by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Small Groups, Weekly Devotional
This is a response to the second question of a two-part question that came up after John Burke (Lead Pastor at Gateway Church) interviewed me last month. I responded to the first of the two-part question on last week’s blog. Last week’s question was about why I think the kind of small group I had mentioned was important. My response is that Jesus spent approximately two-thirds of his three-year ministry with a small group of twelve men—the same twelve men. And all Jesus left was that small group and the Spirit in their midst. Further, Paul’s ministry was largely devoted to starting and continuing to correspond with and mentor a few small groups scattered in cities around the Roman Empire.
So now I’m getting to the second question: “What is the purpose of the small groups you talked about, and do these groups prepare Christians to fulfill the Great Commandment to issue God’s invitation to the world?”
What is the overall purpose of an “adventure” group?
Although the members of an “adventure” group learn about and experience ways to pray as Jesus taught the Twelve, and they examine relevant scripture passages, the overall purpose is for the group members to experiment with and actually experience receiving and giving the love of Jesus in their real time everyday lives and relationships. The experiment begins with every member agreeing that for thirteen weeks they will assume that the God Jesus called Father is real. And for the thirteen-week period the participants will live as if they had actually surrendered their entire lives to God. This includes an agreement among the group members not to argue about God’s existence or different interpretations of the Gospel. Instead they will be guided to experiment with how to love the people in their personal and vocational lives beginning with the other group members. They learn how to share in the group meetings by listening without interrupting or challenging what anyone else says they have experienced, and by reporting what happens—the failures as well as positive experiences—when they consciously take God with them clear through their days and nights. Each group member agrees to pray for the others every day during the experiment about the things shared in the group.
This group experience is not like any Bible study or sharing group most people have ever been in. The purpose is not to evangelize your neighbors or become expert Bible students; it is to learn (by doing) how to carry out the new command that Jesus gave the disciples when he was about to leave them: “Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.” (Jn. 13:34-35, The Message)
Since we are also called to love the world, the primary purpose of Jesus’ group and these groups is to learn how to love God and do his will in all areas of our own lives, secular as well as “religious.” And as we try to do some simple things to learn how to receive and give love—with the Father and each other, we will be acquiring the core characteristics, attitudes and behaviors that we will need later when we go out to meet the needs of those who have been marginalized in our culture—the hungry, the sick, those without clothing and shelter, etc. I’ve always thought it was strange that Jesus didn’t send the Twelve out on missions until not too long before the crucifixion. He evidently wanted them to be sure to go out with love as well as a perspective in everything they did.
Bruce Larson and I worked for years with dozens of groups to build a course that is emotionally safe. We did this by developing rules (and making these rules clear) that keep the members from putting people down who risk sharing their reality, (i.e. not “fixing” them, offering suggestions or corrections) that would shame them for not participating or for “making mistakes”. The leader and all the group members will help each other to learn how to love and assure every person’s safety in the group. (This experience can be invaluable later in missions to people who have been abused in their worlds.)
Almost anyone can lead an Adventure group. In the meetings, Bruce and I face and respond first (on CD’s) to every question to which group members are asked to respond. And the group leader responds third. So an appropriate level of vulnerability is established before other group members are asked to share, which allows the group to become safer and closer more quickly than is usually possible otherwise. Also, any participant can choose to “pass” on responding to any of the questions or exercises without being shamed or criticized. These guidelines create a safe and more free and open atmosphere than many participants have ever experienced anywhere. An atmosphere in which the real issues, the fears, the joys and the reality can be shared—of trying to commit their lives and relationships to God in the real life contexts of their own families, church situations and vocational and social lives.
So in this safer atmosphere, the participants try various experiments in their real life situations (outside the group, between sessions) of praying, handling the many disappointments of admitting when they are wrong and asking forgiveness. As they do so, they are building a library of experiences—living stories—from the experiences they will personally go through and share with the group during meetings. And while they are carrying out these experiments between group meetings, the group members will also be examining some of Jesus’ stories (parables) and considering with which character they identify—thus adding more living stories to their educational base.
When people close to Jesus (including the Twelve) asked about the stories he pointed out that they (whom he was teaching) were getting a good picture of how the Kingdom of God works in their lives. But other people whom they encountered along the way—people who hadn’t had this much teaching from Jesus and so didn’t understand—for those people stories created readiness—readiness to hear more. (See Mark 3:10-11, The Message, quoted at the end of this blog.)
What usually happens—invisibly at first—is that in the process of being heard and accepted as they are, people who may have been church members for years, come to realize that love has crept in and replaced loneliness and the sense of not fitting—feelings that apparently all people long to overcome.
