How to Change the World from Your Living Room
Change the world from your living room? How is that even possible?
When I think about world change I quickly think - having a huge platform, starting an organization to feed the hungry or rescue women who are sexually exploited. As good as those things are, and I greatly admire and pray for those who do have that kind of impact.... the truth is the average woman does not have a huge platform and is not the founder of a world impacting organization. In fact, she's just trying to feed her family while keeping her sanity and honoring the Lord. If I could be completely honest with you I often get bombarded with the voices that tell me my feeble attempts have done nothing to make a dent in this world.
Maybe you have told yourself what do I have to offer that is of value?
Maybe you have found yourself immobile by your own haunting words, "I haven't made my life count."
Maybe you find yourself discouraged by just how average your life really is.
Here's a thought, one that I have wrestled with lately. What if we were faithful exactly where we are with exactly what we have been given?
I myself have had dreams of changing the world, yet instead was consumed by changing diapers. Do you desire to be part of something bigger than yourself, where you can offer hope to those dying spiritually? I have, yet life pulled me over to the side to tend to my son who was drowning in a sea of despair. It's as if God said, "Slow down champ. I need you to pray for your son and fight for him in your prayer closet." I've dreamt of writing a book of how God rescued my marriage from the brinks of divorce and restored our defiled bed with His grace. With great enthusiasm I thought I needed to tell my story from the mountain top, yet have found myself sharing my story with far less people than I anticipated.
Stewardship is learning to be faithful in the little, so that God can entrust you with more. I have learned to be faithful to share my story with women over the phone in need of hope to get through her season of despair. I've not shared my story to the masses, but I have shared it wherever God required me to. The bigger platform perhaps will come one day when I least expect it. The mission trip will be traveled one day, but God is just as concerned with what I do in the 'now' than in the 'will be'. I can so easily be caught up in despair, thinking that I'll never change the world.
Maybe you have thought, Change the world? I've yet to leave my living room for Pete's sake! Yet you and I can change our world, the small one we are surrounded in, with our everyday obedience to honor God and tell of His faithfulness wherever He may lead us.
The world has yet to hear of the great men and women who lived for God because they never wrote a book or preached a sermon, but were faithful exactly where they were with the means and platform they were given.
That grandmother who changed her family legacy through prayer. God saw her tears drenching her bedroom floor as she cried out for her family line.
The father who worked with his hands to honor God and faithfully shared his faith with his coworkers.
The young woman who at her college started a bible study to share her faith.
The pastor of a small church, shepherding the flock God gave him.
It will be a nameless, faceless crowd we will hear about in eternity, the obedient ones, who obeyed God with what they had, with the means they were given right where they were.
What if the change we do may never even be seen with our own eyes? Those visions of doing something great for Jesus may never be fulfilled in our lifetime. Can we be ok with that? King David had a great and honorable dream to build a house for God. A place where God's presence could dwell. However, at the end of his life God told David, "you know that temple you wanted to build that you saved up for? That you had blueprints for? Yeah, you won't be the one to build it (that's my paraphrase). God told David your son Solomon will build it. Wait what? We see the true desire of David's heart was always to esteem God and to make him famous, so on God's word to pass the baton, King David gave all his resources to his son and blessed him. Solomon went on to build a house for God on the foundation and shoulders of his father's faithfulness and God’s word.
What if what we are toiling for in our everyday obedience, will be the building blocks for our children. What if we are the baton passers for God's work.
May our hearts say, “whether through us, or through our children, Christ be glorified and his kingdom advanced!”
Legacy and influence are so key to changing the world from your living room. The Bible says in Psalms 127 that children are a heritage from the Lord. Heritage: a portion, an inheritance....so in other words where blessings and legacy flow. Our children are a stewardship, an allotment God has given us, and we must be good stewards of this gift. The fruit of our wombs is a reward and blessed is the man whose quiver is full. Our children will be like arrows, when we take time to pray and teach them the word or admonish them in the Lord. We are sharpening them and shaping them like arrows.
How can I change the world from my living room? For parents: pray for your children; pour into your children; equip them with truth; display fervor and love for Jesus and let them watch you live this thing out. Let them see your obedience with what you have, where you have been placed. Remember the power in prayer to transform your legacy, propel your future generation like arrows, prepared and sharpened to do God's work.
Suzanne Wesley was a great example of changing her world in her living room A mother of 19 children who found time to faithfully meet with the Lord everyday under her apron as she walked around her house praying. Her children would say "leave mother alone she is praying". She made her home (living room) the first classroom her children learned from. Her life was the example her children would replicate and she used her influence to point them to the wisdom of God's word. When her children married and left her home she would send letters to her children admonishing them of life and the passion of God's word. This was said about Suzanne Wesley in her biography, “Although she never preached a sermon or published a book or founded a church, (she) is known as the Mother of Methodist church.” Why? Because two of her sons, John Wesley and Charles Wesley, as children, consciously or unconsciously willed, applied the example and teachings and circumstances of their home life. She shot arrows to the world from her living room. Upon the absence of her husband who left her to care for her children she wrote: "yet as a mother and a mistress I felt I ought to do more than I had yet done. I resolved to begin with my own children..."
She was a woman with resolve to leave a legacy through her children. A woman who took her platform (mothering) and changed their world, and that overflowed to the world. Through the building block of her faithfulness her son's grew up to love, serve and defend the God she so faithfully lived out. Although she never left the confines of her home to go far and wide to preach the gospel - she changed the world from her living room. John Wesley said, “I learned more about Christianity from my mother than all the theologians in England.”
If we would just steward well the gifts we have been given, we can do far more than we ever imagined from our very living rooms.
