It's advent again and the reading in church from the Letter to the Romans urging us to "put off the works of darkness and put on the weapons of light" brings back the yearly remembrance of an individual for whom these words became the gateway into a new life.
He was the child of a Christian mother, surrounded by prayer, highly intelligent and well educated, but by the time he was 16 he was a slave to sex.
"My youth bubbled up and obscured and darkened my soul so far that it could not distinguish the beauty of love from the muddy darkness of lust," he remembers in his Confessions.
At university, he abandoned whatever Christian belief and morals he had inherited from his mother but the longing in his heart for some meaning in life was not quenched.
Philosophy failed to satisfy him and he began to dabble in astrology. Deciding to try respectability, he broke with his mistress and became engaged to a nice girl, but before long he had taken up with yet another woman.
In increasing misery and despair, his interest in Christianity was stirred again by sermons he heard in a city-centre church but his sexual obsessions burned too fiercely for him to break free into a reformed lifestyle.
One day, sitting in the garden, he heard over the wall a child playing a game, calling, "Take up and read. . . take up and read." He opened the New Testament at random on our Advent reading in Romans 13:11-14: "Let us walk decently, as in the daytime, not in partying and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensual indulgence, not in fighting and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the desires of the flesh."
The words went to his heart as an arrow from God and St Augustine turned to Christ in 386 AD, was quite literally born again, and became a great preacher, theologian and leader in the North African church.
The context of Paul's words is that of Advent, and not the first but the second coming of Jesus Christ. It is a reminder that if the Lord does not come in our lifetime, he will certainly come individually for us in death. Each ache, each pain, each grey hair, each new wrinkle, each funeral, is a reminder that it is later than it has ever been on our personal life calendar.
The Christian who belongs to God's coming kingdom is to wake to the new day, flinging away, like a grubby pair of pyjamas, carousing, drunkenness, immorality and self-indulgence, which all belong to the old order of darkness.
The preacher Ray Stedman said it well: "When I get up in the morning I put on my clothes, intending them to be part of me all day, to go where I go and do what I do. . .In the same way Paul is saying to us, 'Put on Jesus Christ when you get up in the morning.
'Make him a part of your life that day. Intend that he go with you everywhere you go, and that he act through you in everything you do. Call upon his resources. Live your life in Christ.'" Advent is a salutary reminder that we are living in the last chapter of the world's history, however long this chapter turns out to be. The next event on the biblical timeline is the return of Jesus Christ.
That is why John Wesley could comment on the words we hear read tomorrow, words that brought transformation to St Augustine: "Herein is contained the whole of our salvation."
G.F.