The Re-converted Man
IN a certain evening in the olden times, a man of resolute look was sitting by the futy amid a group of talkers, in a high-priest’s hall. During that day his Master had startled him by saying to him: “When thou art converted strengthen thy brethren.” Was he not already a converted man? Was he not already a disciple of Jesus? The remark was well calculated to surprise, and to give him pain. Perhaps revolving the startling words in his mind, the man sits by the fire — waiting to be “sifted.” Satan, the sifter, sees him there, and steals in to sift him. He comes through the lips of an impertinent serving-maid. “Thou wast also with Jesus of Galilee,” sneers the garrulous girl. What an opportunity for the boastful Peter to stand up for Jesus! With craven tone, the lie sticking in his throat, he stammers out, “I know not what thou sayest.” He goes out into the porch, and again the sifter sifts him. How the wheat is running away, and leaving the empty chaff!
In the porch another maid is loitering, who no sooner sees him than she sets the rabble upon him by exclaiming, “This fellow was also with Jesus of Nazareth.” The mob take up the jeer, and cry out: “Surely thou also art one oi ticvem broe li!- wrayeth thee.” This is too much for the poor, irritated, hounded disciple — the man who chafed so under a taunt — and, with swaggering oath, he flings back the jeer, “I know not the man.”
Ah, Peter, methinks thou needest a conversion now! What shall keep thee from going clear over to the ranks of the persecutors of that Man of Sorrows in the judgment hall? Stop. Judge him not too harshly. The difference between a bent tree and a broken tree is, that one springs back to its place when the pressure is removed, but the other never rises from the dust. Peter’s is a bent faith, not a broken; for no sooner does the cock-crow smite upon his ear than in a moment his cowed and brow-beaten loyalty to his Master leaps up and asserts its presence in an honest outgush of blinding tears. Out into the solitudes of the garden he goeth, not to hide his sin with the rope of the suicide, but to be re-convertep; to turn back again, with genuine contrition, to that Saviour whom he had wronged and denied; to do once more his first works, and give afresh his heart to Jesus. And from that garden, whose deep shadows made a fit” closet ‘’ for his secret outbreak of penitential grief, the weeping man comes out a humbler, wiser, better, and braver man than he had ever been before. That baptism of tears was a needed baptism for his high apostleship. Better fitted to sympathize with the tempted; better fitted to warn the presumptuous; better calculated to deal tenderly with the erring, and every way beUei ab .o ^lxli^ls.
the brethren” must the disciple have been for his melancholy lapse, and for his merciful re-conversion.
But what is re-conversion? It is certainly not regeneration. The Bible gives no hint of a second, or a third, or a fourth new birth of the soul. We recognize no such thing in our spiritual experience. Re-conversion is not the awakening of a sinner for the second time.
It is simply the return to God and to duty of a backsliding believer. Peter’s religious character was not wholly swept jfrom him in that sad, shameful hour of his denial of the Redeemer. Nor does any true Christian lose his faith entirely during his seasons of spiritual declension. He is not a happy man, nor a healthy man, nor a heaven-honoured man; but he is alive. As the benumbed Alpine traveller, who has foundered among the swirling snow-drifts, soon “comes to “again when laid before the fire of the St. Bernard Hospice, so a frozen backslider may thaw out and recover under the warmth of Christ’s restoring grace. It is a terrible experiment to try; a terrible risk to run. Let no man tempt God’s love by trying the perilous step. Peter would probably have ended just where Judas ended, had not one been a true Christian and the other an impostor. Christ prayed for Peter that his” faith might not fail” utterly; and but for that timely intercession he could not have come forth from that garden a re-converted man. The process through which “Pelet ^3l^^^ ^NifcwN^^ recovery was partially similar to the process of his first conversion. There must have been repentance deep and sincere. There must have been faith in Jesus exercised anew. The sorrows of his contrition, too, were aggravated by the recollection of his first state of grace, and of his late disgraceful fall. Now, as conversion is made up of repentance, faith, and new obedience to God, ao Peter’s recovery was, in ever)’ sense, a re-conversion. It was a turning unto God, and differed from a first conversion in only two things; namely, the point set out from was a different point, and the distance travelled over was vastly less.
Who the reader of this paragraph may be, we do not know; but he must be a remarkable Christian if he never needed a re-conversion. Every act of disloyalty to Christ, every disgraceful lapse into sin, should call forth Peter’s tears and Peter’s penitence. Even without looking back for some specific flagrant offence against Christian consistency, it will do you no harm, my professing friend, to “repent and do first works” afresh. If you have grown cold in heart and indolent in duty, if prayer is a penance, and the lx)rd’s. table an irksome formality, then you need a new conversion. If, after a searching scrutiny, you are not satisfied with your present hope, give it up. By all means give it up, and seek a better. Nothing would
sooner bring a genuine revival into our churches than for lukewarm, inconsistent members to come forward by platoons and abandon the worthless hope of bygone
days, and, with thorough lepentaiice, .o ^<3wss.
md lay anew their foundation on the Lord Jesus. Multitudes of church members, we fear, are
living on the memory of the religious exces of ten or twenty years ago. John Wesley
call such a state a falling away from grace. pwen would call it a spiritual declension. But 70uld agree in the remedy needed, and both
agree in the exhortation with which we close: lember therefore from whence thou art fallen, fent and do the first works!”