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Stanley Jones on Conversion  

"Many are converted to church membership, which is good, but not good enough. ... Others are converted to the hope of escaping hell and getting to heaven. This is involved in conversion, but if it is made the end in view of conversion it will also let you down. If you pursue heaven as the goal, it will elude you. ... Others still are converted to escape from unhappiness, from ill-health, from failure. These are included in conversion, but if the emphasis is on these, they too are inadequate as life goals, for if pursued for themselves they will slip through your grasping fingers. They are by-products of something bigger and greater. What is that bigger and greater?

"In giving this bigger and greater Jesus Himself was never bigger and greater. With unerring insight He pointed to the Kingdom of God as that to which the converted are converted. Conversion, the new birth, is set within the framework of the Kingdom of God. 

"Since conversion converts ot the Kingdom of God then the area of operation for conversion is the whole of life - individual and social. Jesus gave the content of the Kingdom when He announced His manifesto in the little synagogue at Nazareth in the very beginning of His ministry, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor (the economically disinherited). He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives (the socially and politically disinherited) and recovering of sight to the blind (the physically disinherited), to set at liberty those who are oppressed ("bruised" - K.J.V. - the morally and spiritually disinherited, those who have bruised themselves upon the moral and spiritual laws), to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (or the Lord's year of Jubilee - the Year of Jubilee in which all slaves were freed, all debts cancelled and all land redistributed and the nation began on a basis of a close approximation to equality ...).'

"Here was reconstruction that would remake the economic, the social and political, the physical, the moral and spiritual, and the collective. ...

"A living, growing conversion is conversion taking in greater and greater areas of life. ... Dedication to the Kingdom ... will bring all life into coherence and goal and give it a sense of mission. The false division between the secular and the sacred will be wiped out. The whole of life will be sacred, because used for sacred ends - Kingdom of God ends. ... Conversion is conversion to the Kingdom of God.

E. Stanley Jones, Conversion, 1959, 240-245.

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