Conversion: How God Creates a People

by Michael Lawrence

Overview

Does what a church believes about how people become Christians change how we do evangelism? In this concise book, Michael Lawrence explains the doctrine of conversion and helps us consider the relationship between what we believe about how people are saved and our approach to sharing the gospel in the context of the local church. Readers of this book will understand how the local church should participate in the conversion process through ordinary means, such as biblical preaching and intentional relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433556524
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	06/20/2017
Series:	Building Healthy Churches
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	612 KB

About the Author

Michael Lawrence (PhD, Cambridge University; MDiv, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) serves as the lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church.

Michael Lawrence (PhD, Cambridge University; MDiv, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) serves as the lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church.

Read an Excerpt

Conversion

How god creates A people

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By Michael Lawrence

Good News Publishers

Copyright © 2017 Michael Lawrence
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5652-4

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CHAPTER 1

NEW, NOT NICE

The Necessity of Regeneration

In the introduction, I mentioned my friend who was concerned that his well-mannered adult children weren't really Christians. You might say they were nice, but not new — not new creations.

His experience raises questions about the doctrine of conversion, as well as what that doctrine should look like in the life of a church. It's crucial to get both our doctrine and our practices right. Churches should believe that God makes people radically new, not just nice, through conversion. But they should be able not only to write this out on paper, but also to live it out. What does that look like?

In two of the most important passages in Scripture for understanding conversion, both the prophet Ezekiel and Jesus help us answer that question. Let's start with Jesus. He said we must be "born again" to enter the kingdom of God. Speaking to a Pharisee named Nicodemus, Jesus observed,

"Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, "You must be born again." The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:3-8)

THE APPEAL OF NICE

It's worth recognizing the powerful appeal of nice.

Nicodemus and Pharisees like him believed that people entered the kingdom of God by being nice, which for them meant being a good Jew: keeping the Law of Moses, going to the temple, offering all the right sacrifices, and staying away from Gentiles. I'm not suggesting Nicodemus thought he was perfect. He probably knew he should be a better person. Perhaps that's why he went to Jesus in the first place. But at the end of the day, moral righteousness was the standard to which he aspired. Nice people got into the kingdom.

These days, there are lots of different kinds of nice. There's the polite but detached tolerance of "live and let live" nice. There's the socially conscious and politically engaged nice. There's religious nice in many different denominational and faith-community forms. There's "spiritual but not religious" nice. There's even what's known in my town as "Portland nice," a sort of nonconfrontational, "let's not make anyone feel uncomfortable, even though we're silently judging and dismissing you in our minds" nice.

But for all the different kinds of nice, the appeal of nice hasn't changed much in the last two thousand years. To be a nice person, a good person, a person who's becoming a better person, is to feel good about yourself. It's that appeal of moral self-commendation that binds our modern variations together into a common religious program that Nicodemus would have recognized (see Luke 10:25-29). Nice allows you to commend yourself to others, and maybe even to God. Nice gives you the means of self-justification and the ability to vindicate your life to whoever is asking. That's appealing.

THE ASSUMPTIONS OF NICE

The appeal of nice is always based on three ideas: an optimistic view of human beings, a domesticated view of God, and a view of religion as a means of moral self-reform. Fundamentally, Nicodemus assumes that he is able to do whatever he needs to do in order to vindicate himself to God. He assumes that God is the kind of God that will be pleased with his best efforts, and he assumes that the point of religion is to help him become a better person. This is how nice works. God wants me to be good. I'm able to be good. Religion will help.

No churches ever explicitly teach the religion of nice. In fact, they typically teach the exact opposite. But those same churches are filled with people who believe that God will accept them based on how good they've been. I've heard it on too many living rooms couches and nursing home beds. Not perfect — no one ever says that — but good enough.

Can you relate to Nicodemus? I can. When I was a young college student, I began to worry that God wouldn't accept me. So I started a little conversation with God: "God, I will quit drinking. God, I'll start reading my Bible and going to church more often. So please don't send me to hell, but let me into heaven." Nicodemus and I had the same assumptions. I can be good. God will be impressed. Religion will help. This wasn't the prayer of a pagan. It was the prayer of someone who'd grown up in the church, who'd heard the gospel countless times, and who believed he was a Christian. Yet the religion of nice corresponded to what my heart — like every fallen heart-desired. I wanted to be able to justify myself. And nice was the way to do it.

