Four False Steps That I Took Toward My Conversion

Tymologically, as the scholars say: both etymologically and morally taken, conversion is just conversion. It is just to turn round. It is just having hitherto gone on the wrong road to turn round and henceforth to go on the right road. It is just to stop going away any further from God, and from Jesus Christ, and from eternal life, and to say, ‘ I will arise and go to my Father.’ It is, as Paul has it, from being an alien from the commonwealth of Israel, and a stranger to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world; it is to return from a life like that, and it is to dwell ever after in that city which shall be redeemed with judgment and her converts with righteousness. All that is conversion in its Latin root, and in its moral signi-. ficance, and in its religious experience. Thomas Goodwin, who writes to such purpose on this as on every other spiritual subject, says in one place, that this is the best definition of conversion that lie had ever met with; this: ‘ Conversion is the total change of a man’s chief end.’ Before his conversion every man’s chief end is himself: always and in everything his chief end is himself. But after every true conversion God, sooner or later, comes to His own. God, sooner or later, comes back to His throne and His sceptre in that man’s heart. And the truly converted man — the ideally converted man, shall I say? — lives no longer to himself but to his God and Saviour. He has been redeemed with a price, and he knows it and acknowledges it. ‘ There is a new loadstone,’ says that great preacher, ‘ let into every renewed heart, till every renewed man sails henceforth according to another compass.’

Now, while all that is true, at the same time there is nothing in which renewed men differ more than just in the manner and the scope of their conversion. To give some freshness and some variety to the subject in hand, I shall at this stage tell you what some great authorities have said about this matter. F’or one, the great preacher already named has this: ‘ You all know,’ he says to his specially -experienced and specially -understanding people, ‘ you all know that there are two great types of conversion common in the Church of Christ. The conversion of some men is so sudden and so violent as to be seen and acknowledged of all men. It is accompanied with such an inundation and landflood of humiliation for sin. Others, again, are carried on as upon a quiet and sunny stream. Their conversion has been like the silent and slow breaking of the morning: it has not been discernible neither to themselves nor to others the exact time when their day began to dawn. In their case the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more to the perfect day.’ And a contemporary of his has this on this same subj ect; ‘ There are some persons of whom the grace of God takes an early hold. And the good spirit inhabiting them carries them on in an even constancy, through innocence into virtue. Their religion bears equal date with their manhood. And reason and religion, like warp and woof, make up one web of a wise, an exemplary, and a happy life.’ And a great divine of a very different school has this; ‘ It may freely be granted that conversion to God is often instantaneous: unexpectedly raised from variety of occasions. Thus, one by seeing only a withered tree he refers to Brother Lawrence who wrote The Presence of God: another by readins: the lives and deaths of the antediluvian Fathers: one by hearing of heaven, another of hell: one by reading of the love or the wrath of God: another of the sufferings of Christ: may find himself melted of a sudden into penitence.’ And Coleridge, one of the truest Catholics of all our religious literature, has this in his Aids to Reflection: ‘ Awakened by a sermon, by a calamity, by a sickbed, or by a providential escape: awakened by the cockcrow, as it were, the Christian pilgrim sets out in the morning twilight, while as yet much of the full daylight of God is still far below the horizon.’

Goodwin, our greatest pulpit exegete of Paul, has this also: ‘ Set narrations of solemn conversions,’ he says, ‘ are rarely, if ever, to be found in the Old Testament.’ And that is true. But the New Testament, true to its own special genius, enters far more particularly, and far more experimentally, into its classical cases of conversion. The out¬ standing cases of New Testament conversion will at once occur to every memory. But with all that it is in evangelical Church history, and in evangelical biography and autobiography, written since the New Testament canon was closed, that the most circumstantial and detailed accounts of conversion are to be read. The subcanonical conversions of a high distinction and of great detail are such conversions as those of Augustine, and Luther, and Knox, and Bruce, and Halyburton, and Bunyan, and Cromwell, and Newton, and Cowper, and Wesley, and Chalmers. But the conversion of James Fraser, Laird of Brea and minister of Culross, has so many ‘ intricacies ’ connected with it that it ranks in that respect above them all, though his name is not known at all, nor his book read at all.

From the time he was nine years of age till he was seventeen, the young Laird of Brea took four steps, so he tells us, in the direction of his conversion. And the first of those four steps was this. He early learned some children’s prayers by heart, and he repeated those prayers at his bedside morning and night. And this practice of his gave him a certain peace of conscience from his early childhood up. And when he fell at any time into any sin that deeply wounded and greatly defiled his conscience, he returned the more punctually to his prayers, till he found again a certain healing and a certain cleansing. But as time went on, what with bad company and what with both open and secret sin, he gradually gave up all pretence of prayer. And thus his first step toward conversion came to a dead stop and ended in nothing. Now what about yourselves, you who are still between nine and seventeen? Have you taken as much as James Fraser’s first step .? Do you pray even a formal prayer before you lie down at night, and again when you rise up in the morning? Or, having at one time taken that first step toward your conversion, have you fallen away even from that step, till you now lie down and rise up without God and without hope in the world? Well, that was James Fraser’s first futile step toward his so intricate conversion.

