Growing up in evangelicalism, I was one of those kids who felt mediocre at meetings where ex-drug addicts gave their "testimony" of suddenly losing their craving for LSD. My grandmother used to speak of two groups of Christians: those who were "saved," and those who were "gloriously saved." Everything a good, clean Baptist youth is supposed to be, I didn't "dance, drink, smoke, or chew, or go with girls who do." So unimpressive was my testimony that I did not even remember the day I was "saved." That, of course, was a problem’a big one.
From time to time, I even played with the idea of embellishing my spiritual autobiography in the interest of becoming a "trophy" like these other folks (none of whom, I am certain, had embellished their story). The time spent at a friend's house past my curfew could become a period of rebellion.
In many evangelical circles, one must remember the "big day." Birthdays would be celebrated with a modified version of the usual song: "Happy birthday to you’only one will not do. It takes two for salvation’how many have you?" Since I "asked Jesus into my heart" on a weekly basis as a child, I simply selected age seven as the date to avoid embarrassment.
Finally, as I was going through Paul's Epistle to the Romans and wanted to share it with the youth group as I entered high school, the pastor, worried about my interest in the theology of that book, asked the familiar query, "Son, when were you saved?" But this time I wasn't going to reach for a date out of a hat. Before I could catch myself, I heard myself answering: "In God's plan, I was saved before the foundation of the world. Then, in God's sacrifice, I was saved when Christ died and was raised, and I am being saved by God's preserving and sanctifying grace."
Decisional Regeneration
Ironically, many who would accuse baptismal regeneration of being a form of works-righteousness have no problem with decisional regeneration: the belief that God has done his part by providing a means of forgiveness, and waits patiently for us to "let him have his way" and "let Jesus come into our heart" by "making Jesus Savior and Lord." Many Christians spend their lives questioning whether they are really "saved" because of the nature of their conversion experience, while others who have no interest in Christ, ignoring his means of grace and living as unbelievers, feel "safe and secure from all alarm" on the basis of an evangelistic hoop they jumped through once upon a time. But what does Scripture say about conversion?
The Order of Salvation
The conversionist vocabulary ("making Jesus Savior and Lord," "making a decision," "accepting Jesus into your heart," and so on) is largely the product of an Arminian "order of salvation" that makes faith logically prior to regeneration. Because terms can be used differently over time, we must be very careful on this one.
First, there is a problem of definition. When the Reformers wrote about "regeneration," they were not thinking about the new birth (as most of us do today), but about "sanctification"; that is, the process of inward moral transformation by the Holy Spirit's gradual renewal of our sinful affections. Thus the Reformers, understanding by "regeneration" what we today refer to as "sanctification," insisted against Roman Catholic objections that faith preceded regeneration. But they never would have argued that the new birth is caused by our decision.
The new birth, unlike sanctification, is not a process, but the instantaneous and gratuitous resurrection of those who are spiritually dead. Paul writes, "While you were dead he made you alive" (Eph. 1:5). "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. 2:14). "Therefore, it does not depend on a person's decision or effort, but on God's mercy" (Rom. 9:16). As Jesus declared, "No one can come to me unless the Father draws him" (John 6:44). Then does it matter whether we receive Christ? You bet! "To those who received him, he gave the right to become children of God." But read the rest of the verse: "children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but of God" (John 1:12’13).
While we have the responsibility to accept God's gracious provision, we must never think that such acceptance produced God's acceptance of us. It was because he accepted us, made a decision for us, and made himself our Savior and Lord that we accept his gift. The new birth gives us the principle of spiritual life that causes us to cry out, "Abba, Father"; without it all of our works, all of our movements, all of our decisions and rededications are nothing more than the stirrings of those who are only alive, and utterly alive, to sin.
The children of the Reformation, though differing on specifics, join voices in the biblical affirmation that "salvation is of the Lord" (Jonah 2:9) and that even our new birth is the result of grace alone, not of human cooperation with grace.
The Style
of Conversion
It's important to distinguish regeneration (or the new birth) from conversion. In the former, we are passive recipients. The Spirit draws us inwardly to Christ through the gospel proclaimed. As the sign and seal of this unilateral act of grace, baptism is something God does to and for us. Born again, we now exercise repentance and faith. We are active’not yet in good works, but in consciously embracing Christ with all of his benefits. United to Christ through faith, we are justified and also begin to grow in truth and holiness.
Conversion (repentance and faith) is a lifelong journey in grace. Some of us can put a date on it, but most Christians throughout church history can't recall a decisive moment. The first should rejoice in the palpable experience of an obvious change; the latter should rejoice in God's faithfulness to his covenant promises. Neither should lodge this joy in conversion itself but in Christ, "for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart" (1 John 3:20).
Here we are faced with these two equally disastrous alternatives: either to make repentance a once-and-for-all external act of penance (for example, by going through the modern sacrament of the altar call) or by making it exclusively internal, as if it does not matter if you hate your neighbor, as long as you mean to do otherwise.