The role of religion in the project of self-justification is well encapsulated by a project run by World Weavers in support of the Blood Foundation, a nongovernment organization in Thailand. The program immerses people in different faith traditions for a month for a small fee. They offer "[Buddhist] Monk for a Month," "Muslim for a Month," and "the Rasta Roots Spiritual Experience." The assumption is there's no need to convert or become a true believer. Rather, religions help people become better, nicer people, and any religion can do the trick.

This assumption that all religions are essentially the same underneath their cultural wrappers is why so many people in the West have abandoned religion altogether. If the point is simply to be a better person today than I was yesterday, then why do I need any religion at all? Of course, the real question that must be answered is, by whose standards will my self-justification project be measured? My own? Society's? Which society's? God's? If religion is nothing more than an aid to self-improvement, we'd all be emotionally better off if we abandoned the moral and religious project of self-justification and instead adopted the psychological project of personal growth and self-acceptance. The therapeutic professions have been telling us this for the last century.

My point is this: the appeal of nice is not only that it panders to our prideful desire to justify ourselves, it also dispenses with the need to justify ourselves to God altogether. It substitutes feeling good about myself for being in right relationship with God and neighbor. It numbs my sense of guilt, soothes my anxious insecurity, and promotes the illusion that I am in control of my own fate on judgment day.

THE PRACTICE OF NICE

What makes the moralistic program of nice difficult to spot in our evangelical churches is that it's almost never taught explicitly. Instead, it's the natural condition of our unregenerate selves. It follows us into the church like walking inside with the aroma of the outdoors: it's hard to smell on yourself because you are so accustomed to it. But the smell shows up in a number of ways:

• We condemn the world's sin more than our own.

• We put sins in a hierarchy, and tolerate some sins (especially our own) more than others.

• In church, we sing songs and pray prayers of praise, not songs and prayers of confession.

• We describe our own sins as "mistakes."

• We use Bible stories to teach children to be good rather than to point them to a Savior: "Be like David" not "You need a new and better David, who is Christ."

Perhaps the main way we teach nice is how we present Christ. We commend Christ and the gospel as a method of self-improvement. It's not that we fail to talk about the cross or even sin. It's that sin is presented as a problem primarily for how it messes up our lives and relationships and gets in the way of our goals. And Jesus Christ is presented as the one who will change all that. We tell people that Jesus will make a difference in their marriages and in their parenting. Jesus will bring love, joy, and peace to their home. Jesus will give them renewed purpose at work. Come to Jesus, and he will make a difference in your life.

Jesus, of course, does make a difference in the lives of believers. It's just not the difference of a better life now in all the ways we might want. After all, what did Jesus say? "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matt. 16:24). That means Jesus might make a difference in your marriage by giving you the grace to persevere with a spouse who no longer loves you. He might bring love, joy, and peace to your home by making you an agent rather than a recipient of those things. He might give you renewed purpose at work by changing your attitude rather than your job description.

When we present Jesus as the solution to our self-diagnosed problems, many on the outside of church aren't convinced. They don't stop playing the game of nice. They just don't see the need to play the game at church nor evidence that we play it better than they do.

Meanwhile, people inside the church are confused as to what biblical Christianity is in the first place. So many of us learned the message of nice in churches that introduced us to a Jesus who promised to improve us, not a Jesus who calls his followers to die to themselves; these churches taught us to be nice without making sure we were new. I fear this is why so many of my friends' children have walked away from Christianity. They haven't given up on nice. They've simply discovered that they don't need Jesus to be nice.

THE NECESSITY OF NEW

The appeal of nice is strong. It plays to our vanity and pride. But three times in John 3 Jesus confronts us with the need to be made new:

• "Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." (v. 3)

• "Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." (v. 5)

• "You must be born again." (v. 7)

If we would be right with God, we don't need to improve ourselves. We need a complete restart. In fact, the Bible uses several theological concepts to describe what Jesus means:

• Regeneration, which means being born again, with an emphasis on the divine source of that new life (1 Pet. 1:3)

• Re-creation, which means being made anew as part of the end-time new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15)

• Transformation, which means being given a new nature (Col. 3:10)

A radical change must occur in us. But the word that the Bible never uses to describe what Jesus is talking about is reformation. You might reform a church, but not a dead heart. The personal change that Jesus says we need goes much deeper; it reaches down to our very nature.

