A confident faith

‘As she heard of the Christian life being one of confident, assured relationship with a loving Father, not one of guilt, she started crying. I got to share something of the wonderful truth that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”’.

This summer, we’ve been partnering with CU movements across Europe and beyond to share the good news of Jesus with students.

One of our teams – made up of CU students and UCCF staff – ran a summer camp in Eastern Europe, teaching English and offering Bible studies to interested students. Below are a couple of their stories.

Sarah

I taught Advanced English this week which was lots of fun. My highlight was teaching students the phrase ‘You’re fishing for compliments’!

In our class was a girl called Nadia*. She’s quite shy, and came to camp with her Christian friend Anya, who was one of the student leaders. Anya said that Nadia didn’t say anything during the Bible studies, so she assumed that she was uninterested in the gospel.

Around the campfire on the last evening, I got chatting to Nadia and was surprised to hear that she was ‘almost a Christian’. She said that her family’s strong Orthodox beliefs were stopping her from trusting in Jesus, but the more we talked the more it seemed like she had actually begun following Jesus that week. However, she wasn’t sure how to communicate that to her family.

It was such a joy to hear how she had been so blown away by the gospel through the Bible studies and talks. At one point, she said that she still felt guilty and shameful, and I got to share something of the wonderful truth that there is ‘no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1) – one of the passages that we had been reading that week.

As she heard of the Christian life being one of confident, assured relationship with a loving Father, not one of guilt, she started crying. We chatted about taking her first steps in following Jesus, and also about how to approach the differences between her new faith and her family’s beliefs.

She’s looking forward to going to a new Bible study group that the student movement is starting up. Pray that she would have the opportunity to go to church with Anya, and would continue to trust in her loving Father.

Mike

Baasir* is a Muslim student who was part of our Bible study group. He was the only non-Christian student in the group and to begin with he was shy to share his opinions. However, he soon decided he would discuss them with me and our wonderful translator, Yuliya, over lunch afterwards.

Most days we had really interesting discussions about what we were reading in the Bible in relation to Islam, and Baasir had lots of questions about whether the most recent revelation of God was the most valid, whether the Bible had been changed and so on.

One lunchtime I had the joy of chatting to him and another student who had come to Christ from a Muslim background. This student shared how, from his reading of the Qu’ran, he believed that the solution to the apparent conflict of God’s mercy and justice could be found (and could only be found) through Jesus’ death for us on the cross.

Praise God that the gospel is true, good news for all people. Please pray that students such as Baasir would find answers to their questions and be brought into a loving, trusting relationship with God.

*Denotes name has been changed