Are You Converted?

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 11, 1876

Are You Converted?

READER, there is a great question before your eyes. Try to answer it. The Bible says that without conversion there can be no salvation. Now are you converted?

You attend church perhaps. You go to the Lord’s table. You like good people. You can distinguish between good preaching and bad. You think Popery false, and oppose it warmly. You think Protestantism true, and support it cordially. You subscribe to religious societies. You attend religious meetings. You sometimes read religious books. It is well; it is very well. It is good; it is all very good. It is more than can be said of many. But still this is not a straightforward answer to my question, Are you converted, or unconverted?

Have you been born again? Are you a new creature? Have you put off the old man, and put on the new? Have you ever felt your sins and repented of them? Are you looking simply to Christ for pardon and life eternal? Do you love Christ? Do you serve Christ? Do you loathe heart sins, and fight against them? Do you long for perfect holiness, and follow hard after it? Have you come out from the world? Do you delight in the Bible? Do you wrestle in prayer? Do you love Christ’s people? Do you try to do good to the world? Are you vile in your own eyes, and willing to take the lowest place? Are you a Christian in business and on week days, and by your own fire-side? Oh, think on these things, and then perhaps you will be better able to tell the state of your soul.

Reader, turn not away from this question, however unpleasant it may be. Answer it, though it may prove you in the wrong and expose your fearful danger. Rest not, till you know how it is between you and God. Better a thousand times find out that you are in an evil case, and repent betimes, than live on in uncertainty and be lost eternally. Are you converted?—N. Y. Witness.