True and False Conversion

No one eases into Christianity. You cannot gradually become a Christian. A good solid conversion is the starting point of the real Christian life.  You can't become a Christian because your family or friends want you to. It isn't a matter of making up your mind to "go to church" or behave better. And none of this halfway stuff will do either – praying some prayer in an emotional moment at the end of a retreat, summer camp or after some gospel message, and then stumbling along trying to have one foot in the kingdom and the other in the world.  Scripture records those who “believed,” but the Lord didn’t believe in them (Jn. 2:23-25; 6:25-26; 8:30-32).  This may upset your “weak” or “carnal Christian” theology, but the Lord Jesus tells us that the lukewarm ones will get spewed out of His mouth (Rev. 3:16).  So here’s some good advice.  Take the Lord Jesus Christ and Christianity seriously, or not at all! Someone called it "all or nothing." Well said!
     The first step towards a true conversion is to hear and understand the gospel.  There is no substitute for this. I have been shocked upon asking some professing Christians what is the gospel, to hear them answer, “God is love”, or “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”  A friend of mine asked a lady if she knew the gospel message. She said, “Of course, Christ died for our sins.”  Many would be satisfied with that reply. But He smiled and asked her, “What does that mean?”  She replied with obvious frustration, “I don’t know. That’s what they told me in church.  Isn’t that good enough?”  No, it isn’t.  Pardon the comparison, not wishing to be unkind, but parrots can learn to say words but never know their meaning.  Read the parable of the sower and the seed in Matthew 13 and look for the word “understand.”  There’s no salvation without understanding.  The gospel is not art or philosophy, open to personal interpretation.  It is God’s simple, clear and specific message of salvation; the only one.  It’s more precise than rocket science or microbiology. 

 

"Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

No one is saved without first knowing conviction of sin and realizing his guilty state before a holy and righteous God, the Judge of all the earth. Being convicted of your guiltiness and condemnation, you repent of your sins and believe the gospel, in your heart – trusting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.  A real, Biblical conversion means goodbye to the old you and the old life.  This is not negotiable.  No wonder we read that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17).  This agrees with the Scriptural expression, “washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Tit. 3:5), and is the kind of conversion that Christianity in the Scriptures is based on.  From the Gadarene demoniac by the sea of Galilee to Saul of Tarsus on the dusty Damascus road, true conversion has always brought about such abruptly changed lives.  That is the message of the cross, as A.  W.  Tozer put it in his article, “The Old Cross and the New.”

"That evangelism which draws friendly parallels between the ways of God and the ways of men is false to the Bible and cruel to the souls of its hearers.  The faith of Christ does not parallel the world, it intersects it.  In coming to Christ we do not bring our old life up onto a higher plane; we leave it at the cross.  The corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die".