When I was reading Insanitybytes22’s post, this verse came to mind.
Jeremiah 31:33-34
Good News Translation
33 The new covenant that I will make with the people of Israel will be this: I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 None of them will have to teach a neighbor to know the Lord, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest. I will forgive their sins and I will no longer remember their wrongs. I, the Lord, have spoken.”
Who wants to change the world? Not I! When I was very young somebody smart asked me, “what makes you think the world even wants to change?” It’s a really good philosophical question to ponder. Usually everybody always wants to change the world, but nobody ever wants to change themselves. Did the world even consent to your plans to give it a make over?
When you are all full of idealism and want to change the world, or perhaps burn it down as a group recently suggested, sometimes it’s good to try to figure out what your motivation is. Also, once you have totally burned down the whole world, it can be useful to think about what you might replace it with.
I’ve been watching people up close and personal, try to change the world since the 1960’s. What strikes me as kind of interesting, the more things change the…
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Citizen Tom 
Nobody has ever changed the world and nobody ever will change the world. The Bible also reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. All the political garbage that is happening now has happened before somewhere at sometime in History and will happen again sometime in the future if humanity survives its own stupidity that long. Jesus came as close to changing the world as anybody ever will but He did not actually come to change the world but to save the world. His mission was not a worldly mission. His Kingdom is not a worldly Kingdom. His message was to the world but was not of the world. Jesus changes people but I doubt that if He is at all concerned with changing the world. The world is stubborn, willful, sinful, corrupt and scheduled for eventuyal destruction … nothing is going to change that … nobody is going to change that ….The people who think they are world changers are deceived within their own minds.
@John
Some would say you must be in despair, but we know Jesus has already overcome the world. The world as we would have it is not worth anything; it is fallen. However, Jesus…. Well, John 3:16.
I am not in despair about anything. It is impossible to be in despair in the presence of God. But I am a realist.
Tom, IB,
This is wonderfully put. I would like to humbly add that, although we cannot legislate love, we, as individuals and as a Body of Christ in our roles as Christian citizens of a republic, can try to promote more just legislation WITH and THROUGH love. This is a difficult distinction, but an important one.
Would this dynamic love “change the world”? Well, as IB so well implies, the world is exactly what God intended it to be. But it does, as IB also eludes, exemplify the transformation in us that may also guide the same voluntary transformation in others.
The inexorable dynamic between individual salvation and salvation as a Body of Christ, in my mere faith and experience, is as mysterious as it is profoundly fundamental to my faith. I can’t get there unless I very much am willing to make an deeply internal voluntary individual transformation, but the transformation itself seems to me to necessitate the loving sacrifice of my individuality into the greater communal Spirit as well so that I can’t really get there without a dynamic interaction with others either. The paradoxical quality of this “dynamic” embrace manifested through love in both our extreme awareness of self in soul searching individuation and extreme communal blending in The One Body is one of those mysteries of faith.
Do these twin transformations change the material qualities of scarcity, need, suffering and death in a finite and fallen world? Well, it seems to me to very much transform our BEING IN THE WORLD by allowing us in Christ to at the same time transcend our finite BEING. In that sense, that individual and communal change in the being of the incarnate Christ eternally rocks the world from beginning to end.