Sola Gratia #3 - Converted by Grace (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the Sola Gratia message series teaching from the second book of Corinthians in the New Testament. Christians' conversion experiences can vary greatly. Thankfully the parables of Jesus help to shed light on our own sometimes dim understanding.

Message Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2025/3/17/sola-gratia-3-converted-by-grace

Subscribe to Orchard Hill Plus! - https://orchardhillplus.buzzsprout.com/share

Connect with Orchard Hill Church
Website | https://www.orchardhillchurch.com
Mobile App | https://https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/app
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/OrchardHillChurchPA
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/orchardhillchurch/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/orchardhillchurch/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/orchard_hill

Transcript

Good morning. It's great to be together. Let's pray.  

God, as we are gathered this weekend, as we often pray, we ask that you would speak to each of us, wherever we're coming from, whether our weeks have been filled with some of the highest highs or lowest lows. And Lord, this week we're especially aware that there are many in our church family who are affected in kind of responding to the sudden death of one of our high school students from our student ministry this week. And so we ask for comfort for the students, for the volunteers, for the staff. Lord, we ask for perspective. And Lord, we pray that for the family as well. And God, in these moments, I ask that you would help all of us to think clearly about just eternity and what's at stake in our lives, even here and now. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.  

One of the things that I believe is true but not helpful, ultimately, is a very common belief about how faith works, how Christianity works. And what I mean by this is there's a belief among a lot of people that says something like this, and that is, you come to faith, you don't come to faith, but the Bible is full of good principles, that if you apply them to your life, your life is better. Now, the reason I say that's true, but maybe not helpful, is I believe that if you apply biblical principles to your life, it will help your life. But, what happens for many people is they believe that that is the sum total of what the Christian message is. And as a result, what happens is, they go through life saying, if I can just get the principles right, then I will be able on some level to have God give me the life that I want. And then if something doesn't go well in their life, all of a sudden, it's like, what happened? I thought I was doing the right thing. Why is God not coming through for me?  

And for some people, even before maybe a journey of faith, maybe before they've started their own personal faith journey, it's a barrier to becoming a follower of Jesus because they look at people and they say, you think you have it all figured out. You live according to these principles, you have a certain life. And I can't do that, or I don't want to do that, so why would I ever go down this path?  

And then what we're doing over these weeks together is a series that we're calling Sola Gratia. It's a phrase from the Reformation, a Latin phrase that means “by grace alone”, talking about how our eternity, our salvation is by grace alone. And we're taking each week one of the great doctrines of salvation and trying to think about it together. And today we're going to talk about the idea of conversion.  

And this isn't necessarily just a Christian word. We all know what conversion means. It means to change from one thing to another, to convert a currency from one thing to another. So conversion means a change in essence. And it's one of the key questions. You may not even know that you ask it, but if you're ever sitting with a friend and they say, well, how do I become a follower of Jesus? How do I become a christian. How do I get saved? You have an answer. And that answer has to do with conversion. And if you have an answer that says, I don't have an answer, you still have an answer, because we're all theologians in that sense. We all have an idea about what the Bible says, what God says, how things work in this life. And so we all have different ways to see these things.  

And as a result, these are big questions. And it's a question for us, Am I converted? Are you converted? Do you know? And if you've had somebody that you love that at one time professed faith in Christ and doesn't seem to have faith now, it's also a key question that we ask. And the verse that you heard read is in S Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17. And it very simply says: 

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old is gone, the new is here!”

And the idea of this text is that being in Christ, having faith in Christ, having a union with Christ, brings us into a whole new place. It brings conversion. The old has gone, the new is here. So there's something different. Matthew 18, verse 3 says it in a slightly different way. This is Jesus talking. He says this. He says: 

“’Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’”

So Jesus says, if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to change, you have to convert. You have to become like a little child. This is Jesus giving his words about how this happens. And so I want to draw a picture today to help us think about this. Somebody told me that I hadn't done a stick figure in a while, so it's time. And so maybe it's a little bit like this, so if this is somebody walking kind of down a hill, here's my happy stick figure.  

And if you were around last week, we talked about the idea of regeneration, new birth, spiritual new birth, what God does in bringing us into a relationship with him. And we looked at Ephesians 2, verses 1 through 7, and in verses 1 through 3, it says that we are dead in our transgression and sins. Dead meaning powerless. Transgressions, meaning we step out of bounds. Sin, meaning we fall short of the goal, so we're dead in this.  