As to the sharing, it often happens that when someone who has “passed” several weeks in a row finally speaks, he or she may be a different person than the one whom you met at the first meeting.
We believe that these experiences are all parts of the transformation process Jesus said was essential. It is like being “born anew from on high.” And friends, when you see a fellow adventurer being transformed before your eyes, week after week, it is impossible to tell you what this can do to your faith and ability to love God and other people. It seems that one must experience this personally to understand how important it is.
There is also a strong rule about keeping everything that is said in the meetings confidential. At first this seems strange but in the end, this creates an unbelievable sense of freedom and honesty. I remember when I started the first group of this kind in a church in Norman, OK in the 1950’s I had explained the group plan to the pastor and gotten his permission to start the group. We were meeting in our home. After several weeks the pastor called me and said, “What are you telling the people about money?”
I said, “Why are you asking?”
He said, “Well, three of the couples have started tithing since the group started meeting and they were a little vague when I talked to them.”
I laughed because tithing hadn’t even been mentioned. But the minister was so happy that he said, “I’m sending another couple over to join your group.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” I said. “The rules are that no new members are allowed to join a new group after the second week. In this intimate atmosphere running in new people every week means starting to build the trust level all over again. We may do another group later if some people want to.”
The minister then asked, “Well what is this ‘secrecy’ all about? Where did you ever come up with a rule about people not sharing what’s going on in a group?”
I smiled and said, “Jesus. Several times Jesus told people who’d been helped by his ministry, “Don’t tell anyone.”
This may sound like an unusual way to operate a group, but people who have been together for thirteen weeks sharing their reality, the good news and the bad, sickness and celebrations, have reported time and again that long before the thirteen weeks are over, participants report that they find themselves becoming more caring for people around them outside the group, even difficult people and even in painful situations. But these feelings and attitudes of really beginning to trust and share are new and a little scary for people at first. And we are convinced they need a safe, non-critical place to report failures as well as successes. (We still attend such groups after all this time.)
This sort of group experience can create a spiritual culture of people who want to experiment with really trying to offer to God the living out of their eating, sleeping, working, walking around lives for Christ. (See Romans 12:1, The Message)
No group structure or process is for everyone, of course. But we have found that unless a large church finds a way for new people to learn to love each other and pray specifically for each other in a face to face atmosphere, over a period of time the back door of that church will become bigger than the front—no matter how gifted and committed the teaching pastors are. And our experience indicates that many group graduates go on mission trips after a thirteen-week group, or join a mission group in their own city, or teach a class in the church. They report that because of their experience in these groups, they find themselves listening to and praying for or with the people they are going out to help.
I have not tried to give you a comprehensive picture of the course content. If you would like to read about the course materials, click here.
And one last thing: because of years of being in adventure group meetings of various kinds, I realize that people are all different in their needs, hopes and dreams. And I have discovered that my job is not to change anyone—even any of you who may be reading this blog. So if what we have learned is not something that you feel comfortable trying, we won’t bug you. But this is just my answer to the person who wanted to know the purpose of this kind of group experience.
We are starting up again working in local churches after many years of working in different cultures here and overseas. If you choose to use this group experience as a part of your Christian formation effort, we’ll be glad to do what we can to help that happen.
***
“When they were off by themselves, those who were close to him, along with the Twelve, asked about the stories. He told them, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom—you know how it works. But to those who can’t see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight. These are people—
Whose eyes are open but don’t see a thing,
Whose ears are open but don’t understand a word,
Who avoid making an about-face and getting forgiven.”
-Mark 4:10-12, The Message
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s.”
-1st Jn. 4:17, The Message
Lord, Thank you that you took the time to live the life of love with the few people you chose to deliver the Father’s invitation to the rest of us, so we’d know it’s really livable. Give me trust at this time to believe that I will get my work done if I risk interrupting my busy schedule long enough to live your life with a few others…again. In Jesus’ name, amen.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
Recently I was reading in the gospel of Matthew and ran across Jesus’ first teaching to the disciples. He starts it out this way: “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope because then there is less of you and more of God and his rule.” What in the world does that mean? I mean, it sounds crazy. I thought you were blessed when you succeeded or things went well. What is Jesus trying to say here?
Good question. In fact, I believe an essential question for any Christian who would like to see his or her life transformed. I think the basis underlying this experiencing “powerlessness” as “blessedness” is that Jesus came to announce and inaugurate a new Kingdom of God (or Reign of God) in the people’s lives. The people had tried to have a geographical kingdom through military conquest and they’d tried political conquest. And Jesus was saying, “No, the Kingdom of God is going to be within you, inside your mind.”
