What Takes Place at "Conversion"?

That is the word of faith that we proclaim. Because, this is our text, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the scripture says, everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him.

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on Him whom they have not believed? How are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?

As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news. So far, our reading. Paul is talking here about this moment of conversion, what it means to become a Christian, what it means to turn around to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

And so three questions or three points of what it means to be converted. What do we turn to when we come to faith? Well, first thing is conversion is a turning towards Christ. The Bible makes clear that in order for someone to be a Christian, they must have Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. They must align their hearts and their minds to Jesus.

But that is a cliché we often throw around. What does it mean to trust or believe in Jesus Christ? What it simply means is that you decide to hold onto. You decide to rely on Jesus to be the only thing, the only one that could have granted you forgiveness and reconciliation with the God you have offended through your sin. That is what it means to rely on Jesus Christ, to trust in Him.

When we are converted, therefore, we decide to turn towards Jesus, and trust that He has died in my place, that He has taken on my eternal punishment. And because He has done this on my behalf, I am the one that goes free. How does that turning to Christ look like in reality? Well, in our passage in Romans 10, verse nine, we have it here put this way.

Paul says, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. That is such a beautiful, succinct way to put it. Believe in your heart, profess with your mouth. Verse 10, for with the heart one believes and is therefore justified, receiving the forgiveness, but with the mouth one confesses and is saved. When we say we are Christians, it means our heart and our mouths are aligned.

They must become aligned. We believe with our heart and we profess with our mouths. In other words, we trust silently, privately, personally, deep inside of us in Jesus, but we publicly, externally, physically profess, proclaim, show off to the world that we trust and we believe in Jesus Christ. This is where the idea of leaving our sin behind comes in. With our outward actions and our inward thoughts being aligned, we say that no thoughts and no actions in us will align any further to the old way that we used to live in.

We will now pursue Jesus Christ and His will for our lives. To say that we are converted is to say that Jesus is Lord. And to say that Jesus is Lord is to believe that Jesus rules all the parts of me. And so what Cassie and Anika have come to terms with, as we've talked about these things, is that Jesus has died for their sins. He has therefore justified them.

He has made them right with God. But they also realised that they have been purchased by that death in some sort of cosmic payment that has liberated them, that has set them free from the punishment of sin and even the power of continuing sin in their lives. They now belong to Him because Jesus has paid and bought them. They now call Jesus their Lord, and they profess that they will now choose to follow Him, both in their hearts, their private internal parts, but also with their external actions. So that's the first thing, and probably the thing that we are most familiar with.

Conversion is a turning away from self and a turning towards Jesus as King. The second thing that happens in conversion is that conversion is a turning to other Christians or turning to the church. In essence, this means that people who come to a point of conversion also join the church in that conversion. This is an essential part of every Christian's conversion story. And yet, I want to say, it is the most downplayed part of the Christian conversion story.

Being a Christian, listen to this. Being a Christian means you belong to the church. Being a Christian means you belong to the church. And to belong to the church means you belong to a local expression of the true church. It's not some sort of esoteric, super spiritual thought that I belong to this cloud of witnesses.

That's true. You belong, however, to the expression physically of that church, which is a local church in your neighbourhood. In Ephesians two, the apostle Paul makes clear that Christians, irrespective of their personal likes or dislikes, irrespective of their cultural backgrounds, or all sorts of insubstantial differences, all Christians have become united in this one thing called the church. Ephesians two, verse 19 reads, so then, Paul says, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens, fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him, you are also being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

So when we are converted, when we say we have experienced conversion, we are joined to Jesus Christ by joining into the church. It is not optional. It is not optional. Paul calls the church in Ephesians two and in 1 Corinthians 12. Paul calls the church the body of Christ. And again, we may know that terminology.

But in other words, what Paul is saying, when we have turned to Christ in our conversion, we have turned towards all of Him, which Paul argues is both His head, who is the King of the church, Jesus Christ Himself, but also His body. The church, as Paul explains it, is the earthly expression of Jesus Christ in the world. That is a massive thought. Jesus Christ is present in the world today through the church. We are the body, even as we say that Jesus is the head of that body.

And so when we say we belong to Jesus, we can't separate His head from His body. We belong to both. When we become Christians, we don't come to a severed head. We don't turn to a headless torso. To belong to Jesus is to relate to all parts of Him.

To remain in Christ is to remain in the church. To cherish Him is to cherish His people. To love Him is to love His family. But why is that so unpopular? I think it's unpopular and difficult because of the jarring discrepancy between the head and the body.

The head, who is Jesus, is beautiful, and the body is often ugly. The head is glorious, the body is blemished. But we forget this if we focus on that, that every last person who has ever had any faith at all in the Lord Jesus has come to faith only through the church. Only because of the church. Think about it.

You and I are not the first Christians, and we have not dropped out of the sky as Christians. Who brought the truth of Jesus Christ to us? For Anika, as she said, it was her parents who initially shared the gospel, and then eventually us, the people in this church. For Cassie, it was a Christian husband, and eventually Christian friends in her small group. If you draw the line back enough, our faith has come from generations of people who have belonged to this organisation called the church.

It is a group of people that have existed all the way back and built that faith on what Paul says here in Ephesians two, the foundations of the apostles, those who walked and saw Jesus Christ, who heard the message of Christ. But I think because we don't know our church history, and we don't reflect on it often enough, we don't realise that we are as flawed as they are, and that those previous generations are as bad as the church is today. Men and women who were imperfect and also prone to inconsistency. We might gloss over all their shortcomings, but the body of Christ has always had blemishes.

