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Pilate's soul hangs in the balance as he puts Jesus Christ on trial and declares the innocent one guilty. The question lingers... are you doing the same? - SERMON TRANSCRIPT - This morning I had the privilege to sit again in the “Discovering Christ” class, which is a class we have every week to study the person and work of Christ based on the Gospel of Mark. I was struck again as we began the cycle. We're looking at infinite majesty of the person of Christ. That's the purpose of the Gospel of Mark. It depicts Jesus in His remarkable person, His authority, declared to be the son of God at His baptism by a voice that came from heaven when heaven was torn apart and a dove came down and a voice said, "This is My Son whom I love; with Him, I'm well pleased." Then Jesus begins his ministry, teaching in a way that no one had ever heard before with authority, the ability to speak the truth of God in a powerful way, authoritative way- “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” Then as a demon possessed young man is there, to be able to instantly drive out the demon with a word. The demons were terrified of Jesus. He had no fear of them; He absolute authority over demons. Then there was every disease and sickness known to man. There was no disease or sickness He could not cure effortlessly, instantaneously, personally, effectively, every disease and sickness. We see His ability to control the wind and the waves when He was in the boat. A raging storm came down and the boat was filling with water. Jesus was asleep, then got up and stretched His hand over the wind and the waves and said, "Peace, be still." Instantly they obeyed His voice. “What kind of man is this? Even the wind in the waves obey him.” He revealed power over death as He raised Jairus's daughter from the dead. He said, "Talitha Cumi, little girl, I say to you, get up,” and her spirit returned to her and she got up. For Him, death and sleep were no different. It's just the same as waking a girl up from sleep. That's how powerful Jesus is over death, but even more, His authority over sin, His ability to declare to a sinner, your sins are forgiven and they are. This man that we've been learning about now in fourteen chapters now going into the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark is on trial before Pontius Pilate, on trial for His life, the only perfectly good man that's ever been. On trial for what? What did He do except love God with all of His heart, soul, mind and strength and love His neighbor perfectly as Himself and didn't break any of God's laws or man's laws ever. He's on trial before Pontius Pilate. Things are not, however, as they appear. If we had been transported back in time and we were there, we'd see this prisoner arrested on trial before the Roman procurator, on trial for his life. But the reality is much different. It was determined in the mind of God that Jesus should die for the sins of the world and that that would be the process whereby it would happen. It was a foregone conclusion. What's really going on in this account of Jesus before Pilot is that Pilot's on trial, actually. Pilot's on trial. In order to make that case and to make it then relevant to us, I'm going to... often I just stick with the words of Mark. But this morning I'm going to be reaching out to all four Gospels. I would say especially John 18:28-19:16 which probably puts the trial of Pilot himself more clearly than any of the other gospels. I'll be leaning on that, but also some things from Matthew. Whereas Pilot thought that he was evaluating and judging Jesus, the reality was that he was on trial and through him, all of us are, we all have a decision to make about Jesus because the Bible reveals that someday we're going to stand before his Judgment Seat. The only way we're going to survive that is if in this world, in this time now we have, come to personal faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord. Only that way will we survive judgment day, only that way. So here's Pilot judging, the only perfectly innocent man that has ever lived and by condemning Jesus to death, a man Pilot again and again asserts publicly that He is innocent. A man he may well have believed was supernatural and incarnation of sorts. We'll talk about that. He was actually destroying his conscience and condemning his own soul, he did it, we're told in the text, to please the crowd. Behind that we can say, he was trying to save his life and his job. But Jesus put it so plainly in Mark 8:36, "What would it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul?" I don't know if Pilate ever did repent of his sins and trust in Jesus as his Lord and Savior, I have no idea. But if he didn't, he'll spend all eternity wishing for this moment back. The real question in front of all of us, what about us? What about you? Not just that personal moment of repentance and faith in Jesus, but understanding really what this passage teaches us. There's so many lessons here. We're going to see how God orchestrated in providence the condemnation of Jesus before the Roman procurator, before any of these things came to be, that God moved providential wheels to give the Jews, the chief priests, the Sanhedrin power over Pilate, so he would do what they wanted him to do, though he didn't want to do it. We're going to walk through that and learn providence. Now overall, the purpose of this account, like any account in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is summed up in John's purpose statement in John 20:31, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and believing may have life in His name." So that's the purpose today. 1. The Charge Against the Silent Jesus: “King of the Jews” Let's walk through the trial. Let's see what happens in Mark's account, but then looking at the others as well. In the charge against Jesus... Jesus is arraigned before Pilate, the religious phase of the trial is over. The Jewish leaders had come to their decision. Look at verse 1, “Very early in the morning the chief priests with the elders, the teacher of the law and the whole Sanhedrin, reached a decision. They bound Jesus, led Him away and delivered Him over to Pilate.” They have condemned Jesus to death, but they can't kill him, as much as they would like to. The Romans took away the power of that local body to execute people. The Romans retain that right, so they needed Pilate's involvement. They deeply wanted to put Jesus to death. They wanted him killed. Now we notice in John's account the hypocrisy of these Jewish religious leaders. In John 18:28, "Then the Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness, the Jews did not enter the palace because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.” This is disgusting, religious hypocrisy. They maintained an outward appearance of spirituality and legality, but their whole purpose that morning was to murder an innocent man and not just any innocent man but to kill the glorious Son of God. But they're maintaining a certain pattern of religiosity so they can go through their rituals. Pilate asks Him this question, verse 2, "Are you the King of the Jews?" That's how it begins. This was the charge the Jews had figured would work with the Roman governor. They had tried to get him, as we know earlier in Mark's Gospel, on tax evasion, saying you don't need to pay taxes to Caesar, but Jesus openly asserted that they did. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God, the things that are God's." So that didn't work out, but this “King of the Jews” charge was weighty because it implied a threat to Roman interest in the area. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus’ enemies took another approach. In Luke 23:5, they insisted, "He stirs up the people all over Judea by his teaching. He started in Galilee and has come all the way here." That basically is a charge that He's a rabble rouser, He's an insurrectionist. Ironically, Barabbas, the very one they chose instead of Jesus, was openly an insurrectionist. So are you for or against insurrectionists? In Luke 23:19, "Barabbas had been thrown into prison for an insurrection in the city and for murder." Pilate zeroes in on this question, this charge, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus gives a very interesting answer. In verse 2, "You have said it," or, "Yes, it is as you say," there are different translations. In Matthew 27:11, "You have said it." What does that mean? It’s somewhat mysterious. Perhaps Jesus meant the words like this, “Yes, it is as you say, but it's not what you mean or not how you mean. Or, you have said it but you really don't understand it.” In John 18, he goes into it in more detail. In John 18:36-38, "'My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews, but now my kingdom is from another place.' 'You are a king then,' said Pilate. Jesus answered, 'You are right in saying that I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.' 'What is truth?' Pilate asked." That's a more in-depth conversation on Jesus's kingship. Jesus's kingdom is infinitely more powerful and more complex, more spiritual than Pilate could possibly imagine, but it's an entirely different thing than he was thinking when he asked, "Are you the King of the Jews?" So was He? Was Jesus King of the Jews? Answer: Absolutely, yes. As a matter of fact, that's the purpose of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. The first thing taught in the New Testament about Jesus is that He is the son of David, meaning King of the Jews. That's true, yes, He was King of the Jews, but not the way anyone thought, not the way His disciples thought, not the way anybody on earth thought. Yes, He's King of the Jews, but certainly not the way Pilate thought. Actually, Jesus is more than just King of the Jews. In Zechariah 9:10 it says, "He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth." So not just King of the Jews, but yes, King of the Jews. Was Jesus a threat? Was Jesus a threat to Pilate? Was Jesus a threat to Caesar? Was Jesus a threat to Rome? Answer: yes and no. Let's say no and yes. Jesus is no threat to lead an immediate political insurrection against Pontius Pilate and Judea or Caesar and the Roman Empire. But Jesus threatened Pilate and Caesar with eternal damnation. Jesus' kingdom is vastly more powerful than any earthly ruler could ever imagine. When Christ returns, He will set up a kingdom that will destroy all other kingdoms and will itself never be destroyed. This is the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2, it says, "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but will itself endure forever.” This is the meaning of the vision of a rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands. The rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold to pieces. Those represent empires. All empires come to an end at the Second Coming of Christ, and Jesus's kingdom established will reign forever and ever. The account is given in Revelation 19 of the Second Coming, "Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule him with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty and on his robe and on his thigh, he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords." "Jesus is no threat to lead an immediate political insurrection against Pontius Pilate and Judea or Caesar and the Roman Empire. But Jesus threatened Pilate and Caesar with eternal damnation." Is Jesus a threat? Absolutely. Just not the way the Pilate was thinking. Jesus responds in silence, in direct fulfillment of prophecy. Look at verses 3-5, the chief priests accused Him of many things. Again, Pilate asked him, "Aren't you going to answer? See how many things they're accusing you of." But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed. This is in direct fulfillment of course, of Isaiah 53:7, "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth." Why not? Why was Jesus silent? There's a horizontal and a vertical aspect of Jesus' silence. Horizontally, He's silent because the trial is completely corrupt and unjust, and there's nothing He can say that will change it, and He's very aware of that. There's no point in Him saying anything. As He says in Luke 22:67-68, "'If you are the Christ,' they said, 'tell us.' Jesus answered, 'If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I asked you a question, you would not answer.'" So He's openly saying, "What's the point?” Horizontally, there's no point in Him answering. Vertically, He must be silent because He's our sin bearer and there's nothing we can say in response to defend ourselves. We are guilty. We have broken God's laws and He has taken our sins on Himself and cannot reply to Almighty God, and so He must be silent, vertically. Pilate was amazed at the silence. He had never seen any prisoner behave like this man. As procurator with the power of life, death, he was used to seeing prisoners in many different states. Some might beg and plead for their lives, groveling on the ground. Some might be terrified, unable to speak because of terror, paralyzed. Some might be sullen or defiant or louder defiant. But Jesus had a supernatural calm to Him and a peace to Him. In the Gospel account, especially in John, there's a sense that He's in charge of the whole process. He has no fear at all. “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” Pilot's never seen a man like this before. Never. Proverbs 16:32, "Better a patient man than a warrior. A man who controls his temper than one who takes a city." Jesus was in absolute control of Himself, of His emotions, of His reactions at every moment. He was infinitely strong. 2. Pontius Pilate on Trial It really is Pontius Pilate on trial. Look at verses 6-15, “That was the custom at the feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. The crowd came up and asked Pilot to do for them what he usually did. ‘Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews,’ asked Pilot, knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilot release Barabbas instead. ‘What shall I do then with the one you call King of the Jews,’ Pilot asked them. ‘Crucify him,’ they answered. ‘Why? What crime has he committed,’ asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, ‘Crucify him!’ Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilot released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged and handed him over to be crucified.” Pilot's on trial here, though he doesn't know it. As we look at John's account, we can see that Pilot again and again and again tries to release Jesus. It's his top priority it seems, below self-interest. He wants to release Jesus, he wants to set him free. Pilot knows that Jesus is innocent. In our text he says he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him. Pilot has undoubtedly heard about Jesus's miracles and the power that surrounded His ministry. Thirdly, Greeks and Romans frequently believed that the gods and goddesses took on human bodies and mucked around in human life and did human things and got into human affairs, and they believed this. There's biblical support of this conception. In the book of Acts, in Acts 14:11-12 when Paul and Barnabas were ministering in Lystra and did a healing miracle, it says, "When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in Lyconian language, 'The Gods have come down to us in human form.'" That's it right there. Barnabas, they called Zeus, and Paul, they called Hermes. They tried to offer sacrifices to them. This idea of gods taking on human bodies was well established in Greek and Roman culture. Fourthly, we have Pilate's wife who had a dream about Jesus and sends him a message during the trial about the dream, and we'll get back to that in a moment. John's Gospel, therefore, makes it plain that Pontius Pilate was afraid of Jesus. Most of the depictions of the trial do not show this aspect of Pilate, but he was afraid of Jesus. In John 19:7-9, “The Jews insisted, ‘We have a law, and according to that law, he must die because he claimed to be the Son of God.’ When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid and he went back inside the palace. ‘Where do you come from,’ he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer.” What do you think was in his mind when he asked him that question? Are you a God? That's what he's asking. But however afraid he was of Jesus, he was even more afraid of what the Jews would do to him if he didn't do what they wanted. Now to get this background, we have to turn to a Jewish historian named Josephus, who tells us what the early stages of Pontius Pilate's rule was like in Judea. It was bad. Josephus was a Jewish historian who lived shortly after Jesus, and he gives us insights. Pilate ruled the Roman province of Judea from 26-36 AD. Once he was established in his position, he quickly offended the Jews multiple times by his high-handed and arrogant treatment of the Jewish people. Right away he marches into Jerusalem and sets up the Roman Eagles in the temple itself. The Roman Eagles were looked on by the Romans and therefore by the Jews as idols, representatives of Caesar's power. For him to put them physically in the temple was incredibly offensive to the Jews. They assembled and demanded that he remove the Eagles. Pilate refused and threatened the Jewish mob with slaughter if they didn't disperse. Undaunted, the Jews bared their necks and said, "Go ahead and kill us. We're not leaving." So Pilate backed down, losing face and authority with them. Soon after that, he offended the Jews again with his handling of a public aqueduct conflict. Again, the Jews assembled a protest. Pilot had the crowd infiltrated with plain clothes Romans, bearing swords. When the Jews refused to disperse again, Pilot gave the signal and the soldiers slaughtered many of the Jews. Jesus talks about this, how Pilot had mingled their blood with their sacrifices. He killed a lot of Jews that day. But the Emperor Tiberius was so angry at Pilot for his mismanagement because if he's stirring up trouble, Caesar will have to send more troops to the region. This is key. He was under orders to keep things quiet and orderly and get along with the Jews. These two things happened before Jesus's trial. Do you not see the hand of God in all this? He's giving to the Jewish Sanhedrin, the high priests, the chief priests, power over Pilot and they traded it in, in John's Gospel. No doubt about it. It says in John 19:12, "From then on Pilot tried to set Jesus free." You see that statement? He wants to set Jesus free, but the Jews kept shouting, "If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar's. Anyone who claims to be a king, opposes Caesar." They're clearly threatening to go to Tiberius, to go over his head. There's no doubt about it. Now, as I said, Pilot's conviction is that Jesus was completely innocent. He knew it was out of envy that the chief priest had handed Jesus over to him. Three times in John's Gospel, he declares publicly that Jesus was innocent of any charge at all. John 18:38, "I find no fault in him." John 19:4, "Look, I'm bringing you out to let you know I find no fault in him." And then verse 6, "You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against." That's three times a public assertion of Jesus's innocence. Set him free, you’re in charge. Set him free if he's innocent. This whole conviction is even more greatly strengthened by his wife's dream. Matthew 27:19, "While Pilot was sitting on the judge's seat, his wife sent him this message. 'Don't have anything to do with that innocent man.'" Innocent man. "For I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him." What effect do you think that message would've had on Pilot in the middle of this? In John's account, he goes out to the Jews and back to Jesus. He goes out. He's going back and forth. He doesn't know what to do. He's like a trapped animal. All of this was orchestrated by God. Why? Because He wanted to give His only-begotten son, in your place, as an atonement for your sins to bring you to heaven. That's why, and Jesus was equally determined to die for you and me. That's why all this was happening. Now he tries the clever attempt. One of the things he tries is, "Oh wait, yeah, it's the feast. I can release a prisoner. I got an idea. Let's do that.” It was the custom at the feast to release a prisoner whom the people had requested. A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists, who had committed murder in the uprising. The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did. Pilate brings it up in John's Gospel. They both remember this custom. "Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews," asked Pilate, knowing it was out of envy the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. However, this clever attempt to get out of this whole thing was thwarted by the Jewish leaders. In verse 11, the chief priest stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead. I don't know how they did that, but they were running the show here. They had infiltrated the crowd. They had whispered, they'd called in IOUs, maybe bribed some people, got some people to shout things out for Barabbas and then shout, "Crucify!" for Jesus. They manipulate the crowd into a maniacal frenzy. "What shall I do then with the one you call King of the Jews," Pilate asked them. "Crucify him!" they shouted. "Why? What crime has he committed? He's innocent." But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify him!” In Matthew's account, "Pilate saw he was getting nowhere, but instead an uproar was starting." It's a frenzy. Satan must've been stirring this whole thing on as well. It was Satan that was in Judas Iscariot to orchestrate this whole thing. Satan's fanning this whole thing into a flame because he was a murderer and he hates the Son of God and wants him killed. The sinlessness of Jesus is clearly established. The roots of the chief priests and elders, their wicked hatred for Jesus was envy, greed, and power. The crowd vacillating just a week before shouting, "Hosanna, Hosanna!" Now they're yelling, "Crucify, crucify!" This is the culmination of Jesus's rejection by His own people. He's been officially rejected by the chief priests and the Sanhedrin. He's officially condemned to death, but now the people are shouting for His death. "He came to his own and his own did not receive him." [John 1:11]. In Matthew 27, this stunning statement is made, "When Pilot saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. 'I'm innocent of this man's blood,' he said. 'It's your responsibility.' And all the people answered, 'Let his blood be on us and on our children.’" 3. Jesus’ Blood on the Jewish Nation (Matthew’s Gospel) Wow, what a statement. What does that mean? “Let his blood be on us,” mean we'll take responsibility. It's a common Jewish expression. Like in Leviticus 20:9, "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father and mother and his blood will be on his own head." In other words, he's responsible for what's coming to him. That's their way of saying, "We will take responsibility, let his blood be on us and on our children." This is the very thing that Jesus said would happen in Matthew 23, after the seven-fold woes. "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees." After all that He says, "'Therefore, I'm sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you'll kill and crucify. Others, you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town and so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you the truth, all this will come down on this generation.’" They are going to be responsible for it all. They're willing to take responsibility for the death of Jesus. Later they try to shirk this responsibility. In Acts 5, they said to the apostles, "You filled Jerusalem with your teaching and to determine to make us guilty of this man's blood." Well, you are, you are. So that's the first sense, that's the darkest sense. But there's another sense of “Let his blood be on us and on our children,” a much better sense. Because it is only by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross that our sins are forgiven, that our sins are forgiven. At present through unbelief, the blood of Jesus is upon them and their children for condemnation and for guilt, but if any individual Jewish person repents of his or her sins and trusts in Christ, His blood will be on them to cleanse them from all their sins, just as it's on us for salvation and cleansing. For God delivered Jesus over as a propitiation, a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood. It is by the blood of Jesus, by the shedding of blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. I believe that at the end of history, there'll be a massive turning of ethnic Jews physically descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to faith in Jesus, and His blood will be on Abraham's children for salvation. As it says in Romans 11, "And so all Israel be saved, as it is written. The deliverer will come from Zion; he'll turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.” "For God delivered Jesus over as a propitiation, a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood. It is by the blood of Jesus, by the shedding of blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins." IV. The Final Verdict The final verdict is given by Pilot. In verse 15, "Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilot released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged and handed them over to be crucified." Pilot could not evade responsibility. He washes his hands, but he's responsible for what he did. He rendered a verdict, guilty, death on a cross, but it violated his conscience. He knew he wasn't guilty. Was it really Pilot who handed Jesus over to be crucified? It was at the human level, but as I've already said, Romans 8:32, "He who did not spare His own son but delivered Him up for us all. How will He not also along with Him, graciously give us all things?" Interesting, at the moment that He was delivered over to be crucified, Barabbas was set free. That's marvelous, isn't it? It's an interesting picture. The guilty set free, the innocent dies. This is a picture of substitutionary atonement. As 1 Peter 3:18 says, "For Christ died for sins once for all the righteous, for the unrighteous to bring you to God." Barabbas represents a disgusting, vile murderous sinner who's set free from condemnation death by Jesus. I'm not saying Barabbas is in heaven. I hope so. Wouldn't it be great to meet him and say, "Generations have been talking about you, now here you are." But we don't know. We have no knowledge, but I'm just saying he's a picture of a guilty person set free and not having to pay the penalty that we deserve. Concerning the flogging, it was a hideous punishment. Picture a rod of wood and long leather straps with bits of bone and metal at the end, like a whip, only enhanced. The straps would wrap around the victim's body and then rip flesh off that victim's back. It was a hideous torture. If done enough, it would be lethal. It was done to weaken the victim before the crucifixion, so he ordered that it be done. Why? He was innocent. In John's Gospel, it was used as one of the steps that he tried to appease the people, but it didn't work. Here it is written at the end. It's beautiful because in Isaiah 53:5 it says, "He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our inequities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him. And by his wounds, sometimes translated stripes, we are healed.” As 1 Peter 2:24 says, "He himself bore our sins in His body on the tree that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed.” V. Applications First of all, the judgment theme. You've heard the evidence, you have the information. You're sitting, in some sense, in judgment on Jesus. You're deciding about Jesus. God gives you that time to do that. Make a right judgment. Evaluate Him properly. Look at the evidence. I began the sermon with the marvels of the person of Jesus as depicted in the Gospel of Mark. Make a right judgment about Jesus and trust in Him for the forgiveness of your sins and the salvation of your soul. Don't do what Pilate did. Make a right judgment about Jesus. Secondly, understand what's going on here. I've said it two or three times, I'll say it one final time. This account is evidence of God's sovereign control over human history, His orchestration of events, His maneuvering of people and positioning of people because He's sovereign over everything that happens on earth. What He was doing was giving the Jews power over Pontius Pilate so that he would condemn an innocent man to death. What God's intention was to give Jesus as a Savior for your sin. Again here, Romans 8:32, "He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also along with Him graciously give us all things?" What is the “all things”? I've been thinking about different pastoral circumstances that I'm walking through right now with different people in the church. It could be medical, it could be relational, it could be a sin problem, it could be financial. There's all kinds of things going on all the time in the life of the church. I don't know what's happening in all your lives.The things that you're yearning for are significant, they’re important. Romans 8:32 doesn't minimize. It's just saying, "With God already having given his only-begotten Son, everything else in the universe is lesser than that to Him. He would not withhold from you anything that would further His purpose in your life, which is to save your soul, use you in this world, and then take you to heaven.” Understand that's what's going on in this trial here. Thirdly, rejoice in God's sovereignty over wicked, unjust human governments. As we go through a political process in this nation, and we wonder who's going to get elected president or lesser roles, and not just our country, but around the world, we can see evidence of this kind of selfishness and weakness and caving into the crowd and injustice. Isn't it wonderful to know that God is sovereign over that whole thing and rules actively over it for His own purposes, for His own glory, and for the good of His people? Fourth, look at the fickleness of the crowd here. "Hosanna," one week, a week later, “Crucify," and distrust your own loyalty to Jesus. Say, "Prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord. Take and seal it. Seal it for thy courts above. Help me not to be fickle and weak and vacillating in my love for Jesus." Finally, it's time now to get our hearts ready for the Lord's Supper. I'm going to close the sermon time and prayer ,and we're going to transition to the Lord's Supper. Father, we thank you for the word of God. We thank you for its power. We thank you for this account of the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate. Now as we give our attention to the Lord's Supper, we pray that you would be with us in this time. In Jesus' name, Amen.

