Conversion as breaking with your old life

Becoming a Christian requires a definite and radical break with your former life. You do not merely add Christian to the man or woman you were before. There is an end and there is a beginning; there’s a death and there is a resurrection, as it were—a regeneration, as the Bible will put it. Whoever is in Christ, there is the new creation, Paul says. The old has gone, the new has come.

Now, what changes? You have the same body. You have the same name. You have your previous experiences. You may have your same talents. In some respects, you will gain spiritual gifts. What has changed is your fundamental allegiance. You gain a new master, and you must renounce your former one. Now, by the way, this statement shows us that probably most of the Thessalonian believers were converted Gentiles. There would have been some Jews converted out of the synagogue, but it seems that most were pagan idolaters—Gentiles who were converted—and they realized they could not just add Christ, as it were, to the shelf in their pantheon of idols. They realized that embracing Jesus required a revolution in their religion and worship and service. Let me put it this way: They looked upon the church and culture—Christianity and the false religions—fundamentally with a viewpoint of antithesis.

You and I are living in a time that is synthetic: Well, let’s see how we can work together with the culture. We’ll take the good from the culture, and give the good that we have, and use cultural means, and redeem the culture. The Thessalonians did not think that way at all. They saw the antithesis between the church, the people of God, and the world. One is bound for salvation; the other is damned. And they were seeking to save people out of the fire. That is the way that they thought. By all means, they were seeking to have a loving influence in the society, but they had left the idolatrous world. They had come to Christ and his kingdom, and they embraced a distinctive and biblical Christianity in all of their life, worship, and ministry. That is maybe the single greatest need of the evangelical church today: to be willing to be distinctively Christian, to be different, to think antithetically with respect to the church and the world.¹

Richard D. Phillips