More Than a Sum of My Theology Classes
Thoughts From a Former Bible College Student
What comes to your mind when you think about bible college students? What types of questions do you ask these individuals when they come back home on their summer or winter breaks? Sometimes the label “bible college student” brings upon this expectation that we are just a sum of our classes… That we are the byproducts of the theologians we agree with, the doctrines we uphold or the Christian sides we set our campsites on whether we are Calvinists or Arminians. It’s as if those are the only things that bible college students are known for and can only learn. Though these things do matter to a certain degree, this blog post is not meant to share the things that I learned in my classes (though I would love to have these conversations with those who are curious about how I have reached some of my convictions). Bible college students are more than a sum of what we have learned in our theology classes, and I am more than just a sum of my classes at Moody Bible Institute. Instead, I write this blog to share four lessons God has taught me in bible college that occurred outside my classes. Some of the best lessons were me revisiting the basic foundational blocks of my Christian identity and formation. In fact, some of these lessons spoke a lot louder than the wide known Christian debates on secondary issues of the faith. These truths have hit the core of my being and were the very things I wrestled with before the Lord my God. The Christian life is not an easy one, but it is rewarding. So in honor of my college career coming to an end, here are the four lessons that I learned as a former bible college student.
I am a sinner but Jesus saved me.
I am a sinner, but I am also a saint. This was the most crucial lesson that God had to teach me before anything else.
My freshman year was one of the toughest years for me as I had to learn this. It was the year that would challenge me to rethink my identity as a Christian believer. I grew up in a Christian family and have always gone to church. During my youth years, I would attend church at least four to five times a week and served in at least three different ministries at a time. The gospel became a familiar story to me throughout my years like knowing the abc’s. So, you may be wondering why I’m flaunting my credentials as a Christian? I share these experiences to give you a perspective of who I was and why I had reached the crisis I did during my freshman year. I became self righteous. I was self righteous. I had no idea how corrupt my heart was and how much I needed to be saved by Jesus. At 18 years old, I knew that I was a sinner but I don’t think I understood the depths of what that actually meant and looked like. When I was thirteen years old, I accepted Jesus into my heart. It was the moment when I actually believed in Him and when He became real to me. But I never came face to face with how dark sin taints my relationship with God. So when I moved to Moody Bible Institute, I faced the ugliness of my sins. From lust to gluttony, these little parasites of my life began coming up to the surface, and I despised it. Why were these things popping up in my life? I was positive that I was a genuine believer who gave her life to Christ at thirteen years old. So how could it be possible for me to face the temptations and fall into these traps that sin had built for me? I remember sitting in my Church doctrines class and being completely distracted by this massive realization that I was a sinner. I was so afraid of losing my salvation because of this sin problem. There were moments when I would wake up and feel some type of despair and dread that I was being fake in my relationship with God because of the temptations of my sin. There were even moments when I questioned the sincerity of my whole faith and confession of faith that began years prior. To be honest, I wished that the Lord had fixed me up the day after. I wished that He could take away all the sin that had surfaced and that I could be free from temptation. But He didn’t do any of that. Instead, the Lord redemptively used those opportunities to teach me how to rely on His grace. These moments were opportunities given me to depend on Jesus. For the first time, I truly understood what it meant to be a wretch in dire need of saving after seeing how wretched I could be.
