What Is Conversion?

It's a funny thing being on holidays, being away because you feel so disconnected. You feel you don't hear or see or keep in touch with people that you normally would see and hear and keep in touch with. And yet, in a different country, in a different time zone, there was this stark realisation for me that we as a human race, we as brothers and sisters of the same ancestors, are experiencing very much the same pressures and pains together when we see things happening like terrorist attacks in Nice, France. We experienced things like the shooting death of nine people in Munich yesterday morning. We experienced together Brussels.

We experienced together Kabul, again something that just happened, I think, last night. Eighty people dead in Afghanistan by two suicide bombers. So much pain. We have nations making huge decisions like leaving the European Union. We have controversial populist politicians, like Trump and Pauline Hanson, becoming role players in national politics.

We have constant, tireless wars of attrition against things like gender identity and family. We have corrupt businesses and far left and far right factions fighting in the streets. So much happening. And we as humanity experience this. It's not simply we as Christians, or we as non-Christians, we as humanity are experiencing it.

And if you are concerned about any of these things, like I am, I wouldn't venture it be too difficult or too far out to imagine that you have prayed in your heart for God to change this situation or these situations, that you have prayed for God to change the hearts and minds of terrorists, of murderers, of politicians, of far left or far right factions to change their hearts, to convert people, to turn people, to convert them to faith in order for them to uphold things that we value and hold to be true. In our weekly prayer meetings here on Wednesday mornings, I can vouch for it. That group that sits here in our hall and prays often for God to change hearts, for God to change lives, for God to change our nation and our world. But this morning, I wanna ask you, what does it mean to pray for someone's conversion? What does it mean to pray for someone's conversion? What exactly are we praying to happen in the lives of these people?

What does conversion look like? What happens in that process? This morning, there are three things that I wanna point us to that the Bible teaches us about the significance and the process and the aspects of conversion. The first thing I see in the significance of conversion is that it is a turning towards Jesus Christ. The Bible makes clear that in order for someone to become a convert to Christianity, and the word just incidentally convert is literally turning.

Someone to turn to faith, someone to turn to Christianity, they must firstly align their heart and their mind to trust in Jesus Christ as the ruler and the rescuer of their life. It is what we have placed on the front of the wall here. It is John 3:16. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him, that is the turning, shall not perish but have eternal life. Now before I go on to talk about this a little bit further, let me state as strongly as I can the truth that we must always keep in mind.

We can only turn because in God, through God, Jesus has turned towards us. The simple fact of the incarnation, the simple fact that God came to us in Jesus Christ demonstrates that He first turned to us. But it is also in the cross that God shows us that He has turned to us. Romans 5:8 says, God demonstrates His own love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, while we were still rebels, while we still disregarded Him, Christ died for us. He turned to us first.

And having turned towards us, God, therefore, will never turn away from us. He will never turn His back on us, never abandon us, betray us, or quit on us. Facing us now in Christ, God quickens our hearts. God enlivens us. God turns us towards Him.

And again, the apostle Paul in the book of Romans points out this truth. Romans 8:30 explains how He has set His heart on us, and therefore He won't stop until He has done the process completely in us from beginning to end. He will save us. Romans 8:30 says, those God predestined. Those God set His heart on from the beginning before the foundations of the earth.

Those He predestined, Paul says, He also called. You heard Him. You felt Him touch you. Those He called, Paul says, He also justified. He made right through the cross.

And then he says, this is how it ends. Those He has justified, He also glorifies. From beginning to end, God has set His heart on us. He has turned towards us before we even knew Him, and now He will continue until He finishes turning us towards Him. More than spurring us on in this desire, God fosters in us the capacity to turn towards Him. Having given us both the desire, the call, and the capacity to turn toward Him, God then invites us to do that.

