There is not a "type" for sudden conversion. The Bible tells us that all of us have this opportunity. Consider these classic cases:

Here is C.S. Lewis: militant atheist, Oxford don. The last thing he wants is to be converted. God sneaks up on him, and Lewis is "surprised by joy," and he says, "I am dragged kicking and screaming--the most reluctant convert in all the world--into the Kingdom."

Or here is John Wesley: fanatical son of a minister, a missionary to America, a great theological mind, but a total failure as a human being and a minister. One day he sits in the chapel in England, a failure as a missionary, and his "heart is strangely warmed." He becomes a great fountain for life. John Wesley becomes converted.

Or here's Bill Stringfellow in our generation, the most brilliant lawyer in his class at Yale Law School, who sits in his room quietly and reads the Bible. God gets ahold of him, and Bill Stringfellow begins his ministry in Harlem in New York. You know the story of Bill Stringfellow.

Or my neighbor in Sanibel Island before I came here. I had a neighbor in his eighties who had been a vice-president for McGraw-Hill, one of the great publishing firms of our land. He was a brilliant businessman. He was a senior vestryman in the Episcopal church, on the city council in Sanibel, respected, and loved by all. One weekend, he went off to a Cursillo Movement conference with a bunch of lay people who began praying with him and talking about Jesus. This beautiful man comes home transformed and says to his neighbors and friends, "I met Jesus."

"What happened to you?"

He says, "I don't know. I fell in love."

"He's always been a good man," his neighbors said, "but now he's a new man." You see, there's no single type that conversion happens to.

Or there's a missionary, such as Frank Laubach in the Philippines, who because of his bitterness and all at age 45 becomes the man who invents the system of learning that has taught millions and millions of people in the world to read.

Or Saint Augustine, the monk with a mistress, who is struggling with his soul, sitting under a tree, saying, "O Lord, make me pure, but not yet." One day God gets him, and Augustine becomes Saint Augustine. But you know the story.

There's William Booth, a very unlikely, rough-cut man, who says over a hundred years ago, "Nobody in London cares about the poor, the drunks, the winos." He invented the Salvation Army. One day he said, "Lord, I give you everything there is in this man William Booth. Do with me what you will." A movement starts that changes the lives of tens and hundreds of thousands of people, because one man is suddenly converted.