10. Chapter Eight: How and Where to Begin
Chapter Eight HOW AND WHERE TO BEGIN
Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. —Matthew 18:3
WE NOW recognize that there is a natural principle that pulls us down to the animal plane, blinding reason, searing conscience, paralyzing will. We stand condemned by our own deeds.
God is a holy and righteous God. He cannot tolerate sin. Sin separates from God. It brings the wrath of God upon the human soul. Man has lost his moral, intellectual, and spiritual sense of God because he has lost God. He will not find God until he finds the way back to God. The way back to God is not an intellectual way. It is not a moral way. You cannot think your way back to God because human thought-life will not co-ordinate with divine thought-life, for the carnal mind is at enmity with God. You cannot worship your way back to God because man is a spiritual rebel from God’s presence. You cannot moralize your way back to God because character is vitiated with sin. The natural question comes to you—What shall I do? Where shall I start? Where do I begin? What is my road back to God? There is only one way back to God. Jesus said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Thus Jesus demanded a conversion. This is how to begin! This is where it starts! You must be converted!
There are many people who confuse conversion with the keeping of the law. The law of Moses is set forth in specific terms in the Bible and the purpose of the law is made very clear. It was not offered at any time as a panacea for the world’s ills. Rather, it was given as a diagnosis of the world’s ills; it outlines the reason for our trouble, not the cure. The Bible says, “Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God” (Romans 3:19). The law has given a revelation of man’s unrighteousness, and the Bible says, “By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight.” (Romans 3:20). It is impossible to be converted by the keeping of the law. The Bible says, “By the law is the knowledge of sin.” The law is a moral mirror. It condemns but does not convert. It challenges but does not change. It points the finger but does not offer mercy. There is no life in the law. There is only death, for the pronouncement of the law was, “Thou shalt die.”
There are many people who say that their religion is the Sermon on the Mount, but the man or woman is yet to be born who has ever lived up to the Sermon on the Mount. The Bible says that all have sinned and come short of His glory.
Examine your own motives before you decide that you are above reproach and living a life that absolves you from all need of conversion. Look into your own heart fearlessly and honestly before you say religious conversion is all right for some but you certainly don’t stand to benefit from it. When I was preaching in Hollywood, a group of movie people asked me to talk to them about religious experiences. After my address we had a discussion period and the very first question that was asked was, “What is conversion?”
Some time later it was my privilege to address a group of political leaders in Washington. When the discussion period started, the first question again was, “What is conversion?” In almost every university and college group where I have led discussions, this same question is invariably asked, “What do you mean by conversion?”
Probably there are more different answers to this query than to almost any other pertaining to religion. What is conversion? What is involved in it? How is it accomplished? What are its effects? Why must you be converted in order to get to heaven? The idea of conversion is certainly not unusual in our society. Any good salesman knows that he must convert the prospect to his particular product or way of thinking. The chief business of advertising is to convert the buying public from one brand to another. We speak of political leaders being converted from their original political philosophy and adopting a different one. During the last war, we heard a great deal about peacetime industries converting to war production, and most of the oil furnaces in private homes were converted to coal.
Actually the word conversion means “to turn around,” “to change one’s mind,” “to turn back,” or “to return.” In the realm of religion it has been variously explained as “to repent,” “to be regenerated,” “to receive grace,” “to experience religion,” “to gain assurance.”
I remember one confirmed alcoholic who came to one of the opening meetings of a campaign and said to me, “Mr. Graham, I’m not sure there’s a word of truth in what you’re saying, but I’m going to give your Christ a trial, and if He works even a little bit the way you say He will, I’ll come back and sign up for life!”
Weeks later he told me that he didn’t quite understand it, but every time he started to take a drink it seemed as though something stopped him. Christ had given him victory over his vicious habit. He returned to his family, and is now living his life for Christ. In other words, he turned around, he changed his direction, he changed his way of thinking—he had been converted!
