Our emotions can be incredibly deceitful. Like all of our being the emotions have been affected by the Fall and sin has contaminated them as well. It is disastrous, then, when so many put their hope of salvation in an emotional experience. The Puritans wrote often about the real threat of self-deception, especially deception rooted in a knowledge of doctrine or in an emotional experience. Jonathan Edwards provides a good case study in the distinction between true and false conversion. The young man had multiple religious experiences, but only one true conversion.
Jonathan’s father, Timothy was a noted revivalist in his day (out-shadowed only by his father-in-law). It was during one such revival, in the years 1712 and 1713 that Jonathan marks his first real religious experience. The boy was nine and sensing the wonder of the event of revival sensed something of the divine being. For several months he was engaged in serious prayer, teaching other boys about religious things, and even organized prayer meetings for children. Years later he reflected on this experience, stating: My mind was much engaged in it, and had much self-righteous pleasure; and it was my delight to abound in religious duties (Marsden, 25-26). He and several other boys built a prayer booth in the swamp which they would frequent together, and Jonathan had his own fort elsewhere, which he used for some times of private prayer. But the spark of religious zeal was not to turn into a full blaze at this time, and eventually, he “entirely lost all those affections and delights” and “returned like a dog to his vomit, and went on in ways of sin” (Marsden, 26).
So many would have seen in the young boy a genuine conversion, and for good reason. After all, a desire to spend time in prayer and to speak to others of the things of God are signs of the work of the Spirit. But they may also be the activities of a religious person apart from the work of the Spirit. Longevity of fruit evidences the genuineness of conversion, and for Edwards there was no real lasting desire to know God. His initial experience was a self-deception. The revival surely sparked something in him, but it did not translate into a love for God, and that’s the key. Many men and women have great emotional and even spiritual experiences. Attending great conferences, youth camps, concerts, etc. can cause our emotions to rise, our heart-strings to be plucked, and can compel us to want to change our ways. But if we are not drawn first and foremost to the glory of Christ then no true conversion can be found. We are not saved because we hate our sin, we love the experience of worship, or because we fear hell. We are saved when we turn to Jesus as our great treasure. That had not happened for young Jonathan Edwards.
But God used that initial experience in the boy’s life to propel him forward and closer to God. Historian George Marsden writes: Even after his boyish religious experience proved ephemeral, Jonathan remained fascinated by the eternally momentous question of conversion (33). Writing to his sister in 1716, at age twelve, he comments on yet another revival. The East Windsor revival saw hundreds of people “seeking grace”. He struck a chord with the young lad, and he found great zeal for the revival of that year. As he entered into college, at age 13, the Spirit of God seemed to be at work.
During his senior year he fell deathly ill. Pleurisy is an inflammation of the lining of the lungs and chest which causes severe pain and sometimes coughing up blood. Edwards thought he was dying and that fear terrified him. He was sure, as he reflected on it years later, that this was God hanging him over the pit of hell. The young boy decided at that moment that he would surrender to God and give up all sin, but, again, it did not last. He states that he “fell again into my old ways of sin” (36). No amount of self-discipline or emotional terror was enough to secure his transformation. Marsden writes of Edwards own personal reflection on his condition:
As early as he could remember, he had resented much of the endless tedium of his parents’ teaching and discipline. Holiness seemed “a melancholy, morose, sour and unpleasant thing.” He did not find delight in lengthy church services. He still had a rebellious nature. He was proud. He had a difficult and unsociable personality, and did not have signs of charity that were evidence of grace. He struggled with sexual lusts which, despite prodigious efforts, he could not wholly control. (36)
For all his religious experiences, all his zeal, all his self-discipline he seemed to be no closer to genuine conversion. But this time, though he returned to his sin, God would not let Jonathan Edwards go.
The key to all true conversion is God’s persistence. It is never about our intellect, our discipline, our experiences, it is about God’s never-giving-up-grace. Though, as the Puritans taught, we may put ourselves in the means of grace to receive the work of God’s Spirit it all depends upon Him. For Jonathan that eventually came, but not in the sweet, emotional, and momentous events that we often think of when we talk of someone’s conversion. Instead Jonathan’s coming to Christ was a long “miserable seeking.” He writes:
God would not suffer me to go on with any quietness; but I had great and violent struggles: till after many conflicts with wicked inclinations, and repeated resolutions, and bonds that I laid myself under by a kind of vows to God, I was brought wholly to break off all former wicked ways, and all ways of known outward sin; and to apply myself to seek my salvation, and practice the duties of religion: but without that kind of affection and delight, that I had formerly experienced. (36)
The sixteen-year-old’s “miserable seeking” led him on a long path to God’s grace that often isolated him from classmates and friends, and propelled him to serious study and pursuit of God. But despite the pain and unpleasantness of it, and despite all it cost him in friendships and comfort, he states that he was “brought to seek salvation, in a manner that I never was before” (39). The Spirit continued to work through Edward’s seeking and finally there was a breakthrough.
Two realizations brought Edwards to conversion. The first was a realization that God was just in “eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure” (41). He realized he had no rights to lay claim to God’s grace and that God was perfectly just to condemn all men, even Jonathan himself, to hell for their rebellion. Writing of this revelation he says that he “never could give an account, how, or by what means, I was thus convinced” (41). God’s Spirit was at work in opening his eyes.
The second revelation came as the young boy was reading 1 Timothy 1:17, which states: Now unto the King eternal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever, Amen. Though the words were more than familiar to the Puritan boy, there seemed a fresh comprehension of God’s greatness and majesty in them on this occasion. Marsden records Edwards own words on the experience:
As he read these words, he recalled, “there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being; a new sense quite different from anything I ever experienced before.” He was so much enraptured that, as he put it, “I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be wrapped up to God in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.” (41)
There was no musical swell, no compelling sermon, no alter-call that drew Jonathan Edwards to Jesus, there was only the Spirit of God working through the Word of God!
Edwards was not against emotions. In fact that is one of the great things I love about this Puritan preacher: his willingness to engage head and heart. But his conversion was a painful process that ultimately saw the work of God’s Spirit through the God’s Word. As we seek to understand conversion in our own day we would do well to look to the foundation of our confession. Is it rooted in emotional experiences or in the Spirit of God working through the Word of God. Jonathan Edwards provides a great case study in true and false conversion. I pray you know true conversion like he eventually did.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 