“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” (KJV)

What did Jesus mean by being “born again” and being “converted”? Obviously, He meant something very, very important, for having it or not having it divided men – all men - for time and eternity. We will take up in another chapter an exposition of conversion and the new birth. Before we go on we must clear a confusion in many minds between proselytism and conversion. They are the same for many people, but nothing could be further from the thought of Jesus than to make them one - He rejected one and insisted on the other. He said to the religious leaders of that day: “You traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” He rejected this scramble for numbers which only added to their collective egotism – an essentially irreligious process. For proselytism is a change from one group to another without any necessary change in character and life. It is a change of label, but not of life. Conversion, on the other hand, is a change in character and life followed by an outer change of allegiance corresponding to that inner change. A Hindu said to me one day: “I’ll become baptized if you give me twenty thousand rupees and a good job.” I replied: “My brother, if you should lay down twenty thousand rupees at my feet and say, ‘Please baptize me,’ I would refuse it – and you!” Proselytism and conversion are poles apart, and to confuse them is to degrade the most precious thing that life holds – conversion. It is to confuse love and lust, beauty and ugliness, life and death.

Moreover, to confuse “being converted” with “being inside the church” and “being unconverted” with “being outside the church” is to fall into the same fatal error. For Jesus urged this necessity of being born again upon Nicodemus, a highly respectable religious “teacher of Israel.” Why did He say this straight off: “You must be born again”? The reason obviously was that He saw Nicodemus steal in at night, looking this way and that way before he entered, afraid of what people would say about his coming to see this young disturber of the status quo. Nicodemus was herd-centered instead of God-centered. Some are self-centered, some herd-centered, and some are God-centered. Nicodemus belonged to a combination of the first two, not to the last. So Jesus had gently to put him on the side of those who do not see the kingdom of God.

But was this an arbitrary division imposed on life – imposed by a Gentle Fanatic? Or did Jesus not impose something on life, but expose something out of life? Does life too say: “You must be born again,” and “Except you be converted you cannot enter the kingdom of God”? Is life rendering the same verdict that Jesus pronounced two thousand years ago? And with increasing insistence and urgency? Listen in to what is revealed in doctors’ offices where the disrupted are passing on the illness of their minds and souls to their bodies; to what the patients on psychiatrists’ couches are saying as they reveal their mental and emotional and spiritual tangles; to what lies back of a façade of respectability in homes where marital conflicts cause people to teeter on the verge of breakdown and breakup; to what management and labor are saying as their strained relations harden into sullen hostility or open conflict; to what parents and children say as unconverted parents are irritated to distraction at seeing their children practicing their own sins; to what self-centered and egotistical national representatives are unconsciously saying as they stumble from failure to failure to find agreements – agreements which affect the destiny of us all; to what many a heart filled with the sheer boredom and emptiness of life is saying silently; to what the conscience is saying as it is gnawed at night and day by a sense of estrangement through guilt. Listen to life as is. And you will hear in an increasing crescendo, “You must be born again…Except you be converted you cannot live now or hereafter.”

The whole of life is a commentary on what I’ve just said. Do we need to call the roll of witnesses to the fact that life breaks down without conversion?

Here is what H.G. Wells wrote shortly before his death: “A frightful queerness has come into life. Hitherto events have been held together by a certain logical consistency as the heavenly bodies have been held together by the golden cord of gravitation. Now it is as if that cord had varnished and everything is driven anyhow, anywhere, at a steadily increasing velocity. The writer is convinced that there is no way out or around, or through the impasse. It is the end.”

Here was a great mind, without an inner sustaining conversion, up against a blank wall of futility – “It is the end.” But that end, through conversion, could turn into a beginning. As it has for many – as many as have tried it.

Said one of the greatest statesmen of our time to me: “I’m fed up.” His patriotism and his devotion, without conversion, had run their course and were not sufficient to sustain him. Another great statesman said just recently to me: “We’ve reached bottom.” Life without conversion had no sustaining hope. Another in high office said: “My religion and my philosophy have let me down. So I hate my work, and I hate life.” His “religion” and his “philosophy” did not provide for conversion, so they let him down.

