All Blog Posts (347)

Lewis Benson's The Antipathy Between Prophecy and Religion is rich, too rich to be properly summarized in a short blog post. In the following distillation, much of value has been passed over. I can't gather the essence of this work into a few short, concise paragraphs. It cries out to be read, reread, thought about, and perhaps even argued with.…

Receiving faith through hearing Christ, the Word of God, was the life-changing event for Fox, and so it is for everyone who follows the same excruciating path of partaking of sufferings.

Receiving faith ends the old, worldly order of misery as well as the moral evil that arises from humanity's determination to muffle and quell the fear of weakness and self-diminishment, the fear of death.

Emil Brunner in The Christian Doctrine of Church, Faith, and the Consummation…

 Two centuries before Dickens wrote about the Roman Carnival, the seventeenth-century men and women that would bring forth the Quaker movement had been engaged in something like a Lenten practice. George Fox and others subjected themselves to rigorous self-examination that was, in fact, the awareness the Lenten discipline was intended to evoke. That Friends opted to undergo this self-scrutiny in the absence of any cultural prod vouches for their having been guided not by a culturally…

[This essay was first presented at our annual gathering last month. This is the first part of three, and in the next couple days, I expect to post the second and third parts.] 

And our hope of you is steadfast knowing, that as ye are partakers of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation (2 Cor. 1:7).

In a world that is ever plagued by deceit and cruelty, suffering seems unavoidable. Yet Paul in this verse implies that suffering is optional: one may choose…

New Foundation workers and supporters gathered at Ellis and Rebecca Hein's property near Casper, Wyoming, for an annual gathering in Seventh month, 7th through 10th. Seven people attended, two of them new to our gathering. Those attending were Kevin Anderson, Casper; Patricia Dallmann, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Rhonda Fuller, Lansing, Michigan; Ellis Hein, Casper; Rebecca Hein, Casper; Rae Lawrence, Milton-Freewater, Oregon; and Ron Sirkel, Lees Summit, Missouri. On the first evening of…

Belief is a component of faith. But by its nature, belief is secondary. To have any validity, it must be connected to the right thing. George Fox put it this way:

And Christ saith, verily I say unto you, he that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is past from death to life.' John v. 24.

Now this is and was their belief in the light, that were the children of the light, and born of God,…

George Fox can write some of the most startling, beautiful, cogent phrases, verses, and passages. Just this morning and yesterday I encountered three things he wrote that I thought profound. 

This first one is from Some Principles of the Elect People of God Who in Scorn are called Quakers, which I saw at the Quaker Heritage Press (qhpress.org). The sentence is from VI. Concerning the Cross. "and in that Power of God the…

A Reflection re: Forgiveness

Many Christians speak of forgiveness.  Often this has to do with God’s forgiveness of us and how we get it.  I hope to address this also.  We certainly need God’s forgiveness but how do we get there?

Mathew 6:15:  “But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (NIV)  “He that had shed my blood was afraid of having his hand cut off, for striking me in the church, as they called it; but I forgave him, and…

This the Lord opened to me this morning in worship. We have famine when we fear He will not provide for us. If we had faith; if we trusted what our Lord says, no one would know famine or want of any kind. Yet Jesus said the poor will always be with us.

If our faith is weak we wander in the wilderness like the Israelites (Num 14: 20-25), not trusting God will provide, yet all the while accessing all that he provides for us.

Perhaps in restlessness and unbelief, we take matters…

King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon built an enormous golden statue and proclaimed "O peoples and nations of every language, you are commanded, when you hear the sound of horn, pipe, zither, triangle, dulcimer, music, and singing of every kind, to prostrate yourselves and worship the golden image." Then the King heard that three young men at his court, the Israelites Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego, refused to worship the statue. King Nebuchadnezzar summoned the three and threatened them: "If you…

Today is the day the world celebrates as Pentecost. Though we Quakers have a mild taboo against celebrating particular days, I do often celebrate them, privately, because all the direction and structure of my life is acknowledged in these particular days, and I am affirmed through celebrating a shared knowledge and purpose with those of the past. "Hello Peter; hello David; we are just some centuries apart, but our inward life, our knowledge and love of God, is the same."

There have…

Oh, my goodness--and He is my Goodness--I was just going to write in my notebook for later development this recognition: everything thing I know and understand comes from God. My intelligence is no greater now than it was x number of years ago, but my spiritual growth these last two, three years has been phenomenal. Still, prior to this growth, whatever it was I realized or whatever great thought I had came from God, but I was arrogant enough to believe I had some special insight or…

Joy, joy, and more joy. But first let me tell you the misery I went through last week--because I didn't follow the will of my Lord last First Day. I was sent to Quaker Meeting to give the true Quaker Message to those who claim to be Quaker but are not because they've never heard the Quaker Message. What they have heard is some other, not-Quaker message.

Quakers of the early Nineteenth Century did not keep under the teaching of Jesus Christ and so Satan got in and snuckered them into…

Once, in describing my upcoming wedding to a friend, I mentioned that it was a Quaker Meeting for Worship in which all would sit silent, waiting on the Lord. When she found out that no human being would be leading the meeting, she was puzzled.



"Who pronounces you man and wife?"



"Jesus," I replied.



"Yes, but whose voice does he use?"



In that brief exchange, I glimpsed a fundamental difference in our viewpoints that I'm still trying to understand after…

Blessed Friends, I write of encouragement. This morning in Meeting for Worship (I went to late Meeting) I heard two speakers. One who spoke of individual determination and another who spoke of community. Categorizing the two philosophies I see one as darkness, the other light.

Emil Brunner said something like this, God calls us to Him individually but we are meant to be in communion. Brunner associates individualism with Rousseau and others of spiritual impoverishment including…

"God spoke that was the speaker to Adam and Eve in paradise." (Sermon VI) That George Fox repeated this revelation of the Spirit often in several of his sermons attests to its importance. He exhorts us to hear the voice of the Teacher, the Christ in us, and to remain with him.

My custom for preparation for worship is to pray my reading is profitable to my worship and prayer. In the moments before proceeding this morning I saw that the voice I heard was the voice George Fox heard was…

I have run into a number of issues and causes over the years put forth as being things "we should be involved in." I have first-hand experience of being "involved in" a number of such worthy causes. But it is not the worthy causes that form the foundation of righteousness.

Many will come to me on that day saying, "Lord, Lord, did we not..." [and there follows a list of worthy issues and causes]. I will say to them, "Depart from me you workers of iniquity, I never knew…