Conversion
CONVERSION
What Is Conversion?
Psalm 86:11; Acts 2:37-38; 3:19; Romans 8:1-2
Jesus puts [conversion] within the content of the moral and spiritual as well as the psychological. . . . [Conversion is the unifying] of the personality and bringing harmony into the center of life. All life says we must undergo a change.
Victorious Living
(Week 7, Monday)
The Social Order Converts the Individual
Hosea 4:1-3; Amos 8:4-7
In the interest of individual conversion, I am committed to the necessity of social conversion. If a person shows no interest in converting an unchristian social order, then by that very fact that person has little interest in individual conversion, for, apart from the Holy Spirit, the greatest single power to change the individual is the social order.
Abundant Living
(Week 26, Monday)
What Is Conversion?
John 3:3-8
Conversion is that change, gradual or sudden, by which we pass from the kingdom of self to the kingdom of God by the grace and power of Christ.
The Way
(Week 10, Tuesday)
On Pruning for Power and Poise
Hebrews 12:5-8
Conversion is the grafting of the divine life within us. We are made partakers of the divine nature. But this pruning process provides for a continuous conversion: a conversion from the irrelevant to the relevant, from the marginal to the central, from being just busy to being fruitful. There is a cartoon of a girl getting out of her car, walking up to a policeman, and saying: “Can you please tell me where I want to go?” She was going, but didn’t know where! A man stood up in a meeting and asked: “Is there anybody going anywhere in a car?” This living without plan and purpose and streamlined intentions results in a lot of running around in circles and getting nowhere.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 49, Sunday)
Matthew 19:13-15
Some conversions are gradual and some are sudden. Some fold like a flower to the sun, the gradual type. Others take a sudden leap to the breast of God. Some children who are brought up in a Christian home “can testify that ‘from their childhood’ they knew, not Scriptures, but God.” They cannot tell how they came to know God, but they did, just as they knew the blue sky and a mother’s love. They knew God before they could understand any name by which our imperfect human speech endeavors to affirm God’s goodness, power, or glory.
Most of us need a definite and decisive round-about-face resulting in an unfolding or a sudden conversion. However, even in the decisive type there may be a gradualness; or there may be a suddenness in the gradual type of conversion. They blend into each other. Every Christian knows about Paul’s sudden conversion on the Damascus Road, but who can date with any certainty the supreme crisis in the life of Peter? He heard the call “Follow me,” and followed, and that following became a flowering. Not the phenomena that surround conversion, but the facts that flow from it are the criteria. “You will know them by their fruits” (Matt 7:16). Both types are valid if they are vital.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 7, Thursday)
We Retreat before We Advance
Romans 6:5-11
Conversion brings freedom from the past and the present, and freedom to grow in the future.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 2, Saturday)
We Have Heard for Ourselves
John 4:39-42
The greatest necessity of the church today is the conversion of secondhand Christians into firsthand Christians, the conversion of people who are walking in half-lights to people who walk in full light. “Whoever follows me won’t walk in darkness,” said Jesus (John 8:12 CEB); and he might have added, “or in half-lights either.” They can be “in the light, as he is in the light” (1 John 1:7 CEB).
Mastery
(Week 34, Friday)
Romans 1:19-20
God is light on conversion. If God is light on character, when I look at my character and see God’s character in Jesus, then I know my character has to be changed. But how? In Jesus, I see the door, the only door, through conversion. He said, “Except ye be converted . . . ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3 KJV). There are just two classes of people: the converted and the unconverted, a division that really divides and the only division that really divides. And through Jesus, God provides all the resources for conversion, a total conversion of the total person.
Christian Maturity
(Week 7, Wednesday)
“In Him All the Fullness of God”
There is no record or hint that Jesus went from a once broken life through conversion into wholeness. All of us have to go through that; Jesus didn’t.
In Christ
(Week 39, Monday)
“Man Is Made for Conversion”
John 3:3-10
We come this week to something inherent in the Christian faith and inherent in us: conversion, new birth. When the Christian faith says: “You must be born anew” (John 3:7), and “Unless you turn and become like children” (Matt 18:3), many think that this “must” and this “unless” are imposed from above arbitrarily; God laid down the condition for entrance into the kingdom, and you can take it or leave it. God as ruler of the universe has the right and the power to impose those conditions. But as we work from Revelation down and from the facts up, both are saying: “You must be born anew.”
Humans find themselves incomplete persons in an incomplete world. God apparently created the world incomplete. God left it imperfect so we, in helping the creator to complete the creation, would help to complete ourselves in the process. After creation, God looked upon the universe and saw “it was good”—not perfect, but “good”—for the purpose God had in creation, namely, to make beings who would grow in God’s likeness and be perfect as created beings, as God is perfect as Creator God. So to grow into that likeness, we would have to be converted, converted from what we are to what we ought to be.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 10, Sunday)