And friends, I will tell everyone that there is no more crucial moment than for a person to, in that moment of invitation, hear His voice, and the summons is unmistakable, and the fork in the road is undeniable. Everything hangs on that moment of conversion. Everything. And so as a believer in God's predestination and election, I'm not afraid, however, to preach the gospel that tells people that they must accept God, that they must choose God, that they must make a decision to trust in Christ. And so I preach as though they have the power to repent, that they have the power to convert their hearts because they have.

They have that power, but meanwhile, I trust. And meanwhile, I know that they only have that power because God has enabled them to have it at that point. How and when and why they become converts, I'll leave up to God. That's His business. A turning towards God is the first aspect of conversion, of turning towards Jesus Christ.

Is it turning away from myself as Lord and saviour of my life and turning towards Jesus Christ? It is that moment that I trust for Him to save me. But then secondly, and we know that, but then secondly, something I fear we are starting to ignore more and more, we also must keep in mind in conversion, and that is conversion is a turning towards the church. Many people have difficulty today grasping this point. They don't see the connection between Jesus Christ and the church, but they see no connection that understanding Jesus is actually to understand the church.

Loving Jesus is to love the church. The church is not a club, although it is a force for good. The church, and the church alone, is what the Bible calls the body of Christ. In Ephesians 2, Paul the Apostle talks about the connection between Jesus Christ as the head of the body and the church, the body itself. And Paul the Apostle makes it clear when he talks about how Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians must understand their cultural differences having been crushed by the gospel and that they now belong to the one Christian church.

If you have your Bibles, let's quickly flick to that because we're gonna read a few verses from that. Ephesians 2, and we're going to read from verse 14 to 21. Ephesians 2 verse 14. For He who is Christ, for He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. The two He's referring to here is the cultural groups of the Jews and the Gentiles.

So the ones who used to be God's people and the ones who aren't, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing in His flesh, this is Jesus, the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose, this is God. God's purpose was to create in Himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body, to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which He put to death their hostility. He who is Jesus came and preached peace to you who were far away, the Gentiles. And He came and preached peace to those who were near, the Jews. For through Him, we both have access to the Father by one spirit.

Consequently, Paul says, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. In Him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord, and in Him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His spirit. In other words, the Bible says to turn towards Jesus Christ is always to turn towards all of Him, head and body together. When we turn towards Jesus, we aren't turning towards a severed head. When we turn towards Jesus, we don't turn towards a headless torso.

To be related to Jesus Christ is to be related to all of Him, which includes the church, which is called His body. To abide in Christ, to remain in Christ, is to remain in His community. To love Jesus is to love His people. You can't have it any other way. But how reluctant are we to endorse this?

How reluctant are we to accept this? Think of the many, many possibilities that are out there now to avoid deep involvement and unity with God's church. Think about it. Christian TV broadcasting. Originally a great idea for people who were sick, too weak to come to church physically. The sermon went out to them.

But now it is shamelessly put forward as a substitute for public worship. You sit at home and you click a remote. You open up a YouTube clip, but you don't worship. You don't worship. You allow yourself perhaps to be entertained.

You don't take the responsibility to serve in the local congregation. Instead, you puff yourself up with thoughts that you now have no place to apply these truths. Even listening to great preachers won't get you anywhere if you don't have a place to ground those truths in, which is in the church. Yet in the midst of all this, there remains this truth we hear in Ephesians 2 that Jesus Christ is not divided. He isn't a severed body or a severed head.

If you're going to face Him and embrace Him, then we are going to embrace all of Him, head and body. But why is embracing all of Him so difficult? It is difficult because of the jarring discrepancy between the head and the body. This is why it is so hard for us as Western Christians to really commit ourselves to the church. The head, who is Jesus, is beautiful.

He is lovely. He is gracious. He is kind. He is compassionate. While the body is often ugly.

It is often blemished. It is often disfigured. But what we often forget is this, that every last person who has been converted, who has become a Christian, only became so through the body, the church. You and I are not the first Christians, are we? Those who have gone before us preserved the truth of Christ for us.

