Why is the Word "Salvation" Not Enough? | Clip from Salvation in Full Color: Conversion

John Blair and the Setting of the Sermon on Conversion

This week, we're looking at a sermon by John Blair on conversion. So Chuck, why don't you give us an update on who John Blair was.

John Blair was the younger brother of Samuel Blair, who wrote the sermon that we looked at two of these sermons ago. It's been some weeks ago now, but justification by faith. Like so many of these men, he was a graduate of William Tennant's Logg College.

He became a pastor, a Presbyterian pastor in Pennsylvania, and he made several evangelistic journeys into Virginia that resulted in new congregations. It's hard to believe now, to think about this now, but then Pennsylvania was the western frontier, and the church that Blair was pastoring was on the edge of that.

So very sparsely populated, and they were recipients of a number of hostile attacks by Indians at the time. And so they decided to close up the church because of the ongoing raids and hostilities, and move to a more populated area.

So he was a pastor there for about six years. They moved back to a populated area, and he was left without a pastorate until 1757, about nine years, at which time his brother passed away, and he followed his brother as the pastor at that church.

His brother had been a teacher also of a kind of another Logg College. They called it something else, but John Blair became the teacher there until the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton, opened up, and then that was unnecessary.

But he was called to be the professor of theology and the vice president of Princeton for a time, until they called John Witherspoon, and he said John Witherspoon could teach theology as well as he could, so he left there and went back and pastored again.

So that's a brief overview of John Blair.

The New Creature as Regeneration in 2 Corinthians 5:17

The sermon has been entitled in this book, Conversion. I believe the original title of the sermon was The New Creature Delineated. And the passage he uses is 2 Corinthians 5, verse 17. So it's a passage pretty familiar to anyone who spent much time in church, where Paul writes, therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.

Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new. One of the things we want to look at in this chapter is the relationship between the doctrine of regeneration and conversion and how it fits under the theme of salvation.

Because really, this chapter is going to be dealing primarily with regeneration. And we've talked about regeneration earlier on. He does mention conversion, and he distinguishes between the two, and we'll get to that in a second.

But because he primarily focuses on regeneration, Chuck and I thought that what we could do for this chapter, instead of just going point by point through the sermon, is to kind of come up with eight questions that we're going to try to get through in our time.

Questions that are raised and answered by this chapter. Questions that we feel have a practical, pastoral quality to them. But before we do that, let me just give you a very simple overview of the chapter.

His major point, number one, is that he explains the nature of the change, here called the new creature or the new creation. Let me read you a quote. He says,. And then he gives a number of specifics based on that.

One of the things he says, of course, is that the Holy Spirit is the author, but also that the effect is a spiritual principle implanted. And he describes it this way, So he's talking about regeneration there.

Like with our natural birth, we're passive. So God is doing something within us that is bringing us from death to life, that is opening our eyes, that is altering our hearts' desires. And this is a secret, mysterious thing, something that we are not cooperating in, something that we're not causing to happen.

And he says, So what happens in us is regeneration. And what we do as a consequence of God waking us up, he says, is called conversion. So Chuck, recently, this week, we have a young believer in the church that asked me this question.

So I'm going to ask you the question. And I didn't prepare you for this, so we'll go see how you're going to do. She said to me, Isn't that good enough for all of salvation? Do we need to use these other words?

So how would you answer that question? Why don't we just use one word, salvation?

Well, we do use the word salvation, but we use other words as well because God uses other words, and they describe different aspects of salvation. And if we only use the one, we potentially miss some of the richness of what God has accomplished, and we don't understand all that's occurring and why it's necessary.

Yeah, I think that's the best answer, is that if God, in his kindness, has given us the gift of many words, kind of like turning a diamond, you know, facet by facet. So we're seeing our rescue from all these different angles.

If God sees that that's best for us, then we would be foolish to oversimplify it. So really, you know, I remember Mr. Roberts, who edited the book, was at the church years ago, and he said, salvation is an umbrella term.

So it's the general overarching term that describes everything from beginning to end. We could say, I have been saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved. And that would all be accurate. But when we come to the scriptures, there are specific terms for those different aspects.

Regeneration and Conversion as the Entrance into the Kingdom

So for our talk today, we want to distinguish just two great terms that describe the entrance into the kingdom. So regeneration, God making us alive, or by his spirit implanting that divine principle, waking us up.

The Bible uses wonderful metaphors for this. A new birth, a new creation, a spiritual resurrection, a quickening. And these, as extreme as they sound, these are not exaggerations. To move our souls from where we were to what we are as a Christian, you know, it is not less miraculous than those words.

Yeah, and to talk about them or try to understand them is not to try to be nitpicking. It is to try to understand the richness of what God has described in his word.

Regeneration is actually linked always, always with conversion. And conversion is a word that simply means to be turned or to turn. But the Bible gives two great words for conversion. And this is, in a sense, we could say regeneration is God's view of this great entrance into his kingdom.

You must be born again. God gives that. Conversion is our perspective. I must believe and I must repent. So I turn away from all the lies of self-righteousness and the lies of the world and my pet sins.

I turn away from them in order to turn to Christ. Or as another person has said, I turn to Christ in order to turn away from them. And in that turning, there is that wonderful exercise of faith. I believe what he has said.

Therefore, I turn. So faith and repentance. Faith and repentance is conversion, is the turning. Regeneration is the making alive. Thank you for watching the clip. We hope that it was helpful for you. If you want to hear the full audio of that podcast, you can find it on any of your favorite podcast apps.