Conversion

This morning we are continuing our look at the story of redemption. And we are on part three, which is on the doctrine of conversion. You will remember last time we looked at election, the fact that God is calling us, that through God's sovereign grace, He is bringing individuals to Himself. And then last week, we looked at regeneration, the doctrine, the teaching that says that in and of ourselves, we were lost to God. There was nothing in us that would draw God, but that God in His love and grace breathes into our lives, breathes into our hearts life.

And He restores like Ezekiel 36 says. He restores our hearts from hearts of stone, dead hearts, to hearts of flesh. And we become aware of God. We become aware of our need and our brokenness before Him. And they all tie in together, as we'll see again this morning as we talk about the topic of conversion.

So this morning, I'd like us to read two passages. The first one is going to be from Mark chapter 1, verses 14 to 20. After John, this is John the Baptist, after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. The time has come, He said. The kingdom of God is near.

Repent and believe the good news. As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. Come, follow me, Jesus said, and I will make you fishers of men. At once, they left their nets and followed Him. When He had gone a little farther, He saw James, son of Zebedee, and his brother John in a boat preparing their nets.

Without delay, He called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed Him. And we skip back to Matthew 19, and we're going to read from verse 16. Matthew 19 verse 16. Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life? Why do you ask me about what is good?

Jesus replied. There is only one who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments. Which ones? The man enquired.

Jesus replied, Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony. Honour your father and mother, and love your neighbour as yourself. All these I have kept, the young man said. What do I still lack? Jesus answered, If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.

Then come, follow me. When the young man heard this, he went away sad because he had great wealth. Then Jesus said to his disciples, I tell you the truth. It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, Who then can be saved? Jesus looked at them and said, With man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible. Peter answered Him, We have left everything to follow You. What then will there be for us? Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth.

At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on His glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for My sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. So far the reading. We read this morning of a man who comes to Jesus and is troubled, and Jesus is doing His thing and teaching again, and the man approaches Him and asks, What good thing must I do to get eternal life?

This man, I believe, in some way had an awareness of God. We spoke about last week a regenerated heart, a heart that is aware of God, aware of His presence. We see that his heart had a desire to spend eternal life with God. Text in Matthew 19, you can see that he assumed that he could get this eternal life by doing something, by accomplishing something. What we see in this passage is that Jesus undermines this understanding completely.

Jesus tells a man that there is only one who is good, meaning God. There is only one who is good. But if you want to enter life, obey the commandments. Now Jesus actually hints at the idea that while no one besides God is good, that although this man was a good and morally upright man, he was not really objectively good. Not good enough at least.

And Jesus still decides to give the benchmark of what perfection in God's eyes would really be. Obey all those commandments that you have, but then also sell everything you possess and give it to the poor, and then come and follow me, and then you may enter life. This man had worked so consciously to obey the laws of God. He was saying to Jesus, I am sexually pure. I am a man who keeps my commitments to my parents, who loves my parents, honours them.

He was slow to anger. He didn't steal. He didn't cheat. He didn't lie. But he was still conscious of the fact that there was something missing, that there was something that he was not able to do adequately, that guilt was still something he wrestled with.

And deep down, he knew that there was something more to be done. Jesus' response in verse 21, If you want to be perfect, go and sell all these things and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me. Jesus' response is so radical that it would undermine this man's entire way of life, that He would request a man to leave everything he has and put it in God's hands completely. But Matthew writes that the man wasn't able to do this and that he went away sad. He wasn't able to go through with this.

He wasn't able to listen to this. He wasn't able to adapt it and apply it to his own life. Now putting a pause button on this situation, I want us to also remember that Jesus didn't ask all His followers to become destitute. Jesus didn't say this for every single disciple. Jesus said to what we read in Mark 1, Jesus said to Peter, simply put down your nets and follow me.

And to John and James, He said leave the business, the family fishing business, to your father and the hired hands, and come follow me. There was nothing about selling all they possessed. Jesus didn't require everyone to sell their possessions, but through the Gospels you see that following Jesus did mean a sacrifice of some sort. Friends, it is so easy sometimes to wear the mantle of Christianity, to wear that title, to click a few buttons on Facebook saying that, you know, I'm a Christian, to forward a few Christian clichés on email, rather than making hard decisions that will affect long term lifestyle choices. When it comes to serving Jesus, when it comes to being called a Christian, it is a decision to move from one reality to another.