If the Kingdom of God is going to be within our minds where nobody can see it, then before the kingdom can come we’ve got to establish God as king there. But our difficulty is that our dominant problem is Sin (with a capital “S”); that is, we put ourselves in the center where only God belongs. And we can’t see ourselves surrendering the driver’s seat (throne) to God. So we try to live our lives using our own happiness, fulfillment and way of doing things as the sovereign criteria for all of our decisions.. And when we’ve tried everything in our power, and we can’t prosper, can’t get what we’re trying to get, or be loved the way we want to be loved—we may get to the end of our rope. But it’s at that point we may get tired enough or lonely enough to be willing to surrender to God, asking God to help us become what we were meant to be as human beings. Also at that point we’re open to the possibility of letting God be in the drivers’ seat of our lives to help, teach, and guide us, since we’ve realized that we don’t know how or don’t have the power to fix our situation.
Jesus says we’re blessed when that happens because “then there’s less of us (and our self-absorbed ways of doing things) and more of God and his rule.” To me, that means that when I get to the place where I can’t handle life and hit a wall, then I can detect a doorway in that wall, with a handle on my side. And if I decide to trust God with my whole life, I can step through that doorway into the Kingdom of God.
Jesus goes on to list other circumstances we encounter when we try to run things under our own power that can be doorways to wholeness.
For example, he says “You’re blessed when you think you’ve just lost that which is most dear to you, because only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you.” I did lose my success, my minor fame that seemed to major to me, and I had to face the fact that I couldn’t control other people’s opinion of me. I’d screwed up my life in a pretty big way, so I knew that I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of being perfect. At that point, I came to the place once again where I was willing to say, “Lord, I surrender my life to you—because it’s now clear to me that I can’t handle it. I am powerless to do this. I want to start over, and be your child. Teach me how to be loving, and how to be culpable.” And he has done these things, at least to a larger degree than I ever dreamed could happen.
As I began to live this way, I gradually began to relax, and eventually saw that I really was blessed, because now I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody (although sometimes I still catch myself trying to do these things). All I had to do was to be honest and culpable about myself and make what amends I could and do the next right thing in my personal and vocational lives. And I have this awareness that God is willing to help transform my life now if I will just come to him and surrender the outcome of my life to him and listen to his guidance concerning my decisions, my wife and children, to him. Then when I fail in any of these areas, he’s there at the end of my rope to guide and teach me, giving me some things to do, and teaching me how to have more integrity and to love and care for other people whether they love or care for me or not. These are things I never could have imagined doing naturally without God—and strangely this way of life has already made me happier and more loving than I ever thought I would be.
Jesus goes on to say that “You’re blessed when you are content with just who you are, no more, no less.” I’ve learned that when I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my life, I want to be number one. I want to be the best at whatever I do. If I’m going to be a Christian I want to be the best Christian around. If I want to be a businessman, I want to be rich and successful. And I have lots of ideas I want God to help me perform and implement.
But there is a different set of values in the Kingdom of God. Evidently the reason that Jesus came to announce and inaugurate this plan is so we could live in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, let him transform our lives, teach us how to love other people and tell them about him and his reign. When I’m content with just who I am, then I’m not all the time agitating for something more or better or different. Although I don’t like everything that I am, I’m content with who I am right now. And I want to be whatever God wants me to be. And that’s a switch.
Jesus goes on and says “You’re blessed when your witness to me elicits persecution. Because this persecution will drive you deeper into my Reign and my way of life.” Sure enough, it’s been true. It’s paradoxical that even when I’ve had church officials reject me, I have been calm as I try to hear them and love them because for me this is part of living in the Reign of God.
One little thing I’d like to add. It’s important for me to live in the present moment if I want to cultivate this intimate relationship with God. When I’m at the end of my rope or have lost something very dear to me, or can’t achieve the success I want, then I’m not concerned with little unpleasant things. I’m almost totally focused on the threatening situation that’s going on in the present moment. Somewhere along the way somebody told me that God never did anything in the past or the future. God operates only in the present. Anything that happened in the past was—at the time it actually happened—in a present moment. And so if I want the Kingdom of God and his Reign to be the dominant motivational purpose in my own mind and lived out in my life, then I’ll have to learn to live more in the present moment—instead of filling my present moments with fears about the future or regrets about the past. Whenever I see that I can’t do something in that moment, I can bring it to God and ask if it’s even the right thing to do. If it is, I ask for God’s power; and if it’s not the right thing to do, then I let it go and try to discern something else God wants me to do instead. This has given me a sense of enormous freedom.
