The Frontier of Conviction

Editor’s note:
This is the third installment in a series called “The New Frontier: Reflections on the Future of the Church. View the entire series here.”

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

2 Corinthians 3:3 NIV

Crossing the frontier of conviction means allowing God to write on our hearts—to create within us a spiritual identity that brings inner strength, freedom from fear, and the ability to love. Conviction from God tells who we are and what we stand for.

In Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, Stephen Prothero argues that Americans are dangerously ignorant of what they and others actually believe, and that this religious illiteracy has serious civic consequences. Over the years, I have come to see how this ignorance also feeds some of our cultural polarization and disrespect, and I have been guilty of it as both a non-believer and a believer.

As a non-believer, I didn’t care about religion or Christianity as long as it left me alone. I caricatured what I didn’t understand—reducing it to a distorted version of itself rather than engaging with what it actually was. Many who feel compelled to diminish or dismantle Christianity—particularly at the institutional level—often do the same thing: react to a caricature rather than engage with the real thing.

What I did not expect when I became a Christian was that I would create the same problem from the inside.

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Conviction is formed inside.

In my early years as a believer and eventually as a ministry leader, I was zealous to make the gospel known. But zeal without formation is its own kind of danger. Without fully understanding it, I was teaching behavioral Christianity rather than the spirituality of Jesus.

Jesus named this interior problem long before I encountered it personally:

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’”

Mark 7:6 NIV

He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

Mark 7:20–23 NIV

These verses describe how I lived and taught—looking good on the outside without addressing what was within. I could change how I appeared. I could not change what I desired. I had what Paul warned Timothy about:

… having a form of godliness but denying its power …

2 Timothy 3:5 NIV

Form without power. The distance between the two was exhausting. There came a point where the gap between what I projected and what I actually was became so frustrating I considered walking away entirely. I write about that season honestly in my book He’s Not Who You Think He Is. Eventually, I came to understand that the problem was not that Christian life demanded too much. The problem was that I had too little—too little interior formation, too little genuine conviction, too little of what Paul describes as strength in the inner person:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.

Ephesians 3:16 NIV

My interior life began to change in a way I didn’t expect. While I have had many turning points in my Christian life, none were dramatic spiritual experiences; the most significant ones were ordinary conversations that changed my life.

An older leader—someone I respected and who knew my ministry well—pulled me aside one day. He complimented my effectiveness as a leader. Then, without trying to humble me, he did exactly that.

He told me it wasn’t enough to be effective. He said there had to be more to a person than their ability to produce results. He named three people—friends of mine, people I knew well and was close to—and told me what each of them stood for. Not what they had accomplished but what they believed at the core. What you could count on them for when everything else was stripped away. They weren’t simply following the leader. They had personal conviction. Then he looked at me and said: “I don’t know what you stand for. It isn’t enough to follow the person who leads.”

I have thought about that conversation for decades.

Then he looked at me and said: “I don’t know what you stand for. It isn’t enough to follow the person who leads.”

What he was telling me was that although I appeared to understand on the outside, I was empty on the inside. I had mistaken competence for conviction. He was inviting me into the frontier of conviction, years before I had the language to name it.

That frontier is the interior world that Dallas Willard and Henri Nouwen spent their lives calling people back to—the hidden formation of the person that no organizational achievement can replicate or replace. 

It is the development of deep identity.

Formation produces conviction. Conviction produces identity. And identity—rooted not in performance or position but in who God says we are—is what makes a person strong and immovable:

So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.

1 Corinthians 15:58 NLT

Here is how Scripture describes deep identity formed by conviction:

Faith enabled Moses to choose God’s will, for although he was raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, he refused to make that his identity.

Hebrews 11:24 TPT

Instead fully immerse yourselves into the Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, and don’t waste even a moment’s thought on your former identity to awaken its selfish desires.

Romans 13:14 TPT

My old identity has been co-crucified with Christ and no longer lives. And now the essence of this new life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives his life through me — we live in union as one.

Galatians 2:20 TPT

Once you had no identity as a people; now you are God’s people. Once you received no mercy; now you have received God’s mercy.

1 Peter 2:10 NLT

1 Peter sums it up best: No identity, then God’s identity. That is the transformation. That is what conviction produces when it goes deep enough to become who you are rather than what you do.

No identity, then God’s identity. That is the transformation.

This conviction does not arrive fully formed. It is developed—through Scripture, through hardship, through the slow and sometimes painful work of allowing God to write on the heart rather than simply inform the mind:

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

2 Corinthians 3:3 NIV

The noble-hearted Bereans understood this:

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Acts 17:11 NIV

I was taught that this passage meant we should safeguard ourselves against the potential fallibility of a human preacher by reading and examining the Scriptures for ourselves. I saw it as a way of checking whether the minister was doctrinally correct. I have come to read it as something richer. The Bereans were building something on the inside. They were developing personal conviction—the internal understanding of God, the depth of faith, the interior strength required to actually live the spirituality of Jesus rather than merely perform it.

And when that conviction is genuine, Paul says it arrives not just with words but with power:

For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake.

1 Thessalonians 1:4–5 NIV

Deep conviction—not shallow agreement or doctrinal familiarity. It’s the kind of interior certainty that comes when the Holy Spirit writes something permanently on the human heart.

