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On one side, people think of conversion as a change of religion and the associated external practices. But true conversion, as the Bible describes, is a return to God from a life of sin through faith in Jesus. This starts as a supernatural transformation of one's heart by God in response to our faith, which then shows itself as a change of behaviour on the outside too.

There is such a lot of confusion on this subject. On one extreme, people make the process of conversion so simple as to assume they have become children of God by a matter of belief, when they have not. On the other extreme, others make it look so complicated and beyond the reach of ordinary people, almost making salvation look like something we have to earn! What I would like to do here is to describe the essential elements that are involved in a true conversion, so that we can examine ourselves to see if we lack something, and at the same time point out the simplicity of conversion that makes it available to anyone who sincerely wants it.

These are the essential characteristics of a true conversion from being a sinner to a relationship with God as His child. 1. A recognition of the holiness of God and the simultaneous realisation of our own sinfulness. 2. A realisation that as we are, we stand damned before God because of our sins. 3. A hope that comes when we hear the good news that by dying in our place, Jesus has made possible for God to forgive our sins. 4. A sincere cry from our heart to God to forgive our sins and to accept us as His children. 5. A strong desire that God gives us in our heart, to stop sinning and instead to obey God in everything.

We realise that very few of us came to God with all these factors fully in place at the start itself. Perhaps we were drawn to Jesus for healing or to be delivered from some practical problems. But the point is that after we came to Jesus some way or another in the beginning, we were able to get to know Him more and more through His word, and finally we have come to understand and experience all of these factors. Our prayer of repentance as a sinner or asking Jesus to be our Saviour may not have covered all these subjects but may have been the first step in this direction, but can we now see all these factors in our life?

This is the point. If our assurance of salvation is merely based on a past date or event, and we have not grown to experience all these different aspects in our relationship with God, there is something seriously lacking. We need to make the effort to understand what these mean in practice, and if we find gaps in any area, we ought to get back to God in honesty and sincerity and set those things right.

Spiritual conversion is the result of the work of the Holy Spirit in our life and our proper response towards it. The whole goal of God in salvation is to take us back to Him to the original relationship He had intended for man. Is this true in our experience (Ro.13:11)?

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