Last fall, Jeremiah, one of our student leaders, began going to Collin College McKinney each Monday to help with the BSM outreach booth and free lunch. Through this, Jeremiah met a student, shared the gospel with him, saw him become a Christ follower and now is discipling him. Our hope is that this experience will not be a one-time occurrence, but that we will be able to train up other UTD students to lead out in ministry at the area community colleges.
Here’s a bit of Jeremiah’s experience:
Over this semester, I have gotten to know a student at Collin through the free lunch we offer. I’ve had many conversations with him about religion and various parts of theology. It usually results in me sharing the gospel with him at least once a week. I got the sense that though he had been exposed to the gospel before, he did not quite understand it. He claimed to be a Christian, but he did not know what the Bible says or what God has done for us.
He has many great questions, and we could go very deep into them during the lunches. One week, the idea of discipleship was suggested to him and he seemed interested in it, though he did not quite understand what it was. I talked to him more later and gave him a book that we could go through together in discipleship. When we met up two weeks later, we walked through the first lesson about assurance of salvation.
As we were going through this lesson, I was asking him questions about what he thought of the scripture passages and explaining what they meant. At the end, it occurred to me that I had never asked him if he had ever prayed to receive Christ. He explained that he believed everything in the Bible to be true and had grown up in church but there was never a point when he prayed to God asking for salvation. He didn’t see why it was necessary.
I explained how there was nothing that we do in our lives to go to heaven and shared Ephesians 2:8-9, which says we do not work for our salvation. Once I showed this idea was founded in the Bible, he was very receptive of it. I went on to explain Romans 10:9-10 as well. After talking about this, I asked if he wanted to pray to receive salvation. He was a little hesitant to act, but then we talked a little more about it and on March 25th, 2019 we got another brother in Christ!
I had never walked someone through a prayer of salvation, and I had accepted Christ when I was extremely young, so I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I just walked through some of things we had talked about in the lesson and he repeated after me. It was not perfect, and he still had questions about it, but I am confident that God will continue working in his life to bring him further in his faith.
It was incredible to be used in this way for God. I praise Him that I am now a part of my friend’s testimony. Thinking about everything that went into that moment when he chose to accept Christ, I am humbled because I can see God working events so we would have that conversation at that time. I wasn’t even supposed to be there that day, but because of a storm the night before, I was. It’s awesome and humbling to know God worked to bring about his salvation and I was just a witness who God chose to use.