And then the text says that there are some reasons for this. One is that we follow the way of the world. So we have world or culture that's contributing to this. It talks about the power of the Prince of the Air, or the being, that there's powers, there's spiritual powers that impact this. And then it says the cravings of our sinful nature. And so we have our own nature, our own self. And all of these forces are pushing us away from God, away from the life that he calls us to, to be spiritually dead. And what Ephesians 2, verse 4 through 7 basically says, but it was God who made us alive in Christ Jesus, who changes us.  

So ultimately, what happens in our spiritual life, is if God imparts spiritual life, and it happens through the cross of Jesus Christ. Meaning you come to say, I am dead spiritually, God has provided Jesus. And then what happens is when we look at to God, to the cross, all of a sudden, we have this thing that the Bible calls faith or trust. We have this moment where we start to say, I believe that Jesus paid, that I can't, I'm sinful, but Jesus did it.  

Tim Keller, in talking about this, said it this way:

“Up to now, I've been talking pretty much about the new birth and conversion as if they were pretty much the same thing.”

Okay, conversion, what we're talking about today, from our perspective, what happens, how we believe, and new birth, regeneration, what God does. He says: 

“You need to know that reformed theologians have always made a very warranted and important distinction between what we do, which is repentance and faith. See, we turn. We turn away from sin and we turn toward God. That's what we do. Repent and believe. And what God does, which is the new birth, there is a certain sense in which if somebody says to me, how can I be born again? Technically, the right biblical answer is, there's nothing you can do. John 3:8 talks about that at one point where it says, ‘The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going - and so it is with everyone who's born of the spirit of God.”

So it is God's work that happens. Regeneration logically precedes conversion. But they're tied, they're together, they're one thing. And there's a response, which is this response of faith, this idea of saying, God sent Jesus. That is where I have my sense of certainty. Now, one of the places in the Bible where this is most quoted, most known, is in John, chapter 3, verse 16. And it's a verse most people know. And it says this: 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” 

And so how do you have eternal life? You believe in Jesus. You have faith in Jesus. And often we stop quoting there. Here's verse 17, 18: 

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe in him stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the Son of God.”

So what does the text say? That we are condemned. Although Jesus didn't come into the world to condemn the world, we're condemned already. We're headed down the hill. There's destruction at the bottom of the hill. Jesus came to save, and those who believe in him are delivered from the condemnation. That's the message. And then there's this verse that is right before this that we often don't quote. And we don't quote it because it's a little odd. This is John 3. I'll start in verse 13, 14 is the verse I want you to see verse 13: 

“No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

So how do we have eternal life? We look to the Son of Man. Now, what is this, as Moses lifted up the serpent? This is told in Numbers 21, verses 4 through 9. When some of the people were dying in the wilderness, Moses put a serpent on the stick and he held it up. And everybody who looked at the serpent was cured. They were saved. And so here, John takes this and he says, you want to know how salvation works? It isn't that you do anything. You look to the One who can deliver you. You look to Jesus, ultimately.  

And so faith, trust is saying, this isn't about what I do, it's about what Jesus Christ did. If you've been here through this series, you've heard us talk about this. But what's important to understand about faith is that it's more than just a head knowledge. It's more than just an acknowledgement that something is true. It's more than even an approval of certain facts. We're told in the Bible that the demons believe and tremble, that even the demons believe and tremble. In other words, knowing facts isn't enough for us to say, I am part of this. Conversion involves this idea of repentance as well.  

It involves a change of direction. Let me just show you a couple of places. It's in the two verses that I referenced. Because in 2 Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17, it says very simply this idea that if anyone is in Christ, they're a new creation. The old is gone, new has come. In Matthew 18:3, if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to change, and become like a little child. And then In Acts, chapter 20, it says this very explicitly. Verse 21, I have declared both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. So what this is saying is that there is this idea of faith, but there's also a u-turn. There's a repentance that is part of this conversion account. 