So then what should I make of the moment when I had given my life to Jesus at thirteen and was baptized as a response to that faith? Was it meaningless and insincere? By no means was it any of that. That day I believed in Jesus was absolutely genuine. Ephesians is a book that reveals glorious truths of the process of salvation and sanctification. This book taught me who I was and how I am to process the every day battles against my own flesh. I learned that saving faith happens only once when a believer genuinely believes in Jesus. It’s in that moment that I am made righteous and holy before God through what Jesus Christ did for me. John Calvin describes saving faith to be this:
“A firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given. Promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit”
When I accepted Jesus into my life at thirteen, I was saved by my faith in Jesus. Faith in itself cannot do the saving, but it was the person who I placed my faith that saved me. Jesus saves. Jesus Christ’s perfect birth, life, death and resurrection defeated sin and death. He made a way for sinners to be reconciled to God again by His complete and perfect obedience. He makes us pure, holy and righteous. He saved me when I genuinely believed in Him, and I was sealed with the Holy Spirit as an indicator that I am and will always be God’s child. There is nothing that can separate me from God’s love. I am not exempt from any type of temptation, and I know that my sin does not remove my identity as God’s daughter. But every day is a slow journey and process of sanctification. Today, I will face the temptation to become my own self sufficient god and indulge in my perverse desires contrary to God’s. But through Jesus, I have the choice to resist and flee these temptations. I have the choice to choose righteousness through help from the Holy Spirit so that I can mirror Jesus and His character.
Friendships are sanctifying.
I met some amazing friends in college who taught me how to be a good friend. For a while, I thought I had some deep friendships during my youth to early single adult years. But I’ve never encountered the hills and valleys of some of these friendships until college. In other words, I’ve never learned how to unconditionally love other sinners like myself. It’s really easy to love others during their best seasons, and it’s easy to be loved when I am at my best. But the test of all friendships happen when you are given the choice to love someone when they are at their worst and when you are at your worst. You also have to be vulnerable with your friends if you want them to be part of your close inner circle. It is inevitable. Do you trust your friends enough to believe that they could still love you despite your weaknesses? I couldn’t even handle my own ugliness, so how could I trust another to love the ugly parts of me? This was exactly what the Lord taught me.
We hurt our friends because we are imperfect and flawed. Our friends hurt and disappoint us because they are also imperfect and flawed. The definition of koinonia is deep fellowship or a close knit community of God’s people. All friendships strive for this, but do they ever reach their end goal? Some of my deepest friendships had to go through the fire. They needed to be refined so that they could be stronger and tougher than before. There were moments when I wanted to walk away from my friends because of the hurt, frustration and pain I went through. I’m sure they also had the same thoughts too. There were moments when both of us were at our wits end with no energy to love, forgive and be merciful. But I knew that I needed to push through these challenging times. I needed to learn how to trust God’s purpose despite my natural instinct to burn down and run away from these friendships. I had to trust that God was working in my friends’ lives just as much as He was working in mine. In these moments, it was crucial for me to communicate and articulate the feelings and frustrations I felt. Storing up these feelings would only add flames to the fire. If I decided to shrug off these feelings, I would soon reap lots and lots of bitterness towards the friends I claimed to love. But how could I find the strength to see past my hurt so that I could see my friend throughout these situations?
“Our love for God and for one another had to supersede the hurt we felt from each other.”
Our love for God and for one another had to supersede the hurt we felt from each other. This takes lots of humility. It requires pride to be let down so that we can allow the Spirit to give us the supernatural strength to love and forgive. When my friends and I were obedient to God’s command for to forgive one another, He blessed our friendship ten times more. When I reflect upon these friendships that I have with my brothers and sisters, I can confidently say that they are stronger than before. They were tested and tried. Our characters were being refined in these moments as we had to practice selflessness, forgiveness and love. The suffering we faced sanctified us. Perseverance though the heat of friendships reap beauty and character.
Buy your time.
I might still be in a school mentality right now, but life is really like a big deadline. The more I think about it, our lives are like sands in an hourglass. It’s running out, and it’s limited because we are finite. We don’t live eternally on Earth. One day, we will be forgotten by the world. There will never be a moment when we are this exact age living through this exact day. Instead of getting younger by the years, we grow older. Our bodies slowly decline as our backs ache more, we gain weight a lot faster and the hairs of our head slowly turn into gray. These are just a few things that remind us that our days on Earth are numbered.
