chapter 6 is our text tonight and we're looking at the believer's armor. There are so many things that have come and gone in my life time in terms of Christian emphases. It's good that some of them are fading away and have almost disappeared. It's sort of like the offshoot of the Amish many years ago. It was a quirky kind of cult and they believed that marriage was...and cohabitation sinful. It didn't last very long. They all died and there was nobody left to carry it on. That was a good thing.There are other things that have come and tried to have a life and sometimes lasted quite a while before they died. One of them, basically, was inimitable to the Quaker Movement and I guess you could call it sort of historic quietism. That's a label that really does define the Quaker approach to spiritual life which was to say what you need to do is surrender yourself. They had phrases like "hand it over to the Lord," "let Him do it." Or their most famous one, "Let go and let God." Stop struggling. Stop striving. Abide. Rest. And all that kind of benign quiet language. They said, one writer, it's like a man in a room, there's brilliant sunshine outside but the room is in darkness, that's because the blinds are drawn and the man is fumbling around in the darkness. All he needs to do is open the blind and the light will flood him. This is the quietistic view. It took a firm footing in England and America in a movement called Keswick...
