Whether or not a person knows exactly when it happened, there is always a moment in the secret place of the soul when a person who is saved went from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive, separated from Christ to joined to Christ (Ephesians 2:1–7).

Molly Worthen’s Salvation

Recently I listened to a fascinating interview on Collin Hansen’s podcast, Gospelbound.¹ It was a ninety-minute conversation with Molly Worthen, a journalist and tenured history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over many years, Molly has written as an outsider about evangelical Christians and, when doing so, has sometimes been accused of being “snarky” and having little sympathy for her subjects.²Then recently she was asked to write an article on J.D. Greear and the Summit Church.³ She began talking to people at the church, visiting the church, and sat down to interview J.D. Over time she felt herself increasingly drawn into the church and began an email correspondence with Greear to get her more personal questions about faith answered. She asked him for recommendations of books to read and began reading the books he recommended:

I found myself more than 51 percent persuaded that the Christian account of the resurrection is the best account we have. But I couldn’t believe that a person could be converted by reading a lot of books…I was praying for some sort of warm and fuzzy mystical intervention, and it didn’t happen. I just got to the point as a consistent pragmatist that I had to admit I had gotten over that line of the resurrection being the best explanation for the historical evidence, which meant I had to change my working hypothesis of the universe. That weekend I switched from praying, “God show yourself to me,” to “Jesus, you are my Lord and Savior.”⁴

“Is my conversion real?” she asks. “You don’t hear about a lot of people saved through reading a lot of footnotes…But I have this longing to read Scripture—especially the Gospels—that I never had before, and I think, ‘That is not me. That is new.’”⁵

Isn’t it interesting how God saves people? And whom God saves? And how he changes them? It’s often the people we least expect and in a way we would never expect. Some people hear the gospel and immediately take hold of it, while others spend a lot of time considering the claims of Christ and gradually come to faith. Some people have a profoundly emotional experience, while others feel very little. Some experience immediate deliverance from sinful impulses and patterns, while others spend a lifetime seeking to put certain sins to death. But there is one thing that is always the same. No matter who it happens to or how it comes about, salvation is always a supernatural work of God in which blind eyes are opened, giving a person the ability to see who Jesus is and the faith to trust him.

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