According to Scripture, God made us to worship him, to love him, and to find in him our deepest satisfaction. That was our nature as he originally created it. But when our first parents decided to rebel against God, they didn't just break a rule, they corrupted their nature. Theologians call this "original sin," and we have all inherited it. Created with a nature to love God, we now have a nature that is bent in on loving self. From birth, Paul says, we are dead in our sins, and walk in the passions of our flesh (Eph. 2:1-3). It's like dead men walking. This is why nice doesn't work. We must be made new.

THE PROBLEM OF NICE AND THE PROMISE OF NEW

The necessity of being born again flows from five biblical truths: the inability of human beings, the holiness of God, the grace of the gospel, the power of God's Spirit, and the creation of a people.

1. Our inability. Jesus makes a radical distinction between flesh and Spirit, that is, between us and God: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). No matter how good the flesh is, it cannot produce the spiritual life that's needed if we would be right with God (see also Rom. 8:5-8). It's not that we tried hard, but fell short. Or meant well, but got sidetracked. It's that our sinful nature desires to please the flesh rather than God. Even when we do the right thing morally, we do it for the wrong reasons — to justify ourselves and bring ourselves glory. This is one reason the Bible describes us as dead and not just sick (Eph. 2:1-3). Like a dead person, we are incapable of loving God for God's sake.

2. God's holiness. What's more, God is not like us. The Bible is unrelenting in its presentation of God's holiness. God's holiness means that he's in a different category from us altogether. He's utterly set apart from sin and consecrated to his own glory. He's uncompromising in his goodness. He refuses to tolerate evil. He's not impressed with how good we are — with our nice — because we pursue niceness for our own glory rather than God's (see Isa. 64:6). So we stand under God's judgment, another reason the Bible refers to us as dead. And it's a judgment we deserve.

3. God's grace. Yet there's good news: God is gracious! God himself took the initiative toward us. While we were still his enemies, God sent his Son to take on our flesh and to live the life we were originally created to live. He lived not a nice life, not a good life, but a perfect and sinless life, a life wholly devoted to God's glory. Then Jesus offered his life on the cross as a sacrifice, taking God's wrath on himself as a substitute for anyone who would turn from his sins and put his faith in him. To prove God accepted his sacrifice, three days later Jesus rose from the dead.

4. God's Spirit. But that's just the beginning of God's initiative toward us. Jesus speaks about the Spirit's work in John 3, which he compares to the wind over which we have no control. When God regenerates us, the Holy Spirit of God instantaneously unites us to Christ. In that union the Spirit takes all the benefit of what the Son has done — his resurrection life, his righteousness, his grace — and applies it all to us. This changes our nature, gives us the new birth, makes us new creatures. We then turn to Christ in repentance and faith, are justified by his grace, and are adopted into his family to follow him in a relationship of love and trust.

5. Creation of a people. Hundreds of years before Jesus's conversation with Nicodemus, God promised his grace and Spirit through the prophet Ezekiel. He also promised that he would make us a people.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules ... and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. (Ezek. 36:26-29)

God has kept this promise through the work of Christ. He makes us new creatures. He grants us his Spirit. He makes us a people. And he forgives our sin.

WHY THE DOCTRINE OF REGENERATION MATTERS FOR THE CHRISTIAN

The truth that God actually makes us new has enormous implications for the life of the church, both corporately and individually.

Let's start with the individual. A Christian has a new nature, one that is bent toward God rather than away from him. Jonathan Edwards described the regenerate person as someone who has been given a taste for God, like someone who has tasted honey and now has a sense of its sweetness. That doesn't mean that a Christian doesn't sin anymore. But the old nature is no longer in control. Christ is, and the new nature has a new set of desires for God. The new creation may just be a seed, but that seed will grow.

What does that mean for my friend's children, whom I introduced in the introduction? To begin with, it means they needed to be taught that a Christian isn't someone who prays a prayer and tries hard to be good. Instead, a Christian is someone whose heart has been transformed by God's grace, who is characterized by repentance and faith, who desires to be with God and know him more. It means churches should not offer assurance through baptism to children so quickly, but give a different kind of encouragement instead: the encouragement to examine themselves to see if they're in the faith (2 Cor. 13:5); to look for fruit that the Spirit produces (Gal. 5:22-23); to follow Jesus in self-sacrificing love rather than self-righteous morality (1 John 4:7); to pursue a relationship of love with God through loving brothers and sisters in Christ (1 John 3:10; 4:21). They needed to be taught that regeneration is God's work, not theirs.

