Be ye saved...

What is was your conversion experience like?

Do you remember you life before you were saved and then the change, (there should have been a change) afterward? This is a powerful part of your life, probably the most important day in your life.

How often do you share it? When was the last time you told someone about the day you were saved? Do you share more about fish you caught, football games, how knees hurt, and who is on your nerves? Try telling someone joyfully about your salvation experience. If you find you don’t have one, then you may need to do some praying to see if you have truly received Jesus or just practicing religion. I recently of a great man of God’s conversion experience.

Charles Spurgeon who was one of the greatest Baptist preachers of all time and he also shared his conversion story over 280 times in his preaching. He never got over the fact that God saved him. He said that prior to conversion he had a Christian upbringing (he was christened as an infant, and raised in the Congregational church), and he read the Bible and prayed daily, he did not know Jesus.

He describes his feeling prior as “I was years and years upon the brink of hell—I mean in my own feeling. I was unhappy, I was desponding, I was despairing. I dreamed of hell. My life was full of sorrow and wretchedness, believing that I was lost.”

But one day on a Sunday in January in1850 Spurgeon woke one with a deep sense of his need for deliverance. Because of a snowstorm, the 15-year-old’s path to church was diverted down a side street. For shelter, he ducked into the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Artillery Street. An unknown substitute lay preacher stepped into the pulpit and read his text—Isaiah 45:22—“Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.”

Spurgeon’s Autobiography records his reaction:

“He had not much to say, thank God, for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text, and there was nothing needed—by me, at any rate except his text. Then, stopping, he pointed to where I was sitting under the gallery, and he said, ‘That young man there looks very miserable’ … and he shouted, as I think only a Primitive Methodist can, ‘Look! Look, young man! Look now!’ … Then I had this vision—not a vision to my eyes, but to my heart. I saw what a Savior Christ was.… Now I can never tell you how it was, but I no sooner saw whom I was to believe than I also understood what it was to believe, and I did believe in one moment.

“And as the snow fell on my road home from the little house of prayer I thought every snowflake talked with me and told of the pardon I had found, for I was white as the driven snow through the grace of God.”

Upon his return home, his appearance caused his mother to exclaim,

“Something wonderful has happened to you.”

For the next months young Spurgeon searched the Scriptures

“to know more fully the value of the jewel which God had given me.… I found that believers ought to be baptized.” And so he was baptized, by immersion and joined a Baptist church.

What is your conversion story? Do you have one? Why don’t you share it?