A day may come, if it hasn’t already, when you will walk into your room and feel like a stranger. Looking around at the posters on the walls and the CDs on a shelf and the letterman’s jacket laying on the floor, you realize that none of it fits. This isn’t you, at least not any more. Maybe it never was. You stick what was once your favorite CD into your CD player. Before the first song is over you pull it out and say to yourself, “I can’t believe I used to like this stuff.” That’s why you never loaded it into your iPod, yet you could never bring yourself to throw it out. The band serenaded some good times in your life, but it hasn’t for a while. On this day you realize it never will again.

You’ve been through this before. There was that day you realized Barney was lame and the day you gave all your Barbies to your little sister. Somewhere along the way you stopped collecting action figures and a McDonald’s Happy Meal no longer struck you as fine dining. You exchanged chocolate milk for Starbucks and The Disney Channel for Seinfeld. Those moments may not have felt like turning points, but they were. It’s not that you became too old for those things that used to matter so much to you. You outgrew them. Intellectually. Emotionally. Even spiritually. You moved on with life and as you did some things had to be left behind. Most of the time you didn’t make conscious decisions about what to take with you and what to box up for Goodwill. One day you woke up and you had changed. Living out the new you made those decisions for you.

The stuff you accumulated in your room during your first 18 years of life is not the only thing that no longer fits. The more you learn about yourself, the more you will find many of the odd collection of ideas and beliefs rolling around in your head now seem oddly out of place. Just like the concert T-shirts piled up on a shelf in your closet, not all your old beliefs still fit who you are today. As you try them on you realize some are like that crush you had in the ninth grade on the Olsen twins or Aaron Carter. They made a lot of sense at the time, but you find them a little embarrassing today.

Other ideas you’ve collected pose a greater challenge. From the day you popped out of the womb, your parents, other influential adults, and peers filled your head with ideas about the world. They shaped your concept of right and wrong as well as your understanding of truth. When you are very young, even your likes and dislikes are extensions of your parents. That’s why I became a tireless neighborhood campaign worker for Richard Nixon in 1968 when I was six years old. My dad took me to see Nixon during a campaign stop at a local airport and I was hooked. In my little six-year-old brain, I believed Richard Millhouse Nixon would be the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln. I was the youngest of the young Republicans in my hometown and Nixon was my guy.

In spite of the Nixon wrist watch I bought at the end his first term (a watch I still own today, although I’m not exactly sure where it is at the moment), Nixon wasn’t really my candidate. My attachment to him was nothing more than an extension of my father’s political beliefs. If I’d never grown beyond this point, I would still need to call my dad before every election to find out who he plans to vote for. I could have just as easily gone to the opposite extreme and hated Nixon because my dad loved him, but that wouldn’t have been much of an improvement. My political convictions still wouldn’t be my own. They would simply be some sort of a bizarro world version of my father’s.

Political ideas are minor in comparison to an even more important set of beliefs you picked up as you were growing up: your beliefs about God. As you go off to college and get out on your own for the first time, you will most likely find yourself sorting through these beliefs trying to decide which fit the real you. More than that, you have to figure out if God and Jesus and the Bible are truly your own or if your convictions are nothing more than extensions of the faith of the strong Christians in your life. The real question you have to ask yourself is this: Whose Jesus do I have? Is he mine, or do I believe because others believe?

And that’s where this book comes in. As the title says, the goal of this book is to help you take full ownership of your faith, to make Jesus completely your own. We don’t want this book to be another crutch that tells you what to believe and why. Instead we want to help you discover an honest, gritty, real faith that springs out of a relationship you share with God alone. Don’t get me wrong. We all need others to help us get started and keep growing with Jesus. However, there comes a point in our spiritual development when we can’t depend on others for answers. Otherwise we will end up like the seven sons of Sceva in Acts 19:13-16 who went around casting out demons by saying, “I command you by the Jesus preached by Paul.” One day they ran into a real evil spirit who shot back, “I know Jesus, and I’ve heard of Paul, but who are you?” Sceva’s seven sons barely escaped with their lives after the possessed man turned on them. Piggy backing on the faith of others may work for a while, but eventually Jesus has to become truly our own if it is to survive.

