St. Augustine - Rediscover the Saints - Matthew Kelly

Our God is a God of new beginnings, a God of fresh starts, and I love that because we all need a new beginning from time to time. We all need a fresh start from time to time, and it's a source of great hope for us. As we explore the lives of these different saints and the lessons of these different saints, one of the things we're going to discover is that God gave them all a new beginning. God gave them all a fresh start. In fact, in many cases, God gave them many of those things, and we begin today with Augustine, who was a great sinner. I mean, Augustine was a massive sinner. We talk about him today as a great saint, right? Oscar Wilde said, every saint has a past and every sinner has a future, and Augustine had a massive future. He was a great saint, but he was also a great sinner, and it's important for us to recognize that because there's hope in that. I look at Augustine and I think, wow, if God can do that with him, he can do something with me, and the reality is that throughout history, we have tended to talk about the saints in very flattering ways. If you look at early biographies of saints, the biographers left all the bad stuff out because they thought they were disrespecting the saint or doing the saint a disservice or doing us a disservice, but quite the opposite. The reality is that by whitewashing the lives of the saints, what happened was that a distance was placed between us and the saints. We tended to look at the saints and say, well, they're different. They were born perfect or they were born very holy or they were born very virtuous, and that isn't true. They struggled with the things you and I struggle. They had to work for virtue the way you and I have to work for virtue, and they had paths, in many cases, very, very colorful paths. At the beginning of this journey, it doesn't matter where we are in our lives. It doesn't matter where we are with God. It doesn't matter where we are in our spirituality. God wants to work with you right there. He wants to meet you right there. He wants to walk with you from that very place to where he's calling you to be. What's going to prevent that from happening? Well, the first question I pose in the book, and in many ways, Rediscover the Saints is a book of questions because I think we learn very, very powerfully through the questions of our lives. And so, you know, the first question I pose in the book is, what do you believe about your past that is keeping you from your future? What do you believe about your past that's keeping you from your future? Because we all have self-limiting beliefs. We all have self-limiting beliefs that are not from God, that are not holy, that are not humble. They stop us from being all God created us to be. They stop us from becoming a better version of ourselves today. And so, very often when we talk about belief, we talk about, okay, we believe in God, or we believe virtue is a good thing, or we believe hard work is a good thing. We have this set of beliefs, but we also have a negative set of beliefs, a set of self-limiting beliefs that stop us from accepting God's invitation to a fresh start, to a new beginning, that stop us from becoming all God created us to be. And in those self-limiting beliefs, we experience what Augustine describes in his most famous quote, this restlessness. Augustine wrote, our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you. Our hearts are restless in our self-destructive behaviors. Our hearts are restless in our self-limiting beliefs. Our hearts are restless until we turn our lives over to God, until we surrender to God and we open ourselves up to the incredible future that God is inviting us to. And so, as we begin this journey together, I encourage you to find a quiet place today for a few moments and just rest with God. Just be with God. Doesn't matter what you say, just sit and be with God. Because one of the great, great benefits of our spirituality is this restfulness. We live in a restless world, you know, and God invites us to peace, to calm, to quiet. And one of the lessons I really want us to drill down on is how do we learn to rest with God? How do we learn to rest in God? Because from that will come an explosion of goodness in ourselves, in our lives, and that we can take out to the world.