Saint-Augustine
Short answer: Saint Augustine (354-430 AD) was a North African bishop and theologian whose conversion account in his Confessions is closely tied to Romans 13:13-14. In that account, he describes hearing a child's voice telling him to take up and read, opening the Apostle Paul, and finding there a command to abandon a life of sexual sin and live soberly in Christ. The verses the passage supplies read, Let's walk properly, as in the day; not in reveling and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and lustful acts, and not in strife and jealousy (Romans 13:13). Augustine's significance is not that his story replaces Scripture, but that it illustrates a pattern Paul teaches everywhere: moral change grows out of grace received, not willpower summoned. This article examines what Romans 13:13-14 actually says, how Augustine fits into church history, and where popular retellings go wrong.
The Conversion in the Garden at Milan
Augustine's own account places his conversion in a garden in Milan around 386 AD. He was a trained rhetorician, a teacher of speech, and a man who had spent years pursuing ambition and sexual relationships he later mourned. He describes himself as torn, weeping, unable to will what he believed he should will. Then he heard what he took to be a child's voice chanting a refrain he did not recognize, telling him to take and read.
He picked up a book containing Paul's letters and read the first passage his eyes fell on. The text he names is the one under discussion here, Romans 13:13-14. He writes that at that moment the darkness of doubt was dispelled. Whether one accepts every detail of his memory or not, the substance of the account is that Scripture, not a philosophical argument, broke his paralysis.
Two things deserve care. First, the story is Augustine's own testimony, not Scripture, and it carries the authority of a historical witness rather than of revelation. Second, his conversion did not end his struggles. He became a monk, then a priest, then bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and spent the rest of his life arguing about grace, sin, and the church. His later writings on grace are arguably his most important contribution.
What Romans 13:13-14 Actually Commands
Romans 13 closes a long section on Christian conduct. The command is not to a general self-improvement program but to a specific and urgent turning, framed by an approaching day. Paul writes, Let's walk properly, as in the day (Romans 13:13). The phrase works by contrast: nighttime is when people do what they would not do in daylight. To walk properly as in the day is to live publicly and transparently, as people whose conduct can be seen.
The vices listed are concrete, not abstract: reveling and drunkenness, sexual promiscuity and lustful acts, strife and jealousy (Romans 13:13). Notice that the list pairs bodily sins with relational sins. Drunkenness and promiscuity belong to the first category; quarreling and envy belong to the second. Paul is not singling out one kind of sinner. He is naming the whole range of what a person does when self-rule replaces God's rule.
The second verse shifts from negative command to positive identity. The supplied text gives verse 13 verbatim; the following verse in the same chapter wraps the list in a garment metaphor about putting on the Lord Jesus Christ and making no provision for the flesh. That metaphor matters because it is not merely moral advice. It assumes a change of standing that has already happened and now must be lived out.
Grace Before Effort: Why Augustine Kept Writing About It
The most common misconception about Augustine is that he was chiefly a moral reformer who cleaned up his life through discipline. His own writings resist that reading. He argued again and again that the human will, wounded by sin, cannot rescue itself, and that the beginning of faith is itself a gift. This is why the supplied passages elsewhere in Scripture are so important to him.
Paul frames the same conviction in Philippians 3:12-14: Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on (Philippians 3:12). The Christian life is not the claim of arrival but the practice of pursuit. And in 1 Corinthians 15:10 the tension is held together explicitly: But by the grace of God I am what I am. His grace which was given to me was not futile, but I worked more than all of them; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me (1 Corinthians 15:10). Effort is real, and grace is its source.
This is the framework that makes sense of Augustine's change. If the moral commands of Romans 13 were merely instructions for willpower, the man weeping in the garden would have had no hope. His account is that he was given what he could not produce. That is a claim about grace, and it is the theme he returned to for decades.
The Two Cities and a Life of Long Repentance
Augustine's best-known book after the Confessions is The City of God, written over many years as Rome's political collapse unsettled the empire. His argument there is that two loves produce two cities: love of self to the contempt of God, and love of God to the contempt of self. The distinction is not between church members and outsiders as a simple mapping, but between two orientations of love that run through every human life.
This connects directly to the call to walk as in the day. If the fundamental issue is whom you love and what you are willing to lose for that love, then the specific vices in Romans 13 are symptoms rather than the disease. Augustine's pastoral practice reflects that. He preached constantly, administered a diocese, adjudicated disputes, and called his congregations to repentance, including himself.
It is worth saying clearly that Augustine also wrote things later Christians have disputed, and some of his positions became flashpoints in later centuries. Readers should not treat him as an infallible interpreter. He is a significant historical teacher whose work rewards careful reading and honest disagreement.
Psalm 51 and the Prayer Augustine Kept Praying
Augustine's approach to moral reform is deeply shaped by the penitential psalms. Psalm 51, traditionally associated with David after his sin, contains a petition that captures the whole problem: Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me (Psalm 51:10). The prayer is not for a better resolve. It asks God to create what is not there.
That request is grammatically impossible if the heart is merely a faculty a person can redirect. You do not ask someone to create what you can produce yourself. The psalm assumes that the needed change exceeds the praying person's resources, which is why it asks rather than resolves. Augustine's account of conversion reads like an extended meditation on this verse.