Instead we need to recapture a sense of conversion as lifelong repentance. Conversion is never complete in this life and is always demanding. Since we are converted (Rom. 6), the process of repentance and sanctifying conversion is not a goal to which we strive, but a reality from which we live. We do not live godly lives in order to become godly, but because we are godly in Christ: declared righteous already in justification, growing in Christ as we draw our life-giving sap from the Vine. If our justification depended on our conversion experience, we would never be justified, for conversion is always imperfect in this life. Once again, this is why we must insist that while the new birth precedes faith, the process of conversion follows faith. Yet even in this lifelong process, we are never moving on from Christ and the gospel, but returning to Christ as the only source of our daily repentance and faith.
If this is the nature of conversion, the style of conversion will differ from person to person. Those who have had dramatic beginnings in conversion ought to treasure the radical nature of God's grace they have experienced. They ought to be able to joyfully share this experience with others without cynical slurs like, "Becky 'got religion.'" But those who have been raised in Christian homes and have never rebelled against the promise God made to believers and their children are also God's people and are also being converted. Promised or actually begun in their infancy, conversion and regeneration become as rich a treasure of Christ's presence as memories of "before" and "after" portraits can be for new converts.
The Covenant
The focus of the gospel should be Christ, not conversion, and the date we are to remember is a dark afternoon nearly two millennia ago outside Jerusalem's city gate. In the big picture, the Bible records two essential facts: God is the one acting in our redemption, and he is redeeming a people, not just individuals. Sadly, evangelicalism's conversionist mentality downplays these two central convictions.
Nowhere in either testament are there calls to "let Jesus have his way" or to "make him Lord of your life." The gospel is a promise, not merely an offer: "I will be your God and you will be my people" (Lev. 26:12). We do not "let" the Alpha and Omega, the Resurrection and the Life, the Author and Finisher of Faith do anything! It is because of who he is and what he does, not because of what we allow him to do, that he is our Savior and Lord. We do not "make him Lord" any more than someone in the mailroom makes the CEO one's boss or a child makes her father her parent. The covenant, with all of its blessings (election, redemption, justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification), is God's idea; he started it and he will finish it (Phil. 1:6).
Furthermore, this Sovereign God is redeeming not merely individuals who say "yes," but "a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that [we] may declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once [we] were not a people, but now [we] are the people of God" (1 Pet. 2:9’10). God's goal is a redeemed and converted people. Unlike the Marines, he is not just "looking for a few good men" but is creating a new humanity out of an ungodly race. He does not simply want a few outstanding trumpet players who "wow" their adoring fans (not a few "testimonies" have fit that picture), but an orchestra where the attraction lies in the harmony. Therefore, a correct relationship to God can take place only within the context of the covenant community.
We enter this new society through baptism, as circumcision served in the Old Testament. This analogy, far from an imposition of a theological system, is directly affirmed by our Lord and his apostles. For instance, Paul tells us that we were united with Christ through "the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism" (Col. 2:11). As Peter assured his audience that the gospel promise was still "for you and for your children," so too we must challenge any conversionistic evangelism that ignores the covenantal context of conversion.
In this way, the anxiety of Christian children about being converted or born again is removed. They are called to deepen their understanding and experience of God and their inheritance with the saints, but they are not to turn inward, searching for that one radical change in their behavior they brought about one day when they decided to follow Jesus. Our society is given to conversionism: self-help cures, self-improvement programs with cheerful testimonies and "before" and "after" photos. Dramatic contrasts and sensational reports, while calculated to bring glory to God, often bring glory to those who had the sense to turn their life around. And there is a danger of so emphasizing the covenantal aspect that children are not encouraged to develop their own relationship with God. But the guardrail must also be raised against the opposite and more general danger in evangelicalism: individualistic and triumphalist visions that rob God of his glory and his people of their comfort and assurance.
Let us, therefore, honor conversion not only as an event of turning from sin to Christ, but also as a lifelong struggle. It is not a struggle to inherit the Promised Land, since this is a free gift secured for us by the electing, redeeming, and saving grace of the Triune God. Rather, it is a lifelong struggle toward this everlasting inheritance. We have been saved (justification); we are being saved (sanctification); we will be saved (glorification). Regardless of how unimpressive our experiences of growth, zeal, and spiritual success, God has promised this land to all who have placed their faith in Christ alone. Let us long for greater and deeper conversion by casting a skeptical eye on approaches that make radical conversion and instant change in behavior and personality a mark of a genuine new birth. While the new birth, our spiritual resurrection, is instantaneous and not the product of our cooperation, conversion is a marathon in which we struggle earnestly, and the crown of life awaits us at the finish line. It is not the survival of the fittest, but the endurance of the weakest, "looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith" (Heb. 12:2).
