In 2 Chronicles 7.14, God tells the Israelites that, if they humble themselves, pray, seek His face, and turn from their wicked ways, He will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land (from His judgement on them). 'Turning from their wicked ways' is what is meant by 'conversion.' This lesson will explore conversion further with a look at the conversion of St. Augustine.
As we move from 2 Chronicles to a full Biblical theology of conversion, the means of conversion comes to focus on Jesus Christ. 2 Chronicles pointed to the temple, a place of prayer and sacrifice as the Israelites came to God. The New Testament replaces the temple with Jesus Christ, whose sacrificial death for us, for our sins, and for salvation made the temple obsolete because its purposes were fulfilled in Him. There is no turning from our
wicked ways that will be sufficient for us to stand before God. If we hope to present our good works to God as the means of our salvation, we will not be justified but condemned. Any people hoping to buy their way into God’s eternal presence with the currency of their own goodness will
find that the exchange rate is not in their favour. Our wills, not just our actions, are so in
bondage to sin that it is not possible not to sin. We must obey this master, for we are under
his rule and authority. Our only hope is
that God has redeemed us through Jesus Christ from such a master and has made us, by His grace, to be His own.
The Hebrew word for ‘repent’, shuv,
means ‘to turn.’ This provides us
with a good image to understand conversion.
We walk along a certain path in life, one that continues on and on. If we are happy with that path, we just
continue to walk without much thought about the road ahead. Periodically, there are opportunities to turn
and follow another path. St. Augustine’s
conversion shows that conversion involves three steps: a loathing of his/our empty, sinful path, selves, and life; contrition, that is, a deep sorrow and
repentance; and a turning to God, or
really a surrender to God, with a deep peace and joy. Augustine understood conversion not simply as
a transaction, or a new system of belief, but also and especially as an
emotional process of loathing, weeping,
and peace and joy in the Lord.
St. Augustine recounts how he
became a Christian (in AD 386) in the book that he wrote called The Confessions.[1] In his words, he tells the story of how God ‘delivered me out of the bonds of carnal desire,
wherewith I was most firmly fettered, and out of the drudgery of worldly
business’ (Bk. 8.6.13). There are two obstacles
in his life that made him turn to Christ: being chained to passions of the
flesh and not being able to master them, and being so engrossed in the business
of life as to ignore the things of God. Augustine
wanted more from life, and he came to realize that he would only find this with
God’s help. He tells how he learned of
certain people who came to faith as a result of wanting more than what their
lives entailed. He then confesses to God
that, as he listened to these testimonies, God
turned me towards myself, taking me from behind my
back, where I had placed myself while unwilling to exercise self-scrutiny; and
Thou set me face to face with myself, that I might behold how foul I was, and
how crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous. And I beheld and loathed
myself; and whither to fly from myself I discovered not (Bk. 8.7.16).
Augustine
says that, as a young man, he had even prayed, ‘Grant me chastity and
continency [that is, self-control], but not yet’ (Bk. 8.7.17). He also chose to pursue what he calls
‘worldly hopes’ but later came to see them as ‘the baggage of vanity’ that they
were. But, when confronted directly with
his true condition, Augustine was ‘consumed and mightily confounded with a
horrible shame.’ He had no arguments
left against turning to God, and found himself left in ‘silent trembling’ (Bk.
8.7.18).
Augustine
then spends some time telling how he vacillated. Wanting to turn to God, he nevertheless
considered how great a cost it would be to himself to relinquish the desires of
his ‘unclean members’ (Bk. 8.11.27). He
knows that he could not become a Christian and, at the same time, continue in
his fleshly desires for they were opposed to God’s holy demands. But his desires controlled him. How could he possibly give them up? Did he even want to give them up? About this, he wrote,
My will was the
enemy master of, and thence had made a chain for me and bound me. Because of a
perverse will was lust made; and lust indulged in became
custom; and custom not resisted became necessity. By which links, as it were,
joined together (whence I term it a chain), did a hard bondage hold me
enthralled (Bk. 8.5.10).
Augustine
came to be sorry for his sins, however.
We might first only fear God’s judgement for sin, but we must come to a
point of sorrow over our sins. Augustine
does not even mention any fear of God’s wrath for the sins he committed, though
he might well have done so. Rather, he
expressed sorrow over his life of sin itself, a bondage to a filthy life. We need to come to the point of regretting
our own sin, regretting how it offends God, regretting how we hurt others, and
regretting what we are doing to ourselves.
Such regret is a loathing of sin for the horrible work it does. And a loathing of sin turns into a sorrow
that results in conversion, a turning to God.
Having come to loath his sin, Augustine experienced sorrow for his
sin. He began to weep, and he calls this
an acceptable sacrifice to God (cf. 1 Pt. 2.5).
His tears of repentance were his sin offering to God, and He identifies
his strong emotions as contrition—a heartfelt sorrow for his sins (Bk.
8.12.28-29). Repentance can be a mental
exercise—more of an act of the mind, a resolve to live differently, but
contrition is a sorrow of the heart.
Conversion progresses from loathing sin to sorrow to repentance.
Just
then, Augustine heard from over the wall a child at play repeatedly saying,
‘Take up and read.’ Augustine had heard
how the monk, St. Antony, had been converted upon hearing read a passage from
Scripture. So, Augustine went back to where
he had left his copy of Paul’s writings on a bench in the garden and opened the
book. He read two verses from the
epistle to the Romans:
Let us walk properly as in the
daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and
sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires (Rom. 13.13-14, ESV).
This
was the moment of Augustine’s conversion.
He says, ‘No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the
sentence ended — by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart —
all the gloom of doubt vanished away.’ Augustine had passed from darkness into the
light of Christ. He was converted.
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