The apostles and the early church fathers, they were part of the church. And yet, we know the truth of the early church fathers in Egypt in an era that was so riddled with political intrigue and infighting and showmanship, stuff that would have made our politicians look weak and vague and virtuous, perhaps, even. Who preserved the truth of Christ for us? It was the church. Medieval thinkers, including those thinkers, however, who thought it was their mission to take back the holy land in the crusades by force. Who preserved the truth of Christ for us?

People like John Wesley, even though he was a poor husband as his failed marriage attests. The simple faith and the simple truth is that we believe in a church that shows the truth of Christ. Who handed the truth of Christ to me? Pastors I know who preached when their spiritual well was dry, flawed, struggling, a builder's labourer sharing his faith about Jesus with me. All these people belonging to the body, even though flawed and human, carry the precious message of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Lord with them.

And so that is how we become converts. Yes. The body of Christ is frequently disfigured. It is frequently dishevelled, sometimes disgraced. Still, it is the only means by which God has intended the world to know Him.

To come to faith in Jesus is to be added to the people of God. We should recall that the innermost private faith in Jesus and the outermost public confession of Him are always fused in Scripture. You cannot become a private Christian. You are a public Christian at the same time. Where there is no public confession, which is one dimension of our public worship of Him on a Sunday, there is simply no faith.

We should recall that, however weighty an individual's gift or talent is, it is useless unless it's added to the talents of the rest of the congregation. A solitary bass drummer, you know, those guys that beat the drums like that, a solitary bass drum player sitting by himself on a darkened stage in an unpowered Queensland performing arts complex is useless. He needs the talents and the gifts from all the other musicians to make his part great. The conversion, which is a genuine turning towards Jesus, is always a turning towards the church. To endorse our Lord in faith is always to endorse His people in love.

And so when we pray for people to be converted, we are praying for them to be included into the community of faith to which we belong. And this leads us to our last point on conversion. Conversion is a turning towards the mission. It is turning towards mission, full stop. When we are converted into the community of God, we are converted to share the message of that community to others outside of it.

Paul, again, later in Romans 10, verses 13 and 14, writes this. He says, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. That is a statement. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But he says in verse 14, how then can they call on the one that they have not believed in?

How can they believe in the one whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? It says, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, but who's going to share that with them? Who's going to teach them about this Lord that they can call to? And so there's an aspect about conversion that means we are turning towards the world.

And I'm aware as I say this, that someone might say, well, pastor KJ, remember James 4 verse 4 says, turning towards the world, or a friendship with the world means enmity with God. If you are friends of the world, it means that you are enemies with God. I'm aware of that. I'm aware of what James is saying, but there is an attitude to the world that James is referring to here that is a breaking of fellowship with God. What James is talking about is an uncritical admiration of the world, a naive fascination with the world's shortsightedness.

And so James is correct. Uncritical friendship with the world is spiritually fatal, but this is not what we are talking about. The point is that we as Christians are to be no more uncritical of the world than Jesus was uncritical of the world. We are to love the world as much as the Lord loves the world, for God so loved the world. God never allows His people to turn their back on the world. Why?

Because God never turns His back on the world. So in essence, the Bible says that there are two attitudes that we as Christians are forbidden to have regarding the world. One attitude is that naive view that pretends that everything in this world is rosy, that everything we are striving for and working towards is right. Marriage equality is right. That there's nothing wrong with the world, and that everyone is essentially a good person, misguided maybe, but good.

The Bible says we are forbidden to have that view. But then we are also forbidden as Christians to despair over the world. We are forbidden to despair and to write off the world. God doesn't permit His people to despair over the world because God Himself has appointed the world to a destiny more glorious than anything we can imagine. He has promised that He will be in the process of making all things new in this world.

We know not everyone will be saved, but we know many will be saved. We know that judgment will come, but restoration and renewal comes along with it. We know that God is not fighting a very tight war where the result lies in the balance. No, friends. He has won.

