a txt msg frm God

When the clock strikes 00:00 on New Year’s Eve mobile (cell) phones all over the world start buzzing with New Years’ wishes from friends and family. Huge numbers of text messages are sent, probably because people send group messages to everyone in their phone. Entire phone address lists spammed with something like, ‘Happy New Year – Have a good one in 19 – Cheers Danno’. Boring, predictable, though very friendly and nice.

It makes one wonder how we’ll cope in the future when everyone we’ve ever met or bought anything from sends us a New Year’s Eve greeting. Perhaps our artificial intelligence assistants (the Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant of the future) will gently mention that we’ve got ‘greetings from many current and former friends’, and if we ask, “Oh, who from?”, well they can tell us if we really want to know.

That’s the challenge of the age we live in, so much communication. It’s hard to separate the essential from the mundane. However, one piece of communication we really do need to know about is a text message from God.

Most text messages are short and tell you something you can forget about like, ‘I’m running 15 mins late’. The Bible isn’t like that. It’s pretty long, but, being the word of God, it’s not the kind of information you can dismiss quickly. And the Bible doesn’t muck around. Like all text messages, it tells us what the other person is thinking. In this case God tells us that He made us, loves us, and also that He’s both sad and angry that we ignore Him and do wrong things.

The best part of God’s text message to the people of this world is that it contains what’s called the Gospel. Gospel means ‘good news’. And the incredible news is; God sent Jesus into the world to save us from the judgment that is coming. Jesus died on the cross to pay the price of our sin.

But have you noticed God’s text or have you been too busy? In 2017, 781 billion text messages (SMS) were sent every month in the United States. That’s more than 26 billion texts a day, and more than 9.3 trillion texts a year. Maybe we need to put the phone down more often.

Bible verse: Acts 13:26, “it is to us that this message of salvation has been sent”.

Prayer: Dear God, please help me to read your text message and give it the attention it deserves.

Acknowledgement: This article was sourced from Outreach Media, Sydney, Australia.

Images and text © Outreach Media 2019

Posted January 2019