If these two nice kids had been taught these things, they might still have grown up, gone off to college, and abandoned any walk with Christ, while maintaining their morality. But they wouldn't be deceived into thinking that they were Christians. They would know that they were just nice kids, and nothing more. On the other hand, this teaching might have been used by the Spirit to prick their consciences, awaken them from complacency, and bring them to a vital profession of faith in Christ.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Conversion by Michael Lawrence. Copyright © 2017 Michael Lawrence. Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Series Preface, 11,
Introduction, 13,
1 New, Not Nice: The Necessity of Regeneration, 17,
2 Saved, Not Sincere: God's Work, Not Ours, 31,
3 Disciples, Not Decisions: The Character of Our Response, 47,
4 Holy, Not Healed: Implications for the Christian Life, 65,
5 Distinct, Not Designed: Implications for the Corporate Life of the Church, 79,
6 Summon, Don't Sell: Implications for Our Evangelism, 89,
7 Assess before You Assure: Implications for Ministry, 99,
8 Charitable, Not Chary: The Danger of an Overly Pure Church, 109,
Conclusion, 121,
Notes, 129,
General Index, 131,
Scripture Index, 132,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Conversion is essential and misunderstood. Lawrence understands this and explains what the Bible teaches simply and compellingly. This small book is a big gift.”
—Mark Dever, Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, DC

“This discipleship resource has it all—pastoral clarity, urgent relevance, practical brevity, and faithfulness to the Scriptures. Line by line, every chapter contains fodder for significant discussions on what the Word says about evangelism, conversion, and the church. I’m so thankful that Michael Lawrence wrote this book—I’ll be referring to it often.”
—Gloria Furman, author, Labor with Hope and Missional Motherhood

“Down-to-earth, clear, practical, straight shooting, biblically cogent treatment of the nature and necessity of conversion. This is an excellent book.”
—David F. Wells, Senior Distinguished Research Professor of Theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“This is a biblically informed and extremely relevant book for pastors and sheep alike. Michael Lawrence hits the nail on the head when it comes to the conversion experience. Being born again is not the result of a superficial, emotional, and man-motivated prayer. This is a call to re-examine the Scriptures to see that conversion is a divine work from beginning to end, which should be externally evident by the way true disciples live in love-motivated obedience to Christ; by the interest they show in belonging to a local body of believers to whom they are accountable; and by the way they live the gospel in holiness and practice evangelism. Conversion requires repentance, and repentance requires a work of the Holy Spirit. I am delighted to see this book published at this time.”
—Miguel Núñez, Senior Pastor, International Baptist Church of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

“In this important book Michael Lawrence outlines the biblical theology of conversion with clarity. The aim here is not to suggest that conversion makes people nice, because it is possible to be nice and not be converted. On the other hand, conversion is not a matter of mere subjectivity, for it is possible to feel converted and not be. Lawrence argues that conversion is an act that begins with God (regeneration) and bears fruit in men (repentance and faith). This overflow of God’s grace not only allows us to repent and believe, but also enables us to be inserted into the people that God created in Christ Jesus. In short, conversion culminates in membership in the local church. I heartily recommend this book.”
—Jonas Madureira, Senior Pastor, Word Baptist Church, São Paulo, Brazil

“Real conversion is not a facade of ‘niceness,’ nor does it depend on a decision made once years ago. True conversion is nothing less than rebirth, new creation, and new life in Christ. This book offers a clear and compelling account of conversion, according to the Scriptures. And it shows how essential a right understanding is for the life of every believer and every church. Highly recommended.”
—Constantine R. Campbell, Senior Vice President of Global Content, Our Daily Bread

“With theological precision, but with plain and accessible language, Michael Lawrence guides us through the Scriptures to help us understand what true conversion is and what are the fruits that evidence it. This is a book I would like to place in the hands of all members of our church.”
—Sugel Michelen, Pastor, Iglesia Bíblica del Señor Jesucristo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

“If there is a subject that Satan has tried to confuse people about, it is the nature of true conversion. What better way to get religious people to land in hell than by letting them think they are converted when in fact they are not? Michael Lawrence has clarified this matter for us by building up from the oft-forgotten truth of regeneration, which is the foundation of conversion. He ends with the practical implications of this truth when held in biblical proportions. His pen is that of a skillful writer, and it oozes with wise pastoral counsel. I highly recommend that those of us who know that we are truly converted should also read this delightful book so as to avoid leading others astray.”
—Conrad Mbewe, Pastor, Kabwata Baptist Church, Lusaka, Zambia; Founding Chancellor, African Christian University