He has won it. The enemies of Satan, the enemies of sin and of self are merely fooled into thinking that they can resist this end result. We must remember that phrase made famous by the theologian Abraham Kuyper that says, there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine. Mine. Mine.

And we see this most powerfully in that final book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, that talks about how Christians should and will relate to the world. In Revelation, the people for whom the apostle John writes, the church is terribly suffering at the hands of the world, and John speaks about the unsaved and the unrepentant world in the strongest terms. He calls them a dragon. He calls them a whore, a beast, a blood drinker, a saint slayer. On the other hand, the very people who have suffered so much at the hands of this cruelty, however, are forbidden to abandon this world.

In the very first chapter of Revelation, John introduces the idea that Christians have been made priests. Revelation 1:6 says that we are a kingdom of priests. And now the function of priests biblically is what? It is to intercede on behalf of, to represent God to people, and people back to God. And Christians, in other words, are to intercede and act on behalf of the world.

Their priestly service, their intercession certainly includes prayer, but it isn't restricted to it. They are to represent God to the world, and the world to God. They are to intercede on behalf of the world in any way they can, to fight for God, on behalf of God in this world. But you know what? There's another aspect of priests that is referred to in the Old Testament particularly, and that is to sacrifice.

And the apostle John says that the church will sacrifice itself for the world. John makes this point only because of a truth that he has acknowledged in Revelation, in verse 5 of Revelation chapter 1, and that is that Jesus Christ is the ruler of the earth. Our Lord rules ultimately. No one else does. The Roman Emperor Domitian, the context of what Revelation was being written in at that stage for the Christians of that time, a powerful man oppressing Christians, he didn't rule at the time of the writing.

Jesus Christ, He says, is the ruler of the kings of the earth. Christians have a priestly ministry, an intercessory ministry to exercise on behalf of the world. Why? For it is only because Christ rules the earth ultimately that our priestly service to the world will never be fruitless ultimately. The third aspect of conversion says that all converts to the faith will be converts to the mission, to the world.

If we are Christians, if we are true converts, we have been converted to face the world. This morning, we are reminded that when we pray for others' conversions, when we pray for ISIS to be converted, when we pray for disenfranchised youths who will go on killing sprees to be converted, when we pray for our husbands or our wives or our children to be converted, we pray for them to turn towards the one who has already turned towards us. To turn toward Him, however, is to turn also towards and to never forsake the ones that He has pledged Himself to, which is the church. And then in the church, we are converted and we are turned towards the world that needs to hear this message. The church is God's demonstration that His project, that His rescue plan will happen.

The church is the first instalment of what He intends to do for the rest of the world, that He has started the process of recovering a rebellious creation and restoring it into a beautiful kingdom under Himself. May God work to bring more converts into His fold. May we convert our hearts towards Him. May we plead with God to convert the nations and the peoples and the tribes for His glory and for our good. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, let us never forget the great purpose that You have for humankind. That we have turned each to our own way. That we have rejected our Creator and the purposes to which we have been created, for which we have been destined. And Father, we pray that You will bring a great conversion to the nations, to the tribes, to the people groups of this world. We do pray, Lord, that You will powerfully, by Your Spirit, bring such a great influx of people, Lord, that we will be astounded and that we will praise You for it.

That the world will be forever changed by it. So Father, as priests, we intercede on behalf of these people. And yet as priests, Father, we are also convicted again this morning that we represent You to this world. And so, Father, in our workplaces, to our colleagues, to our neighbours, to our friends, Father, may we boldly, unapologetically, courageously, sometimes even defiantly, proclaim the love of a God who so loved us that He sent His Son for us, and to preach to them that whoever may believe, whether gay or straight, whether understanding their identity, whether understanding pain or truth or any of these things, Father, they may come to know the God who loves them so. Father, give us the words to say, give us the heart to say it.

Father, may we love You, Jesus. May we turn to You more. May we love Your church. May we turn towards Your church. May we love this world, and may we turn towards it for the sake of Your name and Your glory. Amen.