important thinkers in the history of
Christianity.  Yet before Augustine
became a Christian in his early thirties, he was, by his own estimation, a restless
wanderer who had made a shambles of his life. 
Aware of his inner sense of emptiness, Augustine looked to the popular
philosophies of his day to answer his deepest questions about the world and
himself.  Aching with loneliness, he
looked to illicit sex to meet his need for intimacy.  And possessed of towering intellectual gifts, he pursued career
advancement to provide him with a sense of power and purpose.

To be sure, his brilliance and
eloquence had taken him all the way from the small town in North Africa where
he was born to the magnificent Italian city of Milan’in that day, the center of
political power for the Western Roman Empire’where his job was to use those
skills to promote the Empire’s prominent people and their plans.  In order to solidify his standing, and his
potential for continued upward mobility in that society, he secured an
engagement for marriage to a young girl from a local family of great
wealth.  The problem, however, was that
Augustine was currently in a fifteen-year-long, out-of-wedlock relationship
with his concubine, who, to make matters even worse, was the mother of his
teenage son.  But this woman had become
an obstacle to Augustine’s career, so he sent her broke and brokenhearted back
to her native North Africa.  And because
the young girl to whom he was engaged was not yet old enough to marry him,
Augustine got himself yet another lover in the meantime’someone who he thought
could provide a ‘quick fix’ by driving away his lust, loneliness, and pain.

This was the situation
Augustine found himself in at the age of thirty-two.  Yet at that time, while going about the duties of his ostensibly
important and successful life, Augustine happened upon someone who, in God’s
providence, would help change the course of his life.  Ironically, that person was a lowly beggar, happily asking
passers by for coins.  Augustine was
undone.  Not by the beggar’s poverty,
and not by his request for money, but by
his mere happiness.  Augustine
wondered how this beggar could possibly be happy in his impoverished state.  But more importantly, the beggar’s happiness
powerfully brought home to Augustine the fact that, though he had much going
for him by the world’s standards, he was internally confused, lonely, wounded,
and miserable!  He had set out to find
his identity in sex, money, knowledge, and power, but those things had not
delivered; they had instead shown themselves to be impotent and empty.  Looking back on this encounter years later
as a spiritually mature Christian, Augustine prayed: ‘I aspired to honours, money,
[socially advantageous] marriage, and you [God] laughed at me.  In those ambitions I suffered the bitterest
difficulties; that was by your mercy.’

Thankfully, the older,
spiritually-wiser Augustine came to realize that his youthful quest to
understand his identity was not wrong, but rather wrong-headed, or better,
wrong-hearted.  You see, a person’s core
identity is not something he or she manufactures; nor is it something
determined by the world.  Instead, a
person’s core identity comes from having been created in the image of God by
God himself.  And though that identity
has been marred by sin, it can be restored by Jesus Christ, who saves sinners
and graciously reconciles them to the One who made them, defines them, and thus
holds the key to the real fulfillment and satisfaction.  By God’s grace, Augustine came to realize
that he had been on a fool’s errand, and that God had used the severe mercy of
a chronically broken, restless heart to give Augustine ears for the
gospel. 

Augustine once prayed, ‘Our
heart is restless, until it finds rest in you.’  This prayer described not only the truth of Augustine’s own life,
but a fundamental truth for all human beings. 
We are made by God for God.  And
that means that we will never be fulfilled until we are at peace with him. 

I encourage you to spend some
time reflecting on this brief but profound prayer.  How do Augustine’s words describe your past, or perhaps your
present situation?  How do these words
speak to the problems and decisions that you are currently facing, and the
course that you believe your future should take?

For more help see please join us at our next New Life Weekend.
Also, see our New Life Devotionals and Bibles.