As part of the importer series, Yi Xin Ong, Managing Partner of KOT Selections in Singapore, provides an international perspective. From Singapore's 2-3,000 active importers for the small island to the impact of international media, Yi Xin describes how KOT navigates the importing, distributing, and retailing of its portfolio of winegrowers.  Detailed Show Notes: Background Founded KOT in 2011 - they couldn't get the wines they were buying in Singapore, three partnersWork w/ 57 winegrowers, mainly in Europe, 6 in the USSingapore wine market (~6M population, ~20% Muslim - don't drink)No 3-tier system, no gov't monopolyIt is a pretty open market, like the UKMany players are vertically integrated - import, distribute, retail - with lots of captive distributors and retailersVery low barriers to entry - founded KOT in 2 months for S$200 to get licensing and paperworkHorizontally spread - ~2-3,000 active importers (in 2011, ~700 importers, mainly focused on Australia/NZ with either big brands or high-scoring wines)Two casinos / integrated resorts provided the spark for other wines (e.g., Marina Bay Sands opened in 2011)Generally, 1-1.5 generations behind the UK and US wine marketsTook inspiration from other importers - Kermit Lynch (CA), Louis / Dressner (NY), Yapp Brothers (UK Rhone Specialists) - importing wines others were notYapp - focused on winegrowersDressner - spent a lot of wine visiting growers, good storytellingKermit Lynch - newsletters (1970s) were key to storytelling for the wine growersStorytelling is critical to standing out in a crowded marketSourcing strategy - most wineries they bought from personally (90%) were not represented in SingaporeInformal rule - 5 visits to winegrowers between the three partners before they importBroad portfolios - easier to serve clients and fulfill their needsFocused portfolios - clearer story and differentiationOptimal portfolio size - ~50-70 to give each winegrower ~1 week/year of focusKOT differentiationMarket knowledgeLinks to trade, client baseTrust of the people (have only signed one contract, mainly handshake deals, exclusive relationships) -> been burnt occasionally with generational changeBuild brands in Singapore - a very organic approachGet the right people to taste them - professionals, and influencers / Key Opinion Leaders (“KOL”)Host tastings every year, even for highly allocated wines (e.g., Pierre Gonon)KOLs can drive demandInt'l media have a strong influence - English is the primary languageMore important than local mediaOnly the top few have an impact - The Wine Advocate (Robert Parker), Jancis Robinson (less emphasis on scores, more on editorial content)Robert Parker had a big impact on the local market; a Singaporean bought the company100-point scores can drive sales spikesConsumer data/reviews can start trends, increasingly importantVivino, Wine-Searcher, CellarTracker, Instagram75% wholesale, 25% direct-to-consumer sales (mainly e-commerce)Private clients saw KOT through the pandemicTrade is vital for tourist demandSingaporean wine trendsNew regions increasing, Japanese and Chinese winesValue increasing - ~$20-30 retail, ~$5-10 FOBThe low/no alcohol trend is not a thing yetRose has never been a trend Get access to library episodes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you long for greater peace, unity, and harmony in your family relationships? Join me as I have a conversation with Scott LaPierre as we explore the connection between a healthy vertical relationship with Christ and healthy horizontal relationships in our family. Ultimate family unity stems from grounding ourselves vertically in Jesus first. Scott LaPierre is the teaching pastor of Woodland Christian Church in Woodland, WA, an author, and conference speaker. He holds an MA in Biblical Studies from Liberty University, he is a former schoolteacher and Army officer, and he and his wife Katie have ten children and they are passionate homeschooling advocates. Connect with our guest:  scottlapierre.org facebook.com/ScottLaPierreMinistries youtube.com/c/ScottLaPierre amazon.com/Scott-LaPierre/e/B01JT920EQ Resources from this episode: Your Marriage God's Way – https://amzn.to/3GYecUY  Bible Verse Posters: Words of Jesus from the Gospel of John (use code PODCAST for 20% off!) – christianfamilyreformation.com/product/bible-verse-posters-words-of-jesus-from-the-gospel-of-john  Follow and listen on your favorite platforms: Website: FamilyDiscipleshipPodcast.net Facebook: facebook.com/familydiscipleshippodcast Instagram: instagram.com/family.discipleship.podcast Threads: threads.com/family.discipleship.podcast YouTube: youtube.com/@familydiscipleshippodcast LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/family-discipleship-podcast Patreon: patreon.com/FamilyDiscipleshipPodcast SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/familydiscipleshippodcast And your favorite podcast platform! The Family Discipleship Podcast is published every week, Lord-willing, by Christian Horstmann. Feel free to also visit my other websites, ChristianFamilyReformation.com and FamiliesForFreedom.info. 

