Episode 95—Developing Conviction: Being Fully Persuaded by God’s Word

Conviction is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Christian circles, but what does it mean? And how do we develop real convictions—the kind that shape how we live, how we give, how we love our families, and how we relate to the church?

Conviction is being fully persuaded about something—specifically, a position, action, or belief. Paul describes Abraham in Romans 4:21 as being “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.” That’s conviction. Not a vague preference. Not an inherited assumption. A settled persuasion.Crucially, though, Christian conviction isn’t simply strong feeling—it’s word-informed persuasion. The instruction and the persuasion come from Scripture. Take baptism as an example. A Baptist is fully persuaded from Scripture that baptism is for believers only, upon repentance and faith in the gospel. His Presbyterian brother is equally persuaded that the children of believing parents ought to be baptised. Both are convictions held from the Bible. They can’t both be right, but the point is that neither position is merely an opinion—it’s a stance taken on the basis of Scripture.This is also why people will stand and even suffer for truth. Jude’s call to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) is itself a conviction—a conviction about the gospel. You only contend for what you’re fully persuaded of.

You develop convictions by studying God’s word. As you study, you become fully persuaded about what the Bible teaches on a given matter—and then you don’t plan to budge. Martin Luther put it memorably when he stood before the Diet of Worms: His conscience was held captive by the word of God. He was willing to be proved otherwise from Scripture, but he held certain convictions because that’s how he understood God’s word. It’s worth noting that Luther also engaged seriously with positions opposed to his own, which is a helpful pattern. If you want a genuine conviction rather than an inherited assumption, study both sides and see where you land.But what about the person who doesn’t study Scripture? How do we help someone develop a conviction about something they’ve never really thought through? The best starting point is to give them the floor. Ask them why they believe what they believe. In many cases, they’ll discover that their position isn’t really a conviction at all but simply a default they’ve inherited from the tradition or culture they grew up in. Once they can see that their current view doesn’t have a clear biblical foundation, you can point them to what the Bible actually says and ask them to reckon with it. On baptism, for example, an important consideration is, where in the Bible is an infant ever baptised? There’s no instance. On giving, you can open 2 Corinthians 8 and show how the Macedonian churches, though poor, gave beyond their ability—a clear example of sacrificial generosity that goes beyond what’s comfortable. The goal isn’t to win a debate but to help people see that their current position may not be grounded in Scripture—and then to point them to what is.

What does a biblical conviction about fatherhood look like? Deuteronomy 6 opens with the mandate for fathers to ground their children in the truth of God’s word in everyday life—walking, sitting, lying down, getting up. Ephesians 6:4 is clear: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” The sobering flip-side of that comes from Exodus 20—if you don’t serve God, his judgement may follow in the next generations; but his mercy runs to thousands of generations for those who love him. And Acts 2:39 adds a wonderful promise: “For the promise is for you and for your children.” There’s plenty of Scripture to build a firm conviction on parenting.On marriage, you begin at the beginning—Genesis 1 and 2, where God institutes marriage—and then Jesus’ own commentary in Matthew 19: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Right away, you have a conviction: This is a covenant relationship until death parts us. John Piper has said that the marriage covenant doesn’t keep you in love, but it does keep you married—so you can work on your love. That’s a useful way to think about it.The longest New Testament passage on marriage is Ephesians 5. There, Paul calls the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her—even if she crucifies you, as the church did to Christ. The wife is called to submit to her husband. First Peter 3 holds up Sarah as a model, who called Abraham “lord”—and if you go back to Genesis 18, you’ll see the risk that entailed. She trusted God’s word and acted on it, at ninety years old, with all the vulnerability that pregnancy carries. That’s conviction lived out.

One of the areas where a lack of conviction shows up most painfully is in how people relate to the local church. Many people treat the church as one commitment among several, rather than their primary spiritual family. The passage that cuts deepest here is Ephesians 5:25—Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. He didn’t shed his blood for the parachurch. He didn’t die for the government or for the nuclear family. He gave himself for the church. If he thought the church was worth his blood, that should settle the question of priority. First Corinthians 10–11 reinforces this: We are one body, sharing one loaf, and when Paul addresses the Corinthians’ failures he keeps using the phrase “when you come together”—five times in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 alone. The gathered life of the church is not incidental to the Christian life. It is central to it.

Some argue that Christians should give directly to missions rather than to their local church, on the grounds that the church is just a middleman. That argument misunderstands what the church is. The local church is the means through which God does mission. If your church isn’t involved in missions, that’s a problem worth addressing—but the answer isn’t to route your giving around the church. Galatians 6 is clear that you should support those who teach you. First Corinthians 9 and 1 Timothy 5 both make the point that those who labour in preaching and teaching should be paid for that work. Give to the church, and trust the church to invest those resources wisely—in ministry, in missions, in supporting qualified workers.There’s also a protection that comes from giving through your local church. Millions of dollars are wasted every year on ministries and ministers who don’t qualify. When you give through a church you trust, that church carries accountability for those decisions. And underlying all of this is the basic conviction that the money isn’t yours in the first place. God gave it to you to give back to him—for ministers, for ministry, for the work of the church in the world.

One thing worth adding to the practice of studying Scripture is the practice of praying through these things intentionally. Am I giving enough? Am I loving my wife as I should? Am I doing enough for my children? Do I feel distant from the members of my church? Am I fighting my sin? James 4 is direct about the need to fight sin—and that fight requires conviction, not just good intentions.It is also worth asking whether the reason so many Christians lack real conviction is simply that they don’t read their Bibles. Ephesians 4:11–16 gives us a picture of a church that stands on conviction because its members are being built up by gifted teachers—not tossed about by every wind of doctrine. Immaturity, Paul says, is being thrown around by whatever is blowing through the culture. Maturity is Christlikeness. And Jesus was a man of conviction. He overturned tables in the temple because he was convicted. He “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) because he was fully persuaded that going to the cross was his Father’s will. That’s the model.Conviction, then, is not stubbornness, and it’s not just strong feeling. It’s being fully persuaded by God’s word—and then living accordingly.