5 Ways to Mature in Your Faith While in College
Our church culture often frames the college campus as a cesspool of debauchery. The college campus is where you will first experience life’s great liberation– a liberation of both body and mind. For many freshmen, the availability of alcohol, drugs, and sex have never been so close at hand. Even more dangerous, your young mind is ripe to molded and made into the image of another. We naturally seek out mentors and the college campus is full of them. It is the marketplace of ideas… and there are a plethora of bad ideas.
There is good reason for America’s churchgoers to be wary of this high academic institution. Many children raised within the proximity of the church have strolled unguarded into this life phase only to experience the crunch of compelling worldviews and quick pleasures that leave a young person hobbling into adulthood.
This has created a culture of well meaning church congregations and families commissioning their soon-to-be college students out into the world with one mission… keep your faith! Don’t lose it!
While I understand the Godly sentiment of these words, if you enter into any adversity only seeking to maintain your intimacy with Jesus then you will be spiritually stunted. More than that, who wants his or her faith to remain as that of a seventeen year old adolescent? Our faith should mature and grow!
“Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation.”
1 Peter 2:2
The goal is maturity; to grow into full adulthood! Your parents may have laid a Godly foundation for you but to mature into an adult you must weather the adversity of the world in the power of God’s Spirit. The training wheels need to come off!
Here’s my point, I truly believe the college campus presents a unique opportunity– not something so menial as keeping one’s faith but– an opportunity to make one’s faith. The college campus, in its proper form, is a launchpad to send maturing believers to the end of God’s earth!
Will you make the most of this opportunity?
Here are five ways to mature in your faith over these next four years.
Be Filled with the Power of the Holy Spirit
Are you into computer games? Let’s pretend for a moment that you are. As you set up your college dorm you are so excited to bring in your brand new desktop computer. You picked out every detail of this machine– it’s lightning fast, has incredible memory, and can handle all the games you will be playing on it. You are already dreaming of the late nights you will spend with your new college roommate getting lost in whatever Modern Warfare game is popular right now. You rip it out of the box and set it on your desk and press the Power button– nothing happens. Is it broken? After spending an embarrassing amount of time standing dumbfounded in your room you realize that you forgot to plug it in! You quickly slide the prongs into the outlet, press the Power button again and it fires up… success!
That computer has all the capabilities to do everything it was designed to do but if it is not plugged into the power source then it is nothing more than a paper weight. Similarly, every believer has everything he or she will need to live the Christian life but if we fail to depend on the power source– the Holy Spirit– we will experience failure and frustration.
The Holy Spirit is God’s permanent presence in every follower of Jesus. While every believer has the Spirit, it takes a conscious effort to be filled with the Spirit. Paul highlights this command in Ephesians 5:18 by saying, “Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” When you consider the word filled, think of a sailboat and not a cup. A sail can be filled with an infinite amount of wind. When the wind fills the sail it gives the boat direction; the wind is the boat's driving force.
When you put your faith in Christ for the first time you made Him the Lord of your life which started a relationship that would last for all eternity. However, we are not perfect. Our sinful flesh continually tries to take back control of the lives we have committed to Jesus. This does not mean we suddenly lose our salvation but it means we experience a spiritual impotence that does not glorify God. By faith you can put Christ back on the throne of your life the moment you realize you are living out of step with him. This practice is called the Spirit Filled Life.
This is a very practical process that is better explained in this article from Cru. It is important that we begin this list of spiritual maturation with the discipline of being filled with the Spirit because without depending on the Spirit the rest of the list is useless.
Find Christian Community
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!”
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
When you move away for college you typically don’t take your church with you. Some incoming freshmen do not know anyone at the campus they will soon call home. Living on a campus gives you the unique opportunity to develop in a rich Christian community of like-minded people who are all in the same phase of life.
Let’s not belabor the obvious point that you really should find a local church in the community that you will be investing in over the next four years. By most definitions of the word, campus ministries are NOT the church. However, the believers that comprise them are a part of the Universal Church and it would be to your benefit to get involved.
In my experience, it was incredibly motivating to me when I first attended a Cru Winter Conference in 2011 and saw a thousand students who were my own age worshiping God. I looked around at the 30 or so students from my campus and thought “I want to take this back to Morehead State!”
It was in that community that I made some of my best friends and worked through some of my biggest sin issues. Having a community of believers on my campus gave me a home base for personal ministry and provided the relationships that pointed me toward Christ. There are so many good things to get caught up in while at college– academics, social experience, etc.-- but if we neglect the body of Christ on our campus then we are missing an important part of scripture.
“And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.”
Hebrews 10:25
Feast on God’s Word
As any kid growing up in the era of reality TV, my dad always watched the survival show Naked and Afraid where two nude strangers teamed up in the middle of the wilderness to survive for 21 days. I watched the show enough that I began to see a pattern emerge. Very rarely did an individual thrive in this environment. More often than not, the winner would lay out next to a clean water source and wait out the clock while slowly starving for 21 days! No survival skills needed, just enough fat supplies for three weeks of agony.
