Quotes About Conversion

I never heard the Gospel until I was 18 years old. Jesus Christ... the name was synonymous to me as the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

Make no mistake: conversion therapy is not about 'praying away the gay.' It's an emotional torture against our most innocent citizens: our children.

Repentance, rebirth, and conversion were exchanged for cheap grace, and the integrity of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus faded. People join the church in droves, but Christian disciples were hard to come by. Christianity had an identity crisis. It's the same old story of the forbidden fruit--it's the beautiful things that get us. It's the things that seem good, but are not quite of God, that steer us off the course of holiness into destructiveness.

If we believe terrorists are beyond redemption, then we can rip out half of our New Testament since it was written by a converted terrorist who became an extremist for grace.

If I believed terrorists were beyond redemption, I would need to rip out half of my New Testament Scriptures, for they were written by a converted terrorist.

Tom, my husband, who converted to Judaism when we got married, and as a consequence, we were learning about historical conversions to Judaism. Really, every time it pops up, it's very strange.

Falling in love is like religious conversion. It goes on for a long time below the threshold before it reaches consciousness.

Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

That amount of time is to be converted into some products, benefits, goods, services, welfare, ministry, but most of us actually truncate this amount of wealth on daily basis.

The first time I sang in the church choir two hundred people changed their religion.

And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.

Paul did not see himself as switching religions. He came to realize that Christ was the fulfillment of Judaism, of everything that God had planned and revealed within the sacred Jewish Scriptures.

Justin alludes to his conversion, indicating that originally it was Christians' martyrdom that showed him they deserved to be believed.34 They were willing to die for what they held dear. Of how many people can that be said? Or, to put it differently, how many martyrs for Zeus do we hear about?

modern research on conversion has demonstrated that, long after such an experience, a convert tends to confuse what actually happened in light of everything that occurs in its aftermath

Paul started out as an outsider to the apostolic band and originally opposed rather than supported their movement.

Conversion was not a widely known phenomenon in antiquity. Pagan religions had almost nothing like it. They were polytheistic, and anyone who decided, as a pagan, to worship a new or different god was never required to relinquish any former gods or their previous patterns of worship. Pagan religions were additive, not restrictive.

Research on conversion has demonstrated that, long after such an experience, a convert tends to confuse what actually happened in light of everything that occurs in its aftermath. That is to say, years later, the accounts people tell, to both themselves and others, have been slanted by all they have learned, thought, and experienced in the interim.

Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as "conversion." Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity.

We have very little evidence to suggest that serious intellectuals converted to the Christian faith between the time of Paul and the mid-second century. Most converts would have been lower-class and uneducated. This was certainly true in Paul's own day. In a letter to one of his largest congregations, he explicitly reminds the Corinthians about their own constituency: "Consider your calling, brothers and sisters: Not many of you were wise...

Until the end of the nineteenth century, this remote region was known as Kafiristan because of its infidel religion. But after the people in those valleys were forcibly converted to Islam the region became known as Nuristan, or the "Land of Light." It is not improbable that descendants of the Greek-Bactrian kingdom, or even of Alexander's men, live there.

I prefer the monotony of obscure sacrifice to all ecstasies. To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul.

Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends.

Because the truth of God is love, conversion to God is conversion to love.

There is no surer evidence of an unconverted state than to have the things of the world uppermost in our aim, love, and estimation.