There is a pastoral comfort here many readers miss. If change begins as a gift, then the person who feels unable to change is not disqualified from receiving it. The command in Romans 13:13 remains a command; the ability to obey it does not originate in the one commanded. That is the shape of the good news Paul preaches, and it is the shape of Augustine's testimony.
Walking by the Spirit, Not Managing Sin
Paul's instruction in Galatians gives the mechanism for what Romans 13 commands. But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you won't fulfill the lust of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). Note the logic carefully: the promise is not that desire disappears, but that its fulfillment is prevented when a person walks by the Spirit. The passage goes on to describe the flesh and the Spirit as opposed to each other, so that the conflict itself is normal for a believer.
This corrects a common pastoral error. Some teach that genuine conversion ends all struggle, and that ongoing temptation proves something is wrong with a person's faith. Paul does not say that. He assumes an ongoing contest and tells the reader how to walk within it. Augustine's later life, with its public controversies and personal griefs, fits that description far better than a triumphalist story would.
The fruitful life, in this framework, is not the accumulation of moral achievements. Jesus puts it plainly: I am the vine. You are the branches. He who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing (John 15:5). Fruit is evidence of connection, not of independent effort. That sentence, more than any single command, summarizes what Augustine spent his life teaching.
Reading the Confessions Today Without Turning It Into Legend
The Confessions is a long prayer addressed to God, and it is also one of the first extended memoirs in Western literature. It is honest in a way that can still take a reader aback: Augustine does not present his earlier life as a set of unfortunate mistakes corrected by maturity. He presents it as rebellion, and he does not soften the details of what he wanted and pursued.
That honesty is a model for how to read one's own story. Many testimonies rush to the resolution, treating the pre-conversion years as a setup for a good punchline. Augustine refuses that. He lingers on the disorder, not out of morbidity but because it makes the rescue intelligible. A small rescue does not need much gratitude.
At the same time, readers should avoid making Augustine's particular story the template every conversion must follow. Scripture records dramatically different accounts: a persecutor struck down on a road, a jailer converted in a single night, a child raised in the faith from infancy. Sudden and gradual conversions are both real. The common element is not the shape of the experience but the one who saves.
Biblical fidelity check
What Romans 13:13-14 establishes is a command to a decisive break with a way of life, framed by an approaching day and grounded in the identity of Christ, who is to be put on. It is set within Paul's sustained argument in Romans about sin, grace, and the believer's new standing, so the command to walk properly is addressed to people who have already been shown mercy. What it does not establish is a technique for self-reformation. The passage gives no method by which a person generates the change on their own, and it says nothing about how quickly or gradually that change occurs.
A common misreading treats these verses as a moral program whose success depends on the reader's willpower, as though Paul were saying to try harder. That is wrong because it isolates the command from the argument that surrounds it, and because Paul elsewhere insists that grace precedes and empowers the work, as in 1 Corinthians 15:10 where he labors yet credits the grace of God with him. Commands in Scripture are real obligations, but in Paul's letters they are addressed to people already claimed, not to people left to their own resources. Any reading that turns Romans 13 into pure self-discipline has misread the letter it appears in.
Other passages that speak to Romans 13:13-14
Paul's letters are best read as a whole, and the themes touching Romans 13 recur in the Corinthian correspondence. For a study of the call to unity that stands beside the call to holiness, see 1 Corinthians 1:10. The grounding of that unity in God's own faithfulness is treated in 1 Corinthians 1:9. A broader walkthrough of the letter's opening argument, including what it means to be called and to boast only in the Lord, is available at 1 Corinthians 1: called, united, and boasting in the Lord. For the warnings and the discussions of freedom that follow later in the same book, see 1 Corinthians 10: warnings and freedom.
Frequently asked questions
Did Romans 13:13-14 actually cause Augustine's conversion?
According to his own account in the Confessions, that is the passage he read at the decisive moment in the garden at Milan, and he describes the effect as the dispelling of doubt. This is his testimony as a historical witness, not a claim Scripture itself makes. The Bible does not mention Augustine. So the honest answer is that his conversion is reported by him and received by the church as a credible account of what happened, not as something the biblical text asserts about itself.
Does the passage mean Christians must never struggle with sin again?
No. The command to walk as in the day sets a direction, not a guarantee of sinless perfection in this life. Paul himself says he has not already been made perfect and continues to press on (Philippians 3:12). Galatians 5:16-17 assumes an ongoing conflict between flesh and Spirit in the life of a believer. A person who still experiences temptation is not therefore unconverted. The question is which way they are walking, and whether they return to Christ when they stumble.
Why do Christians remember Augustine at all?
He was a bishop and theologian whose writings shaped centuries of later Christian thought on sin, grace, and the church, and his Confessions remains one of the most influential spiritual autobiographies ever written. He is not read because he is inspired or infallible. He is read because his questions about the will and about grace are still live questions, and because his honesty about his own disorder gives language to experiences many believers recognize. Faithful Christians have disagreed with parts of his work and still do.
