E. Stanley Jones

              Today conversion is normally understood as a one-time event – a moment in which you make a decision to agree with certain statements of faith and then recite a certain prayer.  Popular religion projects this image of conversion that is shallow and does not penetrate the depths of the soul.  Jones suggests a much more biblical understanding of conversion, one that pushes us to a total experience of discipleship that affects every sphere of our living.

Not only do we receive or obtain the gift from God, but we respond by truly living and building up.  As Jones puts it, “We trust as if the whole thing depended on God and work as if the whole thing depended on us.”  The idea is “receptivity from God and response in work from us.”

Jones believes that a response from us requires certain disciplines to continue attaining our conversion after we have obtained it.  He turns to the biblical example of Jesus and the three foundational habits he exhibited: reading the Word of God, praying in private, and teaching others what we have gathered.  If a convert is not consistently participating in these activities, he or she is not enlarging “the area of [their] conversion, taking in fresh territory every day.”