Welcome to College: A Christ-Follower's Guide for the Journey
400
Welcome to College: A Christ-Follower's Guide for the Journey
400Paperback(2nd ed.)
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Overview
Is there a more frightening question for a graduating high school senior than "What will you do with your life?" In college, whether they realize it or not, students will answer that question every day with each decision. All of the new friends and new experiences of higher education will shape their future. It's critical that students know how to handle college before they're in the thick of it.
Jonathan Morrow tackles the tough questions that arise during these formative years, including:
- How do you grow spiritually?
- How do you manage your time to both study well and have fun?
- Is all truth relative?
- Are there good reasons to be a Christian?
- As a Christian, how should you view issues like dating and sex?
Each chapter of this new edition has been updated, and the author has included a new chapter on Christianity, homosexuality, and the Bible. Grounded in both his own extensive experience and biblical truth, Morrow's book is full of quick, easy-to-read chapters and excellent advice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780825444883 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kregel Publications |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2017 |
| Edition description: | 2nd ed. |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 581,259 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Welcome To College
A Christ-Follower's Guide For The Journey
By Jonathan Morrow
Kregel Publications
Copyright © 2017 Jonathan MorrowAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8254-4488-3
CHAPTER 1
Preparing for Campus Life
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. ... You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you may be swept off to.
— J. R. R. TOLKIEN
Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
— MARK TWAIN
There I was, standing in the parking lot looking up at my dorm. I had finally arrived ... at college that is. And after filling out a pile of paperwork, I was the proud owner of a key that would cost me $15 to replace if lost — but it was to my own room. I walked in and was greeted by the sweet smell of industrial-strength disinfectant, cinderblock walls painted pale blue, a metallic bunk bed, and a yellowing bathroom that four sets of roommates would share. Along with my roommate, Dave, this was home my first year of college.
My first week of school was kind of a blur. Everything was new and I was nervous! Not only did I have to find out where to eat (and quickly learn what not to eat), I had to find my mailbox and sign up for a parking sticker. (My conspiracy theory is that universities fund their budgets by the revenue from all of the parking fines they make students pay — so be careful where and in which direction you park.)
Every kind of club and organization imaginable had tables set up all over campus. There were banners, fliers, welcome parties, and lots of free food. There were signs for rush week (for fraternities and sororities) and progressive dinners at local churches and ministries. It was a buffet of activity.
Within a couple of weeks, Dave and I had met a great group of Christian friends; we all ended up walking through college together. Within another couple of weeks, I had pledged and "de-pledged" a fraternity. God had other plans in that area that would unfold in my junior year.
Looking back now, I clearly see God's providence at work from the first day. An example: I was helping a friend from my home church in Knoxville move into an apartment. This divine appointment changed my life. In the course of unloading a moving truck with some other people, I met Rich — a guy who just happened to be the newly appointed campus director of Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru) at my school. We hit it off right away, and he invited me to a cookout at his house the following night. Several of us went, and the rest is history.
From that small group of students and staff we launched Cru on our campus. Rich became a mentor to me throughout college and one of my best friends. He taught me how to study God's Word for myself; we studied 2 Timothy and it is still my favorite book of the Bible. God used Cru more than anything else in college to shape my life and provide me with opportunities to serve, lead, and grow. It was through this experience that I discovered I wanted to spend my life investing in the lives of others (2 Tim. 2:2). And my training in Cru inspired me to pledge a fraternity my junior year and be a part of launching a ministry to fraternities and sororities. This by itself was incredibly rewarding, but it was also through this Greek ministry that I met my future wife.
I could go on. But my main point is this: you may think and feel at times that college is a random series of classes, events, and relationships. You may not even be at the college you wanted to attend. Regardless of the situation, I assure you that God is at work. If you yield to His will, you can be confident that He will lead you in the way you should go. Remember, He has good plans for you (Eph. 2:10).
