Boyce Blog

n an age where the cultural norm is to follow your heart and where feelings trump faith, how are Christians supposed to keep believing truth that we are so often tempted to disbelieve? Here are five ways that Christians can keep themselves staying the course on the narrow path which leads to eternal life.

Do you want to grow in your understanding and appreciation of God’s bountiful love? Then meditate on his wrath. Now before you punch your roommate in the throat (metaphorically speaking), just think with me for a moment about this: God’s grace and love are not received apart from the exercise of his holy wrath. The storyline of Scripture shows us this.

On September 2 we awoke to the tragedy of the refugee crisis now spreading across Europe. Aylan Kurdi’s body was photographed and chronicled for the world to see: a three year old, lost in the midst of war and sectarian violence. He was a Syrian Kurd, and his family was caught in the violence of a war that has waged for almost four years with no end in sight, a war that was a result of Arab Spring when another young man, Mohammed Bouazizi, lit himself on fire because of repeated insults and an inability to forge a future with hope.

What kind of father takes his family, paying upward of $800 per person, across a treacherous stretch of water knowing that some of them might not make it? What kind of man, in his twenties with a college education, sets himself on fire to protest the injustices of a country he lives in? Men without hope!

God has used biblical counseling as an essential catalyst for my spiritual growth. Over the years at Boyce, I have too much good to share about how my degree has shaped my life and ministry. I pray that Boyce and the Biblical Counseling Movement will keep growing and be a help to people like me who need change.

It’s hard to believe the beginning of a new semester is so close here at Boyce College. In a few weeks, hundreds of new students will arrive on campus to begin classes. Many more hundreds will be returning, and some (as they are all too happy to tell you) will be starting their last semester at Boyce. I look forward to meeting and interacting with the entire student body.

“So when do you pray?” This question took me back a bit. It seemed like a simple question to answer. I mean, I’m a pastor. Of course I pray. I pray all of the time. But when a church member asked me this question, I found myself dumbfounded. It was probably because I had not been praying much recently, or at least not praying in any meaningful sense. I had been praying quick prayers. “Lord, help me to preach.” “Lord, thank you for this food.” “Lord, protect my kids.” It is not that these were bad prayers. It was that these were my only prayers. When I was asked this simple question, I realized that no relationship, no marriage, no friendship could ever be healthy on these tweet-sized conversations.

I was lying in bed wide-eyed, bewildered, and exhausted. The ceiling was unusually close to my face and I couldn’t get the fear of falling off my bunk bed out of my head. I was in college. I was in college in Kentucky. What on earth was I doing? I had a car’s worth of stuff to my name and now lived on a hall whose name I couldn’t pronounce. I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me. I was afraid and exhilarated at the same time.

Thankfully it doesn’t take very long to make friends at Boyce. In a matter of days I had people to talk to, study alongside, and church search with. Spending time with people only got sweeter the longer I was here. It didn’t take long to realize, however, that those closest to me were the easiest to take for granted. In the name of having fun (yet somehow being studious at the same time) it was dangerously easy to live past the people on my hall.

I started to think about this more and more as I realized the desire I had to be a wife and mom one day. I wanted to intentionally encourage and serve my future family and church. And as each semester passed, the people I lived with became more like family – and easier to take for granted. The correlation unsettled me. All areas of growth in life are connected to union with Christ, and I knew the habits I was forming now would come in to play later in life. But how did living on a hall with 18 girls translate into being a successful wife, mom, and church member down the road? I found the answer to be rather simple: care. I prayed for the grace and strength to care for the people closest to me. And as simple as that is, the implications of such a prayer are gloriously rich.

The New Testament is full of passages that tell us how we are to care for one another. Ephesians talks about loving, speaking truth, building up, being kind, forgiving, and being tenderhearted to one another. I was called to be these things to the girls I lived with. Not just sometimes or when I felt like it. I was called to cultivate a heart attitude that saw people through a lens of this type of care. And friends, unceasing care can only come from the wellspring of Christ. As soon as you buy into the lie that you can muster the “spiritual maturity” to love people well without Christ, you will begin a hard road of neglecting those closest to you.

