My Second Conversion

In a previous blog entry, I mentioned my baptism when I was eight years old. Actually, I think of that first baptism as my conversion to religion. But when I was sixteen, I had another conversion. Due to the gnawing guilt that burdened my conscience, I began to question whether I was really “saved.” Sunday after Sunday, I would silently pray the so-called sinner’s prayer during the invitation at the end of the service, but to no avail. It didn’t seem to matter how sincere I was or how often I prayed this prayer, the burden of guilt remained and increased because I was still rather profane. Finally, during a Sunday evening worship service, our pastor asked a visiting preacher to deliver the sermon. In his sermon, he spoke of people who were baptized church members, but who weren’t Christians. His words, a fear of Hell, and the terrible burden of guilt that weighed upon my conscience drove me to go before the church that night and confess that I was a lost sinner. I remember saying to our pastor, “I want to be saved. I’ve got to be saved. I’m not leaving here until I know I’m saved.” He led me again in the “sinner’s prayer,” and this time it seemed different. I was rebaptized into the church and began to labor to set my life right. Many outward sins (or behaviors I was told were sinful) I gave up quickly. Other external sins I fought to overcome with varying degrees of success. I slowly gave up my old companions. I began to speak openly of my conversion and was asked to speak at different churches. Indeed, something had happened to me, and I believe it was a work of the Holy Spirit. However, for reasons I will mention in a later entry, I believe this was a legal work – I was converted to morality (or to the law).

Three noteworthy events occurred over the next ten years. The first was that I was introduced to Calvinism for the first time. I can only remember one instance in my youth when Calvinism had ever even been mentioned. In response to this, I asked my grandmother what Calvinism was. She told me that Calvinism teaches God has predestined certain people to Heaven and certain people to Hell. I have to admit, this characterization didn’t appeal to me at all, so I quickly put it out of my mind. Yet, by the time I was in my early twenties, I was increasingly being weighed down with the burden of my own depravity (something that Calvinism unambiguously asserts). This depravity was different than the guilt I experienced when I was sixteen. Then, I was living a profane life, albeit playing the religionist on Sunday. But now I had largely reformed my behavior to match my profession. I was striving for righteousness, but it was a righteousness of my own making. Consequently, I felt the import of Isaiah 64:6, “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” It did not seem to matter what standard I set for myself, whether it was God’s law or some other sort of “rules to live by,” I did not live up to any of them. Oh yes, I maintained the outward appearance, but only “man looketh on the outward appearance. . . the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16: 7). This truth disturbed me greatly and made me ripe for Calvinism.

Calvinism per se did not stay my fears or give me any assurance, but its doctrine of Total Depravity made it clear to me what I was going through. In contrast to what many believe, total depravity does not mean that men are as bad as they could possibly be; but rather, it means that everything a man does is tainted with sin. The Great Commandment is “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all they strength, and with all thy mind” (Luke 10:27), but who actually does that? And what works have we performed that are motivated purely by that supreme kind of love? If not, then no matter what we do – pray, preach, give, sacrifice, etc. – it is all tainted with sin and is worthy of condemnation. This is why I have said on more than one occasion that if God gave me the option on the Day of Judgment to examine my life and pick just one work that I’d performed, then have my salvation stand or fall based upon that one work, I could not, no, I dare not do it. Job 4:18 says, “Behold, he puts no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly.” If the Lord’s very best servants (the prophets and apostles) and even the angels cannot justify themselves before him, how could any of my pathetic works procure God’s favor for me?

Now, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Depravity is not just the failure of my works to meet God’s righteous standard. Rather, our very hearts and minds are the problem. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Romans 8:7 says that the “carnal mind is enmity against God.” That carnal or fleshly mind is the one we have by nature, the one we are born with. Considering then that our hearts are naturally wicked and our minds are enmity against (opposed to) God, how can we possibly do anything to please God? The fact is we cannot. As the Lord Jesus said in John 6:63, “The flesh profiteth nothing.” We are not simply helpless victims, doing our best and falling short. No, our hearts, minds, inclinations, and motives fight against God and his Christ. Romans 8:8 says, “So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” No matter how beautiful our external acts may appear to men, they are worthless because inwardly they oppose God. As the Lord Jesus said, “Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27).

