Beginning as potential disciples with fire in then- hearts, they get turned into church members who just go to church and pay their subscriptions and work on a committee or two, and that is all they do. That is not all the early church did, and if it had been, you and I would not be thinking of becoming Christians today. Somebody said you mustn’t put a live chick under a dead hen. It bothers me how many Christians begin by being alive, and then get cooled down, not by losing all contact with religious life, but by being exposed to such an anemic form of it that it makes r V_^>oncerning the divinity of Jesus, C. S. Lewis puts the issues in simple, epigrammatic form. "I am trying,” he says, "to prevent anyone from saying the silly thing that people often say about Him: 'I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That’s the one thing we mustn’t say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher. He’d be either a lunatic I— on a level with a man who says he’s a poached egg — or else he’d be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him for a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But don’t let us come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us.” —Quoted by Samuel M. Shoemaker in "How to Become a Christian,’’ Harper & Brothers. little difference to themselves or others. There is just not much religion behind those blank, lackluster eyes, that necessity to be dragged to church, that grudging gift of perhaps one-half of one per cent of their income. Let us seek conversion, till we find it. There is grave spiritual danger in not asking whether one has ever been converted, or in not pur suing conversion until it takes place. The danger is that this Icdssez fcdre and procrastination will give such hostages to compromise, and so accustom us to the state of not being converted, that our souls will never spread their wings and rise above the half measures and actual defeats of our unconverted state. Many of us think that conversion is a process that is going on: we come to find that the process has not so much as ever started. We are like people sitting
in a railway station, and because there are shouts of stations and times of trains leaving, we think we must be on one of them going somewhere, when actually we are just sitting about in the waiting room. It has never begun at all. How about the matter of gradualness and sudden ness in conversion? Those who want conversion to be gradual compare it to growth. I would like to remind them that growth begins suddenly. It begins when the seed goes in the ground and begins both to die and to live in a new way, at the same time. There is the long period of gradual growth, but that does not take place except it be initiated somewhere. Our birth into the new life is like our birth into natural life. There is the long period of growth within the body of the mother: but conception is sudden, and birth is sudden. The idea that you are not converted, and ought to be, may come to you in a flash. It may germinate in your mind till it comes later to actual rebirth. Many people cover up their spiritual powerless ness, their unsurrendered, unconverted condition, by saying they love the quiet, steady nurture of the Episcopal church; it isn’t always taking them to a fire, or questioning whether they are converted or not. Yes, unhappily that is often true. And that is part of what keeps the Episcopal church, rich beyond al most all others in so many ways, from being the kind of spiritual force in the world that it ought to be. If anyone can speak of our communion, it is the late Archbishop William Temple. And this is what he has to say about conversion: “At first or last there must be a sharp break, a conversion or new birth or else there must be a series of conversions, but there is need for real discontinuity. Often indeed a particular con version takes a long time and is effective through a gradual process; yet even then its completion takes place at a moment, and though the transition effected in that moment may be very small yet it is in its essential nature abrupt.” If you ask what is that moment, I say unhesita tingly it is the moment of self-surrender. When we want God’s way more than our own, when we open ourselves to His divine invasion, He comes in, and the transaction is completed. William James said, “The crisis of self-surrender has always been and must always be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life.” What does a true conversion involve? Four things, I should say. First, a break with conscious sin, as far as we can be aware of it. Nearly every one of us knows one or two or five besetting sins that dog us always. There is perhaps a resentment that must be given up. Or there is a wrong relation that must be cleaned up. Or there is a personal plan for our lives which we have never
The King's Business
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