Conviction

This morning I felt and became convicted.

I was listening to CS Lewis' Mere Christianity and at the very end of the book, he's rattling off a list of sins (as an alternative to giving our lives over to Christ) and one of them (I won't say which for fear of embarassment) just struck me in the face.  I almost stopped dead in my tracks as I was walking to work.  I felt like God was talking through CS Lewis straight to me.  As if to say "I know what you're thinking and you must stop."  I literally had to play that section of the book over again because I thought I had made it up in my head.

I felt at once like a man who had been convicted of a crime, but then I realized my conviction need not be a totally negative thing.  God had called me out on the carpet for something that I had done, and the conviction serves also as a turning point, not merely a condemnation.  The conviction also strengthened by belief in God, and I think you can start to see the double meaning here as my convictions in Christ were strengthened by my conviction of my sin.

It was a strange moment, but I'm glad it happened.