Compare this with the Netflix show Alone and we see two completely different skill sets. In the most recent season I watched a man build a cabin, rest in subzero temperatures, and kill a muskox! Those were real survival skills! The men and women on that show knew how to find physical nourishment in an environment that seemed bare.
Similarly, many Christians are starving themselves spiritually by rejecting the nourishment offered by consistently feeding on the Word of God. Maybe they do this intentionally, maybe they don’t make time in God’s word a priority, or maybe they simply are not trained in how to consistently have a devotional time– regardless of why, many Christians are not self-feeders! A healthy person is always eating– some meals are big and some are small but there are always meals.
To mature spiritually you will need to eat to grow. Our goal is to mature into the likeness of Christ but, functionally, if we don’t know who Christ is then how are we supposed to look like him? By making a consistent time in the Bible a priority you are able to have God’s truth wash over your mind and heart which, over time, will allow for real life change.
You’re busy, I get it, but are you really busier than other people in any other life phase? What about the single mom working two jobs only to come home and parent her child or the dad seeking to balance a demanding new job while also finding time to pursue his wife. Life is busy!
This is why your lack of time in God's word is not a busy-ness issue but a priority issue. I trust you made time to eat today because you made it a priority. Even if we are busy we find time to eat! Did you find time to get into the word?
I pray that you learn to love God’s word early in your life. College is a great opportunity for that! You will never have a better opportunity to make your own schedule and reinforce healthy habits than right now. In the power of God’s Spirit, take some time in the word today or find someone to teach you how.
If you don’t eat you will starve– both physically and spiritually. Check out this article from Crosswalk for more tips as to how to have a solid devotional time.
Cultivate a Prayer Life
Often, prayer is one of the most overlooked aspects of Christian growth. It always seems like we aren’t praying enough. It is as if there is some phantom Christian that has the perfect prayer life and we never measure up.
Sometimes it is hard to nail down exactly what we mean by prayer– from prayer closets, to prayer meetings, to public prayer it’s all confusing. In reality, Jesus wants you to surrender your heart and your thoughts. He wants you to slow down, reflect on who He is, and talk to Him about it.
It was incredibly beneficial to me when I added a quiet reflection time to my devotional rhythm. Up until then, I had been moving so fast that I didn’t know what was going on in my heart to talk to God about. What little time I had to focus on Jesus I would use reading my Bible– not a bad idea but I was missing something. By reflecting I could put my life in context and by getting in the Word I was able to pray God’s truth back to Him.
What do you find yourself praying about? Do you pray at all? College is the perfect opportunity to find the time, seek out training from others with a more intimate prayer life, and get in a solid rhythm. I am working on an article to train people to have a more intimate prayer life. Until I finish that post, check out this article from Cru.
Plug Into God’s Mission
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20
Jesus’ earthly ministry had a beginning and it had an end. It is interesting to me that he leaves his disciples and the hundred or so other followers with an incredibly specific call to action. The action wasn’t about personal piety, humanitarianism, or traditions– even though those things are important. No, His call to action was to take this gospel message to the world! The Greek word used in the above verse for “nations” is ethnos– this is where we get our English word ethnic group. Jesus was telling the early church that the Gospel message he preached was for every culture on earth and He is using us to take it there!
Surprisingly, many Christians in America will live their entire lives without realizing God’s heart has always been about reaching every people group with the gospel. This article from The Traveling Team was incredibly formative for me to see the overarching missions story of the Bible.
Does this mean the new believer needs to pack up and move overseas for a lifetime? Maybe, but probably not. However, it does mean that we, as followers of Christ that have 100% yielded to His calling, need to be prepared to live out our faith for whatever God has for us today.
Today you may find yourself living life as a student on a college campus. Prepare yourself to be plugged into the mission! There are thousands of students around you that don’t know Christ. Do you know how to engage a person in a conversation, help lift their eyes heavenward, and share the gospel? Now is the time! The Holy Spirit in you lives in eager anticipation waiting on you to live out your calling. There is likely a campus ministry in your vicinity praying for laborers to send out to the harvest that would love to train you to have gospel conversations with others. Cru has made it their mission to equip college students to share their faith and this article will get you started.
As a college student, your position on your campus is incredibly strategic. As you walk with the Lord and share your faith more you may be uniquely suited to take the gospel outside of your local context and to an unreached people group. The Joshua Project lists the missional status of all known people groups in the world!
To be truly maturing in Christ we need to be living out His mission.
In Conclusion
God is not surprised that you find yourself on the college campus. This is more than a place you will spend the next four years. Sure, this is where you will make memories and learn a skill that may get you paid but, I argue, that your time at a university is infinitely more important than that!
If you’re not maturing in Jesus then you are wasting your time. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to graduate from college and be launched into a lifetime of intimately walking with Jesus.