Hearing God's Voice: The Inner Light of Christ

one of the beautiful things in the life of george fox is that theme that we've worked on in this last session hearing god as a life and and this life and he had the experience where he was seeking god and not finding not finding kept seeking not finding and then finally he had that well-known experience where he says when all my hopes in them and in every one were gone so that i had nothing outward to help me nor could i tell what to do oh then i heard a voice which said there is one even christ jesus that can speak to thy condition and when i heard it my heart did leap for joy [00:11:28]

and of course that was the great key to fox's life and to the power of the quakers was that as he also said i'm taking people off of men and putting them onto christ and christ as the inner light was something that he experienced constantly and it manifested itself of course in various ways but when you were quiet as a quaker you were waiting to hear the voice of god and the quietness was not as is sometimes mistaken today it wasn't just for its own sake but to give you a chance to hear from god so you could speak to the meeting [00:70:32]

and it always had that corporate sense of us together listening together i sat once in the meetinghouse one where fox was it was a meeting house that was actually built out of the lumber of the mayflower and i spent about uh yeah when it was decommissioned they took the wood and they built and you could see the timbers and some of the names carved and i spent maybe four hours just sitting various places and wondering you know what it would have been like when they gathered and it was very tender because there was a sense that god was with us together [00:111:92]

and we could depend and listen to one another and you don't have to be in the steeple house you don't have to be in the steeple house no one i think part of what's so resonant in it is when he says one who could speak to my condition yeah right and you know no matter how religious or irreligious folks become we want dr phil we want somebody who can speak to our condition exactly and so often we don't even think of ourselves as having a condition until somebody says it and that's what jesus does is he speaks that's right to our condition [00:159:92]

now that has so many dimensions in this particular tradition one is that fox trained his friends uh when they were being persecuted and mad and badly treated that they would address christ in the person who was mistreating them and one of the most powerful things in his teaching was that there's going to be christ there there will be christ there this scares many evangelicals because they're well you mean they're all going to go to heaven yeah well that that was not something that wasn't the issue was the issue that whatever happens to them every person has the light of christ in them [00:197:92]

because he is the light that light's ever known that comes into the world and that that just changes the whole picture of human relationships when you think that you know another experience he had that i found very interesting was great temptations and what he learned from that and it also led him to studying the bible you know essentially studying all the sins of everybody and he he said he wondered why he went through this experience and then he writes the lord answered that it was needful i should have a sense of all conditions how else should i speak to all conditions [00:240:08]

and in this i saw the infinite love of god and then he writes this it's so beautiful i saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness that's lovely he was so conscious of that you remember the scene where he's sitting by the fire and it comes over him that all things come by nature and he sits for a while in a kind of depression with that thought and then the word comes to him there is a god who is over nature [00:283:84]

and uh that sense of the greatness of the kingdom and how it encompasses everything and of course he and his friends took that into all of their lives and they sanctified everything they touched [00:322:80]