The one saving grace is that by God's grace, He guarded the true and the life-giving message that Jesus Christ saves sinners throughout all of that mess. Throughout all of that mess, it has been passed on. And so, yes, the body of Christ has oftentimes been disgraced, and yet nevertheless, in God's wisdom, He has deemed the church as the only means that anyone will come to have a saving faith in Jesus. The only means is through the church. So what that means is, if a person becomes a Christian by reading a Bible, even if they're reading it alone in a hotel somewhere at the edge of desperation, it took Christians to print that Bible.

It took Christians to pay for that printing. It took Christians to put that Bible in that hotel room. Even if someone becomes a Christian through watching a preacher online, it's taken a Bible college to train that preacher. It's taken a church to support that preacher. And if a person becomes a Christian on the couch of their friend, simply having the gospel shared with them, it's taken a church to preach the gospel to that friend every week, so that they have the power and they feel the urgency to share their gospel with their friends.

To come to faith in Jesus is to be added to the people of God. We are no longer foreigners, Paul says. We are citizens. We are being built together to become a dwelling place in which God lives through His Spirit. That is the church.

So to turn towards Jesus Christ is to also turn towards other Christians, and then, leads us to the last point. Conversion is a turning towards the mission. When we are converted, we aren't simply added into some sort of passive relationship with this large rigid organisation called the church. We are brought into a purpose. We are brought into a mission, the mission of God for the world.

And we read that earlier in our passage in Romans 10, especially verses 13 to 14. It says, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Then ask the question, how then will they who call on Him, how then will they call on Him if they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

And how are they to preach unless they are sent? And so, in this passage, even as Paul says, the simple truth is that everyone who believes in their heart that Jesus Christ is Lord and professes that He has died and has risen again from the dead, Paul says, they will be saved. But that is not where it ends, because there are others who must hear this news. Even when you are converted, Paul says, into Jesus, when you have believed these things, you are also being driven into the mission of the church, which is to declare to everyone that anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. And Paul encourages these Christians that believe, that they are Christians, and asks them, how could you have responded if you had not heard?

And how could you have heard if no one was sent? So our job as Christians is to make sure that we train gifted people to preach and teach the gospel. Our job is to support and fund churches to exist in our communities, so that local neighbourhoods may hear the good news. Our job is to fund overseas mission, to support missionaries. Our job is to ensure Sunday school and catechism classes exist in this church because our young people must hear the gospel.

Our job is to grow and develop our own personal understanding of the gospel because how will others hear without our preaching? When we are converted, all of us are converted into the mission of the church. The final book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, has a lot to say about Christians and how we relate to the world. In Revelation specifically, the apostle John writes to Christians who are suffering terribly at the hands of the world. And John speaks of the unsaved and the unrepentant world around them in the strongest terms.

He calls some of them beasts. He says of some of them that they are blood drinkers and saint slayers. And yet, in John's vision, He sees God saying that the very Christians who are suffering so much at the hand of cruel non-believers, these Christians are forbidden to abandon the world. We are forbidden to abandon this world. In fact, as John writes to the Christians in chapter one, verse six, this is how he addresses the Christians.

He says that we are priests. We are priests. We know in the Bible, priests were the people who acted on behalf of people towards God, and on behalf of God towards people. He says, in other words, we are to speak on behalf of God, and we are to intervene in the world in any way we can. And this is all the while knowing that the world will resist us.

When we become Christians, we become priests. So what does it mean to be a Christian convert? What does it mean for us to say that we have experienced conversion? What does it mean for Anika and Cassie to say that? It means that at one point, we have turned away from ourselves as King and Saviour, and have made Jesus the King and the Saviour.

Secondly, it means that we have turned towards other Christians, and that together we form the church, which is the earthly expression of Jesus Christ on earth. And then thirdly, as we form that church, we are converted into fulfilling the purpose, fulfilling the mission of the church, and that is to declare, everyone who believes and calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. So Anika and Cassie, this is what it means for you to have become, or to have professed to be Christians. You have been converted, you have turned from yourself, and you have turned to Christ. You now belong to this church, which is God's demonstration, a first instalment of what He intends to do for the world.

In you, God shows that He has started the process of recovering rebellious people. Sorry to say that. He is recovering rebellious people and restoring them to a peaceful kingdom under His rule. May you pray with us, may you work with us for that kingdom to be established. And may all of us continue to evaluate our hearts and weigh up our professions of faith in Jesus Christ.

And with all of us, as we profess Jesus Christ our Lord, will we plead with other peoples, other tribes, other nations to make Jesus Christ their King as well, for His glory and for our good. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that in Jesus Christ we have all of these promises. And Lord, we know that at times we hold to these things very loosely and inconsistently, we don't always realise these truths, we forget. Help us, Lord, to remember.

Help us, Lord, to align what we say with our mouths to what we believe in our hearts. Help us to align what we say with our mouths with what we do with our actions. Thank you, Lord, that in Jesus Christ, You have turned our hearts to You. Thank you that this initially has been Your work, that You amazingly, graciously have revealed Yourself to us, whether that be through faithful parents, whether that be through the love of friends. We pray, Lord, that You will continue to develop and grow our faith and our commitment to You.

Lord, that You will use this church, this local church, even as small and as insignificant as we may seem, that You will use us to be the expression of Jesus Christ on earth. Help us to fulfil that mission. Help us to preach that gospel. Help us to be the light that draws all people to know Jesus. We ask this in His name. Amen.