What to do as a Christian fresher

Posted at 10:19 PM

In just under a week, freshers will be arriving at Sussex University. Two years ago, Ed Goode wrote his advice to new Christian students; here’s my version.

Join a church

No one can make it alone as a Christian, and living as a student is no exception. You’ll probably be challenged about what you believe, whether in lectures or down the pub. There will be pressure to conform to a sinful culture; many Christians flirt with temptation rather than fleeing, and regret it later. You need people to support you and challenge you because they love and care for you. As a Christian you’re already part of God’s worldwide church, so make it a priority to join a local church community. Church will help you grow as a Christian, so find somewhere where as God’s Word is taught people grow to love Jesus more, love each other more and love the lost more.

Join the CU

Christian Unions are mission teams made up of students from different local churches, united around the gospel in order to better reach students with the good news of Jesus. In short, they exist to make Christ known on campus. Join your CU to get involved in student mission; to be better equipped to reach your friends with the gospel; and to be encouraged as you work as a team to bring others to know Jesus.

Join other societies/do other things!

God’s made a good world, with so many great things in it. Don’t do what I did in my first year and do so many Christian things you don’t have time to play football/sing in a choir/join the wine circle/get involved in student politics/act in a play/go to the pub with coursemates. Not only is it wrong to think such things are “less spiritual” (all of life is for God’s glory!), if you throw yourself into loads of Christian meetings to the exclusion of all else, you’ll find opportunities for mission few and far between. This is my biggest regret about my first year at university. Do something to get outside of the Christian bubble, even if it’s simply spending time with your flatmates!

Work hard, rest well

It may not feel like it sometimes, but you’re at university to study for a degree. This is a good thing to do! Your attitude to your work is a great witness to others, but more importantly God asks us to work as if working for him. My experience is that you actually enjoy your work more the more effort you put in; this is possibly my second biggest regret of my first year, as I didn’t get much out of it academically.

You also need rest, which may seem impossible during freshers’ week, but getting into good habits early on really does help. The temptation is to stay up late like everyone else, because you feel like you’ll miss out on making friendships, especially early on. God knows what you need though, and one of those things is sleep; you will not lose all your friends if you go to bed before them! (You may well find they’re waiting for someone else to suggest going to bed…) Naps are also useful, if you have been up late; caffeine less so. (I wrote about a similar topic back in my second year, on being idle and making work an idol.)

Learn to love

Your flatmates might “borrow” your food, or not do the washing up, or wake you up after a late night out. Your lecturers might not be very good, or overly harsh, and can sometimes be ridiculed or hated by others. You might meet people in the CU with whom you disagree: on theology, on style of meeting, on whether Jesus would have joined the Conservative or Labour Party, on all sorts of things you hold dear. God hasn’t put you with these people and in these situations to annoy you: he’s given you an opportunity to learn to love people. This is important with non-Christians, but possibly even more so with Christians. If members of the CU don’t love each other, that’s not a good witness. If they do love each other, learning to put aside secondary issues because they agree on the core truths of the gospel, it’s a far better witness. Graham Beynon quotes Francis Schaeffer:

Francis Schaeffer said that this love and unity were the “final apologetic”. That is, the ultimate defense of the truth of the gospel. He wrote this: “Love – and the unity it attests to – is the mark Christ gave Christians to wear before the world. Only with this mark may the world know that Christians are Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father.” (p. 92, Graham Beynon, God’s New Community, IVP.)

Summary

University is a great opportunity for so many things, but above all to grow to know and love Jesus more, and so love other people more, through living and speaking for him in your academic work, your time with friends, your CU involvement and in your church family. My prayer is that you’ll do just that!

Musings on idols

Posted at 10:11 PM

My former staff worker Jim Walford has started a blog for students of Bristol University and UWE. His latest entry is a challenge to fight idolatry daily, as we confront our own ideas about what God is like with what he truly is like.

…no one would begin to imagine a God like this on their own. A triune God could never be a God of human invention. Our idols, our made up gods… [are] a million miles away from the true, and stunningly beautiful, three-personed, eternally loving God.

