How to Become a Ch ris tian continued
done en masse; it must be done individually. There is a vast leakage in our churches, people joining them after proper instruction but then somehow filtering away, like a stream-losing itself in a marsh. We shake our heads and wonder what is the matter. But the matter is not far to seek: they should, in most cases, have been converted before they were taken in. (I say in most cases, because at times people get con verted after they have come into the church, and we must not try to box the Holy Spirit.) What troubles me is the thousands, yes, tens of thousands, in our churches who have never been converted at all, and who, traveling at their present rate, never will be. People need intense individual attention. We begin the actual Christian experience when we surrender as much of ourselves as we can to as much of Christ as we understand. That is an honest, scientific approach. You do not say you be lieve something you don’t believe. You begin posi tively where you are. You may not know too much about yourself, but you recognize your sin and need, the need to be different, very different, and your in ability to change yourself. Christ may still be only the best that you know. All right—begin there. Make an act of self-surrender. Do this with another if it will help rivet it, and it very likely will. But make it. Gather up your sins and needs, put them together, bring them to Him for forgiveness and help. Commit yourself to Him in an act of dedication. This act centers in the will, not the emotions. Its reality is not to be determined by whether you see any stars or bright lights, or feel a tingle along your spine; you may and you may not—it is not important. What is important is that you let go, let go of your sins and your fears and your, inhibitions. Do not look for emotional proof, look for practical proof by the presence in your life of new power, new integration, new joy, new love for people. Jesus Christ has made the first move toward you. He has made the promises, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out,” “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man will open unto me, I will come in . . . That is His promise. You do not need to go out and take Him by the arm and pull Him in. You need only to open the door, wide, and invite Him, and He will come in. That is His promise, and its fulfillment is the experience of millions who now know Him as their Lord and Saviour. Time was when I thought conversion was some thing for the very good or the very bad, and as I wasn’t either, I wasn’t a very good subject for it. I had been brought up in the church, and I do not remember when I was not going into the ministry. Is that conversion? Not necessarily. I thought very good people, like St. Francis, got
converted—or very bad people like St. Augustine in his early days. Present-day saints may have been converted, but I really thought they were probably always like that. And then drunks in the back streets needed it. But why good church-people? I’ll tell you why. The test of a man’s conversion is whether he has enough Christianity to get it over to other people. If he hasn’t, there is something wrong in it. I could not do that. I began lay-reading when I was 17. I used to have a small summer congregation for whom I held serv ices. Two or three men in that group met tragic experiences. Why? Partly because what I gave them was so general. There was no conversion in it. I could not get it across. I was like a Scotch friend of mine who said that while his friends could not make him drunk, he couldn’t make them sober! There was a recurrent pattern of failure—at those services, and working in army camps during the First World War. Individuals were seeking spiritual help and I could not give it to them. Their faces still haunt me. I went out to China to teach in a school in old Peking. Again, men were seeking. I should have failed them in the same way, but out there I met a man who challenged me as to whether I had ever made a full commitment of my life to Jesus Christ. He held me to it till I did it. And the very next day a Chinese businessman made his Christian decision with me. Test yourself by this: Can I get across to other people what I believe about Jesus Christ? If not, what real good am I to them, and what real good am I to Him? There are those who associate conversion with wild religious excitement. They have had enough of that in their time. Some of them seek dignified and formal churches to get away from all that. So far as goes the refusal to be intellectually honest, so far as goes identifying conversion with mere emotional arousal, so far as goes the search for a church which holds to some objective verities and not merely a lot of subjective feelings, this may be well and good. But let us be careful we do not throw out the baby with the bath water. Real religion never runs on worn tracks. Unless it makes a profound difference in life, we may be only playing with the echoes and coun terfeits of it, not the real and original thing. What I should like to see for people in my own church, is a definite spiritual conversion as the Meth odists and Baptists talk about, and then these people helped and trained and brought into the church by the ancient apostolic rite of confirmation. But there is something else I should like to see. Some people have had a definite conversion, something that shook and changed them profoundly. Then they came into the church and all this was cooled off.
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