I’ve come to realize that God made me in a certain way with certain gifts (and that each person is unique with certain gifts). And the more that I’m willing to surrender to God, the more I’m inclined and able to use these gifts for other people—to love them without trying to make them see and do what I see and do. I ask God to help me to quit counting to see how many good deeds or how many people I’ve helped or who have helped me. This is a freedom to me, and a sense of peace that I never had before because I was so restless and driven and prone to keep score.
These days I am loving the work I’m doing. I realize I’m not the best in the world to do it, and sometimes I feel like God’s made a mistake in having me do this particular kind of work because he could get a lot better people. But he’s let me know somehow that, although I was not necessarily the first choice, he’s chosen to guide me in it because I said “Yes” and am trying to do it. And when I fail and confess that failure or sin to God, he has let me experience his forgiveness and lets me begin again.
So I’d just say to you, Jesus is trying to describe a different, deeper more significant kind of “being blessed” than just having success or enough material goods. The question I’ve had to face was, “are you willing to surrender your life to God and let him be in the driver’s seat of your inner mind and life, to show you who you are and what to do? At that moment when you are ready, you are really blessed—because he’ll do it. At least that’s been my experience so far.
***
God said, “Heads up! The days are coming when I’ll set up a new plan for dealing with Israel and Judah…. This new plan I’m making with Israel isn’t going to be written on paper, isn’t going to be chiseled in stone; This time I’m writing out the plan in them, carving it on the lining of their hearts. I’ll be their God, they’ll be my people. They won’t go to school to learn about me, or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons. They’ll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They’ll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.
– Hebrews 8:6-13, The Message
***
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way.
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Hold o’er my being absolute sway!
Fill with Thy spirit, ‘till all shall see
Christ only, always, living in me.
– Hymn by Adelaide A. Pollard, 1907
P.S. If you are interested in learning how it might feel to actually take God this seriously, the story of how Keith began to take God consciously into the different parts of his ordinary everyday living and working lives is recorded in The Taste of New Wine.
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, is the Bible true? And if it is, how can I know it’s true?
That’s a good question, one that a lot more Christians wonder about than you would imagine. The simple answer is that since the story is all about God, what God is like, and what God wants from the relationship with His people, only God would know if the story is true or not.
But there is included in God’s story a way for people to know him and know what he wants in a relationship with him. If we surrender our lives to God and begin to live in the intimate relationship with him, we can begin to “see” him walking around in Jesus in the scriptures. We see him loving and inviting people to live with him in the creative life of giving and being loved that he has offered to us. Then, in the actual living with him and for him, we will know that the story is true in a way that is convincing enough for us to keep going.
Since the life God offers people in the Bible is an intimate life of mutual love and trust with God and other people, it should not be surprising that knowing whether the story about God’s loving us is true can be determined only by entering the relationships and beginning to love and trust the God whose story it is.
The love of the God of the Bible whom Jesus called Father is a love that transforms those who accept it and try to live it and pass it on. And the characteristic way that love is transforming is that the loving reign of God in people’s lives works like yeast that is put in dough—it permeates every aspect of a person’s life, and not just Sundays or the “religious” room in one’s inner home.
My experience has been that I first surrendered as much of my life as I could at the time to as much of God as I could understand—which I realize now was not much. But I really thought I’d done it, and that was enough. And as I “took God with me” into the daily aspects of my life, work and relationships I discovered that my life was changing. I began by becoming aware that when I made time to acknowledge God’s presence in the different parts of my life I began to talk to him about what I was experiencing (pray). And I asked him to change one thing after another, until one day I asked God to change everything in my life that was not God’s will for me. It was then that I began to change my behavior as if God were continually with me—which I realized he was.
Although I could tell you thousands or more words about this process, you haven’t asked me to do that. So I’ll just finish this blog by saying that for me the transformation (so complete it’s like being born into a new life) is not just changing one’s ideas about God, but rather in my case it was the changing of my whole perspective about who God is, what he wants from people—particularly from me—and how to love without trying to control people to get outcomes I want to fulfill my dreams and make me happy. I began to think about how I could enhance the lives of people around me. The Bible calls this Life and relationship with God “Eternal Life” that begins “now and never ends.” (John 17:3, The Message) And this is eternal life: to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.
***
Dear Lord, thank you that you didn’t bring a religion to control our lives, but a Way to live and love and learn about all of life. Help us to surrender to a life of love with you in which we can know you and your way of being human. Amen.
