I've recently been working my way through Samuel Chadwick's The Way to Pentecost. Quite a powerful book. There's a lot I need to think about in there, from the first few sentences on: "...No doctrine of the Christian faith has been so neglected [as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit]. Sermons and hymns are singularly barren on this subject, and the last great book on the Spirit was written in 1674. [Pneumatologia by John Owen]"

I've also run into the issue of the "second work of grace" or "entire sanctification" (not surprising for an unabashedly Methodist writer). It seems like I keep running into this issue in what I've been reading and listening to recently, and I'm going to have to work my way through it at some point. For now, though, I'm content to file it for later.

Today's post is on the fruit of the Spirit. There is such a thing as the Charismatic Church, and thank God that there are people who operate in the gifts of the Spirit (no matter how imperfectly some understand them or how clumsily some explain them). But why don't we have a Karpostic* Church? The gifts are wonderful and a blessing, and I will continue to intercede for God to give us more and more and more of the manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit in the Church. But the gifts prove nothing by themselves. The fruit of the Spirit in my life is what glorifies God.

Samuel Chadwick, The Way to Pentecost, Chapter 16: The Fruit of the Spirit

Fruit must not be confused with gifts any more than it must be mistaken for works. Such confusion often leads to doubt and distress. It is not an uncommon thing for earnest workers in the Church to imagine that if they are filled with the Spirit they will be endowed with marvelous and miraculous power for service. Examples have been quoted of wonderful enduement that has turned commonplace men into marvels of power, and they look for like results. Gifts are not fruit. They may exist apart from great spirituality. The Corinthians were rich in gifts and poor in fruit. Our Lord told of some who wrought wonders in His Name, but they were none of His. Fruit is for all; His gifts He gives to each severally as He will. The fruit of the Spirit consists of sanctified dispositions. Gifts are according to the basis of natural endowments; fruit is the perfecting of grace in heart and life. Gifts apart from fruit do not glorify Him. To glory in gifts bringeth a snare, but fruit is sacrificial and sacramental and brings glory to all. It grows by abiding, and is perfected without noise or fuss, without anxiety or care. God glories in Fruit.


* Charismatic comes from χαρισματα, "Gift." The word for fruit is καρπος (transliterated Karpos).

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This weekend we are doing a "24-1" (24 hours of continuous prayer in the spirit of the Moravians) at my church.

To pray continuously "in the spirit of the Moravians" means to have a place dedicated to continual prayer, and have shifts of individuals come and pray hour by hour around the clock.

For many people, the immediate question this raises is - "Why do we need a prayer room?"  God hears our prayers wherever we are - in fact, He even hears the prayers we pray silently.  So why do we need to come to the church to pray?

Of course it is true that God hears our prayers wherever we are.  But experience has shown that there is something different and powerful about dedicating a physical space to prayer for an extended period of time.  Here are some answers to this question which 24-7 Prayer international has published on their website:

 

Why Do You Need a Prayer Room?

"A Prayer Room is to the church what the heart is to the body." (The Praying Church Source Book)
Locating the prayer season in a specific location seems to be one of the keys to the effectiveness of 24-7. Why?

• The Holy Spirit can fill a place as well as a person (Acts 2:2, 4:31, 16:16). There's often a strong sense of God's presence in such a place of prayer, even experienced by non-Christians.

• Time often goes quicker! Many have reported that 'in the prayer room 1 hour feels like 10 minutes'

• Evangelistically the prayer room is excellent. Non-Christians have often sat in such places to pray, some have said that they can feel God's presence. People who don't want to be preached at still like to be prayed for.

• The prayer-room enables people to pray non-verbally, by posting artwork, poetry and graffiti on the wall. The environment can be artistically designed to stimulate and direct prayer.

• The room provides accountability - a place where people have to turn up, and this ensures a constant flow as one prayer-shift hands the baton onto the next. Visiting the room is like a mini-pilgrimage.

• A shared location provides a strong sense of being part of a community carrying each others' burdens, celebrating the breakthroughs together and ministering to one another. You are more than a link in a prayer chain.