TW babe the audio sucks I'm working on it

No matter where you are in your career, we hope you are always seeking to learn something new, whether it's sharpening your existing skillset, meeting with other professionals, or taking on an entirely new challenge. Join us for this episode when we talk about honing your PR skills in any season of your professional life.   Transcript Michelle Kane (00:01): Thank you for joining us for another episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves like me, Michelle Kane, with VoiceMatters, and my wonderful co-host Karen Swim with Solo PR Pro. Hi, Karen. How's it going? Karen Swim, APR (00:17): Hi, Michelle. It's going really well. How good doing this week? Michelle Kane (00:21): Hey, can't complain. Can't complain. Things are moving along, so it's good. Even during the sleepy months of summer, things are popping, so I can't complain. , Karen Swim, APR (00:33): Definitely this summer has been anything but sleepy, let me tell you. . Michelle Kane (00:38): For sure. For sure. And you know, what we want to talk about today is something that sometimes you rely on those sleepy moments to catch up on, which is professional development. How as busy solos do we make the time to keep our tools sharpened? So I'm just going to touch on some points of things that we've been talking about as far as in what areas should you be seeking to learn more? Just learn more about, it may not be something that you practice on your own, but to just have knowledge of it so we can best serve our clients. Karen Swim, APR (01:16): Yeah. I always like to think of professional development in two buckets. One as personal satisfaction, you know, to sharpen skills that I really enjoy or that I just really have a desire to get better at. And then two, to either acquire or improve skillset where it's going to matter most to the clients that I serve. And so I think that's really important because the way that you can protect your ability to develop business and to develop higher value business is by understanding what are clients searching for? What do they need? Are there any gaps? And what types of skills are they looking for? Easy way to do that is to read job descriptions and see what people are putting out there, see what people are talking about, and that'll give you a clue as to what really is in demand. Michelle Kane (02:09): Yeah, that's so true. So true. And one of the things we've been thinking about as public relations becomes a more integrated practice, you know, you'll hear it the phrase “integrated marketing and PR.” I mean, that's how I present myself, that's how I came up actually. But even if you don't practice the marketing end - knowing about it, the basics, what's new out there right now, you know, what isn't so new, everything comes around again, or as I always preach to my clients, look, we went from fax blasts to email . It's like, it's nothing necessarily new, but you should be familiar with some of the tools and just the basic principles, and there are plenty of resources out there. You don't have to kill yourself to get there. Karen Swim, APR (03:07): For sure. I absolutely agree. I was speaking with a PR pro last week that had a good reminder because this professional had said, with all of the social media channels that have popped up since, you know, Twitter has been going through whatever it's been going through , there has been a fatigue among all of us, and you just are sick of it. Like you're over it. We join all these things because we're communications professionals, but they had joined Threads immediately and started to play around with it, tested and understand it, and shortly thereafter, a client had sought their counsel on Threads and they were like, I'm so glad that I had actually been there, had gotten the lay of the land and could actually give wise council. So it's things like that, it's being ahead of your clients, right? And, you know, looking ahead to what you believe, because we're smart people. We have the ability to envision what's going to come and what trends we expect to see. Let that be a factor in what skills you decide to develop. You may decide that there are some skill sets that are worthy of taking certification courses. So maybe it's, you know, a series of workshops over the rest of the summer to get certified in something. Maybe it's something that you want to go and take a class at a, you know, local college, or maybe it's a conference that you want to go to that is going to help you to develop those skill sets, but, you know, be strategic about what you're developing, because I know that many of us love to learn things, and that's great, but we all also had a finite amount of time. So you want to be wise in developing things that are really going to enrich your personal satisfaction in your career, but also increase your value to your clients. Michelle Kane (05:09): Yeah, that is so true. And also because I know we've all had this happen at least one time across the span of our careers, when that new shiny thing comes out, and there's the client that's gung-ho and just wants, oh, I saw all about this. I want to be in on the shiny thing now. And Karen Swim, APR (05:25): Yeah. Michelle Kane (05:26): You know, not that it's the end of the world if you're caught off guard, but it's nice to be able to say, well, , Karen Swim, APR (05:32): Absolutely. That's the best feeling in the world. Yeah. And I celebrate that particular professional because I love when that happens. But that's who we are as solo PR pros. And, let's not forget, one of the bits of our job is to be able to acquire new skill sets and move into new directions quickly. In other words, we're very agile. And when you're in a traditional type setting, you really don't have the ability to do that. You can't just go off and learn whatever you want and decide to incorporate new things into what you do because you don't have the time. And then it's not like you can go change departments on your own. You can't do that. You have to go through channels. And so I love that about us, is that we can quickly respond to market changes. We see something coming and we can hop on it and learn it. Of course, you know, we can't take about, talk about professional development today without addressing AI. Michelle Kane (06:32): Right. Speaking of things to keep track of. And, the essence of that is knowing how to use it, right? Finding out what prompts can serve you well, not just to help you work smarter. Because, and, and I know we've talked about this plenty of times before where it's, at first it felt like cheating, but when you realize that the quality of the output still needs you, it's a huge, huge help. So how can that help you think of new ideas help refine your proposal, help refine your, your strategies, your plants, just so you're not starting from scratch every time? Karen Swim, APR (07:15): Yeah. You can use AI to do any number of things, but here's where your value really begins to increase, as well as you learn to use AI for not just the simple, not just for ideation, not just for coming up with maybe some brainstorming headlines or brainstorming content. You start to understand how it works.  And then you begin to understand how to counsel your clients in incorporating AI. Then you're ahead of the game when clients are like, well, can't we just have AI write our blog posts? And then you can counsel them on the strategic way to incorporate AI and how yes, you can have AI be like a little writer's assistant in developing content. So how much of human time and how they can streamline? So put yourself in the position of really learning this tool, understanding what it can and cannot do, understanding the limitations, understanding how to counsel clients through the databases that AI is pulling from the things that they need to check for how they can you, you know, refine AI to really deliver content in their brand voice and aligned with their brand messaging. So the better you get at it, now you're a strategic counselor in that area too, and you don't have clients coming to you saying, well, can't we just use AI to do PR? Or can't we just use AI to do this? And it's like, yes, you can absolutely use AI as a tool in all of these situations. Here's the best way to do that. And then got them through that, and then bring them into the world. If you were using AI in smart and strategic ways, they're share that with clients. Like, here's what we did. I think that transparency is really important. Michelle Kane (09:08): Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I totally appreciate a lot of the reticence against it, but it's here. So you definitely want to be the PR pro who knows about it and knows how to use it, even just a little bit, get your feet wet. Karen Swim, APR (09:27): Here is the true reality. We do talk, we have this concern about AI taking away jobs or clients prematurely believing that AI technology can replace a human being. This is not new in the history of mankind. Humanity has evolved. Humanity has developed so many things technologically. So with every new tool there came a new way to do things. Some jobs have gone away. We no longer have certain jobs. We no longer call 411 for information to get someone's phone number. We hit Google when we're looking for a number. We don't even use a phone book. So operators don't exist anymore. And if you watch old movies, you know that there used to be operators that actually had to connect actual calls. They sticking those things into the plugs and connecting one call. We don't need that anymore. There's something that no longer exists, but with jobs going away, new jobs enter the marketplace. And so it's clear that it's up to us as PR pros to upskill ourselves. Companies need to do this with their workers and present opportunities to upskill them as well and prepare them for future work. But for us, that's our job. And so, not just learn AI a little bit, get good at it, learn ai, learn what you can do with it, push it, you know, check it, you know, you can't break it, but you can really learn a lot. And I would say become really astute. Like I am gobbling up courses, workshops, every information, every time somebody releases prompts, I'm like, okay, that's great. Let me try that. Lemme refine that because I don't want to be left behind. Here's the other area of AI though, that doesn't get talked about a lot. Learn about the ethical consideration so that you are able to, with confidence, guide your clients in its use. There are some things that I'm seeing that are frightening, and I feel that communicators and professionals need to advocate against those types of uses and we need to stand up for perfect example is what's happening in Hollywood now with studios wanting Yeah. The forever rights to someone's image. This hits intellectual property issues, copyright issues and just power, you know, the power of, you're taking away the power of people to earn a living. So I think there are so many things in this area that if, if this is an area of passion for you, ethics is one of my passions. Become well-versed and what's happening in this, in this area of technology. And you can, again, use this in your client work or in your personal branding work. Michelle Kane (12:39): That's so true. So true. It's here, so get good at it. Do yourself a favor. It's kind of fun. I know I'm weird, but whatever. Karen Swim, APR (12:49): I mean, here are some other things that you might not be thinking about. Maybe you are bilingual or trilingual and maybe your language skillset sets have fallen by the wayside. Practice your non-native language because Michelle Kane (13:04): Oh, I like it. Karen Swim, APR (13:05): Especially if you're thinking about moving into different markets. And you know, one of the things that we can do when there's economic turbulence in a region is that we can just deliver business in other regions. Michelle Kane (13:17): Yeah, that's true. Karen Swim, APR (13:18): Maybe you serve a local market, but maybe now you're going out into a different demographic. Maybe you're only US. And are there opportunities that, for example, in other countries that you're missing out on. So, your language skills could be another professional development thing that you do that allows you to now open up and grow your business in a different area. Michelle Kane (13:40): That's a great idea. And another thing that I know we've talked about, but it doesn't come to mind right away when you think professional development, is that we are all business owners, so brushing up on our business owner skills, spend time with other entrepreneurs. I have to tell you, our local chamber recently had a forum where it was four founders, business owners, and they just shared their story. And three out of the four, I was nodding my head thining, oh my gosh, you two really, you know, like, oh, we started out and it was dodgy and well, this, that and the other. We weren't sure, but we learned and we did, and blah, blah, blah. Try and seek out those kinds of forums. I'm sure there are Ted Talks or things online, or if you want to hear this one hit up, indianvalleychamber.com, it's on their YouTube page. It was people from totally different industries, but they all had the same experience when they were starting. And also talking about kind of like how it started, how it's going. Spend time with other business owners and learn from each other. That's where, you know, sometimes we silo ourselves in our PR and marketing worlds. And of course we have to keep up with our industry, but spending more time, you know, what's the word? Horizontally across different spheres of professions is going to help you as well. Karen Swim, APR (15:07): That really excites me, Michelle, because you're right, business acumen is another skill that is worth developing. You know, I, like you, I also try to put myself in the room with people that are further along that are smarter than me always about business and really looking at, you know, my financial management of my business and, you know, really seeking to improve, like really starting to look more closely at like profitability, getting better at me, you know, how I measure success and getting better at managing and being a CEO. Those are skillsets. That's professional development as well. And also the soft skills of business. You know, yes, we're all communicators, but guess what? Learning, upping your speaking game, becoming a better public speaker, becoming a better writer. These are things that I know that we do, but we are, we should always be learning. We should always be growing and developing. None of us will ever reach perfection. So there's always room to go to grow. So don't forget about the things that you might be taking for granted. I know that we're great writers. I know that we're great communicators, but it doesn't mean that we can't get better. Michelle Kane (16:25): Yeah. And I know for me, I have to tell myself this, you know, ask someone out to lunch. If it's someone that you know is doing something in business that you really admire or you think you might be able to learn from, everyone's got to eat. Even though, no lie, I'm usually doing the desk picnic, which isn't the best thing in the world. . Karen Swim, APR (16:47): I love just meeting with people. And you know, sometimes it's been by Zoom, but I will tell you in was that last month, I'm getting my months mixed up, but at some point I got to talk to a bunch of solo PR pros in a single month. Michelle Kane (17:03): Yes. I remember that. Karen Swim, APR (17:05): It was amazing. I was so inspired. I was also very tired because I had some other stuff going on and then I got really behind in work. But I was so inspired by everyone that I spoke with and it really gave me motivation as well. I was there to listen and to encourage, but I got as much as I gave and may and I would say even more. And so don't discount getting together even with another solo. And if you live far apart, do it over Zoom. I am going to try and organize some Zoom network meetings in the fall. I'm going to need August to recover have a little summer downtime. Plus we're working on some new programs for Solo. But yeah, talk to people. It's, you would be surprised at what a boost it is because I think in this post-Covid era and whatever times we're living in right now, it's easy to forget that we've hit a little bit of a comfort level and we're in a groove. And you may be going back to in-person conferences, but we're saying even on a smaller scale, just grabbing somebody and saying, you know, let's have coffee over Zoom, or Let's meet for coffee. Let's meet for lunch. Let's take a walk together and chat. Michelle Kane (18:28): Yeah. I think that's so important. Well, we hope we've inspired you today. Tickled your brain a little bit. Got you thinking about new and different ways that you can work on your professional development. And if you do value this, please share it around, share it on your socials. Hit us up with your comments at soloprpro.com. And until next time, thank you for listening to That Solo Life.  

Our reading today is on fasting. So, naturally we talk about aliens. Bring bong, bring Bible! 

Will and Jordan answer customer questions about the K-factor for a flow meter, master repair kits, mounting an actuator horizontally, how much supply pressure a valve needs from an air compressor, and choked flow. Resources mentioned: What Causes Choked Flow? Back Pressure Regulator with Outside Supply Flow Meters New Master Repair Kit Codes

Not sure if its the all the Bible verses or the weed. But, aliens bruh.... Also, we got our main man, Jesus the Christ, healing people left and right. Come, BRING BONG! Read the Gospels horizontally with us. 

Today, we'll talk about the big question - should you start with a focused niche? There are pros and cons to the approach, but the perceived cons - "what if I get tired of the niche in a few years?" , "what if the niche doesn't lead to a bigger market?" , "isn't a niche just hiding from the bigger problem I want to solve?" have gotten louder lately. So, we'll address them. We'll go over what a good niche looks like, how to get one, and how to grow. Podcast Insider Sign UpTackleboxKurt Vonnegut Shape of StoriesSlice Podcast - How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers1:00 Kurt Vonnegut - The Shape of Stories2:38 The Niche Question4:15 The Jiro Problem5:20 Act 1 - A Chef's Startup7:48 Smooth Jazz8:15 Act 2 - What's a Niche For? 8:44 A Niche is a Shortcut to Trust11:49 A Niche to Seed Future Growth13:40 What a Good Niche Looks Like14:25 The Cook By Smelling Niche16:38 Act 3 - How to Grow From a Niche17:29 Grow Vertically or Horizontally?19:20 Grow through Influential Customers20:00 Spice Smelling Niche21:14 Act 4 - The Real Villain, and the Real Hero22:11 Trust in Future You  

Rob Biederman of Asymmetric joins Nate to discuss The Surprising Challenge of Launching a Venture Fund, Analyzing AI Horizontally Versus Vertically, and Why Most Companies Are Overstaffed. In this episode, we cover: The difference between a Founder VC and a Non-Founder VC What are the areas that are getting the team excited Vertical vs Horizontal Solutions Building in Use Cases that expand Customer Value with Minimal Cost How to Evaluate Horizontal Business Software Companies Overstaffing and Underinvestment Guest Links: LinkedIn Twitter Asymmetric

We continue with the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew. Yet somehow we still talk about the abuse of power in the church, aliens and the government using false flags to set up civilization off planet. Bring your Bong, bring your Bible.

OH GOD! We've arrived at the JC's first public sermon in our little dog and pony show right here. Only found in Matthew, It's the sermon on the mount! 