A Japanese governor introduced me in these words: “I’m a man here tonight without a faith. I wish I had a faith. I envy those of you who do have a faith. But I’m a lost sheep. I’ve come here tonight to gain a faith if possible through the speaker. And I hope you will gain one too.” And he was a trustee of a Buddhist temple.

A Japanese doctor told me that tuberculosis had been ousted as Killer Number One in Japan in favor of heart disease and high blood pressure. When I asked him the cause, he replied “Spiritual uneasiness.” At the close of the war the philosophy of a great people had collapsed – they were not a divine people with a divine emperor who had a divine destiny to rule. That conception of life went down in blood and ruin and left a vacuum. So this sense of vacuum has sent up the blood pressure of a whole nation.

Carl Jung, the great psychiatrist, said: “The central neurosis of our time is emptiness.” Human nature simply can’t stand emptiness and meaninglessness. It gets jumpy, jittery, goes to pieces.

The tragic thing is that this sense of meaninglessness has become a characteristic of our modern climate. Professor W. T. Stace of Princeton University said: “It is the essence of the modern mind that the universe is meaningless and purposeless.” The modern mind has given us knowledge and conveniences - and emptiness!

An undergraduate of one of our great universities told Sam Shoemaker: “I don’t know what is the matter with me, but I feel lost.” Dr. Shoemaker quoted that remark to a number of his contemporaries and about nine out of ten replied: “That’s me.”

That sense of lostness has produced a sense of cynicism and a lack of faith in anything or any person. A young man asked a professor of history: “What’s your racket?” The professor replied that he was a professor of history, and then asked: “Aren’t you interested in history?” “Naw,” he replied: “I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.” He was not interested in anything, for nothing gave a basic meaning and goal to life. He needed conversion.

Leigh Hunt, speaking of Napoleon’s final weeks when he escaped from Elba and made his stand at Waterloo, wrote: “No great principle stood by him.” That is at the bottom of the sense of lostness in the soul of modern man. No great principle stands by them. They feel orphaned, estranged, alone – terribly alone. An atheist has been defined as “a man who has no invisible means of support.” But many who would not want to be called atheists have that same sense of lacking invisible support. They go down under the pressure of circumstances, for they have no invisible means of support.

I saw a man stagger through a railway station in Japan with a huge carton on his bent back. On the carton were the words, “The Universe.” An individual bent under the weight of the universe! That graphically describes what has happened to the individual. Through books, newspapers, radio and television the “universe” and its troubles are daily laid on the back of staggering individuals. In addition he has to bear his own individual burdens within his heart. Without a sustaining conversion no wonder so many crack up under it.

In India a man spoke to Rotary for an hour on “Nothing.” For this Nothingness, sunyavadi, has been built up into a philosophy. Having nothing to sustain them, they capitalize it and take refuge in nothingness. So the empty take refuge in emptiness, but you cannot change emptiness into fullness by capitalizing it. Emptiness has to be changed into fullness by conversion. An Indian Christian said of a certain man, “He is suffering from nothingness.” Many do.

A pastor’s brilliant son, a personnel man in a great corporation, told his father: “I’m trying hard to be an atheist, but I’m having a time of it!” He and his nurse wife are each spending forty dollars a week with the same psychiatrist. Conversion would take their feet out of this fly-paper of self-preoccupation and send them on their way rejoicing because they would be released.

A sister told of her brother, who does not go to church, that he had said: “I don’t need the money, but I work just to run away from myself.” His wife added: “I work to keep from committing suicide.” Conversion would put back meaning and value and goal to life. They muddle through without it.

Sir Thomas Salt, inventor of Alpaca and founder of Saltaire, heard a preacher say he saw a caterpillar crawl up a painted stick in search of a juicy twig only to have to retrace his steps.

