By Kourtney Vier, Salt Company Ministry Leader

This fall the Salt Company held a Theology of the Gospel class on the campus of Iowa State University. Two other teachers and I were able to teach 23 of those students the “ins and outs” of the Gospel and why it’s important to our lives. Right in the middle of the course, I had a young man, named Jacob Barber, come up and ask if we could meet up for coffee because he, “Didn’t know how to be a good man of God”. Through our coffee time, we both soon realized that he wasn’t a Christian at all, so that’s why he couldn’t be a good man of God.

For almost an hour straight he asked me question after question about faith and what that actually looks like. I took him to Romans 10:9-10 and walked him through all the terms and what that meant for him, as an unbeliever. Before we left, I asked him where he was going to go if he died right then. He said Hell because he hadn’t placed his faith in Jesus. I knew he was an internal processor, so I let him go home and sit and think about what we talked about.

A week later, I checked in on him and he sent me a text message explaining to me how he accepted Christ. How it had transformed his thinking and the new found freedom he found.

This past month at our monthly leader’s meeting we talked to our students about how to identify the root problems of their sins. As staff, we had recently read Jeff Vanderstelt’s Gospel Fluency. In this book, Mr. Vanderstelt talks about dealing with bad fruit and identifying what lies you are believing about yourself and God. After you’re able to do that, repenting to God for the ways you have wrongly viewed yourself and him. Then following that up with what is actually true about God and yourself. Answering this will help you to identify what good fruit the Spirit wants to produce in your life.
We gave our 360 student leaders a diagram to follow the process and asked them to walk through the process with a table partner. The following week, we also asked our discipleship group leaders to talk about to their groups about what they learned and how they processed through their sin. Personally, I had a great discussion with my students and we were able to deal with sin in a new and helpful way.
We are praying that our students will be able to deal rightly with their sin and that this type of process would shape the way that they view their sin and deal with it in future.