Justin Mills
Justin Mills's Story
Pizza and Beer Bible Study
In coming to college, I thought I could be good enough without much help from Jesus. It took my involvement in a local church to realize that I needed Jesus even more than I could imagine -but not exactly the way you might think.
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Most people think that a church is a place that can help you find God and show you where He might be found. Or perhaps others think of church as a place of morals and regulations where only people with the highest standard of moral purity can survive.
If someone had asked me what I thought a church was during my freshman year of college, I probably would have answered the same. However, I was surprised to find out that the particular “church” that I began attending during the first year of college had neither of the above characteristics, but through my time there, I still learned a valuable lesson about how good I really was and how much I needed God’s help and forgiveness to be truly good.
It started like it does with many college students: enjoying the newfound independence that I had in being away from home. But unlike most college students, I was actually a good person. At least that’s what I thought when I first arrived. And who could blame me –I was a good, upstanding citizen with no vices or sins (after all, I had given those up to Jesus a few years earlier right?) and I didn’t expect to have any major problems with any more offenses to God’s expectations.
So in keeping with these lofty feelings of my own goodness, I started attending a church and found one of the same denomination of the one my family and I had gone to when I was younger. It became a comfort to me at the time to know that I continued in my pursuit of goodness in college when so many around me had fallen into the sin of drinking and carousing.
I even started attending a group that studied at the church on Sunday nights; however, this particular sort of Bible study you might not be familiar with: a pizza and beer Bible study. That’s right, this study consisted of a bunch of college students and a few leaders sitting around a Bible, drinking beer and eating pizza. Now I’m not saying that pizza, beer and the Bible aren’t a good mix, but for me, being both immature and underage, this was the beginning of periodic alcohol abuse in my life.
Up to that point I hadn’t had but a few sips of alcohol and now by following the example set by my church, I had been given free reign to include alcohol in all parts of my life –even Bible study. I began to party with the other freshman on my hall to escape from the rigors of studying and once I even ended up sleeping on one of the hall couches in just my underwear, an experience that will probably come back to haunt me if I ever end up in public office or Hollywood.
At the beginning of my sophomore year, the church had a wine and cheese social to kick off the new school year and get new students involved. Due to the lower numbers than expected, the handful of people who showed up were forced to finish off the leftover wine –an unfortunate situation we were all too happy to rectify.
A few drinks into our solution, my roommates came by to walk with me to a Campus Crusade for Christ party that we had arranged to go to earlier that day. Realizing that I was in no condition to join the party, they took me aside to let me sober up and asked me some tough questions about my behavior. They asked whether I thought my actions honored God even though I was attending a church. They even went so far as to suggest that my behavior was not good at all, and that instead of drawing closer to God my decisions distanced me from God who loved me dearly, pained His son Jesus who paid for the consequences of my sins, and grieved the Spirit of God who I dragged with me into every unwholesome activity.
Through their loving questions about my sin, I came to realize that I wasn’t as good as I thought and that I needed Jesus to keep me holy no matter how many Bible studies or church services I attended. It was a slow process for me to realize that I wasn’t as good as I thought and an even longer process to realize that I was far worse that I ever could have imagined. Now I realize that I will never be good enough without Jesus to cleanse me from my old mistakes and also to help me to avoid new ones.
I have since found a different church, but I still continue to attend a small group that studies the Bible –this time without the pizza and beer.