There are the painted sticks of pleasure, wealth, power, and fame. Men climb them only to have to retrace their steps. The next day the baronet visited the preacher and said: “I have been climbing those painted sticks. I’m a weary man. Is there rest for a weary millionaire?” He found rest and release through the words of Jesus: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28, KJV) Conversion turned weariness into worthwhileness.

A Hindu atheist said to me: “I’m like a broken radio receiving set trying to get the wave length.” An inquirer came in just after I had my talk with the atheist, and I called him back and asked if he wouldn’t interpret for me as I talked to this inquirer in a language I didn’t know. He gladly assented. An atheist interpreting the Christian message to an inquirer! He did it enthusiastically, adding emphasis to my points. For the first time in his life he came in contact with something positive, something hopeful, something constructive. He was only a transmitter, but the feel of it was good. The finding of it would be what he was really wanting, amid all his atheism.

What shall we say of those who take refuge in narcotics? It’s an escape out of futility. I talked to an alcoholic. I felt he was agreeing with me about everything so I suggested that we get down on our knees, thinking he would gladly lay his troubled life at the feet of Christ. But he stiffened, sat bolt upright, and said between clenched teeth: “I’ll be darned if I do.” So I prayed without him. When I was interrupted by a noise I opened my eyes and saw that he had slipped out into the bathroom to get a swig of liquor to sustain him through the ordeal of resisting salvation. He had always turned to liquor as the way out, and in the greatest crisis of his life he turned to it again. He wanted a refuge from salvation! Later on his deathbed he turned feebly to God, surrendering his ruined life to save his ruined soul. And the love that had followed him all the years embraced him and bade heaven rejoice. Conversion would have saved his life as well as his soul.

In a city were two signs side by side. “Go to church. Find strength for your life.” Next to it was: “Where there’s life there’s Budweiser.” These two signs represent two approaches to life – one is from the inward to the outward; the other is the outward to the inward. One depends on inward salvation from guilt and fear and conflict; the other depends on outward stimulants – pick-me-ups that let you down. The increase in narcotic consumption and tranquilizers is the outer symptom of a deep need for conversion. It is the pagan substitute for conversion – with pathetic results. When we turn to the philosophers and psychiatrists and writers and novelists we hear the same sense of inadequacy, often deepening into despair.

Dr. William E. Hocking, Harvard philosopher, said at the Jerusalem Conference that man brings himself up to a certain place and then finds he hasn’t the resources to complete himself. He must be completed from without, by something beyond himself. I held my breath waiting to see whether he would say the word. But he didn’t. At the close I said: “Dr. Hocking, why didn’t you say the word?” “What word?” he asked. I replied: “When you said man hasn’t enough resources outside himself, why didn’t you say, ‘Conversion, new birth, born from above?’ He thoughtfully replied: “I’m not willing for you to turn it over to me; if you see it, you should say it.” Whether through implication or by revealing silences philosophy does say the word - it points to the need of conversion, of being born from above.

Listen to this despairing word from an Eastern philosopher: “A blind turtle and an ox yoke are floating on a vast ocean, and the turtle has as much chance of putting his head through that yoke as you have of being reborn as a man not an animal.” A Western philosopher, Bertrand Russell, is of the same mood when he suggests as the remedy “an unyielding despair.”

Men respond to these philosophers of despair, for it represents their own mood. “Who then speaks most powerfully to and for the men of this generation? Those poets, artists, and philosophers who preach despair and sing of bleak encounter with silence and futility and nonbeing.”

These writers can say:
"In my nostrils there is the odor Of Death and Dissolution;
But only the Christian faith with its belief in conversion can end by saying:
But there is also the fragrance Of an Eternal Spring"

