Reformed, Book Reading, Apple Loving, Beverage Snob, 23 Year-Old Husband, In Need of Grace.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
The human will does not attain grace through its freedom, but rather attains its freedom through grace…
Augustine, On Reprimand and Grace
And when it says ‘all your heart, all your soul, all your mind,’ it leaves no part of our life free from this obligation, no part free as it were to back out and enjoy some other thing; any other object of love that enters the mind should be swept towards the same destination as that to which the whole flood of our love is directed.
-St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana)
I aspired to honours, money, marriage, and you [God] laughed at me. In those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties; that was by your mercy—so much the greater in that you gave me the less occasion to find sweet pleasure in what was not you.
Augustine, Confessions
The Unreliable Self
“Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable?”
-Augustine, Confessions (Book VIII. xi, 27)
As I am continuing Augustines’ ‘Confessions,’ I am constantly seeing little pieces of myself in what he is writing. He continually relies on his own strength, as I often do, and he slowly comes to grips with how this has and will fail him. This is something I am in continual need of: dying to myself and relying on the power of Christ.
Augustine writing on the sorrow of pursuing silly things…
I therefore decided to give attention to the holy scriptures and to find out what they were like. And this is what met me: something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries.
Augustine, Confessions
I abandoned you to pursue the lowest things of your creation. I was dust going to dust.
Augustine, Confessions
The malice of the act was base and I loved it — that is to say I loved my own undoing, I loved the evil in me — not the thing for which I did the evil, simply the evil: my soul was depraved, and hurled itself down from security in You into utter destruction, seeking no profit from wickedness, but only to be wicked.
-Saint Augustine, Confessions
Augustine had a HUGE view of sin and a HUGE view of grace. We should see our sin as a huge problem and God’s grace (through Christ’s atonement) as a HUGE answer.
