This is a 1024 page book, but well worth the time to spend reading it. It is by John Piper

Navigate to the below web page and choose Download or Purchase  Here is the Preface At the age of seventy-one, four years before he died on August 28, AD 430, Aurelius Augustine handed over the administrative duties of the church in Hippo on the northern coast of Africa to his assistant Eraclius. Already, in his own lifetime, Augustine was a giant in the Christian world. At the ceremony, Eraclius stood to preach as the aged Augustine sat on his bishop’s throne behind him. Overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy in Augustine’s presence, Eraclius said, “The cricket chirps, the swan is silent.”1 If only Eraclius could have looked down over sixteen centuries at the enormous influence of Augustine, he would have understood why the series of books beginning with The Legacy of Sovereign Joy is titled The Swans Are Not Silent. For 1,600 years, Augustine has not been silent. In the 1500s, his voice rose to a compelling crescendo in the ears of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Luther was an Augustinian monk, and Calvin quoted Augustine more than any other church father. Augustine’s influence on the Protestant Reformation was extraordinary. A thousand years could not silence his song of jubilant grace. More than one historian has said, “The Reformation wit- nessed the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over the legacy of the Pelagian view of man”2—the view that man is able to triumph over his own bondage to sin. The swan also sang in the voice of Martin Luther in more than one sense. All over Germany you will find swans on church steeples, and for centuries 1 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 408. 2 R. C. Sproul, “Augustine and Pelagius,” in Tabletalk, June 1996: 11. See the introduction in this book (page 33, note 24) for a similar statement from Benjamin Warfield. See chapter 1 on the meaning of Pelagianism (page 45). 19 20 The Legacy of Sovereign Joy Luther has been portrayed in works of art with a swan at his feet. Why is this? The reason goes back a century before Luther. John Hus, who died in 1415, a hundred years before Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg door (1517), was a professor and later president of the Univer- sity of Prague. He was born of peasant stock and preached in the common language instead of Latin. He translated the New Testament into Czech, and he spoke out against abuses in the Catholic Church. “In 1412 a papal bull was issued against Hus and his followers. Anyone could kill the Czech reformer on sight, and those who gave him food or shelter would suffer the same fate. When three of Hus’s followers spoke publicly against the practice of selling indulgences, they were captured and beheaded.”3 In December 1414, Hus himself was arrested and kept in prison until March 1415. He was kept in chains and brutally tortured for his views, which anticipated the Reformation by a hundred years. On July 6, 1415, he was burned at the stake along with his books. One tradition says that in his cell just before his death, Hus wrote, “Today, you are burning a goose [the meaning of ‘Hus’ in Czech]; however, a hundred years from now, you will be able to hear a swan sing; you will not burn it, you will have to listen to him.”4 Martin Luther boldly saw himself as a fulfillment of this prophecy and wrote in 1531, “John Hus prophesied of me when he wrote from his prison in Bohemia: They will now roast a goose (for Hus means a goose), but after a hundred years they will hear a swan sing; him they will have to tolerate. And so it shall continue, if it please God.”5 And so it has continued. The great voices of grace sing on today. And I count it a great joy to listen and to echo their song in this little book and, God willing, the ones to follow. Although these chapters on Augustine, Luther, and Calvin were originally given as biographical messages at the annual Bethlehem Conference for Pastors, there is a reason why I put them together here for a wider audience including laypeople. Their combined message is profoundly relevant in this modern world at the beginning of a new millennium. R. C. Sproul is right that “we need an Augustine or a Luther to speak to us anew lest the light of 3 Erwin Weber, “Luther with the Swan,” The Lutheran Journal 65, no. 2 (1996): 10. 4 Ibid. 5 Martin Luther, quoted in Ewald M. Plass, What Luther Says, An Anthology (St. Louis: Concordia, 1959), 3:1175. Preface 21God’s grace be not only overshadowed but be obliterated in our time.”6 Yes, and perhaps the best that a cricket can do is to let the swans sing. Augustine’s song of grace is unlike anything you will read in almost any modern book about grace. The omnipotent power of grace, for Augustine, is the power of “sovereign joy.” This alone delivered him from a lifetime of bondage to sexual appetite and philosophical pride. Discovering that beneath the vaunted powers of human will is a cauldron of desire holding us captive to irrational choices opens the way to see grace as the triumph of “sovereign joy.” Oh, how we need the ancient biblical insight of Augustine to free us from the pleasant slavery that foils the fulfillment of the Great Commandment and the finishing of the Great Commission. I am not sure that Martin Luther and John Calvin saw the conquering grace of “sovereign joy” as clearly as Augustine. But what they saw even more clearly was the supremacy of the word of God over the church and the utter necessity of sacred study at the spring of truth. Luther found his way into paradise through the gate of New Testament Greek, and Calvin bequeathed to us a five-hundred-year legacy of Godentranced preaching because his eyes were opened to see the divine majesty of the word. My prayer in writing this book is that, 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. This is The Legacy of Sovereign Joy. Augustine “never wrote what could be called a treatise on prayer.”7 Instead, his writing flows in and out of prayer. This is because, for him, “the whole life of a good Christian is a holy desire.”8 And this desire is for God, above all things and in all things. This is the desire I write to awaken and sustain. And therefore I pray with Augustine for myself and for you, the reader, Turn not away your face from me, that I may find what I seek. Turn not aside in anger from your servant, lest in seeking you I run toward some- thing else Be my helper. Leave me not, neither despise me, O God my Savior. Scorn not that a mortal should seek the Eternal.9 6 Sproul, “Augustine and Pelagius,” 52. 7 Thomas A. Hand, Augustine on Prayer (New York: Catholic Book, 1986), 11. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Ibid., 27. 

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