When we turn to pagan psychiatry we find that same sense of final futility – man hasn’t enough resources in himself to complete himself. In establishing a Christian psychiatric enter, Nurmanzil Psychiatric Center, Lucknow, India, we defined the relationship of Christianity and psychiatry thus: “Psychiatry carried on under Christian auspices and with the Christian motive and spirit has as its aim to help the patient to become mentally and emotionally sufficiently foot-loose to make an intelligent surrender of himself to God; and to provide techniques to develop the new life.” The end of the whole process is to get the patient off his own hands into the hands of God, for the basis cause of his mental and emotional upset is self-centered preoccupation. Pagan psychiatry has no way of getting that release, for it has no purpose or method of self-surrender to God. The patient is supposed to be cured by self-knowledge – a fallacy. If the self-knowledge doesn’t lead him to self-surrender to God then it leaves him turning round on himself, which is the disease itself, however filled with knowledge it may be. The high priest of pagan psychiatry, Freud, said, “In our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. …Dark, unfeeling, and unloving powers determine human destiny.” I would suspect a premise which brought me to the conclusion that “dark, unfeeling, and unloving powers determine human destiny,” for if I believe that, then it cuts the nerve of my faith in the possibility of human nature’s being changed. Conversion is ruled out, and with conversion ruled out there is nothing to do but to sink back into the fatalities of unfeeling and unloving forces residing in the subconscious.

A psychiatrist called up a friend of mine, a minister, and asked: “Can you help me? These patients hang on my belt as though I were God. They call me up at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning to talk with me. It’s getting on my nerves. I can’t stand it.” The minister suggested the book The Way. The psychiatrist read seven pages and was converted, then and there – gloriously converted. He told the pastor that he had been charging fifty dollars an hour for treatment, and he also added that often when patients were about to be discharged he would raise another issue and string them out – at fifty dollars an hour! After his conversion he cut his prices to eight dollars an hour and did a lot of free work. He became tremendously excited over this matter of Christianity. A new possibility opened up before him and his patients – conversion. The fatalism of being in the grip of dark, unfeeling, and unloving powers was broken – broken by conversion, a conversion that brought him into saving contact with the power of light and love and life. No wonder a leading psychologist told Bryan Green: “I need a religious experience myself for my patients need it, and I can’t give it to them unless I have it myself.” Another psychologist said, “I always send my patients to the church, for there the forgiveness of sins is preached.” A psychiatrist who dealt with the disrupted of Hollywood at high fees said, “All these patients of mine need is a mourner’s bench.”

These pointed words by Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin sum up the trend: “Current psychology adds to these moral alibis. Men and women have themselves analyzed, and find emancipation in banishing the ugly names which vigorous religion attached to sins, where these are re-christened with labels with no suggestion of guilt. They are maladjusted, or introverted, rather than dishonest or selfish. A middle aged father tires of his wife and becomes involved with a young woman half his age, and is told by a practitioner that he is suffering from ‘a spasm of re-adolescence,’ when he ought to be struck in the face with “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

When we turn to the scientists, we find ourselves smiling a wry smile at the statement of Adam Smith in the beginning days of modern science: “Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. When we have learned to make sensible use of science the world will not be filled with war, ignorance, prejudice, superstition and fear.” We smile especially at those last two words “and fear”! At this very moment we are in the grip of a world fear brought on by the creation of atomic bombs by science. Some of the makers of the atomic bombs called together the ministers around Chicago and in a two days’ conference announced: “Frankly, we’re frightened. We can produce the means in atomic energy, but we can’t produce the ends for which those means are to be used. Unless you ministers can produce the moral and spiritual ends for which atomic energy is to be used, then we’re sunk.” Science turned to religion and cried, “Save us or we perish.” And they meant it; for they saw that unless a conversion – individual and collective – which would turn atomic energy from destruction to construction took place we would be sunk, literally sunk. The need is simple and profound - conversion!

The founder of American behaviorism, Dr. John B. Watson, tells us: “We need nothing to explain human behavior but the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry.” I am reminded of saying to Dr. George Carver, the great Negro saint and scientist, that a professor of chemistry had said to me that life was no more than a flaring up of a flame from the combustion of chemical elements. The great chemist shook his head and said: “The poor man, the poor man!” That was all! And it was enough. For anyone who holds that human behavior and human life can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry is a poor man, with a poor view of life and with a poor power to help human behavior and human life. He needs conversion in viewpoint and in person.