Some time after that Fraser took his second sp ’• when, in his own words, ‘ he began to bake his own bread.’ By this time he had a ministerial tutor, whom he describes as ‘ a godly and a tender-hearted man, but none of the deepest reach.’ His new tutor made young Fraser give over his ‘ conned and committed prayers,’ as he calls them; and rather to utter five sentences straight out of his own heart than a whole prayer-book composed for him by other men. But very much for the former reasons, young Fraser’s second step ended very much as his first step had ended. His free prayers, like his committed prayers, came to nothing. And for this sufficient reason: Jesus Christ was not in his second step any more than in his first step — only James Fraser and his self-conceived prayers. All the time it was what was done by James Fraser for himself at Brea, and not what was done for James Fraser on Calvary. All the time it was the foundation that he was laying for himself, and not the One Foundation that God had laid for him in Zion. And, as a sure consequence, his house that he had built for himself with such labour on the sand soon fell about his ears. And Frasei was still in this utterly Christless condition when he came south to Edinburgh to enter the college.

Fraser’s third step toward his conversion must be told in his own warning and memorable words:

‘ Before, I was taken up with prayer alone; but now I made the same conscience of all my duties. I thereupon read the Scriptures and meditated on what I read. I sanctified the Sabbath and read only spiritual books on that sacred day. I left off’ all my sinful and doubtful ways, and I made conscience of all my moral duties. And yet, all the time, I was a total stranger to Christ. In Christ’s own words, I was a complete pharisee. And, for the salvation of my readers, I will describe myself all through my third step. I looked only at the outward letter of the law, and if only I went about the outward form of my duties, I sought no more. I rested in my duties as my end, I did not employ them as so many means to bring me to Christ, my true End. I looked on my duties as opus operatum. I did not run my pipe up to the Fountain. And whensoever I fell into any fresh sin I sought to satisfy God and my own conscience by doubling my duties. I gave my doubled duties to God as so much atonement and propitiation for my sin. All this time I was in the most utter ignorance of the mystery oF the Gospel. I knew not faith, nor the promises, nor justification, nor imputed righteousness. Paul describes me exactly when he says that, being absolutely ignorant of God’s righteousness, I was going about to establish my own righteousness, not having submitted myself to the righteousness of God: that is, to Jesus Christ. By all of which I now see clearly that I was wholly away from the life of conversion.’

Fraser’s fourth step, if a step it could be called, was his three college years, of absolute misery: now sinning’ and now repenting; now falling, and now attempting to rise again in his own strength; now getting a little light from the sermons he heard and from the books he read; and then sinking down into a deeper darkness. Many of you know that dismal condition. And those who do not know it in their own experience will not understand it even by Fraser’s striking description of it. Fraser might have had his conversion before he took any of those futile steps. Only, no one, neither his father, nor his mother, nor his tutor, nor his minister, had ever taken Fraser and had made unmistakably plain to him what is the one and the ever-open way of a sinner’s salvation.

Now, out of all that, let these three lessons be learned and laid to heart and remembered by us all. And, first, there have been many most genuine conversions attained without any previous steps taken at all. And, indeed, the normal conversion, the ideal conversion, is that conversion which is entered on without so much as a single preparatory step. When you are travelling on a wholly wrong road, and when that is suddenly and authoritatively pointed out to you, what do you do? You do not take four steps more on the wrong road before you turn round, nor three, nor two, nor even one. No! that very moment you turn round, and your very first step is taken on the right road. And so should it be in every moral and spiritual and evangelical conversion. Turn you then where you now sit. Yes, just where you now sit. Turn this very moment. Be turned before you stand up to sing your closing praise. And then open your heart to receive the apostolic benediction with your face already turned Zionward, and with your back turned for ever on all your former evil ways. And then for the first time go down from the house of God to your own house a truly and a resolutely converted man. And all your days, be they few or many, push on with all your might and main. For you have a long road to overtake before the sun sets upon your upward path.

Then again, just as there are fierce and fiery and thunderbolt conversions that burn a hole in the very earth at the spot where they took place. so, on the other hand, there are easy and sweet and quite unconscious conversions that leave no mark of time or of place upon the converted man. No mark but only upon his after walk and conversation. You will remember what the man who had been born blind said to the cavilling and sneering Pharisees. ‘ One thing I know,’ he said, ‘ that whereas I was blind, now I see.’ And that is all the evidence that many saintly-minded men have of their sure conversion. They can remember a time when they were wholly blind; wholly blind to themselves, wholly blind to God, wholly blind to Jesus Christ, wholly blind to His sin-cleansing blood, and to His justifying righteousness, and to His sanctifying Spirit, and to evangelical holiness, and to eternal life. But now they see all these things. And they see nothing else so clearly and so continually. Well, if that is so, what better evidence and full assurance could any man have of the reality and the validity of his conversion than more and more to see, and to love, and to follow after all these things?

And, most momentous and most immediate of all: to every hitherto unconverted man and woman in this house: and more especially to all those persons present who are still between nine and seventeen, James Fraser’s Saviour speaks personally and directly to-night to all such, and says: ‘ Turn ye, turn ye! For, why will you die? I have no pleasure in your death: but, rather, that you turn and live.’ Now, the moment He says that to you, say you to Him: ‘ Turn me! O my Lord and Saviour, turn Thou me! And always cause Thy face to shine upon me, and I shall be converted now, and shall in the end be saved! ’ Only you keep turning, and keep praying; keep praying, and keep turning; and so you shall be both converted now and for ever saved. And then when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.

How James Fraser was converted on a Communion week when a student of seventeen in Edinburgh, we shall see in our next discourse.