Our culture downgrades greatness, audacity, courage, originality, and heroism.  Our children are barraged with messages of defeat and limits.  Worse yet, they are told that wanting to excel might hurt someone else’s feelings.

The curse of so many of today’s educators is that they  train this generation is they’re to do just enough to get by.  Instead of going for brilliance, and creativity, many are conditioned to harp, whine, and scream against the unfair world.

“Besides” their teachers say, “you can’t change the world.”  They believe this ideology makes the world safer.  Seneca had it right when he said, “it is not because the times are dangerous that men do not dare, it is because men do not dare that the times are dangerous.”

Small people with small minds mold the future.  You can be sure that if small men cast large shadows, it means the sun is about to set.  Is there anything we can do to push back the approaching darkness?  Where are the world changers?

Tragically, the lie that you can’t change the world also permeates Christian Colleges.  Christian leaders are being trained not to offend. They are studying what to leave out of their preaching.  Their professors serve a smaller God than the one we used to hear about in church.

Billy Graham and Oral Roberts.  Astonishingly, some will not know the two men in the picture.  They changed the world.  One by preaching to more people face to face than any man in history.  The other by bringing divine healing to his generation.

How bad is our defeatism?  When Billy Graham died, some notable leaders called it the end of God’s protection.  Others said “we’ll never see another one like him.”

I rebuke both those statements.  Not only me—human history rebukes it.  Nothing in the Bible supports these pallid words. Frankly, the doubting church doesn’t need another soothing sermon, but a swift kick.

The promise and power of God to change the world is still in force. Billy Graham and Oral Roberts would be horrified to hear us make monuments or a past era out of them.  Their testimony should be a catalyst for God to do it again.

This promise is not just for men either!  Joel: 2:28 says, “I will pour out of my Spirit on your sons and daughters and they will prophesy…  And no one is too old…”your old men shall dream dreams.”

Are these times so evil we can’t break the gravitational force of wickedness?  No one has the right to tell God what He can and cannot do.  There is no devil, demagogue, or disaster too big for God.   

You could listen to doomsayers—who morbidly hope for hell to break loose—or you can seize the Word of God the way that Billy and Oral did.

Here are three timeless truths about world changers:

1. World changers appear when it looks impossible.  The same voices of doubt and despair were present at the dawn of Billy and Oral’s ministries.  There was no money to do what they wanted to do.  There was no supporting faith surrounding their visions.  They were constantly being second guessed by those with unbelief.

It was not until they cast themselves utterly on God that their breakthroughs came.

When Esther appeared  the Jews seemed hopelessly doomed.  Mordecai said these immortal words: “Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Esther 4:14

 2. World changers know when to go it alone.  God kept telling Gideon to shrink—not enlarge his army.   It was only after he won an astonishing victory that the other tribes found out and got offended.  Judges 8:1 “Now the men of Ephraim said to him, ‘Why have you done this to us by not calling us when you went to fight with the Midianites?’ And they reprimanded him sharply.”

The vision of the Lord is always too big for the church. True visions from God will always be too big for any one church or denomination.  Both of these men had to follow God and let the church come along later.  If you wait for approval, you will never start your vision.

Also, world changers don’t mope when people won’t support them.  They know that if God is with them who can be against them.

 3. World changers believe God can do it again.  While nostalgia makes some yearn for olden days, and despair makes others invent impossibilities—world changers say why not now, why not here, and why not me?

1 Samuel 14: 6 says, “Then Jonathan said to the young man who bore his armor, “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised; it may be that the Lord will work for us. For nothing restrains the Lord from saving by many or by few.”

They are in the grip of two explosive thoughts:  The testimony of what God has done before, and an inconsolable grief over the evil in the world.  This wrecks them and they cry out for a new move of God in history.

This was the incurable obsession that made Habakkuk cry out “O Lord, I have heard Your speech and was afraid; O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years!  In the midst of the years make it known; In wrath remember mercy.

Someone will read this and change the world.  Was I being arrogant giving this that title?  No I believe the Holy Spirit told me to write this and I believe He will get it into the hands of a world changer.  Why not you?