We continue in Mark and Luke today. The stories between the Gospels start to deviated from each other more and more from this point on. But, that won't keep us from a good time. PRAISE HIS NAME. Bring Bong, Bring Bible.

Listen as Leif tries to convince Geoff that Jesus actually lived! We are reading the Gospels horizontally BITCHES!

Sixteen questions create this week's edition of the Penscast Mailbag. Frequent contributors, Brenden and Brian, return this week to ask a wide array of hockey and non-hockey-related questions. How does the dysfunction in Toronto affect Fenway Sports Group's decision-making for a new general manager now with Kyle Dubas relieved of his duties? Would you entertain a specific Connor Hellebuyck trade? Which Canadian team will break the 30-year curse of a Canadian market hoisting Lord Stanley's Cup? And finally, perhaps most importantly, which way do you eat corn on the cob? Horizontally, almost like a typewriter action, or do you somehow defy physics and human nature to eat it vertically? All of these topics and more are discussed on this week's show! *** Be sure to follow the Skating Penguin Network on Twitter, @PenguinsFFSN, to stay up-to-date with our latest podcast episodes, new content, and more. Follow Fans First Sports Network on Twitter, @FansFirstSN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When most people read the Gospels, they go Matthew, Mark, Luke then John. Reading the books separately making it hard to see where they differ. When you place them side by side or

The Cross goes both ways. Horizontal, and Vertical. When we come to the LORD, and seek forgiveness, He makes us right with Him (vertical). Then, as we see in the model prayer of Matthew 6, we are told to"Forgive [us] as we forgive those who sin against us". We are called to FORGIVE one another, just as Christ has forgiven us! (Horizontally)! To chat about all things forgiveness, we are hanging out with our sister in the LORD, Laura Osnes. Laura is an actress,  singer/songwriter, wife, dog mama, mentor, and an incredible friend. Laura has been on a refining fire of a journey the past couple of years. Over the next few minutes as she shares her story, I pray you leave encouraged that you are not alone, and that forgiveness is a beautiful, and necessary component to prayer, and FREEDOM in Christ. In this episode we chat about... -How Laura got to Tennessee -How fires reveal idols & can draw you back to your first love -How to grieve as a season comes to a close -How to honor others well through conflict -Why we should be quick to repent & draw near to the LORD rather than pointing blame elsewhere. -What to do when the voices of the world are loud -How the unknown of a new season can lead you into the promise Land -How to acknowledge the LORD when you're in the process of forgiving -The importance of forgiving yourself I am so grateful for Laura's vulnerability and courage to share her story. I pray this time together was refreshing, convicting, and uplifting! Forgiveness is a journey, and I'm so grateful we're on it together. love you! -GB PRE-ORDER, "HI GOD, IT'S ME"!!!Has this episode, or any of our conversations here on Faith & Friends impacted you? Please leave us a 5 star review! We would love to hear from you! Instagram YoutubeWebsite

An age old argument amongst us is which is the right way to cut toast? Are you triangle, horizontal or across? Or do you just eat it whole? Henry McKean, our toast correspondent, took on this massive task to uncover the truth...

An age old argument amongst us is which is the right way to cut toast? Are you triangle, horizontal or across? Or do you just eat it whole? Henry McKean, our toast correspondent, took on this massive task to uncover the truth...

GFA391. This week we got a really cool one with Nicholas Leconte who is a seller on Amazon. He's doing amazing growing his Amazon business all around the world while traveling. Let's tune in. For full show notes, check out GlobalFromAsia.com/horizontal-expansion/. The post Horizontally Grow Your Ecomm Biz Case Study (globally) [EU, AU, UAE, & More] with Nicholas Leconte appeared first on Global From Asia.

This week we got a really cool one with Nicholas Leconte who is a seller on Amazon. He's doing amazing growing his Amazon business all around the world while traveling. Let's tune in. For full show notes, check out GlobalFromAsia.com/horizontal-expansion/. The post GFATV 391 Horizontally Grow Your Ecomm Biz Case Study (globally) [EU, AU, UAE, & More] with Nicholas Leconte appeared first on Global From Asia.

In this interview with Dr. James Renihan we discuss the meaning of reading the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith "sideways".

Witnessing growing faith and love should result in exultation to God and exultation to one another about God.

We did the thing that most podcasts don't do, and we did it with a fan base of 3-4 people. Not much, but to those 3-4 people, thanks. Mercury Aviator Electric Outboard https://www.mercurymarine.com/en/us/news/mercury-marine-announces-bold-new-vision-with-its-avator-electric-outboard-concept-/ Nitro ZV20 https://boattest.com/boats/nitro/zv20-2021 BRP Rotax Stealth 150 Horizontally mounted engine for better everything https://www.boatblurb.com/post/brp-unveils-groundbreaking-rotax-outboard-engine-with-stealth-technology YAMAHA 222 FSH https://boattest.com/boats/yamaha/222-fsh-2023 Vision Marine Technologies world record for electric boat https://insideevs.com/news/607855/electric-boat-vision-marine-outboard-motors/ HARRIS GRAND MARINER 250 https://boattest.com/boats/harris/grand-mariner-250-2022 Hyundai to unveil autonomous boat technology at Ft Lauderdale boat show https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/07/15/Hyundai-Avikus-autonomous-navigation-boat-maritime-Level-2/9471657880408/ https://www.ibinews.com/product-launches/hyundai-to-enter-autonomous-boating-market-at-flibs/43188.article HELMSMAN TRAWLERS 43E PILOTHOUSe https://boattest.com/boats/helmsman-trawlers/43e-pilothouse-review Ilmor marine 630 HP supercharged v8 https://www.ilmor.com/Marine/Mastercraft-Inboard/SC-62L Silent Yachts 60 https://boattest.com/boats/silent-yachts/60-2022 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Horizontal videos for your Instagram Reels?!?!? Yes, you heard me correct! Although Instgram Reels, by nature, is a vertical channel I actually film a majority of my video content horizontally because it allows me to repurpose video content more easily. On today's episode I'm going to: Explain my rational behind filming your Reels Horizontally Explain what 4K video is and why you should consider filming your videos in this format. Offer some tips and insights on filming in 4K

God's work of renewal in the world is both spiritual and social. It's both vertical and horizontal. Vertically, God renews us in relationship with himself. Horizontally, God renews us in relationship with others. In today's sermon, Pastor Ethan shares how God does the work of social renewal in our lives. – The Bridge Church is a kingdom-centered, multi-ethnic, multigenerational church in the heart of Wilmington, North Carolina. We love our city, and we believe God is using us to see his kingdom come here and now. For more information on The Bridge Church, please visit https://thebridgeilm.com/ If you feel led, give online by click here: https://www.thebridgeilm.com/give STAY CONNECTED Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebridgeilm/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBridgeILM Events Page: https://thebridgeilm.churchcenter.com/registrations/events

Do you engage with your family, your neighbors, and your coworkers with the sparkling confidence that God has your back? In other words, are you effective in your relationships because you are leveraging the extraordinary features of the New Covenant in Christ? Or are you mired in obsolete old covenant thinking and practices? Join Kevin as we take a look at how Jesus's work changes everything!  // Download this episode's Application & Action questions and PDF transcript at whitestone.org.

Look, it’s right there on the tin. This rat spins horizontally. You want vertical? That doesn’t sound nearly as good. They have that too. But we like this one. We’re fans of the traditional, horizontally spinning rat values here… AND we have various opinions on crackers. That’s who we are at Video Death Loop. Now… Read more S6 – E27 – High quality horizontally spinning rat

In Episode 188, Shawn McGrade talked about why you should consider a career in Water Treatment, and because so many of YOU wrote in to our producer asking for him to come back on the show, I am bringing him back for a second interview. Shawn works in Sales at Kurita America and is continuously proving himself to be a Versatile Salesperson through personal and professional developments. When not working as a Water Treater, Shawn spends his time catching giant fish and volunteering as a firefighter and EMT in Minnesota.  Today, Shawn and I will discuss the changes in his career since I last had him on the show, why attending conferences, technical trainings, and any additional offerings through your employer is important,, and some personal and professional development tools you should know about and take advantage of.  Bottom line: If you are considering a career in water treatment and don't know what opportunities it has to offer, Shawn McGradehas some valuable knowledge to share with you.  Your roadside friend, as you travel from client to client.  -Trace    Timestamps:  What is a “Career” and upcoming events [03:56] Bringing back one of our most-listened to podcast guests, Shawn McGrade [10:21] What has changed since Shawn was last in the podcast? [12:40] Why you should lean into our industry's educational opportunities [16:00] Tips for successfully closing accounts [21:31] Understanding how to speak your client's language [25:26] Personal and professional development tools [33:19] The benefits of getting involved in the water treatment community [39:05] A firefighting water treater [40:36] What to know if you are considering  a career in Water Treatment [44:29] Lightning round questions [48:36] Thinking On Water With James [56:00]   Thinking On Water With James: In this week's episode, we're thinking about the correct way to install a cooling tower blowdown meter. First, what type of meter should one use? Do you know the options available and the pros and cons of each? Then, how should the blowdown water meter be installed? Vertically? Horizontally? Does the meter need to be continually flooded? Is freeze protection an issue? Can the meter communicate with a controller to log the data? Why would a blowdown meter be a handy thing to have? Take this week to think about cooling tower blowdown meters and how they should be installed.    Quotes: “As Water Treaters, one of the most challenging things is trying to explain to our friends and families is what we actually do.” - Shawn McGrade “Don't shy away from being intimidated and not knowing enough” - Shawn McGrade “I want to learn and learn and learn, I want to be a forever learner.” - Shawn McGrade “With sales effort, diligence, self-discipline, and planning sales time within your day will allow you to reap the rewards.” - Shawn McGrade “Get in front of people, and see how you can help them.” - Shawn McGrade “Sales is a numbers game and you've gotta be diligent and make it a priority.” - Shawn McGrade “Having that curious spirit or being a forever learner has helped me the most in my Personal Development and Growth.” - Shawn McGrade “Water Treatment is like an onion, there are layers upon layers, and you can just keep peeling it back, and you'll never know it all. None of us will ever know everything there is to know in water treatment” - Shawn McGrade “The best way to learn something is to teach it to others.” - Shawn McGrade “For those new to the industry, and are scared to go out there because they think they don't know enough, the Fundamentals and Applications Course at the AWT Technical Training is designed for them.” - Shawn McGrade   Connect with Shawn McGrade: Email: s.mcgrade@kurita-water.com Phone: 651-788-2185  Website: www.kuritaamerica.com LinkedIn: in/shawn-mcgrade-08187114a Recent Article: Using Film-Forming Amines for Water Treatment   Links Mentioned:  Using Film-Forming Amines for Water Treatment article by Shawn McGrade Email The Scaling UP! H2O team: corrine@blackmore-enterprises.com (podcast producer) Industrial Water Week 2022  188 The One To Listen To If You Are Considering Becoming A Water Treater 117 The One With Temperament Expert, Kathleen Edelman 179 Another One that Teaches Us to Communicate Better with Others 239 The One About Negotiating Wilson Learning Audible The Rising Tide Mastermind Submit a Show Idea AWT (Association of Water Technologies) AWT's Student Education and Enhancement Development (SEED) Program The Versatile Salesperson (VSP) by Wilson Learning The Counselor Salesperson (CSP) by Wilson Learning   Events: The Hang Networking Event - July 14, 2022 @ 6:00 p.m. EST ACS Fall 2022 – August 21 to 25, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois  Industrial Water Week - October 3-7, 2022    Articles Mentioned: Using Film-Forming Amines for Water Treatment by Shawn McGrade   Books Mentioned: I Said This, You Heard That by Kathleen Edelman  

