Articles
The beauty of conversion
For many, the teaching of Christian conversion seems unappealing. It is seen as coercive—«No one will force me to accept someone else’s beliefs!»—or even offensive—«Who are you to say that my beliefs and lifestyle are wrong?».
Of course, in this context, beauty is a matter of taste. The most important thing in any teaching is not its attractiveness, but its truth. The true teaching of Christian conversion certainly has its own special and unique beauty.
On the one hand, conversion is as beautiful as any other transformation. In elementary school, children learn how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and a tadpole becomes a frog. In Sunday school, they are taught how these changes illustrate the transformation of the human heart from «dead in sins» to «a new creation.» Each of these transformations is beautiful in its own way, but all are similar in their beauty. In countless corners of His creation, God has left the imprint of His glory, which is manifested in the transition from spiritual death to eternal life.
One of the laws of nature is that things left to themselves do not develop, but degrade. Everything is subject to death. But it is in this world that God has encoded the beauty of change for the better here and there. Are not these phenomena indicators of the miracle of salvation?
In fact, conversion is even more grand. It is beautiful in its simplicity (Romans 10:9) and in its complexity (Ephesians 2:1-10).
But it is not enough to simply claim that salvation is beautiful. Let us show it.
The beauty of conversion is how it is organized.
Conversion is beautiful in the way it is organized. There is a defining moment of conversion: one moment we do not yet believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that God raised Him from the dead, and the next we do.
This initial decision to believe, the empty hand of faith reaching out to Christ, is the moment when the appointed sinner, busy with his own affairs, comes into God's order of salvation. God's sight has been fixed upon him from ages past, but now the effectual call has reached its appointed moment. Man's planned path is interrupted by God's guidance of his steps (Prov. 16:9).
Conversion is, in a sense, both the consummation of God's plan and one of its stages. It is a decisive moment, but how much reflection is hidden behind it! We see the outline of this reflection in Romans 8:30: "And whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified." Our eyes can see people who repent and confess their faith in Christ, but they are unable to see the eternal weight of glory that precedes this and flows from it.
Each stage described in Romans 8:30 deserves its own volume. It is a beauty within a beauty within a beauty. The mustard seed of faith planted in the broken heart of a desperate sinner is the culmination of God’s predestination of that person before the foundation of the world. Even in eternity, God, in His grace, forgave the eternal injury caused by that person’s accumulated sin, lovingly predestining him for adoption as a precious son. And then He sent His only begotten Son to make a sinless atonement so that that sinner could be justified by the righteousness of Christ through the regeneration of his stony heart by the Holy Spirit. Isn’t that just amazing? And the fact that this seed of justifying faith will grow through the faithfulness of the Father, who gives sanctifying faith through the operation of the Spirit, to the promise of glorification is even more amazing.
The beauty of conversion is in its promise.
Conversion is beautiful in its promise. Oh, that promise! Doesn’t it reflect what we all really want? What saints and sinners yearn for every day? Everyone wants change. Everyone wants to believe that bad things will become good and wrong things will be righted. We have our own ideas about how this can be achieved, but everyone basically wants one thing—life.
God has set eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11), and every waking moment thereafter is an expression of worship to one god or another, a manifestation of our innate desperation for what is real, true, beautiful, for the promise of what is better and right.
Bruce Marshall wrote: «A young man who rings the doorbell of a brothel is unconsciously searching for God.».
This is true of all our idols—whether sex or spirituality—but the basic truth is that no one left alone seeks God (Rom. 3:11). We want our gods to be God. What we seek can actually be found in the One we are maliciously trying to avoid.
So those who «find God» are actually those whom God finds. Our Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is roaming the earth seeking those whom He can resurrect. God is patient with His predestined idolaters, not willing that any of us should perish but that all should come to repentance. His Spirit turns on the light in our hearts, cries, «Come out!» from the mouth of our grave, and the unthinkable becomes true. I can be different! I can change! I can know God and therefore know life! As the hymn says, «There is no guilt in life, no fear of death—it is the power of Christ in me!»
The gospel reveals true hope for me and for this world. All the beauty of creation, of the arts, of human endeavors for progress and enlightenment is summed up and made true in Jesus Christ—incarnate, crucified, buried, risen, and glorified. And just as His resurrection is the firstfruits (1 Cor. 15:20-23), so our conversion to saving faith is the promise of conversion to immortality—that «we shall all be changed» (1 Cor. 15:50-53).
