Dear Friends,
Sadly, we often use words without any clear sense of their real meaning. That may cause us some embarrassment at times, but it may also be serious. For example, just what does the word “converted” or “conversion” mean? Today’s devotional will explain and should lead you to ask, “Am I converted?” God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Matthew 18:2-3 (ESV)

  And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

“If you are really converted, it was not the conversion of the feelings only, or the intellect only; it was the subjugation of everything within you to that sweet power of his. You were quite broken down; you had no strength to stand up against him any longer; and the joy of it was that you had not any wish to do so. When he was about to fix the chains of his love upon you, you held out your hands, saying, ‘Here, Lord, bind my wrists;’ you put forth your feet, crying, ‘Place the fetters here also.’ You asked him to cast a chain around your heart; you made a covenant with him, and agreed to be bound all over, for that part of you which was unbound you reckoned to be enslaved, and only that which he did bind you considered to be free. When he had so mastered us, we longed to lie for ever at his feet, and weep ourselves away; or we wished to sit forever at his feet, and listen to his wondrous words, and learn his blessed teaching; yet we also wanted to run about the world on his errands; it mattered not to us where he might send us, we would not make any choice of our sphere of service; if he would but employ us, that would be all we would ask. We wanted then to have a dozen lives, and to spend them all for him.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLV, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1899), p. 482-483]