To pass from estrangement from God to be a son of God is the basic fact of conversion. That altered relationship with God gives you an altered relationship with yourself, with your brother man, with nature, with the universe.

E. Stanley Jones (1884–1973) was a Methodist missionary-evangelist best known for his long work in India and for articulating a “Christ-centered” approach to evangelism that engaged other faiths while stressing personal conversion. Across his mid‑20th‑century preaching and writing, Jones repeatedly framed conversion not merely as assent to doctrines but as a decisive change of relationship: from alienation to filial belonging in God. In that setting, he often linked the inner spiritual change to outward consequences—renewed self-understanding, reconciled human relationships, and a reoriented view of the created order—reflecting his broader emphasis on the social and cosmic implications of Christian faith.

Jones defines conversion as a relational transformation: the move from estrangement to sonship. The “basic fact” is not a mood, moral improvement, or intellectual shift, but a new standing before God that reconstitutes identity (“yourself”). From that new identity flows a new ethic toward “brother man” (reconciliation, dignity, responsibility) and a renewed posture toward “nature” and “the universe” (creation as meaningful, ordered, and entrusted rather than indifferent or hostile). The quote captures Jones’s integrated spirituality: personal salvation is inseparable from psychological wholeness and social renewal, because the deepest relationship—God and the self—reorders all others.