It is something that influences you, that changes you to the core of who you are. And this is called conversion. This moment is called conversion. Wayne Grudem, the theologian, defines it in this way. He says that conversion is our willing response to the gospel call in which we sincerely repent of sins and place our trust in Christ for salvation.

We must never think that Christianity is a clubhouse that we have been given entrance to. Conversion does not mean you get handed a membership card to a club where you can have cheap schnitzels and a free beer. Christianity is a lifestyle. And conversion is a turning away from one lifestyle to another. A lifestyle means, therefore, that you cannot take it off.

You cannot put it on. You cannot turn it down. You cannot switch it around. Being a Christian is who we are. It's a lifestyle and not a fashion.

And the man went away sad that day because he thought it would be an impossibility to convert his lifestyle and give up something that he had treasured so much in order to follow Jesus, in order to inherit eternal life. Now for us, it is true that Jesus might not require us to sell all that we have, all that we possess to follow Him. But this is a truth that the Lord will call us to sacrifice things from time to time. That is a truth. His demands varied, we see in the New Testament, from person to person.

Some had to sacrifice this. Peter had to give up his fishing income. Matthew the tax collector had to stop cheating people and follow Jesus. Paul the Apostle had to stop his career, a flourishing career within the rabbinical circle that he was in. A head honcho, a big fella in the academic realm of his day.

He had to give that up to follow Jesus. And before we are too eager to use, you know, a catch all phrase like Jesus may not demand this of us, before we do that too eagerly, Robert Gundry, a New Testament scholar, puts a very pointed caveat to this. He says, the fact that Jesus did not command all of His followers to sell all their possessions gives comfort only to the kind of people to whom He would issue this command. In other words, if we're thinking, Phew, I'm glad He didn't tell that to me, then you might just be the person He might give that command to. As a Christian, we should be expecting this is the important thing as a Christian, we should be expecting that God's word will expect and anticipate a change in us.

It may demand we change aspects of our lives, and we should expect that. The Bible is not something that we Reformed people are very good at, at marvelling and going, Isn't that interesting? That's a beautiful truth. And then closing it and then putting it down. The kingdom of God is here.

Repent and believe is the single most important statement of the Bible. It is the first purpose of the message of the Bible. The kingdom of God is being established, people. Repent from what you were doing and thought beforehand, and believe it. Mark 1:15 is the first sermon that Jesus preached in His ministry.

And that's exactly what He said. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe. And this is where we find the two aspects of what is known as conversion. Repentance and faith.

And this process of conversion, of turning away, that's what the word means, of turning, is at one time a turning away from a sinful lifestyle, a lifestyle away from God. So we're turning away from that and turning to Christ, which is faith. Repent and believe. And true conversion must have both of these aspects in order to be real conversion. Repentance and faith.

In Matthew 19, Jesus is teaching that lifestyle choices such as wealth, lifestyle choices such as wealth, can go so far as to keep you out of the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Now these words seem radical to us, and they demand honest reflection in our lives. How we spend, how we treat people in need, how generous we are with our money, how much we give to mission organisations, how much we give to the local church. These words are radical to us, but remember, they were also radical to the people of the New Testament.

Nothing has really changed. Look at verse 25. When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, and they said, Who then can be saved? Who can be saved? If a moral, upright, decent man who is simply not willing to sell all that he has all he possesses, if he's not able to come to eternal life by choosing to be destitute, who is able?

Who is able? Who in their right mind would do something like that? Jesus says, not only is it difficult, but it is impossible. And this brings us back to what we have discovered so far in our talks this past week. With mankind, with our hearts, this change of lifestyle is impossible.

This radical change is something that we cannot do in and of ourselves. It is as impossible as a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle. But verse 26 says, with God, nothing is impossible. And there's a truth here that we need to remember. It is possible to be a nice bloke.

And we Aussies love that. He's a great fella. It is possible to be a nice bloke. It is possible not to cheat. It is possible not to lie.

It is possible not to hurt others too much. It is even possible to be like this young man and to discipline yourself in so many areas of God's law. But Jesus says that this is not true freedom. This is not eternal life. I don't know how clued up you are on Greek mythology.