My intention in this entry is not to give a defense of or discourse on Calvinism. I will, however, say that if a person experientially understands total depravity, that is, if he is made to feel the sinfulness of his own heart, the other major tenets of Calvinism generally fall into line. For example, concerning the doctrine of Election, the historic Abstract of Principles from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says unequivocally, “Election is God’s eternal choice of some persons unto everlasting life – not because of forseen merit in them, but of his mere mercy in Christ – in consequence of which choice they are called, justified, and glorified.” If total depravity is true – that all our works, actions, and motives of every kind are tainted with sin and therefore damnable – salvation must be based on something other than our own actions or even our own initiative. Election teaches that God, from all eternity, took the initiative by mercifully and sovereignly choosing to save a certain people via calling, justifying, and glorifying them. Moreover, because men’s hearts and minds are so opposed to God, no one would ever be saved apart from God taking this action. Speaking to his disciples in John 15:16, the Lord Jesus said, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” And in Romans 9:16, it says, “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.”

The second noteworthy event was my introduction to the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness. I had been attending Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary for about two years, and because I was especially feeling the sinfulness of my own heart, I went one morning to class feeling like the miserable wretch that I was. The class was a survey of the New Testament. During the course of the lecture that morning, my professor, Dr. John Mahoney, began to speak about different kinds of righteousness. The one that really caught my attention was something called “imputed righteousness.” I had never heard of this before, or if I had, I didn’t understand it or had forgotten all about it. Yet, on this particular morning, it was like light shining in the darkness. It wasn’t the main point of my Dr. Mahoney’s lecture by any means, so he didn’t dwell on it for long. But I thank God for that morning.

During the lecture, he explained that imputed righteousness was the perfect righteousness of Christ given to the sinner who has no righteousness of his own. Standing in this righteousness, the believer, though having no good thing in himself, appears blameless and without spot before God. This righteousness really belongs to the believer, so much so, that God esteems him as having perfectly fulfilled the law; and therefore, rewards him for the same. Now, I don’t actually recall what anyone else’s reaction was to this idea, but my eyes filled with tears. It was all this poor sinner could do to keep from weeping openly. Little did I know at the moment, but I had just heard the gospel clearly articulated for maybe the first time. I remember going back to my rental house and telling one of my roommates what Dr. Mahoney had said. I will never forget his reaction. Like me, he was startled and somewhat excited.  Then he exclaimed, “It’s too good to be true. It’s just too good to be true!”

Well, I didn’t hear much else about this imputed righteousness while in seminary. Consequently, it slowly faded from my thoughts. But thanks be to God, that holy gospel seed was implanted in my memory so that I could recall it in due season.

The third noteworthy event occurred in the spring of 1991. We had a campus revival scheduled at the seminary, and our speaker for the week was Dr. Tom Elliff, who later served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He began the revival from the text of Proverb 28:13, which reads, “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” He then stressed the need for a clean conscience before God and gave students the opportunity to publicly confess sins that God was dealing with them about. At first, it was very awkward. A couple of students went to the podium and confessed various sins. Other students began to cry. Some more got up and confessed sins. Soon there was a line at the podium. Everywhere you looked, grown men were weeping.

After about thirty minutes of this, it was clear that something unusual was going on. What normally would have been, at most, an hour service, lasted for about three hours. I would guess that I’ve attended or been a part of over fifty planned “revivals” in my life, but none ever even approached what happened on that day in 1991. If it wasn’t a genuine revival, it surely was the closest I have ever been to one.

Initially, my reaction to all of this was one of consternation. Why? Because as the service continued on, and I became more and more convinced that it was indeed a work of God, I feared that if God dealt with me in justice, He would surely pass me over. The unspoken prayer that raced through my mind was something along the lines of one of Fanny Crosby’s hymns, which says, “While on others Thou art calling, do not pass me by.”

Thankfully, by God's grace, I too got up and confessed some sins. Our speaker had warned us from the outset that we should be very careful about what we confessed. If our sin was against God alone, then confession should be made to God alone. If our sin was against a specific person, we were to confess it to that person alone. If we had committed a public sin, then we were to confess it publicly. I have to admit that some of the sins that weighed on my conscience did not fit neatly into any of those categories, but I and most of the other students abided by the guidelines reasonably well. In fact, to my recollection, most of the sins confessed had to do with the seminary's honor code, or more accurately, violations thereof.

Nonetheless, my confession that day wasn't the end of the revival's impact on my life. I knew there were other long-ignored sins that had been eating at my conscience for years. So I purposed with God's help to deal with them one by one. I decided that I would confess them and make restitution or satisfaction in cases where that was necessary. This put me on a nearly five year spiritual journey that literally shook my soul. It was like the more I confessed, the more sins God's Spirit brought to my remembrance - sins long buried deep within my sub-conscious. It was as if there was no end to the blackness of my heart. Through it all, I came to experientially understand the Apostle Paul's words in Romans 7:18, when he wrote, “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing.”