The writer of Hebrews is direct about the cost of skipping this formation. In Hebrews 5, we learn about those who should be teachers but still need someone to teach them the elementary truths. These teachers have settled for milk when they should be ready for solid food (Hebrews 5:12–14). I recognize myself in that diagnosis. My capacity to lead was recognized and rewarded before my character, maturity, and spirituality were ready to carry it.

But God does not abandon the unformed. He trains them as a Father:

Have you completely forgotten this word of hope? It speaks to you as a father to his children. It says, “My son, think of the Lord’s training as important. Do not lose hope when he corrects you. The Lord trains the one he loves. He corrects everyone he accepts as his son.” (Proverbs 3:11–12) Put up with hard times. God uses them to train you. He is treating you as his children. What children are not trained by their parents?

Hebrews 12:5–7 NIRV

God does not value perfection or flawless performance, but progress. We are not finished products. We are people constantly under construction, and the measure of success God applies to us as our Father is not whether we have arrived but whether we are growing:

Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress.

1 Timothy 4:15 NIV

What moves us is not willpower or human accountability. It is our deep and transformative walk with God; it is him writing directly on our human heart, walking together with us as we fulfill our destiny. A quiet time spent with God—unhurried, honest, attentive—is not merely a religious discipline. It is the place where God creates conviction in us. It is formation happening at the heart level—the only level where it actually changes anything.

What changed me was not a better theology or a stronger effort. It was a willingness—slow, imperfect, and still ongoing—to enter the frontier of conviction.

Every enduring organization values learning, growing, and maturing. The church is a spiritual organization, which means the possibilities for transformation are not merely human; they are supernatural. Though there will always be those committed to caricature and diminishment, the vast majority of people want to see genuine good in the world, and that is exactly what men and women formed by the spirituality of Jesus are uniquely equipped to provide.

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Conviction turns fear into faith, and faith expresses itself in love.

One reason believers can do so much good in the world is that conviction is a spiritual quality that makes us blossom under pressure rather than wither in fear. We keep believing, acting, and building because our internal formation is so formidable.

Don’t run from tests and hardships, brothers and sisters. As difficult as they are, you will ultimately find joy in them; if you embrace them, your faith will blossom under pressure and teach you true patience as you endure. And true patience brought on by endurance will equip you to complete the long journey and cross the finish line — mature, complete, and wanting nothing.

James 1:2–4 Voice

Conviction is not confidence in ourselves, but in what we have seen God do and who we know God to be. The Amplified translation of Hebrews 11:1 uses the word “conviction” directly:

Now faith is the assurance (title deed, confirmation) of things hoped for (divinely guaranteed), and the evidence of things not seen — the conviction of their reality — faith comprehends as fact what cannot be experienced by the physical senses.

Hebrews 11:1 AMP

Faith is the conviction of the reality of things not yet seen. This is not optimism. It is the interior certainty of a person whose soul has been formed by a walk with God.

While conviction helps us see spiritual reality in the midst of physical facts, fear keeps us trapped in physical reality. Conviction and fear are not two emotional states. They are two entirely different modes of spiritual perception. When we cross the frontier of conviction, we decide to look beyond what we can physically see. And what we see changes how we love. 

Conviction and fear are not two emotional states. They are two entirely different modes of spiritual perception.

When conviction gives us eyes to see that God is our source—that we are fully known, fully chosen, and fully loved—we no longer need people to fill what only God can fill.

I have learned—at real cost, over decades—that when people are our source of love, we cannot love unconditionally. We will always protect ourselves from those who might not love us back. Our life will be shaped by who might accept or reject us. We begin to live a life of self-preservation. 

But when God is our source, the ceiling on our love is removed. We can love without calculating the risk or return because we are no longer drawing from a supply that runs out. We can serve without self-protection. We can tell the truth without rehearsing the response. This is what conviction produces in every person who has fully experienced the love of God.

… What is important is faith expressing itself in love.

Galatians 5:6 NLT

Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.

1 John 4:18–19 NLT

Faith is how we access the full experience of God’s love. Faith produces the capacity to love others. Faith produces the fearlessness of love—not from our own supply, which runs dry, but from his, which does not. This is the breakthrough. This is what conviction looks like when it is produced by a walk with God. And this is why the frontier of conviction is not primarily about beliefs we hold. It is about love we give—love made possible because we have been loved first.

Faith is how we access the full experience of God’s love.

He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you Except to be just, and to love [and to diligently practice] kindness (compassion), And to walk humbly with your God [setting aside any overblown sense of importance or self-righteousness]?

Micah 6:8 AMP

“Walk humbly.” The bracketed addition in the Amplified translation is the spiritual condition reality check: trying to have conviction without humility leads to self-righteousness. “Setting aside any overblown sense of importance” is the interior posture that a walk with God produces in every person who crosses the frontier of conviction. It is the freedom of a soul that no longer needs to be the most important person in the room because its security comes from God. And from that posture, every person can make Joshua’s declaration their own:

“… But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

Joshua 24:15 NIV

Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land, and his life demonstrates the unique and powerful impact of humility before God: the absence of insecurity. When each of us makes Joshua’s choice to serve God, we are experiencing the power of conviction in our lives that allows us to successfully navigate the New Frontier.