There have, in recent years, been some high profile celebrity conversions to Christianity. Some seem to have stuck better than others. Some are more recent than others. I have nothing particularly to say about those specific professions, but I do think a wider question is worth asking. How do we judge whether a person has truly converted?

Understanding

At a basic level, becoming a believer requires a level of understanding. The gospel is a message of good news to be believed, after all. This seems to be much of what Paul is driving at in Romans 10. People can’t believe in what they have never heard or understood and he goes on to speak about Israel rejecting the message. So, we can begin to judge whether somebody has converted by whether they understand the gospel. That doesn’t mean you expect them to give you a PhD-level treatise on the theology of the cross. But in order for them to believe the message of the gospel, they must understand what they claim to believe. They must have some understanding of their sin and its implications and of the solution to that problem found only in Christ. They must be clear that it is Christ who saves them by faith and not by any other means. Without understanding, there can be no belief. So, we can judge this simply by asking people to tell us the gospel they now believe.

Identification

Another simple way to judge whether somebody has become a genuine believer is the degree to which they are willing to publicly own their profession. If they have clearly understood the gospel, and affirm that they now belong to Christ, how willing are they to publicly identify that way?

We live in a world where there is really no credit for believing on Christ in our UK cultural context. Whilst claiming to be a Christian is by no means everything, to do so in our current climate does say something. To insist that you are now a Christian, who belongs to Christ and believes the gospel message, and to own that publicly in the face of much opprobrium, tells you something about the person who now claims to be a believer.

Behaviour

Genuine conversion is more than a matter of just saying you are sorry. Repentance, if it is real, mean to turn again. It means changing direction away from the sin we have been happy to indulge and turning to Jesus and the things he wants. Conversion isn’t only understanding the gospel message, nor just publicly owning it, but will be evidence in moral change.

If somebody stops doing what they were doing before and starts doing things they weren’t doing before, if they are increasingly putting away what they know scripture says to be sinful and pushing into what scripture says God wants his people to do, these would be good signs that conversion is genuine. Behaviour change on its own is not evidence of conversion – lots of people change all sorts of behaviour for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the gospel – but somebody claiming to change specifically in response to the gospel they now believe, that is good evidence they are a genuine convert.

Motivation

Another key marker of genuineness is a person’s motivation for doing what they do. What, exactly, is driving their desire to change? What is driving their desire to begin doing the things that God asks of them? Gospel motivation is a desire to honour and obey Jesus because we now love him.

We can change our behaviour because we think God will reward us if we do. We might change our behaviour because we think that is what we must do in order to gain God’s favour. If that is the driving motivation behind the change, it would evidence a misunderstanding of the gospel and that somebody has failed to grasp the gospel that they need to understand in order to be saved.

If, however, somebody wants to obey Jesus because they now love him, that is good evidence they have come to believe the gospel. If they love him because of what they have come to understand he has done for them, that is good evidence they have understood the basics of the gospel. The reason why people are driven to change may help us to judge whether this person has truly converted.

A word of caution

Some of these things can be heard and seen pretty quickly. Others of them will be discerned over time. Some of them can be seen by everyone, no matter how far away, while others are going to need to be discerned up close in relationship. For those reasons, it is important for people to join a local church. It is the church who will assess a person’s profession and, over time, will see the changes in behaviour and come to grips with underlying motivations. It is the local church that will disciple new believers and who are, therefore, best placed to discern whether they are seeking to walk rightly with Christ.

For those reasons, it tends to be a bad idea to try and judge somebody’s profession from a distance. We might hear somebody’s gospel message and their identification as a believer. We may have our own particular views on how credible that sounds. But unless we are members with them in a local church, we aren’t going to see their motivations up close nor the meaningful changes in their behaviour. We won’t see whether they appear to be growing in Christ-likeness or they seem to be continuing on exactly like the world. In the end, we should be cautious about judging professions from a distance and instead focus on helping those who profess faith in our own churches continue walking rightly with Jesus and to ensure that those who belong to our fellowship really are truly converted and regenerate.