Are You Auto-Correcting God?

Today we’re going to look at a warning related to altering the gospel. But this message will be just a little different and I hope to present it in such a way that it will cause you to think about it the next time you send a text message from your smart phone.

Our society places a great deal of value on intelligence ─ how smart you are. You have to be pretty smart to earn a Nobel Prize, a Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, or the Intellectual Property Legends Award. Let’s be honest: you have to pretty smart just to win the annual spelling bee contest!

A smart person, and you will never hear anyone say this, is considered just a little more valuable to society than someone who is not. Our history books are filled with intellectual giants whose discoveries and ideas have been praised by society ─ Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Isaac Newton, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Ford, and Marie Curie, just to name a few.

But in our society we would label a person who merely does what he or she is told to do as dumb. Is this not true? I find it interesting that scripture places much more value on obedience than it does intellect. People who are willing to do what God tells them to do are coveted and respected in heaven.

Jesus is example #1. We also have Kenneth Hagin Sr., Smith Wigglesworth, Lester Summerall, and Kathryn Kuhlman, among others, who demonstrated to the world lives lived in obedience to God. Now let’s be honest: outside of Pentecostal and Charismatic circles many of these individuals would not be put in the same category as Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. Do you see my point?

Now, keeping all of this in mind, I’m going to talk this morning about “smart phones” and how they compare to “dumb phones” in their performance of a function that I will disclose in a moment. My intention is not to offend you by using the word “dumb” ─ I’m simply using it as a comparison to bring home a point. For this message, “dumb” is good. Say it with me: dumb is good.

When I was growing up there were no “cellular” phones. The first mobile phones ─ they were actually referred to as “mobiles” ─ appeared in the mid to late 70s and they were huge! As technology advanced, they became smaller and smaller. I purchased my first mobile in 1995. Today that phone would be called a dumb phone because all it could do was make and receive calls. Text messaging wasn’t introduced to the U.S. until the following year, 1996, and its growth was very slow. Why? Most of the available phones were dumb.

But, with the growth of any new technology, society must have a convenient way to use it. As text messaging began to grow, cellular companies found a new way to increase their revenues while meeting the ever changing desires of the consumers. We wanted to be able to use all of the current and developing technology and we wanted our phones to be “cutting edge.”

Don’t you just love that term ─ cutting edge?!? So, in comes the smart phone. The smart phone can not only make phone calls, but it can send and receive text messages; take, send and receive pictures; play videos; and, search the ever expanding internet. This little device can do what the biggest computers in 1970 could not do, and you can hold it in your hand.

I owned a dumb phone until late last year. My dumb phone did exactly what I wanted it to do and it did not try to tell me that it knew a better way to say what I wanted to say.

Do you know one of the most irritating things about my smart phone? From time to time, it changes words in my text messages obviously thinking that I had made a mistake. I know. I know. You’re thinking: Huh? What?

Smart phones have a function called “auto-correction.” My dumb phone did not have this function. Whatever I typed as a text message was sent. The phone interpreted the text exactly as I had typed it and did not try to tell me what I “really” meant.

Not my smart phone. If I make the mistake of not catching its correction, then whoever receives my text must try to figure out what I was trying to say. Then I am forced to send a second message to correct the first one. I know it’s meant to save me time and speed up my texting but I hate the auto-correction function. I know I can turn it off, but then you wouldn’t be listening to a message about how we auto-correct God, now would you?