Chapter 15
Mount Of Conversion
We have now come to the second mountain peak in the life of a sanctified Christian. Of course it is Conversion or the Witness of the Spirit, or Regeneration, or the New Birth, or being Born Again. All the above names are applied to the converted man.
As we saw that Mount Sinai was the mountain peak of conviction for the sinner, We see that Mount Calvary is the mountain peak for the regenerated man. It is a fact that when a man goes to Mount Sinai and gets under Bible conviction he goes down through the valley of repentance and climbs the mountain on which the cross stood, and there, all sin-cursed and devil-ridden he looks up through his tears and sees the blessed Son of God bleeding on Calvary for him. He there believes on him and then accepts Him as His Savior, and the load of conviction that has been hanging over his head ever since he left Mount Sinai, with all of his guilt, slips away at the foot of the cross on Calvary. Then and there he is pardoned and receives the witness of the Spirit and knows for himself that he is converted.
He knows that the load of guilt and condemnation rolled away on the mountain, and now he is a free man so far as sins are concerned, and he knows that he is a live man as far as life is concerned, for he has been born again. He has been changed from nature to grace. Old things have passed away, and behold all things are become new. He is now a new creature. He is what we call a justified man, or, to make it real plain he is now a religious man. He has been regenerated and has been adopted into the family of God, and his name has been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Now if he keeps what he got, he will be alive a million years from today and shining in the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The regenerated life is one of the great mountain peaks of the life of a man of God. It is a great thing to be born again. Indeed it is so great that so many have supposed that there is no room for anything else, and they have made the mistake of trying to make the new birth cover all the ground of the life of the Christian. I am ready and willing to admit that regeneration goes as far as God intended regeneration to go, but God never intended regeneration to cover the ground that sanctification is to cover. If we look we will see that there is a vast difference between the birth of the Spirit and the baptism of the Spirit.
We are all convinced that it is one of the great things of the great God to regenerate a dead soul, but thank God, He can do it, and not only that, but He can give you the witness of the Spirit to the work that has been done, and the man who has received it will know it a little better than he knows anything else.
But while we call regeneration one mountain peak, there are nine works of grace in that one work, or some body else would say, that there are nine steps to be taken to get out of sin into the life of righteousness. I can give them to you just so plain that anybody on earth can see them.
To begin with here is the first step to be taken: it is Bible conviction. Don’t you see that conviction is one thing, and regeneration is another? Now after a man is convicted he repents of his sins. So you see that repentance is one thing and regeneration is another. Well now, when the fellow repents of his sins he is brought to the place where he confesses his sins, and you see that to confess is one thing and regeneration is another. But take another step. After he confesses his sins he is brought to the place where he can believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. You see at a glance that re generation is one thing and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is another. Well now, when a man believes on the Lord Jesus Christ he is then and there justified. We understand that justification must take place in the mind of God, and before he can count that man just He must look at him through the blood of His own Son. When he is justified in the mind of God, He sends the Holy Spirit to witness to it, and we call that regeneration. He is born again, or regenerated, and when he is regenerated, the Holy Spirit will come into his heart bearing witness with his heart that he is now the child of God. Now there is justification, or being justified from past guilt, and there is regeneration, or the making alive of a dead soul, and there is the witness of the Spirit that these works of grace are done in your heart. When that is done then and there you are adopted into the family of God, and your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
Now reader, if you will look you will see nine works of grace as plain as the sunshine before your eyes. Now let us state the nine works as they come in order to make it real plain. First conviction, and second repentance, third confession, fourth forsaking, fifth believing, sixth justification, seventh regeneration, eighth the witness of the Spirit, ninth adoption. It takes all of these great works in the life of the man to make a Bible Christian out of him and get him started on the road to heaven. I grant you that the above looks like enough to make a man anything in the world that he ought to be, but you will notice that there is not one thing said in all of the above works of grace concerning the carnal mind, or the Old Man as he is called, and the blessing, as great as it is, only deals with the sins that we have committed. There is not one thing in the above to show that the Old Man is destroyed in regeneration, but there are thousands of things in the life of the church members of the present time to show that as the Bible puts it, they are “yet carnal,” and it has ever been so.
A regenerated man today is as religious as he ever was in any other age of the world. The people who were born again 1900 years ago did not get any better religion than I got on the frontier of Texas twenty-nine years ago. They needed The Blessing, and so did I, and so do you, and so do we all. But that is to be the next mountain peak that we are to discuss.
The real facts are that the regenerated life is a great life, and higher than the great bulk of people live. If we, as a people, were to live up to God’s standard of regeneration, we would have no trouble in getting the church into the experience of holiness. At the first opportunity they would go into the fountain as a drove of sheep over the pasture fence. You could not keep them out of the blessed experience of full salvation. If it were popular to be sanctified, in all the churches we would have them at the altar by the tens of thousands, and such a revival would break out as the world never saw. The glory would fill the tabernacle and the world would be brought to Christ in this generation.