In other words, it's more than just something we think, we approve of. There's a corresponding change in our lives. And this is something that for many people becomes problematic. In fact, theologians have long debated this. In the 90s, there was a big debate. It was called lordship salvation. There were a group of theologians who said Jesus has to be Lord if he's going to be Savior. And then those who said, well, wait, wait, wait, you're adding works to salvation. It can't be that. And then in more recent days, some authors have come out and talked about how there's faith by allegiance alone. And what they're trying to say is that our allegiance, that faith isn't just an intellectual assent, that it involves some kind of an allegiance of a change of something substantial in our lives.  

Wayne Grudem, who's one of the seminary profs, that I had wrote a big systematic theology book and he just came out with a revision recently, and he has a chapter on this. And he added a whole bunch of stuff to this, because he wanted to counter what he called the free grace movement, where he wanted to show it, and a generation ago, another theological prof, Lewis, Barry Schaefer, writing from Dallas Seminary, where he taught, wrote about the danger of saying repentance is part of conversion. Now, why do I tell you all of this? Because you're probably saying, I don't care about the history of this. How does this have anything to do with me? Well, what this has to do with you and me, is what people have been debating for a long time is what is it that constitutes a genuine conversion experience. So let me just tell you something that has happened just over the years for me.  

Sometimes I'll have people ask a question. They'll say, why don't we at Orchard Hill do the come forward and pray and raise hands and what has traditionally been called the altar call? Why is that not part of what we do at Orchard Hill? And I'll tell you a little bit about why. Part of it is, theological, having to do with this, part of it's experiential, but let me explain this. So when I first started doing church work, I was hired to be a youth pastor at a little church in chicago while I was doing seminary. And there weren't any kids at the church. And so why they hired me, I'm not sure. They had a house they let us live in, and they said we should have a youth pastor, even though we don't have any kids. And so I did what I knew how to do. They had a nice gym. I started doing basketball. And soon I had a bunch of boys coming. And once boys come, I had a bunch of girls coming. We had all these kids coming, none of whom had church background.  

And what I learned very quickly was that I could stand in front of those kids, and I could talk in such a way that almost every one of them would raise their hand. When I would say, raise your hand if you want to become a Christian, if you want to become a Christ follower, raise your hand today. And then they would raise their hand. They'd say, yeah, I want to become a Christian. I mean, there's heaven and there's this other place that’s condemned already. Believe in Jesus, look to Jesus? That's all I need to do? Cool. Sign me up. And what I learned as I worked with that group of students over a period of years is that most of them were no more converted than they were before the prayer, but I had been kind of under the belief that if I can get people to say a prayer and they mean it, that then they're converted.  

But what I realized is that in the Bible and in experience, that saying a prayer does not mean you're converted. Saying a prayer means nothing more than you said a prayer. That conversion, it requires a change. It requires a difference in the way that we live. And the reason that I bring up the theologians who are debating this is because this is problematic, and theologians on both sides are trying to protect something important. On the one side, what they're saying is there has to be a corresponding change, because repentance is part of it in the Bible. And on the other side, they're saying, but wait a second, as soon as I add repentance, I'm adding human work. And I'm becoming very dangerous to taking the Gospel away from being it's what God does, not what you do, and I'm starting to make it a thing where we have to do something and maintain something in order to keep ourselves standing. And both are problematic, unless our understanding of conversion is really precise. 

By the way, I wasn't the only person who's had this issue with the prayers and conversions. One of the two organizations that have been best known for the come forward and say a prayer idea, The Billy Graham Association, come forward just as I am, without one plea. You have to be older to get that reference at this point. But, but, but for years, Billy Graham would have just thousands of people come forward and pray a prayer.  

By their own statistics, after five years, only about 1 to 2% of people who came forward were established in local churches. Now, that still could be incredible. I'm not saying God doesn't use those moments. I'm not saying that it's wrong. What I'm saying is you have to question the effectiveness of it. And by the way, Billy Graham's own wife never had a moment that she could point to that was her quote, unquote, salvation. Billy Graham, most famous for saying, have a moment, all of this. Billy Graham's wife said, I don't know. I've just always believed. I don't know when it happened.  

The other organization that's really well known for this is the Southern Baptists. They'll always have people come forward. There was one year in their own denominational literature, that their churches claim more conversions than there were people in the United States. And what would happen is, people would be in a Southern Baptist church and they would say, I want to be saved. And then they would come back the next week and say, I want to be saved. And they would just keep counting it until they had more people who were saved in a year than there were people. 

