"Don’t get involved in foolish, ignorant arguments that only start fights. A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people. Gently instruct those who oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people’s hearts, and they will learn the truth."
I am convinced that God’s true blessings are meant for everyone. When the Bible says the sun shines on the good and the evil alike, it points to the paradox of rewards but it also describes how God gives. God rains down blessings on us in great abundance. Indiscriminately. Not just on the “deserving.” The forces of evil would try to hoard those blessings for the few. But at the point, they get turned into something spoiled, like the manna from heaven the wandering Israelites tried to hoard.
My review of a talk that Guilford College’s Max Carter gave at the Bible Association of Friends:
Max Carter gave the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (NJ) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at it’s founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools and any First Day School class that might answer their inquiries.
Charles Martin explains the history and mechanics of this worship technique.
Even in the periods of miracle, the miracles aren’t as plentiful or magnificent as they could be. Frankly, they’re fairly spare and austere. God parts the Red Sea and gives the Israelites their daily…
Just blogged: the One Year Bible plan and a place to give Friends to talk about it. http://snurl.com/a520q
"The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply."
From a Conservative Quaker perspective
Since our worship is unprogrammed, it means that if we want to practice something together, like reading the Bible or singing, or a string quartet, we do that outside of worship.
I took the data from the Quaker Bible Index and munged it into a count of the most frequently quoted verses. I then took the top 100… I think it gives a good flavor of how early Quakers used the bible.