Blue Dove Foundation     Featuring: Gabrielle Spatt, Executive DirectorBlue Dove provides mental health education awareness and outreach through a Jewish lens and for the Jewish community. Mental illness often causes people to feel alone and separate. During this interview, Gabby Spatt, Executive Director of Blue Dove Foundation, vulnerably shares her story. Gabby states that this is part of her healing process. Being in a space where people share their story and hear other stories is where healing begins. Hearing someone's story helps people realize they are not alone. Hearing someone's story gives people courage to share their own story. We welcome you to dive into the resources that Blue Dove provides. To Listen to the stories. And when ready, share your stories to expand healing for a strong community and world. About Blue Dove Foundation: The Blue Dove Foundation was created to address mental illness and addiction in the Jewish community and beyond. We work with organizations and communities -- both Jewish and interfaith -- across the country and around the world.Blue Dove's Mission is to educate, equip, and ignite our Jewish community with tools to understand, support, and overcome the challenges presented by mental illness and substance abuse. As a community with a focus on tikkun olam, we work to eradicate the shame and stigma surrounding these issues. Once we achieve this goal, we can begin to improve and save lives.Our Work: 1. Educate and raise awareness about mental health within the Jewish community. 2. Produce powerful and engaging resources about the connections between mental wellness and Judaism.3. Spearhead and design programs that can be easily replicated in any community, like mental health shabbat dinners and community training programs.Communities of PracticeCreating vibrant and diverse communities of practice are core to Mitsui Collective's long-term vision and ability to activate communities in the work of resiliency-building. Our aim is ultimately to center embodied Jewish practice and somatic antiracism as immersive and transformational foundations of contemporary Jewish life. As we continue to hone our internal capacity and operational strength for carrying forward our existing work to date, we are also laying the groundwork to expand our footprint both vertically and horizontally.Vertically this includes further depth both in our local work in the Cleveland area — where we hope overtime to establish a physical homebase both for local community building and as a national headquarters for immersive programs and ongoing research & development — and our intensive work resourcing and training the growing field of embodied Jewish practitioners and educators. Horizontally this looks like catalyzing and growing the ecosystem of opportunities and platforms (both in person and online) to be in communities of practice with others for whom embodiment and liberatory anti racist practice are core to their Jewish expression and spiritual identity.Follow Blue Dove on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and YouTube. Support the show

The boys are joined by the one and only Michael Abber this week! Michael is a NY based standup comedian and writer. He hosts a monthly show called Neighborhood Darlings. You can follow Michael on Instagram at @michaelabber

