A Biblical Understanding of Conversion

Most pastors recognize how crucial the doctrines of God, Scripture, and salvation are to their work. Yet what about the more specific doctrine of conversion? Have you spent time meditating on it lately, pastor? Not only is it beautiful, it is crucial to your work.

Biblical conversion depends upon God’s work of regeneration

The biblical doctrine of conversion is beautiful, for starters, because it displays God’s regenerating power.

Think of the apostle Paul looking back to the moment of creation itself where God creates the universe out of nothing—ex nihilo. Your conversion, says Paul, is like that: “God…gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom. 4:17). God does not convert drowning people; he converts the drowned. As Jesus called lifeless Lazarus up out of the tomb, so he called you, friend, when you were dead in your sins and trespasses (Eph. 2:1).

Scripture teaches that we must have our hearts replaced, our minds transformed, our spirits given life. We cannot regenerate ourselves any more than we could cause ourselves to be born the first time. The change every human needs is so radical, so much at our very root, that only God can do it.

Pastor, if your doctrine of conversion lacks a strong conception of God’s rescuing work, your preaching and evangelism will risk becoming manipulative and man-pleasing. Your approach to leadership will more likely become pragmatic. You will risk burning out yourself and your congregation with an over-burdened schedule. Your membership practices will become entitlement or benefits based—like a country club’s. Your practices of accountability and discipline will mostly vanish. You will put holiness at risk.

The nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon once told a story of how a drunken man approached the shrewd and sensible pastor Rowland Hill and said, “Hey, Mr. Hill, I’m one of your converts!” to which Pastor Hill responded, “I daresay you are—but you are none of the Lord’s!”

Biblical conversion Involves our work of repentance and faith

God regenerates. He causes us to be born again. Yet there’s a human counterpart to what God does. He calls us to repent and believe. That’s what Jesus commanded at the beginning of his ministry, “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15).

When God’s Spirit causes a person to be born again, change happens. Always. A newborn baby cannot help but breathe and cry and eat and act according to its nature. Likewise, a newborn Christian, someone who has been recreated or regenerated by God’s own Spirit, cannot help but love God, God’s law, and God’s people.

The New Testament is filled with pictures of sinners doing just this—leaving their sin and receiving Christ. Think of Levi the tax collector leaving his trade to follow Christ. Or the woman at the well, or the Roman centurion, or Peter, James, and John. Even Saul, the persecutor of Christians, became Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. Each of them trusts, turns, and follows. That’s conversion.

Biblical conversion is not reciting a creed. It’s not saying a prayer. That’s not a conversation. It’s not an emotionally-heated experience. It’s not a journey, everyone strewn along the path at different points. Rather, conversion is turning with our whole lives from self-justification to Christ’s justification, from self-rule to God’s rule, from idol worship to God worship.

Conversion results in transformation

Maybe you remember this from when you became a Christian. Before becoming a Christian, you wanted to indulge certain sins. Afterward, you didn’t. Maybe you loved getting drunk. Then you didn’t. Maybe you enjoyed taking advantage of people. Then you didn’t. Maybe you despised Christians. Then you found yourself loving them. Maybe you had no interest in God’s book. Then you found yourself fascinated by it. I’m not saying the desire for all sins vanished, but I am saying a change began. And you could feel the change.

Reborn people love righteousness. Justified people pursue justice. Those forgiven of sin fight sin, personal and public.

We don’t do any of this perfectly. Far from it. We are like newborn babes who learn to crawl, then walk, and then run only gradually. Plus, our old natures remain mixed with our new natures for now (Rom. 7). But little by little, in fits and starts, from one degree to the next, God’s love is perfected in us. The apostle John writes, “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected” (1 Jn. 2:3–5).

We must get this right

Pastor, if your doctrine of conversion lacks a strong conception of human responsibility, you will more likely be tempted toward complacency in evangelism and sermon preparation. You may be less likely to communicate love and compassion toward those who are hurting. Perhaps you might come across to others as severe. You might suffer from a weak prayer life and so forfeit all the blessings that could be yours.

If your doctrine of conversion lacks a strong conception of repentance, you will be quick to offer assurance of salvation, and slow to ask people to count the cost of following Christ. You will more likely tolerate worldliness and divisiveness in the church, and your church members just might tolerate these things because many of them will remain in the shallows of the faith. Nominalism will also be more common because grace will come cheap.

If your doctrine of conversion lacks a strong conception of faith, you will have a church filled with anxious, self-righteous, man-pleasing legalists. The more self-disciplined members of the church will feel self-deceivingly good about themselves, while the less-disciplined members will quietly hide away their secret sin and steadily learn to condemn themselves and resent others. Transparency will be rare, hypocrisy common. Outsiders and prodigals will not feel the warmth and compassion of true grace. Cultural preferences will be confused with law.

Conversion is corporate: we’re Included in a people

So far we’ve emphasized the individual in conversion. Yet conversion is also corporate because we’re born again into a people. We’re adopted into a covenant, and a covenantal head comes with a covenantal body (see Rom. 5:12ff). Notice Peter’s parallel statements:

“Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Pet. 2:10)

Typically, when Christians tells their testimony, they narrate the second line: “I was living in sin. But someone shared the gospel with me, and I learned I could be forgiven.” Yet Peter wants fuller testimony. He says that becoming a people occurs simultaneously with receiving mercy, meaning our testimonies ought to include something like, “I had no interest in loving God’s people, but then something happened, and I found myself loving them!”

Paul tells the same story in Ephesians 2, but says it all happened at the cross. Verses 1 to 10 point to our vertical reconciliation with God: “But God…raised us up and seated us with Christ in the heavenlies.” Verses 11 to 20 then present the horizontal: “But you who were far off have been brought near” (v. 14). The vertical and the horizontal are inseparable.

When a mom and dad go down to the orphanage to adopt a son, they bring him home and place him at the family dinner table with a new set of brothers and sisters. That is to say, biblical conversion signs you up for a family photo.

What’s the application for our lives? Simple: join a church! You’ve been made righteous, so be righteous. You’ve been made a member of his body, so join an actual body. And you’ve been made one, so be one with an actual group of Christians.

A biblical understanding of conversion is pastorally powerful

Not only does a biblical understanding of conversion display God’s power, it is pastorally powerful.

It gives you the ability to encourage and enliven your brothers and sisters in Christ who are gripped by sin. Sin—liar that it is—pretends to be inevitable. It dons the mask of “real” or “authentic” or “just how I feel” or “natural” or even “just.” But a right doctrine of conversion exposes the lie in all such posturing. “Yes, your feelings might be natural, but no, you are bound by it, because Christianity is supernatural. The Holy Spirit is real, and he has made you free. You’re a new person!”

Such assurances belong not only to the so-called imperatives of the New Testament: “Go and be holy and united.” They belong to the indicatives: “This is what you are.”

So there you sit, across the living room from the man struggling with alcohol, the victim of marital infidelity, the ornery and divisive deacon, the young couple who hates your church’s music. What is your task? It’s to remind them that they are Christians. They’ve been born again. God has something more and better for them now.

Remind them of their baptism, like Paul does in Romans 6. They’ve died to sin and the old self and have been raised in newness of life with Christ. They no longer belong to themselves or this world’s judgments. They belong to the Son and Father in heaven (see 1 Cor. 3:21-23).

©2023 Jonathan Leeman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.