A prayer room filled with the prayers of the saints after 3 months of 24-7 prayer

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"...the world's oldest profession - advertising: 'See this nice apple? You need this apple. Try it, you'll like it! Just one soul.'

By the way, the profession that is usually called 'the world's oldest profession' depends on this older one for its success. All sin does. If sin didn't seem like fun, we'd all be saints.

The origin of sin is advertising. That is, the substitution of image for substance. Appearance for reality. It's no accident that the New Testament calls Satan the 'prince of the power of the air': ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV..."
- From "Ten Unusual Insights into evil from The Lord of the Rings" by Peter Kreeft

I came across a great blog post today on CNET (thanks to Google Desktop I think), that was pointing out a study that had given objective evidence of a huge flaw in the "New Economy" (also known as "making money without making products").

That guy clicking on your ad? You don't want him | by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs: "The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000."

All of this is ironic, of course, because this information would have been much more pertinent in 1998 than in 2008, but we've been led to believe that after the economy dispensed with the crowd of dotcom pretenders who thought that you could make a fortune by throwing up "the next big idea" that would attract a million clicks and provide millions in ad revenue for nothing, there are still some players who have "made it work". Google certainly has made it work. By and large selling nothing but advertising, having a massive install base (I'll freely admit to being a heavy user of many Google products), and now becoming the most significant threat to Microsoft's dominance, they are a picture of new economy success.

But... How deep does the success go? Three random - and not very carefully proven - thoughts about why I think success based on advertising is flimsy.


First, ad revenues are a moving target. I - and thousands of others, I'm sure - use AdBlock Plus with the filterset list which effectively removes all graphical ads from the web. It's quite refreshing, really. No more animated ads, ugly flashing banners, obtrusive flash popups, or borderline pornographic ads for dating services (or who knows what). What you still get are inobtrusive Google adWords, Facebook "announcements" and various other kinds of ads that typically aren't annoying or distracting at all.

The reason that AdBlock Plus and the filterset were invented was because advertisers had gone too far. Greedy to get as many clicks as possible and make bank, the advertisers overstepped what people would put up with, and the result was that an entire category of ads got completely shut down, and will continue to be shut down by increasing numbers of users.


Second, how much of what is feeding the success of Google and other "new economy success stories" is legitimate business? I see some utterly outlandish things on Gmail sponsored links. Somebody apparently paid money to get an atheist site targeted at keywords like "Church" and "God" and "Jesus". But the site wasn't selling anything - just spouting the same endless if-God-is-so-good-why-is-there-evil arguments. Huh? This is healthy economic activity?

But even the advertisers that are selling something legitimate - how much is actually going to turn into profit? It seems to me that it is possible that Google could be at the top of a kind of "new economy pyramid scheme" in which a hundred thousand venture-funded "the next facebook" startups feed all their advertising money into Google and their ilk and then die out without ever coming close to making a profit for their investors.


Third, it seems to me there are fundamental problems with the way advertising is tracked. On a semi-regular basis, when I see an outrageous ad on Gmail (e.g. "The Law of Attraction really works" - New Age occult nonsense associated to The Secret), I click on it. Why? Because I know that every time I click on an ad like that, the advertisers have to pay Google a certain amount of money. I am obviously never, ever going to pay any money to a site like that - but I can actually express my disgust with them simply by clicking on their ad. Then they have to pay for my click, while I never have to even look at their content.

The distortion comes when they start reporting their numbers. They successfully attracted clicks by "targeted marketing" of New Age trash to a fire-breathing charismatic fundamentalist (or whatever I am :) ), but the click they attracted was actually an indication of how poorly the ad was targeted, rather than any kind of success.


I really do appreciate Google, honestly. They make good products, and their ads don't bother me. But I suspect that we haven't quite seen the full negative fruit of the story we've bought into about the "New Economy." If we want to make money, we need to deliver something that actually has substance.

Proverbs 28:22
A man with an evil eye hastens after riches,
And does not consider that poverty will come upon him.

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