This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio.A few topics covered Building on top of open source Forking their GoTrue dependency Relying on Postgres features like row level security Adding realtime support based on Postgres's write ahead log Generating an API layer based on the database schema with PostgREST Creating separate EC2 instances for each customer's database How Postgres could scale in the future Monitoring postgres Common support tickets Permissive open source licenses Related Links @antwilson Supabase Supabase GitHub Firebase Airtable PostgREST GoTrue Elixir Prometheus VictoriaMetrics Logflare BigQuery Netlify Y Combinator Postgres PostgreSQL Write-Ahead Logging Row Security Policies pg_stat_statements pgAdmin PostGIS Amazon Aurora Transcript You can help edit this transcript on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Ant Wilson, he's the co-founder and CTO of Supabase. Ant welcome to software engineering radio.[00:00:07] Ant: Thanks so much. Great to be here. [00:00:09] Jeremy: When I hear about Supabase, I always hear about it in relation to two other products. The first is Postgres, which is a open source relational database. And second is Firebase, which is a backend as a service product from Google cloud that provides a no SQL data store.It provides authentication and authorization. It has a functions as a service component. It's really meant to be a replacement for you needing to have your own server, create your own backend. You can have that all be done from Firebase. I think a good place for us to start would be walking us through what supabase is and how it relates to those two products.[00:00:55] Ant: Yeah. So, so we brand ourselves as the open source Firebase alternativethat came primarily from the fact that we ourselves do use the, as the alternative to Firebase. So, so my co-founder Paul in his previous startup was using fire store. And as they started to scale, they hit certain limitations, technical scaling limitations and he'd always been a huge Postgres fan.So we swapped it out for Postgres and then just started plugging in. The bits that we're missing, like the real-time streams. Um, He used the tool called PostgREST with a T for the, for the CRUD APIs. And sohe just built like the open source Firebase alternative on Postgres, And that's kind of where the tagline came from.But the main difference obviously is that it's relational database and not a no SQL database which means that it's not actually a drop-in replacement. But it does mean that it kind of opens the door to a lot more functionality actually. Um, Which, which is hopefully an advantage for us. [00:02:03] Jeremy: it's a, a hosted form of Postgres. So you mentioned that Firebase is, is different. It's uh NoSQL. People are putting in their, their JSON objects and things like that. So when people are working with Supabase is the experience of, is it just, I'm connecting to a Postgres database I'm writing SQL.And in that regard, it's kind of not really similar to Firebase at all. Is that, is that kind of right?[00:02:31] Ant: Yeah, I mean, the other thing, the other important thing to notice that you can communicate with Supabase directly from the client, which is what people love about fire base. You just like put the credentials on the client and you write some security rules, and then you just start sending your data. Obviously with supabase, you do need to create your schema because it's relational.But apart from that, the experience of client side development is very much the same or very similar the interface, obviously the API is a little bit different. But, but it's similar in that regard. But I, I think, like I said, we're moving, we are just a database company actually. And the tagline, just explained really, well, kind of the concept of, of what it is like a backend as a service. It has the real-time streams. It has the auth layer. It has the also generated APIs. So I don't know how long we'll stick with the tagline. I think we'll probably outgrow it at some point. Um, But it does do a good job of communicating roughly what the service is.[00:03:39] Jeremy: So when we talk about it being similar to Firebase, the part that's similar to fire base is that you could be a person building the front end part of the website, and you don't need to necessarily have a backend application because all of that could talk to supabase and supabase can handle the authentication, the real-time notifications all those sorts of things, similar to Firebase, where we're basically you only need to write the front end part, and then you have to know how to, to set up super base in this case.[00:04:14] Ant: Yeah, exactly. And some of the other, like we took w we love fire based, by the way. We're not building an alternative to try and destroy it. It's kind of like, we're just building the SQL alternative and we take a lot of inspiration from it. And the other thing we love is that you can administer your database from the browser.So you go into Firebase and you have the, you can see the object tree, and when you're in development, you can edit some of the documents in real time. And, and so we took that experience and effectively built like a spreadsheet view inside of our dashboard. And also obviously have a SQL editor in there as well.And trying to, create this, this like a similar developer experience, because that's where Firebase just excels is. The DX is incredible. And so we, we take a lot of inspiration from it in, in those respects.[00:05:08] Jeremy: and to to make it clear to our listeners as well. When you talk about this interface, that's kind of like a spreadsheet and things like that. I suppose it's similar to somebody opening up pgAdmin, I suppose, and going in and editing the rows. But, but maybe you've got like another layer on top that just makes it a little more user-friendly a little bit more like something you would get from Firebase, I guess.[00:05:33] Ant: Yeah.And, you know, we, we take a lot of inspiration from pgAdmin. PG admin is also open source. So I think we we've contributed a few things and, or trying to upstream a few things into PG admin. The other thing that we took a lot of inspiration from for the table editor, what we call it is airtable.And because airtable is effectively. a a relational database and that you can just come in and, you know, click to add your columns, click to add a new table. And so we just want to reproduce that experience again, backed up by a full Postgres dedicated database. [00:06:13] Jeremy: so when you're working with a Postgres database, normally you need some kind of layer in front of it, right? That the person can't open up their website and connect directly to Postgres from their browser. And you mentioned PostgREST before. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about what that is and how it works.[00:06:34] Ant: Yeah, definitely. so yeah, PostgREST has been around for a while. Um, It's basically an, a server that you connect to, to your Postgres database and it introspects your schemas and generates an API for you based on the table names, the column names. And then you can basically then communicate with your Postgres database via this restful API.So you can do pretty much, most of the filtering operations that you can do in SQL um, uh, equality filters. You can even do full text search over the API. So it just means that whenever you obviously add a new table or a new schema or a new column the API just updates instantly. So you, you don't have to worry about writing that, that middle layer which is, was always the drag right.When, what have you started a new project. It's like, okay, I've got my schema, I've got my client. Now I have to do all the connecting code in the middle of which is kind of, yeah, no, no developers should need to write that layer in 2022.[00:07:46] Jeremy: so this the layer you're referring to, when I think of a traditional. Web application. I think of having to write routes controllers and, and create this, this sort of structure where I know all the tables in my database, but the controllers I create may not map one to one with those tables. And so you mentioned a little bit about how PostgREST looks at the schema and starts to build an API automatically.And I wonder if you could explain a little bit about how it does those mappings or if you're writing those yourself. [00:08:21] Ant: Yeah, it basically does them automatically by default, it will, you know, map every table, every column. When you want to start restricting things. Well, there's two, there's two parts to this. There's one thing which I'm sure we'll get into, which is how is this secure since you are communicating direct from the client.But the other part is what you mentioned giving like a reduced view of a particular date, bit of data. And for that, we just use Postgres views. So you define a view which might be, you know it might have joins across a couple of different tables or it might just be a limited set of columns on one of your tables. And then you can choose to just expose that view. [00:09:05] Jeremy: so it sounds like when you would typically create a controller and create a route. Instead you create a view within your Postgres database and then PostgREST can take that view and create an end point for it, map it to that.[00:09:21] Ant: Yeah, exactly (laughs) . [00:09:24] Jeremy: And, and PostgREST is an open source project. Right. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about sort of what its its history was. How did you come to choose it? [00:09:37] Ant: Yeah.I think, I think Paul probably read about it on hacker news at some point. Anytime it appears on hacker news, it just gets voted to the front page because it's, it's So awesome. And we, we got connected to the maintainer, Steve Chavez. At some point I think he just took an interest in, or we took an interest in Postgres and we kind of got acquainted.And then we found out that, you know, Steve was open to work and this kind of like probably shaped a lot of the way we think about building out supabase as a project and as a company in that we then decided to employ Steve full time, but just to work on PostgREST because it's obviously a huge benefit for us.We're very reliant on it. We want it to succeed because it helps our business. And then as we started to add the other components, we decided that we would then always look for existing tools, existing opensource projects that exist before we decided to build something from scratch. So as we're starting to try and replicate the features of Firebase we would and auth is a great example.We did a full audit of what are all the authorization, authentication, authentication open-source tools that are out there and which one was, if any, would fit best. And we found, and Netlify had built a library called gotrue written in go, which did pretty much exactly what we needed. So we just adopted that.And now obviously, you know, we, we just have a lot of people on the team contributing to, to gotrue as well.[00:11:17] Jeremy: you touched on this a little bit earlier. Normally when you connect to a Postgres database your user has permission to, to basically everything I guess, by default, anyways. And so. So, how does that work? Where when you want to restrict people's permissions, make sure they only get to see records they're allowed to see how has that all configured in PostgREST and what's happening behind the scenes?[00:11:44] Ant: Yeah, we, the great thing about Postgres is it's got this concept of row level security, which actually, I don't think I even rarely looked at until we were building out this auth feature where the security rules live in your database as SQL. So you do like a create policy query, and you say anytime someone tries to select or insert or update apply this policy.And then how it all fits together is our auth server go true. Someone will basically make a request to sign in or sign up with email and password, and we create that user inside the, database. They get issued a URL. And they get issued a JSON, web token, a JWT, and which, you know, when they, when they have it on the, client side, proves that they are this, you, you ID, they have access to this data.Then when they make a request via PostgREST, they send the JWT in the authorization header. Then Postgres will pull out that JWT check the sub claim, which is the UID and compare it to any rows in the database, according to the policy that you wrote. So, so the most basic one is you say in order to, to access this row, it must have a column you UID and it must match whatever is in the JWT.So we basically push the authorization down into the database which actually has, you know, a lot of other benefits in that as you write new clients, You don't need to have, have it live, you know, on an API layer on the client. It's kind of just, everything is managed from the database.[00:13:33] Jeremy: So the, the, you, you ID, you mentioned that represents the user, correct. [00:13:39] Ant: Yeah. [00:13:41] Jeremy: Is that, does that map to a user in post graphs or is there some other way that you're mapping those permissions?[00:13:50] Ant: Yeah. When, so when you connect go true, which is the auth server to your Postgres database for the first time, it installs its own schema. So you'll have an auth schema and inside will be all start users with a list of the users. It'll have a uh, auth dot tokens which will store all the access tokens that it's issued.So, and one of the columns on the auth start user's table will be UUID, and then whenever you write application specific schemers, you can just join a, do a foreign key relation to the author users table. So, so it all gets into schema design and and hopefully we do a good job of having some good education content in the docs as well.Because one of the things we struggled with from the start was how much do we abstract away from SQL away from Postgres and how much do we educate? And we actually landed on the educate sides because I mean, once you start learning about Postgres, it becomes kind of a superpower for you as a developer.So we'd much rather. Have people discover us because we're a firebase alternatives frontend devs then we help them with things like schema design landing about row level security. Because ultimately like every, if you try and abstract that stuff it gets kind of crappy. And maybe not such a great experience. [00:15:20] Jeremy: to make sure I understand correctly. So you have GoTrue, which is uh, a Netlify open-source project that GoTrue project creates some tables in your, your database that has like, you've mentioned the tokens, the, the different users. Somebody makes a request to GoTrue. Like here's my username, my password go true.Gives them back a JWT. And then from your front end, you send that JWT to the PostgREST endpoint. And from that JWT, it's able to know which user you are and then uses postgres' built in a row level security to figure out which rows you're, you're allowed to bring back. Did I, did I get that right?[00:16:07] Ant: That is pretty much exactly how it works. And it's impressive that you garnered that without looking at a single diagram (laughs) But yeah, and, and, and obviously we, we provide a client library supabase JS, which actually does a lot of this work for you. So you don't need to manually attach the JJ JWT in a header.If you've authenticated with supabase JS, then every request sent to PostgREST. After that point, the header will just be attached automatically, and you'll be in a session as that user. [00:16:43] Jeremy: and, and the users that we're talking about when we talk about Postgres' row level security. Are those actual users in PostgreSQL. Like if I was to log in with psql, I could actually log in with those users.[00:17:00] Ant: They're not, you could potentially structure it that way. But it would be more advanced it's it's basically just users in, in the auth.users table, the way, the way it's currently done. [00:17:12] Jeremy: I see and postgrest has the, that row level security is able to work with that table. You, you don't need to have actual Postgres users.[00:17:23] Ant: Exactly. And, and it's, it's basically turing complete. I mean, you can write extremely complex auth policies. You can say, you know, only give access to this particular admin group on a Thursday afternoon between six and 8:00 PM. You can get really, yeah. really as fancy as you want. [00:17:44] Jeremy: Is that all written in SQL or are there other languages they allow you to use?[00:17:50] Ant: Yeah. It's the default is plain SQL. Within Postgres itself, you can useI think you can use, like there's a Python extension. There's a JavaScript extension, which is a, I think it's a subsets of, of JavaScripts. I mean, this is the thing with Postgres, it's super extensible and people have probably got all kinds of interpreters.So you, yeah, you can use whatever you want, but the typical user will just use SQL. [00:18:17] Jeremy: interesting. And that applies to logic in general, I suppose, where if you were writing a rails application, you might write Ruby. Um, If you're writing a node application, you write JavaScript, but you're, you're saying in a lot of cases with PostgREST, you're actually able to do what you want to do, whether that's serialization or mapping objects, do that all through SQL.[00:18:44] Ant: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then obviously like there's a lot of awesome other stuff that Postgres has like this postGIS, which if you're doing geo, if you've got like a geo application, it'll load it up with a geo types for you, which you can just use. If you're doing like encryption and decryption, we just added PG libsodium, which is a new and awesome cryptography extension.And so you can use all of these, these all add like functions, like SQL functions which you can kind of use in, in any parts of the logic or in the role level policies. Yeah.[00:19:22] Jeremy: and something I thought was a little unique about PostgREST is that I believe it's written in Haskell. Is that right?[00:19:29] Ant: Yeah, exactly. And it makes it fairly inaccessible to me as a result. But the good thing is it's got a thriving community of its own and, you know, people who on there's people who contribute probably because it's written in haskell. And it's, it's just a really awesome project and it's an excuse to, to contribute to it.But yeah. I, I think I did probably the intro course, like many people and beyond that, it's just, yeah, kind of inaccessible to me. [00:19:59] Jeremy: yeah, I suppose that's the trade-off right. Is you have a, a really passionate community about like people who really want to use Haskell and then you've got the, the, I guess the group like yourselves that looks at it and goes, oh, I don't, I don't know about this.[00:20:13] Ant: I would, I would love to have the time to, to invest in uh, but not practical right now. [00:20:21] Jeremy: You talked a little bit about the GoTrue project from Netlify. I think I saw on one of your blog posts that you actually forked it. Can you sort of explain the reasoning behind doing that?