#inward guide

Some of the descriptions of Christ found in early Quaker writings:

Listening to God implies that God speaks. This may put some people off. They have had no clarion calls like the ones which came to Samuel or to Saul. Friends usually refer to something less dramatic, more subtle: a sense of Presence; of the Inward Christ, the Inward Teacher or Guide. I doubt if anyone here has not felt over and over again a persistent inner tugging, an inner stirring or prompting, a sudden rapture or welling up of thankfulness, a comforting or encouraging which is not yourself speaking to yourself, or conscience (which has its cultural and moral content). There may be no audible voice, but there is a movement in the heart, a sense of Otherness that one is aware of.

Recognition that God’s Light is in every person helps us to overcome our apparent separation and differences from others; it leads to a sympathetic awareness of their needs and a sense of responsibility towards them. Friends believe that the more widely and clearly the Light is recognized and followed, the more the human family will come into harmony and peace.

Are you convinced of the reality of God and do you respond to His Spirit at work within you? Have you individually, through repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, experienced true conversion of heart? Do you depend on the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit and do you show this by your devotion to God and by your love to all people?

Keep within. And when they shall say, "lo here," or "lo there is Christ," go not forth; for Christ is within you. And they are seducers and antichrists, which draw your minds out from the teaching within you.

Therefore the great work of the minister of Christ is to keep the conscience open to Christ, and to preserve men from receiving any truths of Christ as from them further than the spirit opens, or to imitate any of their practices further than the spirit leads, guides, and persuades them. For persons are exceeding prone to receive things as truths from those whom they have a high opinion of, and to imitate their practices, and so hurt their own growth and endanger their souls. For if I receive a truth before the Lord, by his spirit, make it manifest to me, I lose my guide and follow but the counsel of the flesh, which is exceeding greedy of receiving truths and running into religious practices without the spirit. Therefore the main thing in religion is to keep the conscience pure to the Lord, to know the guide, to follow the guide, to receive from him the light whereby I am to walk; and not to take things for truths because others see them to be truths, but to wait till the spirit make them manifest to me; nor to run into worships, duties, performances, or practices, because others are led thither, but to wait till the spirit lead me thither.

Let God’s guidance control your hearts. Never try to impose your will on someone else. It’s not our job to tell others how they must live but to encourage them to listen to the Guide.

This decidedness in a Christian, in a Quaker, is not to be confused with the decidedness of the bigot, or the decidedness of the man with a one-string gospel. It is not a decidedness about a particular doctrine. Such 'decided' Christians are plentiful, but they are not the answer to the world's need. True decidedness is not of doctrine, but of life orientation. It is a commitment of life, thoroughly, wholly, in every department and without reserve, to the Inner Guide. It is not a tense and reluctant decidedness, an hysterical assertiveness. It is a joyful and quiet displacement of life from its old center in the self, and a glad and irrevocable replacement of the whole of life in a new and divine Center. It is life lived out from an all-embracing center of motivation, which in glad readiness wills to do the will of the Father, so far as that will can be discerned. It is a life of integration, of peace, of final coordination of all one's powers, within a singleness of commitment. It is the final elimination of all tolerated double-mindedness, and the discovery of the power which comes from being 'in the unity'.