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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 10th mo. 3, 2009 at 4:06pm

Self awareness of how much we are lacking is a good beginning to letting His light shine through us. I pray that you accept God's grace in helping you in your journey.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary Gould on 5th mo. 11, 2010 at 8:42pm

Wonderful metaphor. Thank you.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 5th mo. 13, 2010 at 7:43pm

The whole world and everything in it is God's ongoing work which includes an ongoing process in which God is revealing truth to us.

Messages we receive before we're ripe to receive them just have to go into storage while we ripen; the process is most efficient when someone can be led to precisely what he needs to nourish himself, precisely when he's fully prepared and hungry enough to receive it.

Efficiency, of course, is not everything. Obstacles and setbacks also have divine purposes. But generally we can expect the most rapid progress when someone is eager to learn, looking to God for guidance, and nourishing himself from sources he can recognize as appropriate to what he knows and what he seeks.

By such considerations, it is not a matter of how much "Truth" might be found in some "Scripture" (or in any other writing) but whether the Living God sets it before us and tells us: "Read!"

I regret that so many contemporary Friends have lost all appetite for reading in the Bible! But I don't think this is necessarily a mistake, at this time. They simply won't read anything they don't expect to give them new, significant truth; and that is only reasonable-- But their assumption that there's nothing essential there for them is utterly wrong!

If we see a "message from God" as like our modern model of a communication: like a note wrapped around a rock and tossed over our fence... the real message is not in either that rock or that letter, but in what God intends us to see through it.

We don't want to build cathedrals on little pebbles, which is what people do when they think that the pebbles and the notes and every little piece of dirt on them must be "Truth", or even "true." (Just think of that stuff as "extra minerals"; it's not worth breaking teeth on them!)

If you can be moved by the Spirit of God to write and speak and know the truth-- which is what George Fox found written in the Christian scriptures, as he read them-- then you can be spared much confusion between due reverence for what you honestly recognize as their true message-- and idolatrous servitude to notions that aren't showing you true light.

Nothing in the Bible-- or anything else in the world-- is meaningless "accident"; but many of the details are there for reasons other than literal "Truth"-- One reason being to show us human corruption, cluelessness and self-deception at work, if I'm not badly mistaken.

What good ways are there to read, and use the Bible? Reading it aloud in small groups, allowing for utterly free (but spiritually-centered!) discussion is one of the better things I've found.

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