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The Christian Classics - Part V

  • Jim Daly Jim Daly is president and chief executive officer of Focus on the Family, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping families thrive.
  • Published Aug 01, 2011

Posted by Jim_Daly Jul 29, 2011

 

 

Conversion:  The Life-Changing Power of the Word

(from Augustine’s Confessions, Book VIII, Chs. 8-12)

There was a garden attached to our lodging, and we had the use of this as of the whole house; for our landlord, the owner of the house, did not live there.  To this garden the tumult in my heart had driven me, as to a place where no one could intervene in this passionate suit which I had brought against myself until it could be settled—though how it would be settled You knew, not I.  As to me, I was mad and dying; but there was sanity in my madness, life in my death; I knew how evil I was; I did not know how well I would be soon …

… I kept saying to You, not perhaps in these words, but with this sense:  “And Thou, O Lord, how long?  How long, Lord; wilt Thou be angry forever?  Remember not our former iniquities.”  For I felt that it was these which were holding me fast …

So I spoke, weeping in the bitter contrition of my heart.  Suddenly a voice reaches my ears from a nearby house.  It is the voice of a boy or a girl (I don’t know which) and in a kind of singsong the words are constantly repeated:  “Take it and read it.  Take it and read it.”  At once my face changed … I checked the force of my tears and rose to my feet, being quite certain that I must interpret this as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first passage which I should come upon …

So I went eagerly back to the place where Alypius was sitting, since it was there that I had left the book of the Apostle when I rose to my feet.  I snatched up the book, opened, and read in silence the passage upon which my eyes first fell:  Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in concupiscence.  I had no wish to read further; there was no need to.  For immediately I had reached the end of the sentence it was as though my heart was filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away. 

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