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My primary source as I preached on Joyful Ministry yesterday was John Piper’s The Legacy of Sovereign Joy. In this inspiring little book, Piper traces the connections from Saint Augustine in the early 400s to Martin Luther and John Calvin in the early to mid 1500s.

This was the first book in Piper’s series The Swans are not Silent. The title derives from Augustine’s retirement after forty years of ministry in Hippo, North Africa. His apprentice, a young priest named Eraclius, looked over at the brilliant and godly Bishop sitting down and said, “The cricket chirps, the swan is silent.”

Next to giants of the faith like Saint Augustine we all feel like chirping crickets. But the truth is that the swans of history are not silent, for they speak through all of us who carry on their legacy.

Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk – so his focus of study and teaching was the voluminous writings of Saint Augustine. Luther, very much a product of his age, was enslaved by his fears and superstitions, consumed by his terror at the just wrath of God that surely would come for him at any moment. This fear drove him to the monastery following a fierce thunderstorm. And this fear drove him constantly to the confession booth where he never felt his contrition was sufficient.

Finally, Luther’s mentor, Dr. Staupitz, directed him away from his efforts to identify every tiny little sin and instead to consider his overall condition or nature – a very Augustinian approach. “To treat smallpox,” Luther later reflected, “You need not examine every tiny pustule but rather treat the overall disease.” The teachings of Augustine were uniquely suited to help Luther diagnose his fundamental disease of slavery to sin.

1,100 years before Luther, Augustine wrote: “O Lord, my Helper and my Redeemer, I shall now tell and confess to the glory of your name how you released me from the fetters of lust which held me so tightly shackled and from the slavery to the things of this world” (Piper 51). Luther became a herald of Augustine’s theology of total depravity and salvation as entirely the work of God, lest man rob God of His glory.

Luther wrote: “Man cannot by his own power purify his heart and bring forth godly gifts, such as true repentance for sins, a true, as over against an artificial, fear of God, true faith, sincere love…” (109)

“I condemn and reject as nothing but error all doctrines which exalt our ‘free will’ as being directly opposed to this mediation and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. For since, apart from Christ, sin and death are our masters and the devil is our god and prince, there can be no strength or power, no wit or wisdom, by which we can fit or fashion ourselves for righteousness and life.” (110)

This flows directly from the thought of Augustine: “A man’s free will, indeed, avails for nothing except to sin, if he knows not the way of truth; and even after his duty and his proper aim shall begin to become known to him, unless he also take delight in and feel a love for it, he neither does his duty, nor sets about it, nor lives rightly. Now, in order that such a course may engage our affections, God’s ‘love is shed abroad in our hearts’ not through the free-will which arises from ourselves, but ‘through the Holy Ghost, which is given to us.’ (Rom. 5:5).” (60)

Augustine described his conversion from slavery to sin to joyful new life in Christ: “During all those years [of rebellion], where was my free will? What was the hidden, secret place from which it was summoned in a moment, so that I might bend my neck to your easy yoke? …How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose! …You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light, yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor, though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves…. O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.” (57)

Luther’s experience, when finally the truth of Romans 1:17 illumined his heart and mind, was very similar as joy in the Lord overcame all of his fears and competing desires: “There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith… Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”(92)

Here was the legacy of Saint Augustine and the rallying cry of the Reformation: sovereign joy – a delight in God that reigns supreme over all other desires in our hearts.

Augustine:

  • “You yourself [O God] are their joy. Happiness is to rejoice in you and for you and because of you. This is true happiness and there is no other.” (67)
  • “He is happy who possesses God.” (68)
  • “You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you.” (68)

May we invite the Holy Spirit to kindle this single-minded, sovereign joy in our hearts and lives – may we, tiny crickets though we are, boldly chirp the song that God alone can fulfill the deep desires for happiness built into us all.

Piper: “Once we see Augustine’s vision of grace as ‘sovereign joy,’ the lessons of Luther’s study will strengthen it by the Word of God, and the lessons of Calvin’s preaching will spread it to the ends of the earth” (12). Amen. Let it be so!