Augustine’s book Confessions is a wonderful reflection on the sovereignty of God and the evangelical nature of the gospel. That is to say, in reading in the Confessions, you are steeped in the reality that God will judge every moment of your life. Augustine underlines and highlights this reality throughout the book by writing it as one long prayer to God.
One time I was talking with a friend about the book and he commented that he kept getting caught on the pronoun “you”. He would be reading along and then Augustine would say “you” and my friend said that pronoun would reorient everything: the book is not addressed to the reader but to God. This is true throughout the whole book even up to the end where Augustine writes, “Only you can be asked, only you can be begged, only on your door can we knock” (Bk XIII.38).
As I reflect on the nature of prayer and what Augustine is doing in this book, I am challenged in a couple of ways. First, do I have such a robust prayer life that I could pray to God like Augustine? Augustine prays about everything imaginable. Big things and small things: he prays about smiling as an infant, being beaten at school, dreams, friendships, reading, death, philosophy, memory, etc. Augustine’s prayer life is his whole life. I don’t know when I have ever heard someone pray about the nature of time. But Augustine does it.
The second way I am challenged is to consider what enables Augustine to have such a deep prayer life: God’s sovereign and direct care for Augustine. That is what gives Augustine such a huge depth to his prayer life. God isn’t merely sovereign over Augustine when he is praying; God is sovereign over Augustine’s whole life.
It is again striking to remember that Augustine is not addressing these things primarily to his reader but to God. Which also reveals that Augustine knows how much God cares for His people. Augustine is recounting his life to God: something that God already knows fully. After all, God was the one who planned it all out. But Augustine knows this and that is why he is telling God about it.
This is a key lesson we can learn from the Confessions. God’s care is directly evident in the particular life that Augustine lived. This is true for all of us. God works in each life in a special way and it is our joy to look at the story that God is telling and to reflect on it and communicate that story back to God. To state it in a way that Augustine would enjoy: prayer is when I am telling God the story that God is telling me.
This is what drives Augustine to his knees. It also makes him full of a great joy in God. Confessions is Augustine reflecting on the way that God has told and is telling a wild and joyful story through the life Augustine is living. This sovereign design and plan is what motivates Augustine to reflect on the details and moments of his life and to see that God has been weaving an intricate pattern throughout.
After reading Augustine’s Confessions, I am always challenged to ask: do I know God as fully as Augustine? This question in turn presses me to ask: am I looking for the story that God is telling me in my life? God is telling a complex story in history that is beyond my comprehension and my story is one tiny thread but as I stop to reflect on my life, I can see the patterns and ways that God has been moving and is moving. This should impel me to pray through my life the way that Augustine does. The same sovereign God who told Augustine’s life is also telling my life. How can anyone reflect on his life for one moment and not burst out into a prayer of praise like Augustine?
Who will enable me to find rest in you? Who will grant me that you come to my heart and intoxicate it, so that I forget my evils and embrace my one and only good, yourself? What are you to me? Have mercy so that I may find words. What am I to you that you command me to love you, and that, if I fail to love you, you are angry with me and threaten me with vast miseries? -Confessions Bk I.5
