Week 10—Sunday John 3:3-10
John 3:3-10
“MAN IS MADE FOR CONVERSION”
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.”
A British psychologist put it in these important words: “Man is made for conversion.” The very makeup of his being demands conversion, a new birth. Why? Because 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 ourself 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 the 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.
If the necessity of conversion is inherent in the necessity of growth into the Divine Image, that necessity is doubly reinforced by the fact that humans have corrupted the raw materials God has put into our hands—including especially God. We have used the good things and made them into the bad by using them for wrong ends. We have perverted God’s entrustments. We have “sinned and come short of the glory of God.” That perversion needs conversion! Conversion is conversion from perversion. It is inherent.
O Father, I know that life is wrong at its center until it is right with you. We are bumping ourselves against the system of things until we make peace with you. So teach us to live by teaching us how to live with you. In Jesus’ dear Name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If I fight conversion, I fight with the law of my being—I fight myself.