I’d originally planned to make this next section a clever relationship quiz that dripped with sarcastic humor to help you figure out where you stand with God. But the quiz ended up on the cutting room floor because I realized quizzes about your relationship with God are about as effective as a quiz in some teen magazine that is supposed to help you figure out if the guy you are dating is Mr. Right or if you are your girlfriend’s potential soul mate. Those quizzes usually give you the answer you wanted to find in the first place. The same goes for a God relationship quiz. Some of you would read a question that asks, “Do you pray enough?” and automatically say no, even if you’d just spent the past three days laying on your face pouring out your heart to God. And others would say yes, of course, even if in the past six months you hadn’t prayed for anything more significant than answers on a physics test you forgot to study for.

Maybe that’s why the Bible doesn’t include any relationship quizzes. That omission, however, shouldn’t lead us to jump to the conclusion that God never tests us and our relationship with him. He does. Daily. The questions, however, aren’t written out in black and white with convenient ‘yes’ and ‘no’ boxes for us to check. Instead, God allows our faith to be tested in ways that probe the very core of our convictions. Jesus described this process in one of his most famous stories:

"A farmer planted seed. As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road and birds ate it. Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn't put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly. Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled among the weeds and nothing came of it. Some fell on good earth and came up with a flourish, producing a harvest exceeding his wildest dreams." (Mark 4:3-8)

If your first response to reading this is, “What does a farmer planting seeds have to do with my relationship with God?” you are in good company. Jesus’s disciples didn’t get it at first, either. That’s why Jesus had to spell it out for them and us. He explained the story of the farmer by telling his disciples:

"The farmer plants the Word. Some people are like the seed that falls on the hardened soil of the road. No sooner do they hear the Word than Satan snatches away what has been planted in them. And some are like the seed that lands in the gravel. When they first hear the Word, they respond with great enthusiasm. But there is such shallow soil of character that when the emotions wear off and some difficulty arrives, there is nothing to show for it. The seed cast in the weeds represents the ones who hear the kingdom news but are overwhelmed with worries about all the things they have to do and all the things they want to get. The stress strangles what they heard, and nothing comes of it. But the seed planted in the good earth represents those who hear the Word, embrace it, and produce a harvest beyond their wildest dreams." (Mark 4:14-20)

God allows birds as well as rocks and thorns to come into our lives to check out our faiths and determine not only whether or not it is real, but if it is our own. It’s not like this will be a completely new experience for you. If you were an active follower of Christ in your high school, you’ve already encountered some rocks and thorns. However, the challenges you’ll face in college take these tests to a whole different level. God isn’t being cruel by letting this happen. Far from it. His goal is to help you grow up and become fully mature in your faith, and that can’t happen as long as your beliefs, convictions, and behavior are extensions of those of your parents or your youth pastor or your Christian girlfriend. You will discover whose Jesus you have as God allows some very unique tests you can only experience through the phase of life you are about to enter. These tests include:

Moving off to college can be like living at Outback Steakhouse (without the steaks and blooming onions and anything else that approaches edible food): “No Rules. Just Right.” Of course there are a few rules. All colleges have rules against under-age drinking and the use of illegal substances. Christian colleges go further by limiting when guys can go into girl’s dorms or floors and vice versa. But, for the most part, when you are on your own, no one is standing over you telling you what to do, and no one is there to make sure you do the right thing. You mom and dad don’t know what you are up to unless you tell them.

Go ahead and insert your own story of your friend, whose parents were really strict, and the moment went off to college became hell on earth. This nice kid who never did anything wrong throughout high school lands on a college campus and starts drinking and partying and sleeping around. Basically became his/ or her parents’ worst nightmare, if the parents even knew what was going on. I knew people like this when I was in school, and you probably do as well.

What causes Christians like this to go off the deep end? It wasn’t just that they couldn’t handle the peer pressure of college. The real problem came down to this: Jesus wasn’t their own. They kept the rules because their parents made them keep the rules. Imitating Christ wasn’t something that welled up from deep within their own souls. That’s the purpose of this test, to see whether or not Jesus has truly transformed your life, or if you toe the line because that’s what’s expected of you.

