Advice For Those Under Spiritual Conviction | Clip from Salvation in Full Color: Conversion

Well, let's look at a couple more questions. What advice would you give someone who recently has come under a deep sense of conviction of their sin?

Blair gives us three things. Well, I'll hit you with the first.

Be thankful for conviction, he says, and do nothing that would stifle it. Do nothing that would kind of, you know, smother it, reduce the pain.

And he warns that the love of ease is really dangerous at this time in your life.

Do not quiet the painful, convicting voice of God. Let that discomfort drive you to the cross, to the doctor, not cause you to say, look, if religion is painful like this, you know,

I came here and I wasn't very good. I mean, we often get this statement at the church. I came here to become a better person, but after a couple of months,

I'm worse than I ever was. Well, it's because God is showing them the truth. And then you have a choice. Run toward the

God that is saying some unpleasant things about you, and that's pretty frightening. Or run away from that God and go back to kind of putting a band -aid of, you know, indifference or religion of some sort of morality, you know, and say, well,

I'm fine. I don't need that. Yeah. You can think of Jesus' words about, well, are they

Jesus' words or John's words? Go ahead. John 3. You can think about the words in John 3 about light coming into the world and men loving the darkness rather than the light.

I mean, to embrace Christ is to run to the light where you're exposed and all the sinfulness is right there.

So, we can understand the natural desire to kind of run backwards and hide in the shadows, even though it's the wrong direction.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's much like us with doctors, you know, like I got a terrible diagnosis.

The prognosis doesn't look very good. I don't really want to go through that, even though I know that might be my only hope.

Another thing he says is stay in the Bible because that is where you will get the clearest understanding of your need, of God's provision in Christ, and of the nature of the new birth.

You know, so don't, when you're under conviction, don't avoid your Bible because then you're left kind of to this fuzzy imagination like, well,

I feel like I got it or I feel like there's no hope for me, you know, and the

Bible is not guiding you at that point. A third thing he mentions, keep crying out at the foot of God's merciful throne until he saves you.

You know, give him no rest. Final question today, Chuck, what advice would you give to someone who has never been bothered about their sin?

Yeah, Blair spends a fair amount of paid real estate on answering that, and a big part of his answer to that is how you obviously are not aware of the danger you're in.

How could you be at ease if you understood the danger that you're facing? So you know, don't stick your head in the sand, but look and see what

God has said about you and about eternity and about the hostility that exists between you and him and the cure that's been provided.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately it comes down to, do I trust him? Because who would go to God when your life feels fairly comfortable and everything's going well?

Do you want to go to God and for him to just turn it all upside down? I mean, that's pretty terrifying if you take him seriously.

I mean, he will demand that you lay every single thing on the table and there will be no locked doors in your life that you can say,

God, I'm going to give you 85%, but this is mine. You know, if you say that, if you try to negotiate with God, all conversation ends.

It's just you talking, you know. There's no reality. God's not there listening. God's not responding.

And you just get stuck with religion, which is more miserable. But to trust

God enough to say to him, this seems to me to be the most frightening thing and it seems counterintuitive, but I'm coming to you because I believe that what you say is true.

Please open my eyes, you know, show me myself and then show me your son.

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