Augustine is utterly committed to the moral accountability of the human will, even though the will is ultimately governed by the delights of the souls which are ordered finally by God. When pressed for an explanation, he is willing in the end to rest with Scripture in a “profound mystery.” This can be seen in the following two quotes:

Now, should any man be for constraining us to examine into this profound mystery, why this person is so persuaded as to yield, and that person is not, there are only two things occurring to me, which I should like to advance as my answer: ‘O the depth of the riches!’ (Romans 11:33) and ‘Is there unrighteousness with God?’ (Romans 9:14). If the man is displeased with such an answer, he must seek more learned disputants: but let him beware lest he find presumptuousness.

Let this truth, then, be fixed and unmovable in a mind soberly pious and stable in faith, that there is no unrighteousness with God. Let us also believe most firmly and tenaciously that God has mercy on whom he will and that whom he will he hardeneth, that is, he has or has not mercy on whom he will. Let us believe that this belongs to a certain hidden equity that cannot be searched out by any human standard of measurement, though its effects are to be observed in human affairs and earthly arrangements.

The fact that grace governs life by giving a supreme joy in the supremacy of God explains why the concept of Christian freedom is so radically different in Augustine than in Pelagius.

For Augustine, freedom is to be so in love with God and his ways that the very experience of choice is transcended.

The ideal of freedom is not the autonomous will poised with sovereign equilibrium between good and evil. The ideal of freedom is to be so spiritually discerning of God’s beauty, and to be so in love with God that one never stands with equilibrium between God and an alternate choice. Rather, one transcends the experience of choice and walks under the continual sway of sovereign joy in God. For Augustine the self-conscious experience of having to contemplate choices was a sign not of the freedom of the will, but of the disintegration of the will.

Choice is a necessary evil in this fallen world until the day comes when discernment and delight unite in a perfect apprehension of what is infinitely delightful, namely, God.

What follows from Augustine’s view of grace as the giving of a sovereign joy that triumphs over “lawless pleasures” is that the entire Christian life is seen as a relentless quest for the fullest joy in God. He said,

“The whole life of a good Christian is a holy desire.”

In other words, the key to Christian living is a thirst and a hunger for God.

And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.

The desperation to be ravished for the sake of worship and holiness is unintelligible. Here’s the goal and the problem as Augustine saw it:

The soul of men shall hope under the shadow of Thy wings; they shall be made drunk with the fullness of Thy house; and of the torrents of Thy pleasures Thou wilt give them to drink; for in Thee is the Fountain of Life, and in Thy Light shall we see the light?

Give me a man in love: he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns; give me one who is hungry; give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal country. Give me that sort of man: he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about. . . .

The remedy from God’s side for this condition of “coldness,” of course, is the gracious awakening of a sovereign joy. But on the human side it is prayer and the display of God himself as infinitely more desirable than all creation. It is not a mere stylistic device that all 350 pages of the Confessions are written as a prayer. Every sentence is addressed to God. The point is that Augustine is utterly dependent on God for the awakening of love to God. And it is no coincidence that the prayers of Augustine’s mother Monica pervade the Confessions. She pled for him when he would not plead for himself.

—The Swan is Not Silent, Sovereign Joy in the Life and Thought of St. Augustine, a sermon delivered on February 3, 1998 by John Piper at the 1998 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors.

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Read the rest of this zeal kindling message on a greater manifestation of the joy in God and battle against lust, here, for mp3, here. I personally found much spiritual help in this message on the life of Augustine of Hippo. O, that we all may be ravished by the surpassing beauty of the God that loved and saved us! O, that we may grasp a greater conception of the wonders of His sovereign grace! May we be crushed by such a vision of the deadness of our own souls and cling to him in all our might that He may be our only purpose and joy!