Remembering our finiteness helps us to think about what matters for eternity. We reposition our priorities when we realize that our time is limited. School deadlines meant that I had to complete that assignment. It meant that I couldn’t fool around or do things that didn’t get me to my goal. Likewise, our finite nature and death shakes us up. It reminds us that we can’t fool around for forever or be distracted by the things of the world that don’t grow us in our relationship with God. Instead, we need to remember the things that do matter for an eternity. One thing that does matter for eternity is God’s word. 1 Peter 1:24-25 says,
“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
The things of this world will fade away like us. But God’s word will remain forever. His promises, commands and stories are what will stay for an eternity. So, it’s important that I don’t get distracted by the world because all of that will fade away. Instead, I need to remain in God’s word who will instruct me on how to live a life that pleasing to Him. I learned that I need to draw near to the living God who remains for all of eternity.
Abide in Jesus and walk with the Spirit.
This was the cherry on top to all the lessons that I learned. If learning that I was a sinner was the first lesson, then abiding in Jesus is the final lesson that God taught me before leaving school. Nothing else matters if I can’t get this truth aligned in my life. Abide in Jesus.
“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
John 15:4
Towards the end of my years at Moody, I was growing very weary and tired. I was finding it hard to be patient with those that seemed to get on my nerves. I would get snappy with my words without thinking that words have a lot of weight to them. It was hard for me to find the joy of my studies and instead I would gravitate towards being lazy. Honestly, my life did not seem to mirror Jesus at all. There were times when I felt merciless, loveless and joyless. I stopped wanting to do good for others or put others before me. Instead, I wanted to become selfish with my time, energy and money. So the past two years were probably the worst years for me in terms of how I was bearing fruits of the Spirit. If I was bearing any fruit at all, it was on my own accord and energy. In other words, it was very unproductive.
Jesus says in John 15 that those who abide in Him bear fruit. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. My life seemed to be the complete opposite of what Jesus was communicating in John 15. I was not bearing any fruit because I was apart from Jesus. I hardly spent time reading the Bible, praying and even desiring Jesus’ presence in my studies or free time. Instead, I got caught up in the motion of life. I went days without praying or even thinking about Him. Hanging out with my friends or watching movies on Netflix seemed to take up all my time. It was all I wanted to do after writing papers on God or reading the Bible for school assignments. Maybe this was the reason why I couldn’t forgive those I needed to forgive, to love those who were hard to love in the moment, and to be selfless instead of being selfish. I simply was not faithful to God and followed the distractions of my heart. It pushed me farther away from Jesus, and I began losing myself.
I am at my worst when I am not walking with the Spirit. I am at my worst when I rely on my own strength instead of depending on the Holy Spirit’s. Yet, I hit rock bottom the final two weeks before my graduation. There was a situation that caused me realize that I can’t love others well if I am not abiding in Jesus. I can’t love others to the capacity that I am called to because I am not depending on the Spirit. Sometimes it takes us to hit rock bottom before we desperately reach out our hand to God for help. That’s what it took me. I couldn’t keep running away from Him anymore, but I needed to come face to face with God. It was brutal and excruciating. None of us like to ask for God’s help because we are prideful or think we can handle things on our own. The reality is that we can’t. We don’t have the perfect strength to love others or to hold off our tongue before saying a snarky comment to those who are rude to us. We don’t have the perfect strength to consider other’s interests above ours. However, Christians do have the strength to do all those things with help from the Holy Spirit. All it takes is for us to simply depend on Him. All it takes is for us to run back to God and accept His help.
“My failure to abide in Jesus and be in His presence will lead to my failure in loving God and His people.”
When I finally ran back to God after months of being stubborn, He finally gave me the strength that I needed to do all those things that I was called to. He knows we can’t do these things on our own, so He provides us ways so that we can through depending on God. This very truth that Jesus tells us in John 15 is absolutely true for every single believer. We cannot expect to do the things God requires us to do as His people if we are not abiding in Jesus. Before I dive into any ministry or take any opportunity to serve those around me, I always need to do a heart check up. My failure to abide in Jesus and be in His presence will lead to my failure in loving God and His people.
