Autocorrect

Title: Autocorrect

Text: Ephesians 1:15-23

Thesis: The Holy Spirit gives us the ability to see things through eyes of faith.

Introduction

In July of 2014 Wired printed an article about what we call autocorrection. Dean Hachamovitch, former vice president of Microsoft, is essentially the father of Autocorrect.

When Hachamovitch first came to work for Microsoft in the early 1990s, he was given a job on the team for WORD, the company's word-processing program. In Hachamovitch's view, the main thing people do on a word processor is type, and he considered typing as a matter of "a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of scutwork."

And so he set out to reduce the amount of scutwork, aiming to make typing a smoother experience.

Hachamovitch and his team developed a master list of common mistakes and set autocorrections for them all. The list continues to be expanded and refined yet today, with updates released periodically. And when cell phones became text-messaging instruments, autocorrect was introduced on those devices as well. Hilarious and even egregious "corrections" still happen, but most of the time, autocorrect fixes our blunders and boosts the accuracy of our communications. (Gordon Lewis-Kraus, "The fasinatng ... frustrating ... fascinating history of autocorrect," Wired, July 22, 2014, wired.com)

A very common autocorrect is in the spelling of the word “the.” If I spell it “teh” autocorrect makes the correction and spells “the” correctly. However sometimes autocorrect gets ahead of us and we may be typing the word “list” but it will appear as “lust.” So if I have a list for you arrives stating I have a lust for you… that isn’t a good thing.

Buzzfeed.com has come up with a list of "35 of the most concerning autocorrect fails of all time." This is one that is actually usable.

It is a conversation between Mike’s brother and his girlfriend, Emily.

"I'm fighting with Mike."

"Again??? I'm so sorry."

"Yeah. It's bad and I think it's it this time. He just drove off with his mom's corpse."

"WITH HER CORPSE?"

"No! Her Camaro! HA!

"You scare me."

"Love you babe! Goodnight!"

"My love for you is strong, I would buy you a casket if I could."

"Castle. I promise I meant castle…

"Emily? Emily? Emily? Hello?" (buzzfeed.com. Retrieved December 2, 2014)

I don’t know any more about his conversation than you do, other than it seems to be a conversation between Mike’s brother and Emily. But this text message conversation is an example of autocorrect gone badly. There is quite a difference between corpse and Camaro and between casket and castle… but we can see how autocorrect is supposed to work.

I am suggesting that for the Christian the Holy Spirit may work as something of an autocorrect in our lives. The Holy Spirit sometimes autocorrects our interpretation of what the events in our lives mean.

If we look at life through the lens of insight we may see things as they really are rather than as humanly perceived.

I. The Lens of Insight, Ephesians 1:17

I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. Ephesians 1:17

His prayer is for two things:

A. Spiritual wisdom and insight

The prayer is that we be given spiritual wisdom and insight or a spirit of wisdom and insight. The word “spiritual” of “a spirit of” means invisibility and power suggesting the origin of this wisdom and insight is God.

In addition to this being an act of God’s spirit speaking wisdom and insight into our minds and hearts it means that wisdom be insightful in our understanding of God and God’s ways.

B. Growth in the knowledge of God

The word “grow” has a number of meanings. It can mean to ascend as in spurting up or it can mean descending as in growing worse. It can mean to extend as in the elapsing of time. It can mean to produce fruit. It can mean to abound as in abounding in love or generosity or whatever. In our text it simply means to increase or become greater.

The idea is that our knowledge of God increases more and more.

The word “knowledge” means that our knowledge of God is exact and complete… not a misguided and partial knowledge of God.

This thinking is more than just knowing more and more about God… it is thinking based on knowing God. And what we know of God then influences us and conditions us in our approach to life.

So when we think, we give ourselves time to allow for God to autocorrect our attitudes and outlooks and expressions and actions by asking, “What does God think? What is God doing? How does God want me to be in this circumstance?