The ultimate source of joy is not anything of this world, the two speakers at Cru’s 2012 Revolution Conference said this past weekend.
“We’ve all bought into the lie that joy comes from earthly treasures, and not from the lavish love of Jesus,” said Chad Young, who has been a Cru staff member for a decade now.
Revolution, held in Hudson, FL, is an annual weekend retreat that is run by the international club Cru and focused on teaching college students from the club at UCF, UNF and USF about biblical truth. Roughly 130 UCF students were in attendance. The speakers this year included Young and Christie Smith, the former of whom is a frequent speaker at conferences and the author of a couple books about what living for the gospel of Jesus really looks like.
Young’s first teaching at Cru’s retreat discussed the treasures of a person’s heart, and he used the verses Matthew 13:45-46 as the root of his teaching about pearls—people’s greatest treasures in their lives. Examples given by Young of common things treasured by college students include good grades, pleasing or obtaining a girlfriend/boyfriend and careers. These things are not bad, but anything such as these that are not devoted to Christ, but that one greatly treasures, will “always lead to a life of frustration and lack of joy,” Young went on to say.
“Whatever you think about when you’re in solitude, that’s what your greatest treasure is,” Young said.
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All the contemplating about treasuring Christ first and foremost really spoke to Laura Merchant, a UCF Freshman majoring in Engineering.
“I have trouble trusting God with my future, because of the pressure to make good grades,” Merchant said. “I don’t think I could make it there without trust in God.”
Young’s final teaching was about sin in people’s lives and God’s view on it. He said that because all are born in sin, all deserve eternal separation from God.
“It’s not because God is a mean God; He just is who He is,” Young said. “He’s utterly and perfectly holy, and it’s not His fault that He’s that way, it’s just His nature that’s purer than the purest thing on this earth. Therefore, because of His purity, He can’t be close to sin.”
Yet Young emphasized that because of Jesus’s sacrifice of dying on the cross due to His incredible love for the world, everyone has the choice to turn away from sin and be reunited with Him.
“When we bring it out into the light and we confess our sin, it brings us immediately into fellowship with God,” Young said.
Learning of God’s great compassion stirred a passion inside Juliana Diaz, a UCF Sophomore majoring in Hospitality.
“I was thinking I could do a summer mission project for God,” Diaz said. “That’s like something really on my heart right now.”
The second speaker, Christie Smith, another staff member of Cru, spoke of people’s misconceptions of the word commitment and of the act of surrender. She challenged the college students to consider what their lives would look like if they surrendered everything to God’s control.
“We’re just a part of a non-committal culture,” Smith said. “We’re a last-minute culture waiting for a better option and so we always have the opportunity to get out of something. When you have a million invitations on Facebook or even just a bunch of invitations to something in your life, they just hold little value.”
Then Smith went on to explain what she calls a fringe follower. A fringe follower could even be a very religious person. She explained that religious stuff people do isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t qualify as total surrender.
“A ‘fringe follower’ is someone that, when things get really hard, they bail,” Smith said. “How quickly we expect the blessings the Bible promises but forget the commands that it demands.”
Leaving everything to follow God’s will for one’s life is the only way to find true satisfaction, Smith said. She organized a time for students to just pray, telling God they surrender their lives to Him. The main question she encouraged students to ask during this teaching was, “To whom shall I go?”
“Spend time praising God that you are in a place of surrender,” Smith said. “Because the second that you think that it’s because of you, you probably need to surrender your pride.”
Smith’s final topic was on perspective. She taught that perspective should affect the way people live, and how they cope with various “storms” in their lives.
“When you have a tornado in your life, how will you deal with it?” Smith asked. “Will you go to God—who’s the God of comfort, the God of provision, the God of rest—in a time of trial?”
She placed great emphasis on the verses 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, describing the importance of eternity. She used the analogy of eternity being a never-ending line, stretching from the farthest North to the farthest South, and our life on earth being one tiny dot made by the tip of a ballpoint pen. This represents eternity lasting forever, and our life on earth measuring a very short amount of time.
“1.7 billion unreached people in our world begs the question of what we’re living for,” Smith said.
She said everyone should live with the gospel as the perspective. Additionally, when she thinks of how the Bible says that one day everyone will know Jesus Christ is Lord, she is motivated to live with eternity in mind.
This eternal perspective inspired UCF Freshman Danielle Culibao, a major in Interdisciplinary Studies, to go out and share the news of the gospel before it’s too late and the short time in this life has come to an end.
“Evangelism isn’t an option,” Culibao said. “It’s a command. When you remember that, everything gets simplified. That’s why we’re here.”