Conversion can take many different forms. The way it is accomplished depends largely upon the individual—his temperament, his emotional balance, his environment, and his previous conditioning and way of life. Conversion may follow a great crisis in a person’s life; or it could come after all former values have been swept away, when great disappointment has been experienced, when one has lost one’s sense of power through material possessions, or lost the object of one’s affections. A man or woman who has been focusing all attention on financial gains, business or social prestige, or centering all affection on some one person experiences a devastating sense of loss when denied the thing that has given life its meaning. In these tragic moments, as the individual stands stripped of all his worldly power, when the loved one is gone beyond recall, he recognizes how terribly and completely alone he really is. In that moment, the Holy Spirit may cause the worldly bandages to fall from his eyes and he sees clearly for the first time. He recognizes that God is the only source of real power, and the only enduring fountainhead of love and companionship. Or again, conversion may take place at the very height of personal power or prosperity—when all things are going well and the bountiful mercies of God have been bestowed generously upon you. The very goodness of God can drive you to a recognition that you owe all to God; thus, the very goodness of God leads you to repentance.
Conversion at such a moment can be as sudden and dramatic as the conversion of pagans who transfer their affection and faith from idols carved of stone and wood, to the Person of Jesus Christ. Not all conversions come as a sudden, brilliant flash of soul illumination that we call a crisis conversion. There are many others that are accomplished only after a long and difficult conflict with the inner motives of the person. With others, conversion comes as the climactic moment of a long period of gradual conviction of their need and revelation of the plan of salvation. This prolonged process results in conscious acceptance of Christ as personal Savior and in the yielding of life to Him.
We may say, therefore, that conversion can be an instantaneous event, a crisis in which the person receives a clear revelation of the love of God; or it can be a gradual unfoldment accompanied by a climactic moment at the time the line is crossed between darkness and fight, between death and life everlasting.
It does not always happen in exactly this way. My wife, for example, cannot remember the exact day or hour when she became a Christian, but she is certain that there was such a moment in her life, a moment when she actually crossed the fine. Many young people who have grown up in Christian homes and had the benefit of Christian training are unaware of the time when they committed their lives to Christ. Others remember very clearly when they made their public confession of faith. The reports of conversions in the New Testament indicate that most of them were the dramatic, crisis type. For many years, psychology left conversion and religious experience alone, but in the last twenty-five years much study has been made by psychologists concerning the matter of conversion. They have pointed out that conversion is not only a Christian experience but is also found in other religions, and that it is not necessarily a religious phenomenon but also occurs in nonreligious spheres. Students of psychology have agreed that there are three steps in conversion: First, a sense of perplexity and uneasiness; second, a climax and turning point; and, third, a relaxation marked by rest and joy.
Starbuck says that there are two kinds of conversion. He says that one is accompanied by a violent sense of sin, and the other by a feeling of incompleteness, a struggle after a larger life and a desire for spiritual illumination. The value of psychological studies of conversion has been underestimated. We cannot brush them aside and ignore them. They shed a great deal of light, but few of them are willing to accept the Biblical conversion as a supernatural experience.
Actually, Biblical conversion involves three steps—two of them active and one passive. In active conversion, repentance and faith are involved. Repentance is conversion viewed from its starting point, the turning from the former life. Faith indicates the objective point of conversion, the turning to God. The third, which is passive, we may call the new birth, or regeneration.
Now in order to get to heaven, Jesus said that you must be converted. I didn’t say it—Jesus said it! This is not mans opinion—this is God’s opinion! Jesus said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
True conversion will involve the total mind, the total affection, and the total will. There have been thousands of people who have been intellectually converted to Christ. They believe the entire Bible. They believe all about Jesus, but they have never been really converted to Him. In the second chapter of John there is a description of the hundreds of people who were following Jesus early in His ministry. It says that many of them believed on Him. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them because He knew the hearts of all men. Why would Jesus not commit Himself to them? He knew that they believed with their heads and not with their hearts.
There is a vast difference between intellectual conversion and the total conversion that saves the soul. To be sure, there must be a change in your thinking and intellectual acceptance of Christ.
