It's Not About You!

And this is a great thing! and it will free Generation Z from what they are being told

“Seek your truth”

“Read more self-help”

“Follow your heart”

“Do what feels good to you!”

“The truth is within you”

Have you heard people say these things? Hang around the college campus for a bit and you’ll hear them flying all over the place! I do want to attack these ideas because they lead to worldview that doesn’t stand on anything solid except for what you came up with and what feels right to you.

This is what Nicci’s campus meeting message addressed in the beginning of the Spring Semester! She spoke at the first campus meeting of the semester and kicked us off with some heat. She wanted to come against prevalent thoughts that college students come into college with and give a grander vision for life.

Life in the Kingdom of God and a life following Jesus.

Prevalent thoughts of the average college student (and I can relate!) largely revolve around “How can I live it up and make the most of my 4 college years?” “What can I do that will make me most happy?”. “What can I do to set myself up for making a lot of money?”.

The students that swim against the current of college thought I have found ask questions like “God, what do you have me during my time at college?”. “What can I give myself to during my four years here?”. “How can I be apart of change this campus?”.

The former line of thoughts I understand, but they will almost always lead to a search for significance and meaning from something other than God. Usually it’s a search inward to discover what kind of person you want to become and what you believe about the world.

I want to share quickly about a conversation I had recently on campus with a student. This might sound like an extreme example, but I want to share this because I believe that this quest for truth that students pursue inwardly can lead to this: destruction.

I met this guy a couple weeks ago when we were doing our weekly evangelism. For this specific day on campus, we had a Called to Greatness table and a question of the day for students to ponder and hopefully converse with us about. We post up on a very popular area on campus and attempt to stop students to answer the question and talk with them about spiritual things. Engaging students with the goal of gospel conversations!

Right now my memory fails me what the question was that we were asking students on this particular day (So Bad!!), but I engaged this student while he was walking by and he wanted to stay and chat about it. I quickly began asking him if he had a faith background and how he views God. He began to unpack how he believes that there is something out there that made the world but its difficult to know what it is and how we will probably never find out. Conversation went on…more questions were asked…and we soon got to talking about morality and the idea of objective morality.

As with many students we talk to, he believed that truth was subjective. He thought that there is not one main Truth, but every person has their own truth. “Each person has their own truth, what’s true for them” , something we hear a lot.

So I brought in a very extreme example, which I prefaced to him that “this is an extreme example I know, but I’m curious what you think about it”. If one person believes it’s morally wrong to kill a baby, but another person says it’s okay to kill babies, you would say, using your logic, that they are both right?”

“Yea, I mean, if the person has a good enough reason I guess that would be true for them. It depends on the motive of the person though”.

….

I was stunned to actually hear this come out of his mouth. I honestly doubt that he actually believed what he said, even though this is what his worldview was.

We continued on for only a few more moments before he had to jet to class. I didn’t have time to talk more into what he said sadly, but I am believing some Kingdom Truth was planted throughout the conversation (I shared what I believed about God).

Again, I wanted to share this because these are some of the ideas that college students swim in. Now I know this is probably a rare thing to actually hear someone say, but most students we talk to will say things that come from the underlying current that they are swimming in: that God does not exist and there is no Objective Truth.

And so they are left with looking inward to find what is true. What feels good and what seems right to me is what I will determine as good. This is not a new thing though, this comes straight from the garden of eden. And it can end up with the kind of thinking that this young man had.

And this is exactly what Nicci is speaking to in her message. The message of God’s Kingdom that life is not about you… and that is wonderful!