And my concern became, just as I worked with students, was that if your message is pray this prayer and then you're saved, you're converted, and our assurance to it is to say you have to really, really mean it. What we're actually doing is maybe giving people false security. Because in the Bible, what it talks about is in Christ, if somebody's in Christ, they are a new creation. The old is past, the new has come. What does it mean to be in Christ? It means it's current faith. It's something that is now. It's not a past decision.  

And so the way that you're converted is instantaneous. It happens in a point in time. So there is a time to say, pray today, but the evidence of it is an ongoing looking to Jesus, like the people in the wilderness look to the serpent on the stick, and that there's a corresponding repentance. And in fact, when there's debate, one of the best things we can ever do is say, well, where in Scripture do we learn about this concept, and can we glean from it some significant lessons? And one of the places that this is true is when Jesus told the story of the parable of the sower. 

So, a farmer went out basically to sow some seed. And what we're told is he threw some on the hard compacted soil, and some birds came and snatched it up and ate it, took it away. And then, he sowed some that fell on the shallow soil. It sprouted up for a little bit, but. But when the weather came and the sun, it lost its ongoing nature. And then, some fell among the thorns and it was choked out from its full growth. And some fell on the good soil. And the disciples came to Jesus and they said, tell us what this means. This is Luke 8:11 and following Jesus says this: 

“This is the meaning of the parable. The seed is the word of God. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.”

He says, here's what happens. Sometimes people hear this, and their hearts are hardened, so they don't believe, and they're not saved. Now notice what Jesus does here. He puts the responsibility on the hearer. Yes, God is the one who initiates. He regenerates, but then, he says, at the same time, it is your hardness of heart that keeps you from believing. So there's a category that's just hard, doesn't respond. Verse 13: 

“Those on the rocky ground are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing, they fall away.”

It says, here's what happens. Some people hear this message, and they say, yes, I want to believe in Jesus. I want a spiritual life. And then as their life happens, something hard happens, and they say, forget about this. This is the category of person who in some way said, if I do the right things, believe the right principles, practice them well, then everything will go somewhat well in my life. And when it doesn't, they say, where is God? What kind of God is this? I don't wanna follow this God anymore. And then verse 14: 

“The seed that fell among the thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go their way they're choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature.”

Says, there are some who take this word in, but everything in their life just conspires against this taking root. And he says:

“But the seed on the good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a good crop.”

See, what Jesus says is this. He says the word, the Gospel, the message, it goes out. Some people just reject it outright. Some are shallow, they believe for a season, but any kind of testing makes it hard to persevere. And some are just choked by all of the things of their lives. They say, someday I'll get back to this. You know, when I'm done with school, when I have built my career, when we have some kids, when the kids leave home, you know, it's always out there somewhere, where I'll get serious about this. Because right now I'm just too busy to focus on this. And he says, that will choke out your faith. 

Now, I know that even in talking about this, some of you are saying, okay, help me say what it is you're saying. What is it? Because you've been all over the place. I know. So let me just try to clarify this. Conversion is instantaneous. It's an act of God, but it is evidenced in faith and repentance with ongoing results. So, there is current faith that is evidenced, even though it's instantaneous, it is irreversible. I believe that when God does this in a person's life, it cannot be taken away.  

But it is also possible from our perspective, that there are false conversions, people who appear to be converted who are not, because what has happened is they have this appearance of it sprouting up like faith. And as a result, we cannot always tell when somebody else has come to faith and when somebody else has not come to faith. And our assurance for ourselves or for anybody else should always be tied to current faith. Meaning, it should be, is this person in Christ today? Do they believe today? It's never in the Bible that if they prayed a prayer once 20 years ago and haven't lived with any form of repentance ever since. 

And then I would say that repentance, change is a direction more than it is perfection. And what I mean here is very important in trying to understand this. This idea of a u-turn does not mean that you will always be walking up the hill in the right direction, even with God empowering you. There will be days when the world, the powers, the nature get the better of us, and we sin and we commit transgressions, but the direction of our life will not be to be swept up with that once God has converted us. And that is a change. 

