Autocorrecting God

Autocorrecting God

Scripture: Genesis 3:1-6; Genesis 5:1-3; Proverbs 14:12

Good morning, Strangers Rest! The title of my message this morning is “Autocorrecting God.” Two weeks ago, I told you that of all of God’s creation we are what He values most. On last Sunday, I told you that we demonstrate to God that we value Him by understanding our role as sheep and allowing Him to be our shepherd. When we “stay in our lane” and not attempt to take on the role of shepherd in our own lives we demonstrate to God that we value the fellowship we have with Him. This morning, I will shift a little, and discuss how we give God (and each other) lip service about valuing Him (and one another) when we do not.

Before I go any further, I want to lay out what you are going to hear in this message by putting myself on blast. I have learned through many years of interacting with people that we show one another how we value them by attentively hearing them when they are talking with us. I do not know about you, but I feel honored and valued when I am talking to someone, and they quietly listen to what I am saying as if what I am saying is especially important to them. But like I said, I will put myself on blast this morning. Now, although I feel special and valued when someone is giving me their undivided attention when I am speaking, there are many times when I “devalue” someone else when they are the ones doing the talking. How do I do that? By interrupting them while they are talking because I have a thought that I want to share. You see, in those moments I sometimes believe that I know what they are going to say so I attempt to get them to their end so I can share the thought that’s come to me based on what I know they are saying. Do you understand what I am saying? When I have those moments I tell the person through my interruption that what they are saying is not as important as what I want to say. And to make matters worse, I attempt to ease the impact of the interruption by telling them I already know what they were going to say before they said it. And if that doesn’t work I can quickly apologize and tell them to continue all the while impatiently waiting for them to finish so I can get back to my point. Have you ever done that? Have you ever interrupted someone because the thought you had just could not wait any longer. I will confess that when I interrupt someone and then attempt to explain it away by saying I knew what they were going to say, I not only devalue their statements as not being important enough to hear out, but I fill in the blanks with what I think they are going to say which is often wrong. I want to be clear that I am talking about me as I am sure most of you do not do this. But if any of you have done this occasionally as I have then I want you to understand that when we do this, we are “autocorrecting” the other person because we are filling in blanks that we create with what we think the person is about to tell us.

This morning you are going to hear about how we not only autocorrect one another, but we often autocorrect God, which in and of itself devalues Him in our lives and leads to an outcome that we do not expect. To illustrate this message, I will use the accepted terms of “smart phone” and “stupid phones” as it relates to their text messaging capabilities. As you listen to this message on how we autocorrect God, I want you to keep this Scripture in the forefront of your mind and it is found in Proverbs 14:12. I will read this from the Amplified Bible. It says, “There is a way which seems right to a man and appears straight before him, but its end is the way of death.” I will come back to this later.

The first mobile phones were those that had to be carried in a case and were huge. As technology advanced, mobile phones became smaller and smaller. I purchased my first mobile phone in 1997 when I was traveling a lot out of state for my job. My phone was small compared to some, but it had a large battery that attached to the back. The longer I talked on the phone the hotter the battery would get. That phone today would be called a stupid phone – or a caveman phone, not having higher intelligence. All it could do was make phone calls if I were in an area where I could get a signal. The phone could not access the internet or send a text message so by today’s standards it was a stupid phone – lacking the capabilities of today’s smart phones. Text messaging was introduced in 1996 but not all phones had that ability at that time. As text messaging began to grow and become more common, consumers wanted to be able to use all the current and developing technology and thus the smart phone was developed. The smart phone could not only make phone calls, but it could send text messages, take pictures, play videos, and, dare I say it, search the ever-expanding internet. This little device can do what the biggest computer in 1970 could not do.