When we turn to organized religion, does it speak of the need of conversion! It certainly does – and with louder and louder insistence. When the Archbishop’s Report on Evangelism said: “The church is more a field, rather than a force, for evangelism,” it spoke the sober truth. I have said above that probably two thirds of the membership of the churches know little or nothing about conversion as a personal, experimental fact. That should not discourage us about the church. For hospitals are out to banish disease and yet they are filled with diseased people. Only a few – the doctors and attendants – are well. Schools are out to banish ignorance and yet they are filled with ignorant students. The church is out to banish sin and yet it itself is filled with sinful people. That is not to be wondered at, nor need it give us concern. The point of concern is, are the people inside the churches being converted? Or are they, having come into the church, settling down to half-conversions, living in half-lights, or worse, in complete emptiness under the respectable umbrella of the church? The acid test of the validity of a Christian church is whether it can not only convert people from the outside to membership but also produce conversion within its own membership. When it cannot do both, it is on its way out.

Many within the church have their motives and conduct determined by other than Christian sources. Carl Jung says: “His decisive motives, interests and impulses do not come from the sphere of Christianity, but from the unconscious and undeveloped soul, which is just as pagan and archaic as ever.” Here Jung says that the behavior of the person described is determined by the subconscious and not from Christian sources.

A British cabinet minister commented to a friend: “I can’t say that being a Christian seriously affects the decisions I make, the way I make them, or my relation with others. ”What can you expect in the laity if the ministers too lack conversion? A senior in a theological seminary asked: “What do you mean by being born again?” He hadn’t run across it in the seminary. A student who had just passed out from the seminary asked me: “What do you mean by self-surrender? I never heard the word in the seminary.” The preface of a book on pastoral counseling contains these words: “Let no one think he will be converted through the reading of this book.” When I laid it down I thought to myself: “No danger of anyone being converted through the reading of that book. He never gets near it”. The word self-surrender was not used in the book, nor hinted at. The counseling was about marginal issues with the essential self untouched, hence unconverted.

A Polish Catholic courted an American girl. While attending a Protestant church with her he got up from her side and went to the altar. The girl said to herself: “Here I am praying for my Roman Catholic husband-to-be, and he goes forward, while I, an unconverted Methodist, don’t go forward.” She went forward, and they were both converted. They called up the Methodist pastor to tell him the good news. He was cold: “You’ll get over that. It often happens.” They couldn’t get what they wanted in that church so they went to another. A lady asked a minister: “What does the cross mean?” The minister replied: “Well, I don’t know a better way to decorate the top of a church, do you?”

A Negro woman summed it up in these words: “You can no more tell what you don’t know, than you can come back from where you ain’t been .”Unconverted or half-converted ministers in the pulpit produce unconverted or half-converted people in the pews. Someone facetiously defined a Methodist as “a man who has just enough religion to make him feel uneasy in a cocktail bar and not enough religion to make him feel at home in a prayer meeting.” If anyone of another denomination reading the above is about to throw the first stone at the Methodist, it might be well for him to look into a mirror first!

Sam Shoemaker says pointedly that “many are not converted, but a little civilized by their religion. ”I picked up bottle of “Viet”, my grass vitamin tablets. The wrapper of the bottle came off in my hand, leaving the bottle standing. As I stood there with the wrapper in my hand, I read the various items in the vitamin content. I could have become vitamin-starved reading the contents without taking the tablets themselves. Many take the table of contents of religion – its doctrines, its beliefs – but they don’t take the thing itself – Christ the Redeemer and Savior – to convert and save them. They starve while reading the menu.

Many are so afraid of the hot-pots that they forget that the bigger danger is the cold-pots who outnumber the hot-pots a hundred to one. These outwardly-in but not inwardly-in church members need one thing, and only one thing, supremely – conversion. When a bishop announced a Quiet Day for the clergy, one of them wrote back and said, “What my parish needs is not a Quiet Day but an earthquake.” Augustine describes such unconverted Christians as “frost-bound Christians.” They need the warm glow of the Spirit’s converting power to unfreeze them. One of this type prayed in a prayer meeting: “O God, if any spark of divine grace has been kindled in this meeting, water that spark.” A lot of people are in the business of watering sparks! To change the figure, many belong to “the mothball fleet of Christians – immobilized Christians.”

