The Conversion Experience

Converting influences commonly bring an extraordinary conviction of the certainty of the great things of religion. Of course, in some people this is much greater some time after conversion than it was at first. They see and taste of the divine excellency of the Gospel, which more effectively convinces them than reading many volumes of arguments about it. It seems to me that in many instances, when the glory of Christian truths has been set before a person and he has at the same time seen and tasted and felt the divinity of them, he is as far from doubting their truth as he is from doubting whether there is a sun when his eyes are open under a clear sky.

Indeed, the strong blaze of God's light overcomes all objections. And yet many of these people, if we were to ask them why they believed those things to be true, would not be able to adequately express or communicate a sufficient reason to satisfy our inquiries. Perhaps they would give no other answer except that they see that God is true. Even so, if someone were to have a deeper conversation with these new converts, he would be satisfied that, by their answer, they mean to say that they have intuitively seen and immediately felt the most glorious works and the powerful evidence of divinity in them.

In this way, some are convinced of the universal truth of the Gospel and that the Scriptures are the Word of God. Others set their minds more specifically on some particular doctrine of the Gospel, or on some particular truth that they are meditating on or reading about in some portion of Scripture. Some have such conviction in a much more remarkable manner than others. And there are some who never before had a special sense of the certainty of divine things impressed on them with so extreme a degree of inward evidence and strength.

The latter also have very clear displays of grace -- love for God, repentance, and holiness. And if they are more particularly examined, they appear to have been inwardly convinced of the reality of divine things, though they were not quite so persuaded of these things before their conversion.

Those who have the clearest discoveries of divine truth in the manner that has been mentioned cannot always have them in view. When the sense and relish of the divine excellency of these things fade, when the Spirit of God seems to withdraw, they do not have their conviction of the truth at command. In a dull state of mind, they cannot perfectly recall the idea and inward sense they had; things appear very dim when compared with how they looked before. There still remains a strong, habitual persuasion in them, yet not to such a degree that temptations to unbelief are excluded or that all possibility of doubting is erased.

But, then, by God's help, the same sense of things revives again at particular times, like fire that lay hidden in ashes. The grounds of such a conviction of the truth of divine things are just and rational; yet God makes use of the minds of some much more obviously than He does in others. Oftentimes, people have (as far as others can tell) received the first saving conviction from reasonings that they have heard from the pulpit; and often in the course of such reasoning, they are led into their own meditations. The arguments are the same ones that they have heard hundreds of times, but the force of the arguments, and their conviction by them, is altogether new. The words come with a new and previously unexperienced power. Before, they heard it was so, and they allowed it to be so; but now they see it to be so indeed.

--Jonathan Edwards, The Surprising Work of God (pg. 86-89)