One of the things that struck me at Relay 1 was our session on the cross, and looking once again at the “foolishness of the cross”. At the cross we see God’s power, revealed in weakness; we see God’s justice, through the execution of an innocent man; we see God’s love, through the rejection of his only Son.

Who would imagine such a God? No one. If someone tells you “I don’t believe in God”, the chances are you don’t believe in that God either. Our God suffers and dies, and that for us! How wretched we are, and how loved!

How can the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the cross, ever be just words to learn or ideas to comprehend? In Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, each chapter ends with a hymn of praise. Paul finishes Romans 11 with an outburst of adoration to God, like he can’t help himself. Every session at Relay 1 led us to praise and rejoice in God. It’s this excitement we need to rekindle constantly.

Conversely, how wicked is idolatry, that we should reject this God, and make our own images? How foolish! And yet I’m constantly wandering away from him. The hymn has it:

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

We must constantly remind ourselves of God’s grace, lest our hearts wander and turn to idols. Jim ends his entry with a challenge: “Have you done that today?” Have you “set before [yourself] a true vision of God as he’s revealed in the Bible”? Have you shut down the idol factory in your heart? There’s an urgency, here, because Satan loves to hoodwink us – convince us that God doesn’t love us, or that we need to atone for our sin ourselves. I need reminding of his grace, his goodness, his holiness, his power, every day of my life.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it;
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Moving

Posted at 11:49 PM

Tomorrow my parents move out of their house of ten years, and move to another part of Oxford to be closer to international students. These last three years I haven’t been here a huge amount, and have mentioned before that Bristol has felt more and more like home. It takes a move to realise that Oxford still feels like home too; both my parents moving house, but also moving away from Bristol. With Brighton on the horizon and Bristol no longer home, Oxford is the only place left, and even that is changing, as we move into the centre from the suburbs.

Changes are exciting; my parents are no longer with Friends International, their employers for my entire life, though they continue to work with international students in the UK, as well as developing international student ministry overseas. I’ve got an entire year to give to my own spiritual growth and that of others, in a new city, with new people. Yet change can also be unsettling. I know this year is going to be hard, because God loves me too much to give me an easy ride. He values my spiritual growth and godliness more than my comfort – and that’s how it should be, because ultimately godliness is where lasting joy is found – and so I’m expecting difficulties that force me to throw myself once again on his grace.

The day after tomorrow, I move to Brighton, and begin life as a Relay worker. I’ve just come back from eleven days in Shropshire with the other Relay workers, with all the CU leaders arriving half way through. Relay 1 (the first of three Relay conferences) was one of the best weeks I’ve had for a long time – revelling in God’s grace with other Relays, enjoying each others company, praising Jesus together.

Moving is hard because we like routine, and moving interrupts it. You don’t know exactly where the cafetiere is in the new kitchen, and the pre-coffee early morning haze is never the best time to start searching; you’re used to having a shower at a certain time, but new housemates are always there first; the shops are different, and don’t have your normal toothpaste. Stupid examples, but there are more serious ones too: your friends aren’t a couple of roads away any more; no-one knows you at church; you no longer have a large living room to which you can invite guests over. You might be in a different region, with a different accent, even a different culture – or indeed, a different country altogether.

Spending just over a week with the Relay workers was perhaps the best thing that could have happened before these moves. Remembering God’s grace gives us a confidence that God accepts us no matter what – so there’s no need to worry about impressing new people. Just be faithful. (We saw this in action on the conference, as within only a couple of days everyone was being completely real with each other, with no pretence.) The sense of community we had – sinners saved only by God’s grace, with complete equality before him – reminded me of God’s new community, one with no geographical ties. Our home is with Jesus. This house has been a temporary home – my house in Brighton too, and my parents’ new home as well. Our homes are gifts of God, for us to use in his service, being welcoming and hospitable. We have an eternal home that’s far greater, though, and spending time living with God’s people, enjoying him together, gives us a glimpse of what it’s like, because God is building a spiritual house, and it’s us (1 Peter 2:5).

So I miss my fellow Relay workers; I’m sad to leave this house; I’m not sure yet what Brighton has in store for me. That’s okay. God has prepared us a city (Hebrews 11:13-16). Praise him!