Three Pieces of Wisdom
There are many important lessons to learn during college, but I think these three will be especially helpful in the beginning.
1. You are not alone. It will be tempting to think that you are the only one who has ever felt "this way" or struggled with a particular fear or insecurity in college. Not true! College can be lonely and overwhelming at times, but this is the reason that life is a team sport: we need each other. Good friends are essential in college. Moreover, as a son or daughter of God, you have the sure promise that your heavenly Father will never leave or forsake you (Matt. 28:20). Hang in there and stay faithful by leaning on God and the solid friends in your life.
2. With freedom comes responsibility. College is great! Finally you are not under the all-seeing eyes of parents. There are no curfews, and no one will make you do your homework or eat your vegetables. You don't even have to scrub the toilet or wash dishes if you don't want to (though I'd advise against this particular expression of liberty). What will you do with this newfound freedom? Will you define freedom as living any way you want, or will you define it as the opportunity to live how you ought to live? College is not like golf; there are no mulligans. Your free choices have real consequences. If you don't study or go to class, you'll fail. If you don't take care of your body, you will be sick much of the time. If you break the law, you will have to deal with the consequences. So enjoy your newfound freedom — I sure did — but be responsible in your decisions. What you sow now, you reap later.
3. Don't take yourself too seriously. Take college seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously. Like everyone else, you will have your moments of wanting to go crawl under a rock and hide out of embarrassment and awkwardness. Many situations will feel like they are the end of the world; they aren't. You are going to have some bad days. It's kind of like a rite of passage. If you can't laugh in the moment, you will definitely laugh later!
Two Survival Tips
Here are two other survival tips — free of charge. First, pick your roommates carefully. I was blessed with great roommates in college. They were Christians who encouraged me and held me accountable. We hung out together all the time and laughed a lot. I wouldn't have made it without them. Sure, we got on each other's nerves at times, but that's par for the course when you spend that much time with the same people. If you can help it, make sure you are in a good roommate situation; you want an encouraging and safe place to come home to at the end of the day.
Second, find your academic advisor and the financial aid office ASAP. This is critical. You want to graduate someday, right? Well, to ensure that, make certain you are taking the right classes in the right order. There are few worse feelings than heading into your last semester and finding out you still have twenty-four credits left to take! Also, make sure that your advisor is knowledgeable in your program's course requirements. I have heard numerous stories of advisors who didn't have a clue about the academic programs — they were assigned the job of advising because they lacked seniority within the department. If they look uncertain, seek out a second opinion!
As far as financial aid, you'll figure out soon enough how expensive college is. You might qualify for some financial aid. So find the financial aid office early and turn in your paperwork on time. I have known several people who lost out on thousands of dollars in financial aid because they forgot to turn in a form by the deadline.
Owning Your Faith
Now that you have successfully survived high school, it's time to embark on the challenging process of owning your faith in college. Up until now, your parents and youth pastor have probably played a significant role in shaping your Christian convictions — and this is a good thing. But your dad, mom, and youth pastor aren't here to tell you what to believe anymore. You will have to discover what you really believe. There will be growing pains, frustrating days, and some disillusionment along the way. This is a natural part of transitioning from a teenager to a responsible adult. There will be many voices offering their opinions. You will have to decide which ones to listen to and why.
While we will spend plenty of time dealing with "practical college stuff"," we also need to invest some time and effort in becoming grounded in what is true about you, God, the world in which you live, and the really big questions in life. Take it from one who has been where you are, this is time well spent.
Part of owning your faith in college means putting down roots and becoming established in your faith (Col. 2:6–7). God's Word calls us all to "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18). This means not only understanding what you believe and why you believe it but also growing in your ability and confidence to talk about it with others (1 Peter 3:15).
THE BIG IDEAS
• No matter how it looks at the moment, God is providentially at work in the everyday details of your college experience.
• Three important pieces of wisdom to remember are (1) you are not alone, (2) with freedom comes responsibility, and (3) don't take yourself too seriously.
