Yes the ipv4 forwarding seems to be explicitly disabled during the "stop" section of the network service script /etc/rc.d/init.d/network. During the "start" section there are calls to sysctl which will re-enable forwarding if it's set in sysctl.conf but there is no corresponding alert message printed.
So it would seem that the message is safe to ignore, and your forwarding will be re-enabled correctly during a restart. If you're concerned about it you could always hack the network script to check that forwarding has been re-enabled and print a message accordingly:
Code:
[ `sysctl -n net.ipv4.ip_forward` eq 1 ] && echo "IPv4 packet forwarding is enabled"