By Not Known
Not too long ago, Barack Obama captured the imagination of the world with his campaign slogan, “Change we can believe in.” It gave new hope to the American people as well as the rest of the world. So, have we seen change? Or are we back to square one after several years?
I suppose in many ways, the USA has changed but not in ways that many had hope. As President Obama’s campaign loses its initial euphoria with time, people begin to be skeptical. We go away with the feeling that Obama is just another politician who cannot fulfill the high hopes he had envisioned so vividly earlier. Prehaps he had promised too much, too simplistically.
Our collective culture has warned us that change is unrealistic. It asserts that we cannot change and it is foolish of us to try. Our genetic makeup, our individual experiences and our social conditioning are supposedly such overwhelming influences that we just cannot overcome them! So, can we still believe in “Change we can believe in” ?
The Christian Gospel tells us that change is something we should expect and believe in because our God is able to transform us from the inside out (e.g. 2 Cor. 5:17). It is only when we are inwardly transformed that we can hope to change the world around us. When Obama’s promises or the promises of whatsoever world leaders begin to lose their punch, it should bring us back to God whose promises never ever fail.
Even as the promises of world leaders fail to deliver, God’s promises stand forever reliable and trustworthy. We can trust the new relationship between God and humans mediated by Christ Jesus, that is available to all people (both Jews and Gentiles) enabling us to live the new life. It enables us to have a new start, helping us to live in Christ fruitfully and abundantly and be transformed from one degree of glory to another. It enables us to multiply even thirty, sixty or a hundredfold, so that God’s glory will continue to fill the earth, as the waters cover the seas.
Joseph Teng