• Two survival tips are (1) pick your roommates carefully and (2) find your academic advisor and the financial aid office ASAP.
• Owning your Christian faith is a necessary part of growing up and living well.
CHAPTER 2Think Christianly
Cultivating a Christian Worldview
All truth, no matter where it be found or by whom it be discovered, is still God's truth.
— ARTHUR F. HOLMES
I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
— C. S. LEWIS
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
— 1 CORINTHIANS 10:31
Most Christians have bought into a lie. The lie is that religious beliefs are to be kept private and should not impact who you are — and what you say — in public. It's easy to fall into this way of thinking, but I want to help you avoid this trap because it will weaken your faith. Popular culture teaches that it doesn't matter if you are a Supreme Court Justice, doctor, lawyer, sales representative, or college student, you must keep your spiritual beliefs to yourself and out of everyone else's business. Often this is referred to as keeping the "sacred" and "secular" separate. Today's culture teaches that what is sacred — personal religious beliefs about God or worship practices — should be kept separate from what is secular — the public sphere of activity and what the hard sciences can tell us. It's a long story, but this is an artificial distinction, resulting from ways of thinking inherited from the Enlightenment and overflowing from the current misunderstanding of the relationship between church and state (more on that later). Not only is the distinction artificial, it's false! In reality, there is no separation between one's personal beliefs and public life — especially for the Christian (1 Cor. 10:31) — because our commitment to Jesus Christ should permeate every part of our lives.
Everyone Has a Worldview
Images and information constantly wash over us via high-definition TVs, high-speed Internet, smartphones, and social-media updates. All of these are mediums for constant messages, which necessarily flow out of different worldviews that, for good or ill, have a huge influence on us individually and culturally.
A worldview is a web of habit-forming beliefs about the biggest questions of life that helps you make sense of all your experiences. I like how Wheaton College president Philip Ryken puts it, "Whenever we bump into the world, our worldview has a way of spilling out. It comes out in what we think and love, say and do, praise and choose."
Everyone has a worldview. It makes no difference whether someone is a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, atheist, agnostic, humanist, or skeptic — they all have a worldview. Now, all these worldviews can't be true because that would mean there is no objective reality — no way things really are. Reality is discovered by human beings, not created by them. And only a little examination shows that different worldviews make contradictory claims — they can't all be true! So, one can test a worldview by examining how well the worldview's set of ideals and beliefs fit together and explain reality. Here are three helpful questions you can ask: Is it rational? Is it livable? And who says so?
What do these questions look like in action? As an example, I'll summarize some points I have developed in more detail elsewhere. First, naturalism (the worldview behind much of atheism today, which claims that all phenomena can be adequately explained by scientific laws) is at its core irrational. Why? Because if the universe is just purely physical — molecules in motion — then where do nonphysical things like souls, reason, truth, logic, consciousness, and free will come from? In the naturalist story, if we are "lucky" enough to somehow find ourselves in a life-permitting universe and cross the gaping chasm between random chemicals and biological life without any supernatural activities along the way, then why think that we can trust our thinking? After all, the standard view from evolutionary biology of natural selection through genetic mutation is concerned with selective advantage for the species, not truth. There are a lot of false beliefs I could hold that could also help me survive.
Next, atheism is unlivable because it fails to adequately deal with the problem of evil. According to atheism, there is no evil (or good for that matter). Why? Because there is no way the world is "supposed" to be. Where would an objective standard of good and evil come from? The six million Jews killed in the Holocaust at the hands of Nazi Germany can't truly be called evil; that's just what happened. And the wheels on the evolutionary bus go round and round, indifferent to human suffering, tears, and loss. Ultimately if someone is cunning or powerful enough — no matter how heinous his or her actions may be — they will get away with it in the end because there is no ultimate standard and no ultimate judge of human behavior. So a worldview that not only fails to account for evil but also provides no meaningful hope rooted in reality fails the livability test.