My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. (1 John 4:7-10, The Message)
God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us… (1 John 4:17-18, The Message)
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Who is God, and what is the Bible really all about? I try to tell my children that God is love. But I see God’s people in the Bible (and in history today) slaughter people in God’s name. Can you give me a simple definition of who God is and what the Bible is all about?
That’s a very good question—probably impossible to answer in a brief blog post. But since I have spent the past four years almost full time reading virtually nothing but the Bible (trying to write a book that Andrea and I hope will shed a little light on that very question) here is my two minute impossible “answer” to your impossible questions.
In very simplistic terms the Bible is the story about God—who created the world and everything in it. The story line of the Bible deals with God’s experiment as “Father” with human beings, or you might say—with family life. According to the story, God “Fathered” human beings as male and female, and he gave only them free choice so they could experience love. (Without being able to choose, humans could not have made a decision whether to love God or one another or not.) The tragedy of the plot is that from the beginning (Adam and Eve) chose not to respond to the Father’s love and tutoring about what life and reality are about—“what is good and what is evil.” And the first humans rebelled and tried to replace God as their own teacher of what is good and what is evil.
From that point the Bible is the story of how we human beings—men and women—have scratched and clawed (either with bared claws or wearing velvet gloves) to get what we want that we think will make us “happy” and justified our choices because we have put ourselves and our self-centered desires in the center of our life where only God, who created everything, belongs.
In the pages of the Bible are all the Father’s recurring offers to transform whatever we get as the result of our efforts (failure, injury, disappointment or hollow success) into what we need in order to be transformed into what we were ‘designed’ to become: co-hosts in the Father’s family as we join God in inviting the rest of humanity into the intimate, caring relationship with the Father and each other to learn how life and loving were made to work. In this relationship, the Father has offered to limit his power and personally tutor each of us about how to interact with him, each other and the environment—teaching and modeling the same self-limiting love with which God relates to us. And the idea seems to be that it is the Father’s love that lubricates all of the rough edges of life and turns them into the wisdom and knowledge that can make existence a heaven or hell—now and always.
Since all of us human beings have consciously or unconsciously put ourselves and our wants to satisfy our self-centered desire in the center of our lives and relationships (thus creating what we call Sin: replacing God as the source of the knowledge of what is good and evil for us and those around us to do,) we all resist accepting the Father as our tutor about how to live and relate.
This unconscious but universal tendency to replace God (Sin) blinds us to who God is and who we were made to become. We project our own need to control onto God, punish those who disagree with us and use his name to enforce our own will on others. And we have honestly taught and projected our conclusions onto God. So we lost the original vision of the self-limiting love of the Father. For centuries we see the Father touching the lives of those who would trust him, and sending messages through these “prophets” about our screwing things up. Invariably we killed or ignored these prophet-messengers.
Finally Jesus came to make clear what the Father is like—how the Father’s self-limiting love looks walking in our homes and neighborhoods as we face our political and personal dishonesty and controlling relationships. At last we could see and interact with the Father person in Jesus.
But people’s projections of their own unconscious self-centered experience and ideas about God overshadowed Jesus’ self-limiting love. They could not accept the fact that God would transcend even legalistic justice to forgive them, love them and teach them how to love each other and even their enemies, so that love could be the guide for Reality oriented life and relationships.
Experiencing the fact that we could not believe that kind of self-limiting love (because we couldn’t do it ourselves), Jesus limited his power to escape or retaliate and instead died for us—the unmistakable act of self-limiting love. (“i.e. if I stepped in front of you and took a bullet to save your life, you would know that I care for you.)
So in Jesus’ life and death we see God as the loving, intimate Father we always longed for but most of us could not find, who limited his power to punish us in order to give life and freedom to us if we will accept as we see it in Jesus.
That’s the impossible short version of the answer the Bible story gives to our impossible questions: “Who is God?” and “What’s the Bible story about?”
“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us.” Ephesians 2:1-2, The Message
***
“The person who knows my commandments and keeps them, that’s who loves me. And the person who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and make myself plain to him.”
Judas (not Iscariot) said, “Master, why is it that you are about to make yourself plain to us but not to the world?”
“Because a loveless world,” said Jesus, “is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him—we’ll move right into the neighborhood.” John 14:21-24, The Message
***
“How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He’s the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.” Ephesians 1:2-4 , The Message
Lord, thank you that you have not given us a complex philosophical system that only the brilliant and educated could understand. But instead you loved us as your children and gave us a story to walk in with you and each other. And thank you Lord, that it’s a love story about forgiveness. In Jesus name, amen.
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” 1 John 4: 17-18, The Message
