Proclaimer Blog
No amazing conversion?
Perhaps your conversion is amazing. I know every conversion is miraculous – but perhaps, I mean, you were a terror before you became a Christian. Drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. Some of us have stories like that. But the truth is many of us have conversion stories that are less spectacular (‘I can’t remember a time when I was not a believer’). I was converted aged 12 and I can’t really remember much of my life before that, apart from a few isolated incidents, including one very memorable run down the right wing for the school football team.
How do you treasure your conversion and continue to marvel at its miracle if that is the case? If you have a life of sin to look back on and see dealt with perhaps it is easier, at one level, to say ‘that is what I was, but by the grace of God…’ For those of us with less spectacular turnarounds, I think we treasure our miracle of grace less, or at least, there’s a real risk that we do.
The answer, of course, is to see our transformation in Bible terms, which means not just in terms of actions, but in terms of categories. I was dead. I was an enemy of God. My heart was utterly black. Before God I was deceitful above all things. A real appreciation of what we were in these categories does not require us to have to say ‘and I murdered someone’ (I exaggerate to make the point). If we really understood our hearts in Bible terms, we would never cease to be grateful for our own amazing, miraculous, grace-filled rescue and never cease to be preaching and praying tirelessly for the salvation of souls. In today’s ‘good’ world, it may just be a help not to have had such a miraculous conversion, because it forces us to see things as God sees them.