I used to love my mum had a Greek mythology book and we used to love reading through those stories. But there was a poem, a great poem written by the philosopher and poet Homer, not Homer Simpson, the other one, a bit more intelligent probably, called The Odyssey. And in The Odyssey, the story talks about Ulysses, who was a sailor, and he had a crew who were on a long and dangerous journey. And on a particular stretch of this journey, they were to sail past an island where sirens lived. Now sirens were beautiful, sweet voiced temptresses who lured sailors and passers by with their songs.

And they would draw these sailors onto the rocks to run aground, and then they would viciously attack and kill these sailors. Now Ulysses knew about this temptation. He had heard the stories, and so what he did was he ordered his crew to bind him to the mast of the ship. And as they sailed by, he hears these sirens, and he immediately falls in love with them. And they have sweet songs, and he desperately wants to go closer, but he is tied to the mast.

And so he grins and bears it, and they manage to escape. He can't follow his urge. He can't give in to his overwhelming appetite. In his battle against temptation, he wins. But he's not free.

You see, often I've heard people talking about life decisions of coming to Christ. That big event. And people say that we must turn away from sin, and we must turn to Christ. But the truth is turning away from one lifestyle to the next is going to practically mean that some of us will have to give up on bad relationships, sinful relationships, not God honouring relationships. For others, it may mean selling your possessions.

But so many times, these messages that get preached like this stop short of real lasting change because it stops with us. It stops with our willpower. It stops with our emotional state. It stops with our circumstances, with our discipline or lack thereof. But Jesus says that if it were up to us, if it were up to us really, it would always be impossible.

It would always be impossible. Not just sometimes, but always impossible. But God, He says, through His spirit, is able to empower even the weakest individual to make the greatest sacrifices for Christ. We are able to do this only because God has made it possible. When Jesus Christ said, Repent and believe, He means that we are able to give up on addictions, that we are able to get out of a relationship that needs to be broken off, that there are sins that feel awfully good that can be given up.

To some extent, you can be Ulysses and change your life for some time. You can. You can do it. You can change it for some time. Just white knuckle resilience through it.

Holding on. Changing your life in such a way that you are tied to a mast in the face of temptation, but you can only do it for so long. Humanly speaking, these things would be impossible to completely leave behind, but it is not impossible when you have the empowering work of God in your lives. And this is what Jesus is getting at here. Understand me well, friends.

Understand me well that I'm not diminishing in any way our responsibility in this. I'm not in any way trying to undermine our role in free will and choice in this at all. The point that I'm trying to make is that in this moment, we find the mysterious overlapping of God's sovereign grace and our free will coming together in this moment. And I'm wanting us to understand, as well as our choice in running and fleeing from sin and converting our lives, at the same time also understanding that there is a God involved in this process. And that He's a God who is powerful, and what we see is a top down view of how God is working in this situation as well.

Whilst we are here on this earth, we should be continually, continually converting and repenting our hearts and changing it. Giving God more and more authority in us to redeem us, to redeem every aspect of our lives, every broken, incomplete area in us. But the reality is, the fact that you are even sitting here this morning is a miracle of God. The fact that you would be generously willing to give up your hard earned income to this church or to any mission organisation or to any other person is a miracle of God who is at work in your heart. That is the truth.

The fact that you walk a different path to your friends, the fact that you walk a different path to your colleagues at work, is a miracle, and something that would have been impossible to do if you relied completely on yourself. What is impossible for man, Jesus said, is possible only for God. Now this isn't a throwaway line about miracles or healing. What this verse, in this context, is talking about is a miracle of eternal magnitude. It's about the impossibility of converting a sinful heart.

And today, if we were completely honest with ourselves, we would say Amen to this. Because we know our hearts, and we knew that it was only God who could have transformed us completely, truly. It is only God who could resurrect the saint from within the wretch. What is impossible for man is possible for God. And lastly, we see Peter say to Jesus, But what about us?

You called and we came. We didn't hesitate. We gave up and we put our nets down. We gave over the family business and we came and we followed you. We've left everything to follow you.

Peter had to leave a wife for three years to follow Jesus. And Jesus tells the disciples that they will have places of prominence on judgment day, that they will even be involved in the judging of the 12 tribes of Israel. What a huge responsibility and a privilege that will be. But then Jesus widens this and says that everyone who has sacrificed, that everyone who had to say goodbye to some very good things even, who may have lost friends or family to follow Christ, children even, will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. Now before we start thinking of, you know, seven virgins in paradise or or that sort of thing, biblical commentators say that the emphasis here lies far more on the sharing of Christ's kingly glory than on individual rewards.