Now let me try to just even take it from clarifying statements to a story, because we all think differently. Sometimes statements are good, sometimes stories. So, when my kids started in college, I thought that one of the things that would be good for them was to not just have mom or dad come get them, or to pay for something, but to have them ride the megabus back and forth. Any of you remember Megabus? It was this bus service that was around. I'm not sure if it still is. Maybe it is. They always advertised $1 fares to get to a city. How you can transport somebody for a dollar, I do not know. 

And so when my first son went to college, it was, you're going to take the megabus. Second son, you should take the megabus. Third son, you don't have to take the megabus. Fourth son, what's the megabus? And I never took the megabus. I think one or two of my sons may have had to do some therapy from the megabus. But. But if you were to take the megabus somewhere, and you were about to get on the megabus, and somebody said to you, listen, this bus is going to crash. Now, being reasonable people, the first thing you do is say, well, I'm not going to get on the bus. Okay, I get that. So the analogy breaks down. But let's just assume that you said, I need to get on the bus.  

So you get on the bus and they say, but because it's going to crash, I have some really good news for you. I have bubble wrap. And if you will wear the bubble wrap, then you will be safe from this crash. So what happens? You put the bubble wrap on and you get on the bus. Now how do you think the other people on the bus are going to interact with you and the bubble wrap? The first thing they're gonna do is laugh at you and say you're wearing bubble wrap. Little afraid of the megabus, huh? Bubble wrap, really? And you're going to feel self-conscious because you've put bubble wrap on for something that you believe you need even though the other people don't have it. And when you go to sit down, I can imagine, I've never tried this, but I can imagine that if you're fully wrapped in bubble wrap, that sitting for a long period of time would be uncomfortable, because you're gonna be hunched over. It's not going to be, oh, I'm just sitting here enjoying the drive.  

Now, why do I say that this is somewhat of a story. When you come to understand the reason that Jesus Christ died, and you look to Jesus, you can't help but change. You don't have to try to have faith. You don't have have to muster up faith, because what happens is, you say, this is what I need. You believe that the bubble wrap is necessary for the coming crash, and anything that happens is secondary. But if you're on that bus, and you thought that the bubble wrap was gonna make your life better, what happens? Somebody laughs at you and you say, ha ha, I don't want this. You're sitting there and you're uncomfortable. After a while, your arms are bound and they come through with a drink service. I don't think they do that on Megabus by the way. But you go to get a drink out of your backpack or whatever you have, and your arms are bound, you say, I can't do this, this is ridiculous. And you're gonna take the bubble wrap, you're gonna cut it, you're gonna get it off yourself, you're gonna say, I don't want this anymore. This isn't what I need.  

It is only when you say my own goodness will never be enough, but the goodness of Jesus Christ on my behalf is, that you will be converted and you won't have to muster up faith and you will have a corresponding change, although that change is never what produces faith. It is just a fruit, just an evidence of what has happened in your heart. And so, conversion is when you or I are in Christ., faith and repentance, and there is a change. We become a new creation before God.  

And today is a day, that I believe if you're here and realize maybe for the first time that you need God and that Christianity isn't just a self-improvement, a moral improvement of yourself, or a life improvement system that you can be converted. You can say, God, I believe, I look to Jesus. And in time, the repentance will show.  

I believe that there's probably some of us who are here. And the truth about us is that we always try to live our lives to be good enough. And we're trying to do this whole repentance thing without looking to Jesus. So we feel guilty, we feel like we can't live well enough. And what we need to do is we need to come to Jesus with fresh eyes and say, I look to Jesus, and it's that alone that saves.  

And some of us are probably here, and we are those people who have a confidence based on some past prayer, some past decision, and our faith is not current. And we know that there is not evidence of repentance in our lives. And this is a day to say, God, I don't want to live my life on my own anymore, but I want to trust Jesus and look to Jesus as my Savior. And that is, in 30 minutes conversion. So, let's pray.  

God, I pray that you would help us to understand and see conversion. And God, if you've converted us, that there would be assurance and confidence even in the face of our failures. And God, if there needs to be conviction and a turning, I pray that you would bring that about right now, and that even in this moment there would be a looking to your son, a casting our own hope on your son. And God, I pray for all of us. That current faith, being united to Christ in Christ, would preserve, be preserved over time in such a way that we would be able to say, I know, I know that I've trusted in Jesus and that my hope is secure. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen. 

Thanks for being here. Have a great week. 

This transcript was automatically generated. Please excuse errors.