Living for Jesus in high school is no easy task. To make it, most of us have to develop some sort of support system. You have your Christian friends at school, your youth group at church complete with a youth pastor or other adults who help you stick with Christ. Usually you have other adults as well, parents, pastors, neighbors, someone who genuinely cares for you and tries to mentor you in the faith.

Then you move off to college but your support system doesn’t move with you. Even if you go to a school close to home or live at home and commute, things will change. Those buddies you hung out with who shared your desire to stay close to God, you don’t see them every day like you once did. Your lives start going in different directions. Now what will you do? How will your faith survive when you find you can’t lean on the people you once leaned on? It’s times like this, when it’s just you and God, that he looks at you and asks, “Am I enough for you?”

We interrupt this book for a special message from parents everywhere: College can be scary. People at college like to do bad things. They will try to get you to do bad things, too. This is called temptation. Beware of temptation. Temptation bad. Resisting temptation good. And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming….

Okay, it’s not like you’ve never faced temptation before. Sex. Drugs. Alcohol. More sex, drugs and alcohol. You’ve had to face these temptations since junior high. Maybe earlier. However, the question you must come to grips with is no longer, will you drink or have sex or do whatever. The real question becomes, why will you choose to either give in or walk away. In God’s eyes, what you do means far less than why you do it. And the question of why is something you are now going to have to figure out in a way you never have before.

And they need to be.

Yes, you read it right. Our beliefs and our concepts of truth need to be called into question. You need professors who will shake the foundations of your faith, and you need to get to know other students who will make you wonder if there really is a difference between Christianity and Islam, and you need to read books that make you question whether you can really know anything at all. You need all of this. Yes, you need it. We all need it. Your profs and friends and books aren’t playing into the hands of the devil to shipwreck your faith. Honestly, they aren’t doing anything God himself doesn’t do to us. Read through the first four books of the New Testament and note how many times Jesus made his disciples’ heads spin. How many times did he tell people to leave if they couldn’t handle what he had to say? The answer: a bunch.

I know, I know, it’s bad when someone’s faith is shipwrecked. But, shipwrecks happen because ships sail across the ocean. The only surefire way to avoid a shipwreck is to never put your boat in the water. And the only surefire way to keep your faith safe and sound and never question anything, ever, for your entire life is to stay cooped up in some safe little Christian cocoon where nothing bad will ever happen to you and no one will ever plant a seed of doubt in your head. Of course, you will then be about as useful to God as a ship in perpetual dry dock.

People make a lot of jokes about hell and the Devil. He also shows up in movies as the ultimate big bad wolf that even Schwatzenegger has trouble defeating. But this is no joking matter, and it isn’t the stuff of movies. Satan, the Devil, is a real entity, and he never stops trying to ruin your testimony and make you completely unusable to God. He does more than tempt you to break as many of the ten commandments as possible. Instead, his real goal is to separate you from God and God’s eternal plan for your life. And he never rests.

Just because Jesus already defeated the Devil doesn’t mean Satan will now leave you alone. However, Jesus’s victory gives you both the weapons and confidence you need as you make your way in this world. Paul said it best:

"God is strong, and he wants you strong. So take everything the Master has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything the Devil throws your way. This is no afternoon athletic contest that we'll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels. Be prepared. You're up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it's all over but the shouting you'll still be on your feet. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them. You'll need them throughout your life. God's Word is an indispensable weapon. In the same way, prayer is essential in this ongoing warfare. Pray hard and long. Pray for your brothers and sisters. Keep your eyes open. Keep each other's spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out." (Ephesians 6:10-18)

Jesus said birds would come and snatch away the word of truth from the lives of some. Others would be done in by thorns or shallow soil. But these are risks we have to be willing to face head on. Unlike seeds laying on the ground, no one can snatch your faith from you unless you let them. Working through the process of making your faith your own will bury those seeds of truth deep within you, even as you wrestle with hard questions, never-before-considered concepts, and ideas thrown at you by atheist friends and professors. James said it best:

"Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all side. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let is do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way" (James 1:2-4).

When you know tests are coming, it is best to prepare yourself in advance, the same way you’ll be preparing for your first political science exam. And the best place to start is coming to grips with what this faith is all about.

©2006 Mark A. Tabb

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