July 14, 2022

On a recent long car ride, Kathy and I were listening to a song playlist from years ago that included John Mayer’s hit, “Waiting On the World to Change”. I hadn’t heard the song in a long time. It’s got a catchy tune, so it helped the miles pass quickly, but I was most intrigued by a few of the lines which I had never paid much attention to.

After listening, I think we should classify the song, like we do some psalms in the Bible, as a lament.

Mayer laments the state of the world: leaders leading the nation in wrong directions; soldiers sent away to fight wars and missing Christmases at home; news organizations controlling the flow of information.

But the songwriter also laments that he and his generation have no power to “rise above” the powers that be. They’re “standing at a distance,” far from where decisions get made to change things. They would be happy to do something, but “the fight ain’t fair.”

This leads to the repeating refrain: “We keep on waiting on the world to change.”

In what follows, I’m not at all disparaging John Mayer or anyone who is annoyed by the way the world is going. There are always lots of things to be annoyed and troubled about. And I can certainly sympathize with anyone who feel helpless and unable to effect change.

In fact, except for Jesus, I would have no more hope or direction that what we hear in the song. But Jesus…

The world into which Jesus unleashed His followers was, to say the least, broken. First century Rome was no heaven-on-earth society, and we imagine that many in those days were “waiting on the world to change.”

Besides massive numbers of slaves and lots of oppressed, subjugated peoples, there was exorbitant taxation, desperate poverty, no social safety net at all, and widespread persecution of Christians.

But Jesus commanded His followers to be “salt” and “light” to THAT world. And, within a few decades of His death and resurrection, the church had made dramatic impact on the world in which it was placed.

So much so, that when Paul and Silas were in Thessalonica, Jesus followers in the city were arrested by those in authority who claimed that these believers had “upset the world” (or, as the King James Version has it, “turned the world upside down.”).

Pastor Tim Keller has pointed out that the first-century Roman world was “upset / turned upside down” by the Christians in very specific ways.

Christians upset the world by their love for babies (they opposed abortions and rescued “exposed” infants who were left outside to die) and by their love for the poor (they were unusually generous to those in need, even to outside their tribe).

Christians upset the world by the forgiveness and love they showed to the persecutors who caused their suffering.

Christians upset the world by their proclamation of a relationship to God and the promise of eternal life through faith in Jesus.

What an overwhelmingly positive way to upset the world’s apple cart! The world was positively upset, one deed after another, as Jesus followers met needs in His Name, shared the beautiful message of the Gospel, and watched as God changed lives.

The hopeless refrain of the song, “We keep on waiting on the world to change” need never be the song believers in Jesus sing.

The song envisions change coming from the top down. It assumes that if we could just gain access to power brokers and get close enough to major news outlets, well then we could change the world.

Yet God does His work differently…

He commissions us each to be salt to our personal worlds. He sends us out to love, to serve, and to be generous. And when enough of us – singly or in small groups – are unleashed to do that, a modern-day work of redemptive upsetting begins. People see the beautiful Person and work of Jesus – and they believe in Him. The world is changed, as one life at a time is rescued.

Would you ask that God would open your eyes to a person you could serve, a need you could touch, in Jesus’ Name, alone or with a group that could spark a God-honoring upsetting? (See below)

Yours…His,

Dave