This Thursday, we’ve got another short excerpt from the upcoming ‘University: The Big Challenge’ resource. I've been working on getting it finalised and ready to print. When I was reading through it, I came across this passage: “Don’t copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:2, New Living Translation)

 

Everyone wants to be an individual. We all like to think we’re unique and special and that’s true! The reality is however, for the most part, we’re inclined to conform. That’s certainly a big temptation at the beginning of university life. When you start living in university accommodation, there’s often a strong sense of group identity. The university world has its own set of behaviours and customs. You might get t-shirts with the name of your hall or college. There are a range of group activities and often a tradition of singing and chanting: songs before nights out, songs which every group of freshers has sung for the last 20 years. It’s likely there will be games and challenges and it can be a lot of fun. It’s a powerful process of initiation into university life and there is a pressure to conform. Some of that is OK, but there will probably be aspects of university life, particularly in those first few weeks, that as followers of Jesus we don’t want to conform to.

However, we’re called to “be in the world but not of it”. In John 17:15, Jesus himself said that “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one”. The solution to not conforming is not to isolate ourselves from people who don’t know Jesus yet. Instead, let’s commit to spending time in God’s presence with Jesus, so we become more like him, so that we can carry that presence into every interaction we’re part of. We’re called to be “salt and light” and we bring light to the situations and environments that we’re in. We become more like Jesus when we spend time with him and work out what that looks like when we live in the world.