Are you a true Christian? or a false convert?

(from http://www.livingwaters.com/learn/trueandfalse.htm)

Tonight I want, by the grace of God, to share with you a teaching called “True and False Conversion.” A very
sobering teaching, and a teaching that I believe is most necessary within the contemporary church.
I have a teaching called “Hell’s Best Kept Secret” which deals with the use of the Law in evangelism. In fact, God’s
Law, the Ten Commandments, was the essence of the gospel proclamation of Wesley, Moody, Whitfield, Jonathan
Edwards, all these men that God so greatly used. They said that if you don’t use the Law, you’ll almost certainly
lead to false conversions.
I was reading in the American Horizons magazine, which is the official magazine of a very large, or a major,
denomination of the United States which has 11,500 churches throughout the US - in 1991, their first year of what
they called “the decade of harvest,” they got 294,000 decisions for Christ. They found that only 14,000 remained in
fellowship. That is, they couldn’t account for 279,000 of their decisions for Jesus. And this is normal modern
evangelical statistics when it comes to crusades and local churches.
Many converts don’t fall away. They get followed up and squeezed into a local church where they’re surrounded by
a good social life, and they stay within the church given assurance they’re saved when there is no grounds for their
salvation, because they do not have the things that accompany salvation.
Now this has happened, this great tragedy has happened, simply because we haven’t followed the Biblical example
and preach law to the proud and grace to the humble. Always, when you see Jesus approach a proud arrogant
self-righteous person with the gospel, He gave law before grace. Always. With the law He broke the hard heart,
with the gospel He healed the broken heart.
Why did He do that? Because He always did those things that were pleasing in the Father’s sight. God resists the
proud and gives grace to the humble.
We see this so often in Scripture, where Jesus resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. The rich young
ruler, the arrogant self-righteous lawyer that stood up and tempted Jesus. Both times, Jesus gave the Law. He
gave the Ten Commandments. When ones came with humility with a knowledge of sin by the Law, that is Godly
Jews, he gave grace.
Paul says in Romans 7:7, “I had not known sin but by the Law.” Charles Finney said, “Evermore the Law must
prepare the way for the gospel.” Now Finney had an 80% retention rate. He said, “Evermore the Law must
prepare the way for the gospel. To overlook this in instructing souls is almost certain to result in false hope, the
introduction of a false standard of Christian experience, and to fill the church with false converts.” And then he
said, “Time will make this plain.”
John Wesley said of those who failed to use God’s Law in evangelism, “All this proceeds from the deepest
ignorance of the nature of the properties and of the use of the Law, and proves that those who act thus either know
not Christ, or are the strangers to living faith, or at least they’re but babes in Christ, and as such unskilled in the
Word of righteousness.”
Martin Luther, in his commentary on Galatians, which is the book which speaks of freedom from God’s law, spoke
of a sect that rose up in his day with a Satanic doctrine. Listen to what that doctrine was. He said, “Satan, the god
of all dissention, stirs up daily new sects. And last of all, which I should never have foreseen or once suspected, he
has raised up a sect such as teach that the Ten Commandments ought to be taken out of the church, and that men
should not be terrified by the Law, but gently exhorted by preaching the grace of Christ.”
He said that’s a sect, a new sect that’s risen up, a satanic subtlety and one I thought would never ever come. He
was aghast at the thought that men would not use the Law but instead they would gently exhort one to come to
Christ, preaching grace alone, which is the perfect summation of the methods of modern evangelism.
Charles Spurgeon said, “They will never accept grace until they tremble before a just and holy Law.” George
Whitfield said, “That is the reason we have so many mushroom converts.”

for more:
http://www.livingwaters.com/learn/trueandfalse.htm