Listen to these statements, not from the outside world, but from within the church as they speak in “the Morning of the Open Heart” in our Ashrams.

Sapporo Ashram, Japan: “The church is not touching the painful spots in ourselves – no confession. I think I’ll get the church to confess – to bare ourselves in the presence of God.”

Sendai Ashram, Japan: “I repented of my cold attitude toward my family and last night it was all cleared. I wanted to boss my family and had no love for them.”

Hardware merchant in Sendai Ashram, Japan: “I have been a Christian for thirty years, but I find I am not honest about my income tax. I have to straighten this out. I don’t want to be frightened when a telephone call comes from the tax office.”

Same Ashram: “I have too many defects to be a good pastor. When people go wrong I should feel more deeply. I’m cold to whose who fail in their Christian lives. Instead of a self-centered feeling I want to have good will toward everybody. My preaching becomes the word become word, instead of the word become flesh.”

Same Ashram: “I am tired. Someone gave me a tape recorder, so I could listen to my own sermons played back. I was surprised. The language, the thought, the whole thing was shameful. I must start over again.”

Hiroshima Ashram, Japan: “I need everything - I need to be made over. I need a heart that trusts the church members. I don’t trust people and don’t say anything for I have no faith.”

Same Ashram: “I am getting inquirers, but I don’t know what to do with them. Surrender is my deepest need.”

Fukuoka Ashram, Japan: “Forty years I’ve been in the ministry and nothing has happened. I’m afraid. The sense of fear has always bothered me, also an inferiority complex. I thought I had surrendered all, but apparently I had not.”

Same Ashram: “I want to get resentment and strife out of my heart. I want my church to grow from a minister-centered church to a Christ-centered church.”

Amagisanso Ashram, Japan: “I want to be free from myself and be filled with the Holy Spirit. I have been saved from a disease, but the fear of it is in the subconscious mind and keeps me from serving Christ.”

Same Ashram: “When I heard Brother Stanley I wondered why he talked so fast. Why was he excited? I thought I should try to talk fast, as that was the secret of his power. But when I talked it didn’t impress people. I wanted to upset the world, but I couldn’t upset a group of twelve people. Thought I would put on a mustache and get gray hair – that would help me. Now I see it is the Holy Spirit I need.”

Osaka Ashram, Japan: “I have a destructive idea about everything. People said, ‘Its mysticism you need.’ But knowledge makes people proud. Love makes people humble. My negativism made me break with my brother. My pride is a wall between God and myself. I feel the emptiness of myself.”

Same Ashram: “It has been about a year since I began coming to church. I realize I’m haughty and proud and I’ve caused a lot of trouble with church members. I want to get clear of old habits. I want to be reborn in this Ashram.”

Same Ashram: “We Lutherans are always saying we have the best doctrines, but our evangelism is not going. Our Lutheran Church needs another Reformation. We have many seekers in our churches, but we don’t get them across to conversion.”

One of the finest men in the American pulpit said: “I went to the altar twice because I was preaching an insipid gospel. Here this visitor comes and preaches the gospel with such freshness and power that people hold their hats and hold onto their benches.”

From the pew, Keuka Ashram, New York, someone said: “I deliberately set out to make myself a shallow person. I find it easier. But it hurts my faith, and it hurts me.” Of one church member it was said: “She believed a little bit in everything. And nothing in anything.” In the voting in India with two hundred million potential voters, many of whom were illiterate, they got over the difficulty by placing the party ballot boxes in a row with a symbol on the box representing that party. One man tore his ballot into small bits and dropped a piece in each of the ten boxes – he voted for all – and none! Dr. Samuel Johnson once said roundly: “Sir, a man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.” Many people are so open-minded that their minds are like a sieve; they can’t hold a conviction.

