Tests For Christian Conversion, Part 2b

“TESTS FOR CHRISTIAN CONVERSION, Part 2b”

Second Corinthians 13.5

Please turn in your Bible to Second Corinthians 13.5, where we find that portion of God’s Word I will use as the starting point for the second half of the message I recently began to present to you. Once you find that verse, please stand so we can read God’s Word together:

“Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.”

If you are a Christian, if you are genuinely saved, if your sins are forgiven, if you are heaven-bound, then you are a new creature, and the old things of your life have been replaced by new things. Is your personality changed so that you are humble in a way you were not before? Or, are you the same self-willed and stubborn individual you’ve always been?

Do you actually serve God, or do you think serving God and being involved in Christian ministry are for other people? Do you attend Church regularly and faithfully, or is such extremism reserved only for those who have less important occupations, who are somehow less needful for the betterment of mankind than are you? Additionally, do you object to your spouse faithfully attending Church, and are you threatened by the level of commitment to serving Christ displayed by the person you are married to? Some husbands do not want their wives attending Church more than once a week or committed to a ministry. Some wives throw up roadblocks to their mates attending Church without them when they do not want to attend.

Before you ask yourself such questions, which have to do with whether or not you presently are a Christian, spend some time dealing with whether or not you ever became a Christian. It doesn’t make sense to spend time evaluating whether or not you are a Christian if, in fact, your so-called conversion experience, which is how you supposedly became a Christian, does not pass muster.

A valid approach to examining an individual’s credibility as a Christian (and such examinations are reasonable, proper, and called for in God’s Word), is the present conduct of your life. The Christian life is so much more than the mere existence of an unsaved person with a new destiny tacked on to the end. The Christian life is actually new life in Christ.

It is necessary to question the salvation of anyone who does not regularly attend Church, who does not routinely tithe, who does not habitually read the Bible, who does not frequently pray, who does not love being around other Christians, and who does not actually serve God in a describable, an accountable, and a reasonable way. Why so? Because these are things Christians do. All Christians do these things. Christians have always done these things. We know these things to be God’s will, God’s way of nourishing and sustaining us, and the most basic ingredients in the Christian style of life.

However, this is not the only way to examine a person’s Christian credibility. Because we live in these last days of spiritual apostasy, with so many people claiming to be born again who are actually lost, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth,[1] and having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof,[2] Another valuable tool is to subject yourself to the implicit tests of conversion in our text.

We previously considered Richard Baxter’s first test of Christian conversion, which he derived from his personal study of God’s Word. I remind you that Baxter’s tests of conversion were accepted by most spiritually minded pastors in his day and for centuries afterward. We now take up the second portion of Baxter’s second test of conversion. Let me again read Baxter’s words on the handout given to you:

“That man who was never led to Christ for deliverance, nor beaten out of the conceit of merit of sufficiency in himself, nor brought to admire the glorious design of God in the great work of redemption, nor to relish the sweetness of the glad tidings of salvation brought to distressed sinners in the gospel, so that his heart was never warmed with the sense of the Redeemer’s love, but who hears and reads the gospel as a common story, or as if it were not he who was thus redeemed, is yet unconverted, whatever he may seem or think.”[3]

Baxter’s second test of conversion is not a clarion call to judgmentalism. He was not urging his readers to take up his tests so that they might walk around with an air of superiority to condescend upon others and pronounce them lost. That’s not ever been the goal. It was his desire, just as it is my desire, for you to use this test of conversion for self-evaluation. Then, should your soul become troubled, and you find yourself in need of the help of a pastor to guide you to Christ, I urge you to come to me.

Take the time to consider Baxter’s words. They are written on the handout so that you can do that. Notice also that his comments show that he recognized conversion to be a profound break in a person’s life.

You must have been converted if you are a Christian, for no sinner can become a Christian without conversion. “Turn thou me, and I shall be turned,” we previously read from Jeremiah 31.8.

The question is, Are you so turned? Has the Lord God so completely turned you about that there has been a great divide in your life? Much more than just breaking a bad habit or adopting a good one. I speak of something fundamental, running as deep in you as your immortal soul. Are you converted?

Let us once more consider the before and the after of conversion. As the Rocky Mountains form the great continental divide of North America, and separate the East from the West, I challenge you to investigate to see if there has been such a great watershed of real conversion in your life.

First, HAVE YOU THE KINDS OF EXPERIENCES BEFORE CONVERSION THAT CONVERTED PEOPLE TRULY HAD, OR ARE YOU LACKING THOSE PREPARATORY EXPERIENCES FOUND SO OFTEN IN THOSE TRULY COME TO CHRIST?

That sermon video is https://www.youtube.com/live/86jg8WMruqg?si=qeB-9uXDRLg4_zMG

This we considered in part one of this message. We now turn to part two of the message,

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GREAT DIVIDE. PERHAPS NOT ALWAYS IMMEDIATELY, BUT EVENTUALLY, ARE THESE YOUR EXPERIENCES?