The beauty of conversion in its many manifestations
Conversion is beautiful in its many manifestations. The conversion of people to saving faith in Christ is beautiful in all the remarkable moments it encompasses. Many people in my generation and others have been «saved» by walking down the aisle, raising their hands, or repeating a formulaic prayer. And many who have become pastors in my generation will not resort to such special invitations to invite a response to the Gospel. We should all be concerned to see that the biblical Gospel is preached in biblical ways. But what a wonder it is that God uses imperfect people, using imperfect means, to communicate the perfect power of the Good News of Jesus Christ!
I am no longer a fan of the dispensational pre-turbulation approach, but my conversion came after the Holy Spirit in His wisdom used an old 1970s-style movie like The Forsaken to soften my heart and awaken in it a desire for Jesus for forgiveness and safety. I would not choose such means today, but I am grateful that God does not care what ways He brings His children into life. He does not try to impress. His power is made perfect in our evangelistic weakness, even through our imperfect preaching and pleading. It amazes me how God works both through and against our evangelistic ministry.
All conversions to Christ are the result of a realization of Him as our Savior, as the sacrifice for our salvation. A prime example is Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus—a moment of extreme drama. For others, the realization comes less dramatically. A child praying in Sunday school. A man coming forward at the end of a service. A man I know told me that he sat in church every Sunday for almost three years until it finally dawned on him, «Wait—I need to be saved. I need to believe this.».
In the novel «The Vile Power,» C. S. Lewis uniquely describes the mundaneness and at the same time the weight of one woman’s true conversion:
What awaited her was serious, even to the point of grief. There was no form, no sound... The boundary had been crossed. She had entered the world, or rather the Person, or the Presence of the Person. She was met by something expectant, patient, inexorable, without any veil or protection... In this height, depth, and breadth, the little idea of herself that she had hitherto called "I" suddenly fell and disappeared, unadorned, into the bottomless distance...
…But her defenses had already been overcome, and these counterattacks proved futile.
Demons oppose her, sometimes outright denying, sometimes distorting the meaning of her experience. But nothing—not even angels or demons—can separate Jane from God's love. Thus, in the silence of an English garden, in the waiting prayer at the altar of a sanctuary, or in the solitude of a soul reading the Bible in an armchair, eternity descends.
The many ways in which God brings the dead back to life are beautiful: some are immediately aware of bright new realities, others come to it over time. Some hear the message for the first time and respond in faith immediately. Others hear it all their lives but have no «ears to hear» until one day, far in the future, it happens. It is truly masterful. Here God—in the broad spectrum of human experience and everyday life, in the mundane and the sublime—repeats the resurrection over and over again. And even the most ordinary conversion is extraordinary. The angels celebrated my daughter’s first act of saving faith in her bedroom a few years ago no less than they celebrated Paul’s conversion 2,000 years ago. Every conversion is a miracle. And the great beatific vision of Christ leads us to beatific visions (2 Cor. 3:18).
The beauty of conversion is in its source
Conversion is beautiful in its source. Because the Creator is glorious, all that He makes is glorious. And because of this vital truth, it is not enough to say that «beauty is in the eye of the beholder.» Beauty is objectively in the Trinitarian God, whether or not mortals see it. David asks to dwell in the house of the Lord and to gaze upon His beauty (Ps. 27:4), but even if the Lord does not answer such a prayer, His beauty does not diminish for a moment.
On the other hand, the beauty of God—more often called His glory—is reflected and even increased as we contemplate it. One of the beauties of God’s raising the dead to new life is that they begin to reflect His beauty in their sermons, songs, and hearts filled with gratitude (Col. 3:16). After Peter witnessed Christ’s suffering and resurrection, he could call himself «a partaker of the glory that is to be revealed» (1 Pet. 5:1). To respond to the call of the gospel and to keep the faith is, in a sense, to receive this beauty and thus increase it. «To this I called you through our gospel,» Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2:14, «that you may obtain the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.».
Conversion is beautiful because God is beautiful. He is beautiful in majesty and glory—that grand summation of all His attributes and qualities. The way the Bible describes the beauty of God is beautiful in itself. From the holiness revealed in the narratives of the Pentateuch, through the rapturous words of the Psalms, God’s epic response to Job’s question, the rapture of the prophets, the testimony of the Gospels, the ecstatic doxologies of the epistles, and to the awe-inspiring Apocalypse of John—the Bible is beauty intrinsically and incontrovertibly because of the beauty of God.
And this God—wonderful, incomprehensible, and holy—knows us, loves us, chooses us, calls us, and saves us. «For God, who said, »Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
The whole beauty of conversion (which we must explore for eternity) comes from and is even overshadowed by the beauty of God Himself. His glory extends infinitely throughout all time and at the same time comes close to us so that we can see it, know Jesus, and be changed forever.
[1] Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945), 108. [2] C. S. Lewis, The Abominable Power (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 318-319.