What about those who once knew conversion, but it has faded out? One man said in a testimony meeting: “Twenty years ago I was converted and got my pitcher full and since then nary a drop has gone in and nary a drop has gone out.” Someone remarked: “Then I’m sure by now it is full of wiggletails.” Most people need a rebirth in their forties on general principles. Hazlitt wrote of the middle-aged Coleridge: “All that he had done of moment, he had done twenty years ago; since then he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.” Many are living spiritually on the sound of their own voices – echoes of the past instead of an experience of the present. Harnack, the great church historian, tracing this inner evaporation says: “The original enthusiasm evaporates and the religion of law and form arises.” Said a high churchman: “I don’t care what happens to the outside world just so I can say Mass every morning.” A Mass but no message!

What shall we say of the absorption in trivial church duties in lieu of this divine contagion? Of one man it was said: “He increased his pace the more he realized that he had lost the way.” Busyness takes the place of blessedness. I sat in the early devotional hour on a hillside and watched a dog excitedly wagging his tail with his head in the bushes. I expected him to jump a rabbit at any moment. But he was only after crickets. All that time and energy and attention over crickets! Many of our church activities could be classed as cricket attention. We are busy at nothingnesses!

A great deal of missionary work is left undone because the missionary is absorbed in the missionary and his problems. I said to a missionary about to be sent home: “What do you think is the basis of your trouble?” She replied: “I’m sitting on a powder keg.” When I asked: “What is the powder keg?” she replied: I’m two “Myself. persons – one a person who didn’t want to come to the mission field and the other, one who was afraid I’d be lost if I didn’t.” I replied: “You can’t afford to be either one of these persons, can you? For they are both unsatisfactory. You need to decide to be a new person, different from each – to be converted.” She assented that that was the only way out. It is the only way out – for everybody, East and West. No wonder a Danish doctor in an African mission field told me: “Ninety-nine percent of the missionaries who are sent home from the mission field go on account of emotionally and mentally induced illnesses.” A change of climate wouldn’t make them well – a surrender to God would.

Alexander Pope, the writer, muttered: “O Lord, make me a better man,” and his spiritually enlightened page replied: “It would be easier to make you a new man.” People need not to be patched up, but to be made over, to be converted, to be born again. A businessman said to a group: “I want to be born.” His experience of life had led him to that conclusion. The fact is that all life is taking us by the hand and is leading us to the necessity of conversion. Someone asked George Whitefield why he preached so often on the text, “Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” He replied, looking the questioner in the face: “Because you must be born again.” Whitefield had preached on that text over three hundred times, but life itself is preaching on it from doctors’ offices, from psychiatrists’ couches, from conference rooms, from factories, from international conferences, from our homes, and, if we know ourselves, from our hearts. Someone in our Ashrams said: “Brother Stanley would be a mess without the Holy Spirit.” And she was right – profoundly right. We are all messes without the Holy Spirit – without Him in converting, regenerating power. Our homes are messes too. Someone has said, “Ninety percent of homes have a problem unsolved.”

A brilliant pagan told a minister friend of mine: “You don’t need to create any demand for your wares. The demand is chemical; it exists already in everybody.” The demand for conversion is not merely written in the texts of Scripture – it is written into the texture of our beings and in the texture of our relationships. Life just can’t live unless it is converted to a higher level. It goes from tangle to tangle and from mess to mess and from problem to problem. All life echoes the words of Sir Philip Sidney: “O make in me these civil wars to cease.” For every man who is not at peace with God is a civil war within himself. If you won’t live with God, you can’t live with yourself. The psychologist William James tells us: “The hell to be endured hereafter of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”

All of these things we have mentioned in this chapter – and more – converge on one thing, the necessity of conversion for the good, the bad, the indifferent. Without it the good are not good enough, the bad are too bad to be changed, and the indifferent cannot be awakened. What Jesus preached and offered, life is echoing – with increased emphasis. “Ye must be born again.”

E.Stanley Jones