Lastly, when it comes to naturalism — who says so? Where does ultimate authority rest? The ever-changing opinions and evolving morality of Homo sapiens? Christianity, on the other hand, is rooted in the claims of Jesus of Nazareth who predicted his own death and rose from the dead to authenticate his claims. If true — and I discuss the powerful evidence to support this in chapter 17 — then this man would have the authority to speak to the biggest questions of life.
People may not ask these three questions of their own beliefs or think carefully about the way they view the world, but they still have a worldview. And it affects every area of their lives. Every person — knowingly or not — filters the information that enters their minds through their worldview. They then make sense of that information based on their worldview. This process is automatic, and the filtered information shapes their beliefs and influences how they function in society, including the smallest decisions they make.
A good illustration of how this works is commercials. If I asked why you want Beats headphones, the odds are very good that you wouldn't respond with the scientific specs of how the noise cancelation feature works. You buy Beats to feel cool, empowered, unique, and untethered. Listen to how an advertising account manager, aka "consumer anthropologist," described working for Porsche: "My task was to hijack your imagination, brand your brain with our logo, and then feed you opinions you thought were your own. ... An effective ad tries to tap viewers' most intense and emotional experiences, the trigger for all consumer impulses. My job was to save people from feeling impotent, unattractive, or powerless by offering them a Porsche, which promised to fix those problems." It's only a commercial, right? The same thing happens with the shows and movies we stream on Netflix or Hulu (see chapter 40 for more on this). Our assumptions about questions of human worth or what happiness is and how to achieve it are subtly shaped without realizing it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Welcome To College by Jonathan Morrow. Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Morrow. Excerpted by permission of Kregel Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword John Stonestreet 11
Preface to the Second Edition 13
Introduction: Along the Way 15
01 Preparing for Campus Life 17
02 Think Christianly: Cultivating a Christian Worldview 22
03 Getting Theological: Knowing and Loving God 29
04 Blinded by Faith? 39
05 Can We Know Anything at All? 45
06 Truth Matters 54
07 A Moral Disaster: Why Moral Relativism Is a Bad Idea 59
08 True Tolerance: Tolerance Just Ain't What It Used to Be! 65
09 How to Read the Bible 70
10 Can I Trust the Bible? 80
11 Knowing Versus Showing Your Faith 90
12 No Apologies Needed 96
13 The Existence of God: God Is There and Is Not Silent 102
14 Do All Roads Lead to God? 110
15 The Problem of Evil and Suffering 117
16 Thirty-One Flavors of Jesus 126
17 Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? 133
18 Science Rules! 141
19 Designed or Not Designed? That Is the Question 148
20 Dealing with Doubt 159
21 Good News to Share 165
22 To the Ends of the Earth 173
23 Getting to Know You 179
24 Here's to Your Health 188
25 Sticks and Stones 195
26 Has the Church Lost Her Mind? 201
27 Overcoming Syllabus Shock 207
28 Show Me the Money 215
29 Becoming More Like Jesus 221
30 Discovering the Will of God 231
31 When Someone You Love Dies 241
32 Gentlemen, Become Who You Were Born to Be 247
33 Ladies, Pursue Real Beauty 257
34 The Dating Game 264
35 Sex, Sex, Sex 273
36 A Call to Purity 282
37 Christianity, Homosexuality, and the Bible 288
38 Unplugged and Offline 303
39 Compassionately Engage Your World 309
40 Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open 317
41 A Christian View of Alcohol 324
42 Ethics in a Brave New World 334
43 Beyond the Horizon 340
Postscript: What I've Learned Thus Far 346
Acknowledgments 348
Appendix A A Devotional Reading Plan for Your First Semester 351
Appendix B Christian Versus Secular Colleges: Pros and Cons 355
Appendix C Resources for Philosophy 360
Appendix D Discussion Questions 363
Notes 379
About the Author 411