Most of us Christians can isolate a moment when we made a conscious decision to follow Christ. If we grew up in church, we can probably remember a time when we chose to fully embrace the beliefs we inherited. This was our moment of religious conversion.
I was 9 when I knelt by my bottom bunk with my mom and asked Jesus into my heart. The next Sunday, at First Free Will Baptist Church of Berkeley, Missouri, I went to the altar, prayed with the pastor, and “made it official.” Shortly after, I was baptized, along with some of my friends.
History shows it was a genuine conversion, a life-transforming moment for me. I am among the many who can testify that choosing to follow Christ changed everything. If in some parallel universe, the 9-year-old me decided to reject Christ and the church, I can’t even imagine how different that version of me would be at 50.
When Conversion Doesn’t Stick
Maybe you can think of people who made similar professions of faith but experienced very little, if any, life transformation. They accepted Christ in one moment and then proceeded to live as if they had never made such a decision. What was the difference? Are we to believe they were lying or insincere when they claimed to be putting their faith in Christ? Perhaps some minute percentage were, but I doubt that was the case for most of them.
Most of that second group, in my opinion, made a genuine, conscious decision to follow Christ in the moment—no different than those who experienced life transformation. But they did not allow that conscious decision to penetrate their subconscious mind. Christianity never become a core belief—a key part of their internal operating system. I say this without judgment. They were probably not aware of the distinction between conscious and subconscious belief, just like most of us who did experience life-transformation. They just thought Christianity wasn’t “working” for them.
The Power of Religious Conversion
There’s a huge difference between believing something consciously in the moment versus adopting a life-transforming belief. Religious conversion of any kind—whether it be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other variety—literally transforms your life. When a person changes their belief system—assuming their new belief is fully adopted at the subconscious level—they not only change what they believe; they change who they are.
That’s at least part of the experience people are describing when they say, “Jesus changed my life.” Because when you change any core belief at the subconscious level, it changes how you think, feel, and respond at every moment. It doesn’t mean you will always act in harmony with your new beliefs. But that new belief will always influence your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
You can’t escape the impact of the beliefs you hold at the subconscious level. That’s why genuine religious conversion is always a life-transforming experience.
The Connection with Faith over Fear
You may be wondering what all this has to do with our ongoing exploration of faith over fear. The answer is everything.
When we place our faith in Christ, none of us adopts a pristine set of beliefs. Nobody gets it 100 percent right. How do we know? Some of the beliefs we initially accept as “Christian” cause negative results in our lives—such as fear instead of faith, or apathy instead of love. Negative results, such as chronic fear or apathy, don’t mean we lack faith. They mean we’ve allowed some unhelpful beliefs to become part of our internal operating system.
The only way to transform fear into faith, or apathy into love, is by calibrating our internal operating system. We need to replace unhelpful beliefs with the truth.
More on that next time in Subconscious Mind and Its Role in Life Transformation.
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