Answering Machine Message

"We’re not home at the moment, so please leave a message after the beep. Thank you"...beep!

For many of us, messages left on the answering machine are a regular part of living in a fast-paced world. We have so many places to go and equally as many people to see. I have often phoned my wife discovering she’s not at home so I've left a message, or had to leave a message on her cell phone. Different times it might be the same message but perhaps worded differently, “Honey, I just called to say I love you” ...nothing fancy, just reminding her that this man loves her.

Is what is now being referred to as the “grace message” just another message that has been left for us? I find it interesting that it takes but a short time to condense something that was initiated at a spirit level within the intimate areas of our inner being into a formula-based teaching, and come up with just another gos-pill to dispense! Grace is not a formula, meaning, there is nothing we can DO to improve ourselves by using 'grace principles' as an aspect of the grace message.

As I love to say, ‘it’s a revelation, not a seminar’ that will produce in us all and more than we could even begin to imagine. If that isn’t the source of our fruitfulness (the fruit of His spirit operating in and through us as us), then it's us trying that much harder, using the 'grace message' to be ‘more like God’. What a trap - not to mention a horribly pitiful substitute for life! Yet, the choice is ours.

Once again it comes down to embracing and accepting whom God has fully embraced and accepted - me and you - despite our failures and shortcomings. But there again that ability only happens at a heart level by revelation - as it were, turning on the light in our darkness to see what really is true and not trying to get it to work by listening to a canned grace ‘message.”

Rich