We have so many things to do – papers to write, meetings to attend, books to read, church activities to plan. One decision at a time though, it becomes easier and easier to choose your schedule than those living around you. I would encourage you to press into Christ, pray for discernment concerning your schedule, and love people with abandon. You won’t regret it. You may get a B on your paper because you stayed up late talking through your roommate’s problems. Or you may wind up sitting in the ER with a girl from your hall instead of attending a concert. But do it. Live life with the people around you. Don’t try to be the captain of your own canoe. Start scrubbing the decks next to someone on the magnificent ship of your immediate context.

That first night in the dorms at Boyce College was quite a memorable one. I had the sense that I was on the brink of adventure, but little did I know just how true that would prove to be. College has the reputation of being a completely unique phase of life, one that can never be revisited or reconstructed. It’s only been a month since graduation and even I can tell that’s true. But what will be visited moving forward are new people and new ministry opportunities. And what will be constructed is church fellowship and families. In light of this, I would encourage you to sow biblical care into your relationships in your college years. You will be reaping from it for a lifetime.

Renee Jarrett is an alumni of Boyce College with a degree in Biblical Counseling. She now works at the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC), and lives in Louisville, KY.

Reading the Bible can strengthen your confidence in the Bible. There are good arguments already for the trustworthiness of God’s word, and I’m thankful for faithful scholars who argue for it from historical, archaeological, and manuscript evidence. But when a reader is immersed in the majesty and glory of God’s story, that simple act of reading can become a powerful apologetic.

In my academic studies I was introduced to biblical theology, which is a discipline that considers the Bible as a whole, attending to its organic unity and progressive revelation and seeking to understand how later authors interpret earlier texts. I enjoy learning how to think about the Bible in these ways, and I am still rejoicing at the many truths biblical theology teaches us. Here are three.

1. The Bible is telling one story.

From the beginning of Genesis to the consummation of all things in Revelation, there is a discernible and coherent storyline. The Bible’s sixty-six books are not filled with unrelated accounts. Rather, in multiple languages, on multiple continents, and over the course of about 1,500 years, many different authors were inspired by God’s Spirit to tell the story of promises made and kept, of a redeemer who was prophesied and who entered our broken world in the fullness of time and bore our sin and shame. The Old Testament prepares the way for Jesus, and the New Testament heralds the coming of Jesus, the most important person who ever lived and died—and lived again.

2. The Bible is interpreting history.

The Bible does much more than report major historical events from the ancient Near East. The one true God is Lord of all and wields human history for sovereign purposes. The Bible not only records history, it interprets history. For instance, the Israelites left Egypt, but that event should be understood in the larger context of how God was working out his will to rescue his people through an appointed deliverer who would lead them to a promised land. In the first-century A.D., a baby was born in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, and died on a cross outside Jerusalem, and the Bible explains the theological and cosmic significance of these events. History is not a collection of random happenings. The grand narrative of God’s plan is a marvelous tapestry that testifies to his infinite wisdom, where all of the parts have meaning in light of the whole. The meaning of history is not in the eye of the beholder but in the mind of the Creator.

3. The Bible is unfolding a worldview.

The Bible calls you to a different kind of seeing. The biblical authors, across sixty-six books, give you a set of lenses through which to view the world. The Bible’s worldview allows us to see why we’re here, what went wrong in the world, what God has done to rescue us, and what will happen when Jesus returns. We need biblical theology because we need to live faithfully before God, walking in a manner worthy of the gospel and understanding that our struggle is not against flesh and blood. To be a disciple on this narrow road, we need to see the world and our lives as the Bible does. We should immerse ourselves in Holy Scripture, beckoning God to renew our minds and conform our hearts and orient our affections. We should read not just verses and paragraphs but chunks of chapters and whole books. The Christian faith begins in Genesis, so we should rejoice in and submit to the whole counsel of God, which spans a garden in Eden to the holy city where all things have become new.

As Erich Auerbach rightly put it, “The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.”

Mitch Chase (PhD, SBTS) is an Adjunct Professor of Old Testament at Boyce College, and is the Preaching Pastor at Kosmosdale Baptist Church. He tweets sporadically from @mitchellchase.