There are thousands of people who have had some form of emotional experience that they refer to as conversion but who have never been truly converted to Christ. Christ demands a change in the way you live—and if your life does not conform to your experience, then you have every reason to doubt your experience! Certainly there will be a change in the elements that make up emotion when you come to Christ—hate and love will be involved, because you will begin to hate sin and love righteousness. Your affections will undergo a revolutionary change. Your devotion to Him will know no bounds. Your love for Him cannot be described. But even if you have an intellectual acceptance of Christ, and an emotional experience—that still is not enough. There must be the conversion of the will! There must be that determination to obey and follow Christ. Your will must be bent to the will of God. Self must be nailed to the cross. The only desire you will have will be to please Him. In conversion as you stand at the foot of the cross, the Holy Spirit makes you realize that you are a sinner. He directs your faith to the Christ who died in your place. You must open your heart and let Him come in. At that precise moment the Holy Spirit performs the miracle of the new birth. You actually become a new moral creature. There comes the implantation of the divine nature. You become a partaker of God’s own life. Jesus Christ, through the Spirit of God, takes up residence in your heart.
Conversion is so simple that the smallest child can be converted, but it is also so profound that theologians throughout history have pondered the depth of its meaning. God has made the way of salvation so plain that “the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein” (Isaiah 35:8). No person will ever be barred from the kingdom of God because he did not have the capacity to understand. The rich and the poor, the sophisticated and the simple—all can be converted. To sum it up, conversion simply means “to change.” When a person is converted he may continue to love objects which he loved before, but there will be a change of reasons for loving them. A converted person may forsake former objects of affection. He may even withdraw from his worldly companions, not because he despises them, for many of them will be decent and amiable, but because there is more attraction for him in the fellowship of other Christians of like mind. The converted person will love what he once hated, and hate what he once loved. There will even be a change of heart about God. Where he once may have been careless about God, living in constant fear, dread, and antagonism to God, he now finds himself in a state of complete reverence, confidence, obedience, and devotion. There will be a reverential fear of God, a constant gratitude to God, a dependence upon God, and a new loyalty to Him. Before conversion there may have been gratification of the flesh. Culture and intellectual pursuits or the making of money may have been of first and supreme importance. Now, righteousness and holiness of heart, and living the Christian life will be placed above all other concerns, for pleasing Christ will be the only thing of real importance. In other words, conversion means a complete change in the life of an individual.
I remember so vividly a young New York career girl who came out to Los Angeles to be married. She and the young man had met when they were both working in a high-powered New York advertising agency, and their courtship had been conducted against a background of cocktail parties and night clubs. Filled with ambition and “on his way up,” he had himself transferred to the California office, with the understanding that the girl would follow him in six months and they would be married.
About a week after she had arrived in Los Angeles, expecting to take up a gay new life, she discovered that the man had fallen in love with a movie starlet and lacked the courage to write her about it before she left New York!
Here she was, alone in a city where she knew no one- all her plans in ruins, her pride crushed, and the future stretching ahead, bleak and empty. Her family had not been religious, and in this hour of extreme need she knew of nowhere to turn for comfort, advice, or guidance. As she walked along the unfamiliar streets, trying to overcome her shock and humiliation, she came upon the “canvas cathedral” in which we were conducting our campaign. She said she was never sure what made her come inside, but she did, and sat glumly through the entire service. The next night she came again, and every night for the whole week, until through the cloud of bitterness and misery that surrounded her, God made His voice heard, and she came forward to confess her need of salvation. With the burden of guilt and rejection lifted from her through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, she came to see that the love she had lost was but a steppingstone to a far greater and much richer love. The sense of humiliation that prevented her from returning to her former New York job vanished, and rather than life being finished, she found upon her return that it was fuller than ever. Only instead of wasting her brains and organizational ability on an endless round of cocktail parties, she became extremely active in her church. The imagination she formerly devoted to entertaining the “office crowd” now goes into making Bible stories come alive for the young people. Her training as a fundraiser is now being put to good use in the service of the Lord, and her minister says her ideas have been invaluable in increasing regular church attendance. Far from being rejected and unwanted, she is sought after constantly by her fellow church members. But, most important of all, her sense of loneliness has vanished, for she knows now that Jesus Christ is ever by her side, ready to comfort, to guide, and to protect her.
All this had come as a result of her conversion—her turning away from the bleak, empty, worldly road she was traveling so unhappily—to her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! She had found peace with God.