Although other places in scripture do talk about personal rewards in heaven, the idea here is on the comparison between the magnitude of what is sacrificed or what is lost to the absolutely surpassing joy and fulfilment of what is inherited or received on the other end. Like the apostle Paul would write later in Romans 8:18, I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. And when Jesus says that you will receive a hundred times, a hundred fold, the number is inconsequential. What He is referring to here is the immensity of this glory. It will be astounding.

It will be staggering. You will have no limit to the joy that you will be experiencing in that moment. And Jesus overturns all human valuations and all possibilities and says that those who would by human judgment be considered the lowest, the most destitute, the poorest, the less well off, that these persons on the other side will have received so much glory and so much joy and so much vindication for what they had been willing to go through. They will be considered the first in the kingdom of God, and their joy will be multiplied many, many times over. The great lesson here is that our motives for change or sacrifice doesn't need to be guilt ridden.

This is a great releasing statement of this teaching, that our motives for changing our lives, for putting Christ as King and Lord of our lives, it doesn't need to be motivated by guilt. I've messed this up again. I better not do that because I will feel terrible if I do that. Our motives can be induced by joy instead. If an immense treasure awaits me, what does my discomfort mean now?

If an immense, staggering treasure awaits me, what does my discomfort mean now? If I live as a citizen of an eternal kingdom, why invest in things now that will pass away? This gives us amazing peace and freedom. It allows us to be motivated by a much healthier and longer lasting motivation. You know how I told you about the story of the Odyssey and Ulysses?

There was another poem, another story that was written about these sirens, and this time about a Greek sailor called Jason. Now Jason knew about the Sirens Island as well, and he was passing by them. But instead of resisting the sirens, instead of being tied to a mast, what Jason did is he introduced a better alternative. He hired a man called Orpheus, a very skilled musician, to play his most beautiful piece just as the ship floated within earshot of the island. And Orpheus played his music, and he played his music, and as the ship neared the island, both the captain and the crew were pleased, not by the sirens, but by Orpheus' better music.

If it seems impossible to us that God could call you to a pure life, that God would call you to a life that is radically different, a truly good life, it is but God and His beautiful music that will make it possible. And it is the beautiful music, friends, of the cross of Christ. The beautiful message of a God who loves you, who loves you so much that He would come and rescue you in your deepest need. And even in a need that you did not recognise to be yours.

A need that you did not recognise existed. That is the beautiful music that will motivate our souls, that will motivate our hearts to follow this God, to listen to His words, to make Him Lord of our life, to align our will with His will. You can white knuckle it through life, but that's not how God wants us to live. True conversion is impossible for us, but possible with God. It's a process of repentance and turning away from what we were and turning to Christ in faith.

Let's ask God to do what He sees fit in our lives, to see us, to change us, to renew us. And then let's be willing to comply with those changes in us. Let's pray. Father, it is hard sometimes to talk about and to think about our responsibility in the face of Your great power and Your sovereignty. But we know, Lord, that You have given us hearts that can respond to this.

We thank You, Lord, that in Your good wisdom You have regenerated our hearts and made us aware of You, that You have warmed us up to Yourself. But Father, we are also aware of our responsibility to convert, to change our hearts and our lifestyles. It is that mysterious overlapping, that mysterious intermingling of Your sovereign grace and our human responsibility. Father, for us, for some of us, the message of Christianity will be difficult to understand. There may even be people here or people in our lives that will walk away from this and say it's too hard.

People will walk away sad because the sacrifice is too great. But Father, I plead for every heart. Let us know the great joy that awaits us. Give us a foretaste of it through Your Spirit so that our motives may not be made, our motives may not be motivated by guilt or shame or status or power. Father, that our motives may be aligned with a joy, with a desire, with a yearning to be glorified, to be joy filled, to be overcome with fulfilment and peace.

God, give us just that great balance between sensing our inability and our inadequacy, but also sensing Your ability and Your supreme adequacy. Father, we change our lives. And if there are things in our in our world at this moment, things we have read in Your word, things that we have been confronted with this week that we know needs to be changed. Father, I pray for the strength to do it. Father, if it be generosity, or as we read earlier in 1 Peter, if it is hospitality even, if it is love for one another, if it is sacrifice, Father, let us do that.

Let us run that race that You have marked up for us, keeping in mind what it means to cross that finish line. Father, we pray these things through Your enabling power in us by the Spirit. Amen.