Who Can Change the World?

I want to follow up on the reel I did yesterday (you can find that here) on how kids are often told they can change the world. It is a very popular statement made by parents, teachers, activists, and politicians. I remember one parent telling me that her child, a prospective student, would change the campus where I served.

The question is, can they really change the world? And is that even their responsibility? A lot of this exhortation is, I think, founded in our desire to build up our children and demonstrate our belief in their potential. We want to encourage them as children that their lives are valuable and have meaning. Yet, as believers, where do we derive our value and meaning? Is it in what we accomplish, or is it found in who we are—children of God?

In the beginning, before sin entered the world, human value was simply found in being a creation of the Creator. There was no striving to earn or prove our worth. Only after the Fall did it become a deep-seeded belief that we had to earn God’s love and favor. And with that entered pride as the central motivator and main obstacle in our relationship with the Lord. What has followed is a continual striving to earn our way. How many times do we hear people say of someone who has died that they are in heaven because they lived a good life?

It easily follows then that we pass (perhaps unintentionally) these urges onto our children. Our desires and aspirations for them may be based on a common but wrong belief that our strivings can indeed change the world. The reality is that only God can do that (Proverbs 16:9). Only he can transform the heart, which is where all change is given birth. We can be the conduit for change, but the power to make that change happen is beyond our ability.

So, without the intention to do so, these exhortations to our children are lies. They cannot change the world; only God can. What they can do, and what we need to encourage them to do, is to love the Lord with all of their heart, soul, strength, and mind (Luke 10:27). In other words, to be faithful followers of Jesus. This is how God changes the world—through using faithful believers like Abraham, Moses, Daniel, and the New Testament church. They weren’t the power of the change; they were its conduit through their faithful lives.

And that is what we should encourage in our children—be a conduit of change through submitting your life to the Lord and faithfully serving him. If they do that, indeed the world will be changed through them, just not by them.

© Jim Musser 2023 All Scripture references are from the New International Version, 2011.