Acts 3:19: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted (Aramaic – surrender, submit), that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord;”
I am completing a book with the working title: We Prayed for Revival and All We Got Was a Hug. It is sort of autobiographical of my first pastoral experience in a church that was one fourth rank liberal, one fourth indifferent, one fourth fundamentalist and one fourth charismatic. Everyone tried to convert everyone else to their theological position or lack thereof. It was about to explode the whole church into splinters when all of a sudden we had a visitation from the Father of Lights (ancient Jewish term for Jehovah). It was nothing what you would expect from a revival and yet it was everything a revival should be.
For years I have been haunted by a word I discovered in my Aramaic Bible that is rendered in our English Bible as conversion. I grew up in the fundamentalist church where the main duty of the Christian was to go out and get converts. I was a sorry excuse for an evangelist, not that I didn’t try. I mean I went door to door with our Sky Pilot invasion, I tried the Friendship Evangelism of my Youth For Christ Club in high school, I worked with Campus Crusade and shared the Four Spiritual Laws with students at the University and I did door to door evangelism and street evangelism in my Practical Christian Work assignments at Moody Bible Institute. I never got used to it, I never felt comfortable sharing my faith, and suffered extreme anxiety over my attempts at personal evangelism. I prayed that God would make me bold in sharing my faith. I dreamed of being like those spiritual giants in Bible College who went out on the streets and returned with a dozen names of new converts, people they led to the Lord. But When the Father of Lights paid a visit to our little church evangelism took on a whole new meaning as did this concept of conversion. I no longer fear evangelism.
When I served in this church with the fourfold theologies I was pressured by the charismatics to speak in tongues which I was adamantly against at that time. I was pressured by the fundamentalist to go out witnessing which I was terrified of doing and I was pressured by the liberals to take the youth out trick or treating only instead of getting a treat they encouraged the people at the door to drop in a monetary gift in a little box they carried to collect donations for UNICEF. Not that I had anything against UNICEF, I just did not see that as a church function. That just left me with only the indifferent group that I could relate to.
If the church agreed on one thing it was to get converts so we could increase our size and numbers. Nobody had a problem with getting converts except me as that responsibility fell on me. I never, ever recommend a book or a movie in my blog. However, I must make an exception if you will forgive me. I highly recommend the movie Father of Lights. You can download it for free or order if off of Amazon for ten dollars. The movie demonstrated the only way I ever felt comfortable in sharing my faith. I also recommend a book by former Congressman and UN Ambassador Mark Siljander entitled: A Deadly Misunderstanding. Mark Siljander sees the common ground between Christianity, Muslims and Judaism as Aramaic and his understanding of the Aramaic word for conversion is identical to the understanding I have had for years but was afraid to share it. I would like to use Mark Siljander’s explanation of the word conversion as he does a much better job of it than I do.
You see the word convert appears exactly ten times in the New Testament (KJV) and five times in the Old Testament. When Peter told the people to repent and be converted the word used for conversion in the Greek is epistrepho which means a turning about or a conversion. But the Aramaic word that was spoken by Peter who spoke Aramaic and thus it had to be translated into Greek was the Aramaic word shalem. Sounds a lot like shalom. It is from the same root and means peace, good well and all that but it has a wide range of meanings and usages. I found in extra Biblical literature that the word shalem was used to express the idea of submission.
Maybe the difference between submission and conversion is not that significant to you. But to me, once I stopped trying to convert people, convert them to my way of thinking and just simply encourage them to submit to God, evangelism took on a whole new meaning for me. Our society today is inundated with encouragements to convert. We are pressured to convert to a new toothpaste, new car, new diet you name it everyone is trying to convert us to their way of thinking. The least tasteful of all conversions is religion. I have not yet read in the Bible where we are commanded to convert people to a religion. It seems this whole idea of conversion is to convert from our sinful life style to a righteous life with God. But, hey, does not the Bible say that salvation is by faith and not of works? Ephesians 2:8-9. Here is where this idea of conversion troubled me. For the very act of conversion means you are taking an active role in your conversion and believe me in my years of ministry I have dealt with a lot of people who begged and pleaded to convert from their life of drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling etc. They tried and tried to convert and failed miserably.
What I hated most about personal evangelism was that I was trying to convert someone to my beliefs, my faith, my way of thinking, my way of living and I was always plagued by the thought, “How do I know my way is the right way after all?” The other day I did a study on I Corinthians 2:2 where the Apostle Paul said that he came with nothing more than Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I found it a whole lot easier and more natural to simply encourage someone to shalem, submit to God, surrender to Him rather than convince them to think like me.
After our visitation from the Father of Lights at my first church I went out on a pastoral call to a delinquent member of our church. She only let me in her house because I was a preacher and she felt she had to do it but told me in no uncertain terms she was not about to be converted. I assured her I had no intention of converting her. She introduced me to her three cats that immediately jumped up on my lap and contentedly started to purr. The little lady stood with her mouth open and said: “My cats always run away from strangers, the fact they came to you proves you are someone special.” I told her, “My friend, if I have learned anything in these past weeks is that I am no one special, but I have a very special God living inside of me I just submit to Him and you cats come, not to me but to Him. The little lady sat down and said: “I once submitted to God, but I haven’t done so for many years. Before long we were both in tears as we just basked in the presence of God and she prayed a prayer of shalem submission, not conversion, but submission. The converting was left to God who did whatever converting was necessary. Our job is to just submit and encourage others regardless of creed, doctrine or religion to submit to Him.
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