Getting the Message

When I ask you, “Do you get the message?”, your answer will be, “Which one?”  Any of us receives hundreds if not thousands of messages in any given day.  They’re on TV, radio, the newspapers, mailers, and on billboards (thankfully, not too many these days).  They are on the Internet and emails (alas, especially in spam messages).  They are in the voicemail we wade through, and in voicemail.  I just picked up an unsolicited phone call (an automated “robocall”) telling me that “this is the second and final call you’ll receive on how to lower your credit card rate!”  I hope that, indeed, it is the final call, but it won’t be.

            What do we do with these messages?  We answer the ones that are most important to us, or which truly are urgent.  When an item or service is involved, I’ll respond only if I’m ready.  When I taught marketing workshops, I noted the four stages of response to a message.  First, unawareness; second, awareness; third, interest; and fourth, action.

            Yesterday, in preaching about the prophetic call to hear (and, yes, a sermon is another message), I noted that Malachi relayed the word of God when he said, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead to prepare the way.”  John the Baptizer also proclaimed the ancient message from the prophet Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”  Some people longed for the presence and power of God to meet them in their longing and desire.  Most people, however, were unaware of their need for God’s presence, busy as they were with their daily lives and focused on themselves and their lives.

            And so the prophetic message was spoken then, and so it is now.  The question is, do you and I get the message?  Are others around us getting the message to repent and return to the Lord?

            One piece of advertising that actually has gotten through to me so that I remember it (but won’t purchase the product) is being presented by Verizon FIOS.  Ty Burrell, the actor who plays Phil Dunphy on the TV show Modern Family, is the narrator who says that it’s one thing to get FIOS—but after we get it, only then can we get it.  Only then can we discover all of us features and benefits. 

            Then I heard the prophets in a new way.  They cry out, “Do you get it?”  For only then, they add, will you get the message for your life now and for eternity:  that God loves you and me so deeply that Christ has come into the world and will come again.

            Do we get it?