A person genuinely converted from darkness to light, from the way of the world to the way of God, from unrighteousness to righteousness, repents and keeps on repenting of their sin. Their life is not marked by perpetual indifference to sin.

Our English term conversion is not often used in our translations of the Bible. But lest we commit a word-concept fallacy, we should not conclude from this that the concept captured by our term conversion is infrequently found in Scripture. Far from it. Peter in his sermon recorded in Acts 3 expresses the idea of what is meant in Christian theology by the term conversion. There we read that Peter told the men of Israel in v. 19, “Repent therefore, and turn, that your sins may be blotted out.” And again, in verse 26, Peter affirmed that God had sent his Son first to Israel in order that he might bless them “by turning” them from their wickedness. In other words, conversion to the Christian faith and life is about a decisive break from a life of sin, and turning to God so that one faithfully thinks and acts in accordance with God’s word.

Easy enough. Well, there’s actually nothing easy about this, other than perhaps stating it. In point of fact, what we are dealing with in conversion is a supernatural act of the living God whereby he replaces our sinful and stone-hardened heart with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). God alone does this, but this does not nullify the human proclamation of the gospel calling people to repentance. It is why the summary of Jesus’ preaching (Mark 1:15), which was also a summary of John the Baptist’s preaching, was: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” The acts of repenting and believing are not envisioned here as once-for-all-time actions that never need repeating. On the contrary, the exact opposite is conveyed. Repenting and believing are ongoing, perpetual activities for the one genuinely converted. Which is another way of saying that one of the ways we can tell whether we or anyone else has truly been converted to the Christian faith and life is whether they demonstrate repentance from sin as a way of life.

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