Literature

“So let me say right here something about conversion I find most people do not understand,” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in his Autobiography. “The repentance required as a condition to being truly converted by receiving God’s Holy Spirit is something far different than most people suppose. It is infinitely more than … merely agreeing with certain doctrines.

“Whoever you are, you have, or you have had, an idol. You have had another ‘god’ before the true living Almighty God. … It might be your own vanity … or your business or profession. Very often it is the opinion of your friends, your family, your group of social or business contacts.

“But whatever it is, that idol must first be crushed, smashed—it must be literally torn out of your mind, even though it hurts more than having all your teeth pulled out and perhaps a jawbone, too! … I don’t know of any anesthetic that will render it pleasurable. Usually it seems like something more excruciating than the agony of death by the cruelest torture. …

“I was never converted until I was brought to the place where I realized my own nothingness, and God’s all-encompassing greatness—until I felt completely whipped, defeated. When I came to consider myself as a worthless burned-out ‘hunk of human junk’ not even worth throwing on the junk pile of human derelicts, truly remorseful for having imagined I was a ‘somebody’—completely and totally and bitterly sorry for the direction I had traveled and the things I had done—really and truly repentant ….”