There are three questions I will put to you to honestly, with brutal frankness for the welfare of your immortal soul, for you to consider and answer to yourself. You may wonder why you should, brutally and honestly, consider and answer the questions I will ask you. So that you will not be among those the Savior referred to when He said, in Matthew 7.22-23,

22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?

23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

I do not want that to happen to you. What genuine love would I have had for my mother or my daughter by standing by while my mom continued her pretense of Christianity based on her occasional visits to Church and her infrequent allusions to the Bible? Could I have let my mother’s delusion continue without challenge and, at the same time, risked my daughter falling into the same trap, all the while pretending to love them both? Had my mother truly loved her grandchildren, she would have turned to Christ and lived for Him and served Him continually, not intermittently, sporadically, and conveniently.

Here are the three questions.

Question number one. Do you greatly admire God’s redemption? In other words, is God’s plan of salvation a wonderful and marvelous thing to you? It isn’t if you never tell anyone about it. Are you like a cheerleader who reacts to your team’s touchdown when you hear the Gospel being preached, when you see the Savior being pointed to? When you are reminded,

“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,”

Acts 4.12, does it excite you? Does it thrill your soul? Does your heart well up inside you? Or does the thing barely attract your notice? Is it a wonderful thing to you that the Just would sacrifice Himself for the unjust, so He might bring you to God? So He might bring others to God? Does your voice sometimes catch when a particular hymn seems to capture the glory that filled your soul when heaven came down? Or are you distracted by more immediate concerns?

Question number two. Do you now seem to be aware of and conscious of God’s love for you as His child? Do you love Him loving you? We know God loves the world. And for that reason, He sent His Son to suffer and bleed and die for our sins. But do you recognize that you are now in the “much more” relationship of actually being a child of God? His plan is for us to someday stand before Him,

“That we should be holy and without blame before him in love,”

Ephesians 1.4. Do you not detect the evidence of your Father’s providential watch care over you, day in and day out? And does not your conscious love for Jesus Christ grow daily as you consider Him Who endured such contradiction of sinners ... for you, and for others, Hebrews 12.3? Some people pretend to be Christians. Other people think they are Christians. But there is no love of God shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost because He is not given to them.[4] Chastening does not occur with them.[5] Suffering is not seen by them as having a grand purpose and design, as they are motivated by God’s great love. There are some things a pastor cannot do. There are some things that only you know in the depths of your heart. Since your conversion, has your love of God been shed abroad in your heart in this manner? No? No child is truly convinced he is his father’s son whose rear end is never spanked when he disobeys or is foolish, which is why such a child does not obey his dad. You obey your dad if you obey no one else. But your father proves himself to be your father by chastising you! Has God ever so loved you that He spanked you?

Question number three. Is the Gospel something more to you than just a story? Does it now mean something to you? When you hear the thunder and see the lightning, do you think of your great God almighty, Creator of heaven and earth? When you contemplate the might and majesty of God, does it strike you from time to time that though He created the universe with but a spoken word, He channels all of His infinite power to save sinners through this thing we call the Gospel? When Jesus died, was buried, and rose again from the dead on the third day, and all that He accomplished in securing the ground for saving sinners who embrace Him, who come to Him, who will trust Him, so also was the Father and the Holy Spirit engaged in that watershed event in the history of the universe! Is that not exciting to your soul? Does that not stir your spirit? How can it not open your mouth? Do you see yourself as a player in God’s unfolding drama of redemption? Are you someone who has no significance, or do you see yourself as someone profoundly important to God because the blood of His beloved Son was shed to secure your salvation and to cleanse you of all your sins? Does that not grant to you some significance?

Please look at your handout once more. Read along silently while I read Baxter’s second test for conversion yet again. And consider what I’ve said, and the Scripture verses I’ve read, quoted, and alluded to.

Please understand that although conversion is not something that you experience in such a way that you would actually “feel” yourself reconciled to God at the instant you, by faith, embrace Christ, there are feelings associated with it. Have you ever had such feelings?

Before you were converted, your conceit and self-sufficiency were squeezed out of you, or you would not have been willing to come to Christ. As well, you were distressed before your conversion, or you would not have come to Christ for relief from your sins.

But now that you are supposedly converted, you glory in the plan of salvation. Your heart is warmed by God’s and the Lord Jesus Christ’s great love for you. And the Gospel really means something to you.

Conversion. It’s truly a watershed experience for a believer. Every memory and experience is categorized as to whether it was before or after conversion. Why? Because conversion changes everything!

As the continental divide of North America separates the East and the West, so conversion separates the old man from the new man, the sinner from the saint, the damned from the delivered, the merely religious from the truly righteous.

As we pray, allow me to ask you what you have concluded after this second self-test for conversion. Does it describe you? Are you truly converted?

__________

[1] 2 Timothy 3.7

[2] 2 Timothy 3.5

[3] Richard Baxter, A Treatise On Conversion (New York: American Tract Society, 1830), pages 193-195.

[4] Romans 5.5

[5] Hebrews 12.5-11

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Calvary Road Baptist Church

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