[00:20:34] Ant: Yeah, initially it was because we were trying to move extremely fast. So, so we did Y Combinator in 2020. And when you do Y Combinator, you get like a part, a group partner, they call it one of the, the partners from YC and they add a huge amount of external pressure to move very quickly. And, and our biggest feature that we are working on in that period was auth.And we just kept getting the question of like, when are you going to ship auth? You know, and every single week we'd be like, we're working on it, we're working on it. And um, and one of the ways we could do it was we just had to iterate extremely quickly and we didn't rarely have the time to, to upstream things correctly.And actually like the way we use it in our stack is slightly differently. They connected to MySQL, we connected to Postgres. So we had to make some structural changes to do that. And the dream would be now that we, we spend some time upstream and a lot of the changes. And hopefully we do get around to that.But the, yeah, the pace at which we've had to move over the last uh, year and a half has been kind of scary and, and that's the main reason, but you know, hopefully now we're a little bit more established. We can hire some more people to, to just focus on, go true and, and bringing the two folks back together. [00:22:01] Jeremy: it's just a matter of, like you said speed, I suppose, because the PostgREST you, you chose to continue working off of the existing open source project, right? [00:22:15] Ant: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think the other thing is it's not a major part of Netlify's business, as I understand it. I think if it was and if both companies had more resource behind it, it would make sense to obviously focus on on the single codebase but I think both companies don't contribute as much resource as as we would like to, but um, but it's, it's for me, it's, it's one of my favorite parts of the stack to work on because it's written in go and I kind of enjoy how that it all fits together.So Yeah. I, I like to dive in there. [00:22:55] Jeremy: w w what about go, or what about how it's structured? Do you particularly enjoy about the, that part of the project?[00:23:02] Ant: I think it's so I actually learned learned go through, gotrue and I'm, I have like a Python and C plus plus background And I hate the fact that I don't get to use Python and C plus posts rarely in my day to day job. It's obviously a lot of type script. And then when we inherited this code base, it was kind of, as I was picking it up I, it just reminded me a lot of, you know, a lot of the things I loved about Python and C plus plus, and, and the tooling around it as well. I just found to be exceptional. So, you know, you just do like a small amounts of conflig. Uh config, And it makes it very difficult to, to write bad code, if that makes sense.So the compiler will just, boot you back if you try and do something silly which isn't necessarily the case with, with JavaScript. I think TypeScript is a little bit better now, but Yeah, I just, it just reminded me a lot of my Python and C days.[00:24:01] Jeremy: Yeah, I'm not too familiar with go, but my understanding is that there's, there's a formatter that's a part of the language, so there's kind of a consistency there. And then the language itself tries to get people to, to build things in the same way, or maybe have simpler ways of building things. Um, I don't, I don't know.Maybe that's part of the appeal.[00:24:25] Ant: Yeah, exactly. And the package manager as well is great. It just does a lot of the importing automatically. and makes sure like all the declarations at the top are formatted correctly and, and are definitely there. So Yeah. just all of that tool chain is just really easy to pick up.[00:24:46] Jeremy: Yeah. And I, and I think compiled languages as well, when you have the static type checking. By the compiler, you know, not having things blow up and run time. That's, that's just such a big relief, at least for me in a lot of cases,[00:25:00] Ant: And I just loved the dopamine hits of when you compile something on it actually compiles this. I lose that with, with working with JavaScript. [00:25:11] Jeremy: for sure. One of the topics you mentioned earlier was how super base provides real-time database updates. And which is something that as far as I know is not natively a part of Postgres. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit about how that works and how that came about.[00:25:31] Ant: Yeah. So, So Postgres, when you add replication databases the way it does is it writes everything to this thing called the write ahead log, which is basically all the changes that uh, have, are going to be applied to, to the database. And when you connect to like a replication database. It basically streams that log across.And that's how the replica knows what, what changes to, to add. So we wrote a server, which basically pretends to be a Postgres rep, replica receives the right ahead log encodes it into JSON. And then you can subscribe to that server over web sockets. And so you can choose whether to subscribe, to changes on a particular schema or a particular table or particular columns, and even do equality matches on rows and things like this.And then we recently added the role level security policies to the real-time stream as well. So that was something that took us a while to, cause it was probably one of the largest technical challenges we've faced. But now that it's in the real-time stream is, is fully secure and you can apply these, these same policies that you apply over the CRUD API as well.[00:26:48] Jeremy: So for that part, did you have to look into the internals of Postgres and how it did its row level security and try to duplicate that in your own code?[00:26:59] Ant: Yeah, pretty much. I mean it's yeah, it's fairly complex and there's a guy on our team who, well, for him, it didn't seem as complex, let's say (laughs) , but yeah, that's pretty much it it's just a lot of it's effectively a SQL um, a Postgres extension itself, uh which in-in interprets those policies and applies them to, to the, to the, the right ahead log.[00:27:26] Jeremy: and this piece that you wrote, that's listening to the right ahead log. what was it written in and, and how did you choose that, that language or that stack?[00:27:36] Ant: Yeah. That's written in the Elixir framework which is based on Erlang very horizontally scalable. So any applications that you write in Elixir can kind of just scale horizontally the message passing and, you know, go into the billions and it's no problem. So it just seemed like a sensible choice for this type of application where you don't know.How large the wall is going to be. So it could just be like a few changes per second. It could be a million changes per second, then you need to be able to scale out. And I think Paul who's my co-founder originally, he wrote the first version of it and I think he wrote it as an excuse to learn Elixir, which is how, a lot of probably how PostgREST ended up being Haskell, I imagine.But uh, but it's meant that the Elixir community is still like relatively small. But it's a group of like very passionate and very um, highly skilled developers. So when we hire from that pool everyone who comes on board is just like, yeah, just, just really good and really enjoy is working with Elixir.So it's been a good source of a good source for hires as well. Just, just using those tools. [00:28:53] Jeremy: with a feature like this, I'm assuming it's where somebody goes to their website. They make a web socket connection to your application and they receive the updates that way. How have you seen how far you're able to push that in terms of connections, in terms of throughput, things like that?[00:29:12] Ant: Yeah, I don't actually have the numbers at hand. But we have, yeah, we have a team focused on obviously maximizing that but yeah, I don't I don't don't have those numbers right now. [00:29:24] Jeremy: one of the last things you've you've got on your website is a storage project or a storage product, I should say. And I believe it's written in TypeScript, so I was curious, we've got PostGrest, which is in Haskell. We've got go true and go. Uh, We've got the real-time database part in elixir.And so with storage, how did we finally get to TypeScript?[00:29:50] Ant: (Laughs) Well, the policy we kind of landed on was best tool for the job. Again, the good thing about being an open source is we're not resource constrained by the number of people who are in our team. It's by the number of people who are in the community and I'm willing to contribute. And so for that, I think one of the guys just went through a few different options that we could have went with, go just to keep it in line with a couple of the other APIs.But we just decided, you know, a lot of people well, everyone in the team like TypeScript is kind of just a given. And, and again, it was kind of down to speed, like what's the fastest uh we can get this up and running. And I think if we use TypeScript, it was, it was the best solution there. But yeah, but we just always go with whatever is best.Um, We don't worry too much uh, about, you know, the resources we have because the open source community has just been so great in helping us build supabase. And building supabase is like building like five companies at the same time actually, because each of these vertical stacks could be its own startup, like the auth stack And the storage layer, and all of this stuff.And you know, each has, it does have its own dedicated team. So yeah. So we're not too worried about the variation in languages.[00:31:13] Jeremy: And the storage layer is this basically a wrapper around S3 or like what is that product doing?[00:31:21] Ant: Yeah, exactly. It's it's wraparound as three. It, it would also work with all of the S3 compatible storage systems. There's a few Backblaze and a few others. So if you wanted to self host and use one of those alternatives, you could, we just have everything in our own S3 booklets inside of AWS.And then the other awesome thing about the storage system is that because we store the metadata inside of Postgres. So basically the object tree of what buckets and folders and files are there. You can write your role level policies against the object tree. So you can say this, this user should only access this folder and it's, and it's children which was kind of. Kind of an accident. We just landed on that. But it's one of my favorite things now about writing applications and supervisors is the rollover policies kind of work everywhere.[00:32:21] Jeremy: Yeah, it's interesting. It sounds like everything. Whether it's the storage or the authentication it's all comes back to postgres, right? At all. It's using the row level security. It's using everything that you put into the tables there, and everything's just kind of digging into that to get what it needs.[00:32:42] Ant: Yeah. And that's why I say we are a database company. We are a Postgres company. We're all in on postgres. We got asked in the early days. Oh, well, would you also make it my SQL compatible compatible with something else? And, but the amounts. Features Postgres has, if we just like continue to leverage them then it, it just makes the stack way more powerful than if we try to you know, go thin across multiple different databases.[00:33:16] Jeremy: And so that, that kind of brings me to, you mentioned how your Postgres companies, so when somebody signs up for supabase they create their first instance. What's what's happening behind the scenes. Are you creating a Postgres instance for them in a container, for example, how do you size it? That sort of thing.[00:33:37] Ant: Yeah. So it's basically just easy to under the hood for us we, we have plans eventually to be multi-cloud. But again, going down to the speed of execution that the. The fastest way was to just spin up a dedicated instance, a dedicated Postgres instance per user on EC2. We do also package all of the API APIs together in a second EC2 instance.But we're starting to break those out into clustered services. So for example, you know, not every user will use the storage API, so it doesn't make sense to Rooney for every user regardless. So we've, we've made that multitenant, the application code, and now we just run a huge global cluster which people connect through to access the S3 bucket.Basically and we're gonna, we have plans to do that for the other services as well. So right now it's you got two EC2 instances. But over time it will be just the Postgres instance and, and we wanted. Give everyone a dedicated instance, because there's nothing worse than sharing database resource with all the users, especially when you don't know how heavily they're going to use it, whether they're going to be bursty.So I think one of the things we just said from the start is everyone gets a Postgres instance and you get access to it as well. You can use your Postgres connection string to, to log in from the command line and kind of do whatever you want. It's yours.[00:35:12] Jeremy: so did it, did I get it right? That when I sign up, I create a super base account. You're actually creating an two instance for me specifically. So it's like every customer gets their, their own isolated it's their own CPU, their own Ram, that sort of thing.[00:35:29] Ant: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, and the way the. We've set up the monitoring as well, is that we can expose basically all of that to you in the dashboard as well. so you can, you have some control over like the resource you want to use. If you want to a more powerful instance, we can do that. A lot of that stuff is automated.So if someone scales beyond the allocated disk size, the disk will automatically scale up by 50% each time. And we're working on automating a bunch of these, these other things as well.[00:36:03] Jeremy: so is it, is it where, when you first create the account, you might create, for example, a micro instance, and then you have internal monitoring tools that see, oh, the CPU is getting heady hit pretty hard. So we need to migrate this person to a bigger instance, that kind of thing.[00:36:22] Ant: Yeah, pretty much exactly. [00:36:25] Jeremy: And is that, is that something that the user would even see or is it the case of where you send them an email and go like, Hey, we notice you're hitting the limits here. Here's what's going to happen. [00:36:37] Ant: Yeah.In, in most cases it's handled automatically. There are people who come in and from day one, they say has my requirements. I'm going to have this much traffic. And I'm going to have, you know, a hundred thousand users hitting this every hour. And in those cases we will over-provisioned from the start.But if it's just the self service case, then it will be start on a smaller instance and an upgrade over time. And this is one of our biggest challenges over the next five years is we want to move to a more scalable Postgres. So cloud native Postgres. But the cool thing about this is there's a lot of.Different companies and individuals working on this and upstreaming into Postgres itself. So for us, we don't need to, and we, and we would never want to fork Postgres and, you know, and try and separate the storage and the the computes. But more we're gonna fund people who are already working on this so that it gets upstreamed into Postgres itself.And it's more cloud native. [00:37:46] Jeremy: Yeah. So I think the, like we talked a little bit about how Firebase was the original inspiration and when you work with Firebase, you, you don't think about an instance at all, right? You, you just put data in, you get data out. And it sounds like in this case, you're, you're kind of working from the standpoint of, we're going to give you this single Postgres instance.As you hit the limits, we'll give you a bigger one. But at some point you, you will hit a limit of where just that one instance is not enough. And I wonder if there's you have any plans for that, or if you're doing anything currently to, to handle that.[00:38:28] Ant: Yeah. So, so the medium goal is to do replication like horizontal scaling. We, we do that for some users already but we manually set that up. we do want to bring that to the self serve model as well, where you can just choose from the start. So I want, you know, replicas in these, in these zones and in these different data centers.But then, like I said, the long-term goal is that. it's not based on. Horizontally scaling a number of instances it's just a Postgres itself can, can scale out. And I think we will get to, I think, honestly, the race at which the Postgres community is working, I think we'll be there in two years.And, and if we can contribute resource towards that, that goal, I think yeah, like we'd love to do that, but yeah, but for now, it's, we're working on this intermediate solution of, of what people already do with, Postgres, which is, you know, have you replicas to make it highly available.[00:39:30] Jeremy: And with, with that, I, I suppose at least in the short term, the goal is that your monitoring software and your team is handling the scaling up the instance or creating the read replicas. So to the user, it, for the most part feels like a managed service. And then yeah, the next step would be to, to get something more similar to maybe Amazon's Aurora, I suppose, where it just kind of, you pay per use.[00:40:01] Ant: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Aurora was kind of the goal from the start. It's just a shame that it's proprietary. Obviously. [00:40:08] Jeremy: right. Um, but it sounds, [00:40:10] Ant: the world would be a better place. If aurora was opensource. [00:40:15] Jeremy: yeah. And it sounds like you said, there's people in the open source community that are, that are trying to get there. just it'll take time. to, to all this, about making it feel seamless, making it feel like a serverless experience, even though internally, it really isn't, I'm guessing you must have a fair amount of monitoring or ways that you're making these decisions.I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, what are the metrics you're looking at and what are the applications you're you have to, to help you make these decisions?[00:40:48] Ant: Yeah. definitely. So we started with Prometheus which is a, you know, metrics gathering tool. And then we moved to Victoria metrics which was just easier for us to scale out. I think soon we'll be managing like a hundred thousand Postgres databases will have been deployed on, on supabase. So definitely, definitely some scale. So this kind of tooling needs to scale to that as well. And then we have agents kind of everywhere on each application on, on the database itself. And we listen for things like the CPU and the Ram and the network IO. We also poll. Uh, Postgres itself. Th there's a extension called PG stats statements, which will give us information about what are, the intensive queries that are running on that, on that box.So we just collect as much of this as possible um, which we then obviously use internally. We set alerts to, to know when, when we need to upgrade in a certain direction, but we also have an end point where the dashboard subscribes to these metrics as well. So the user themselves can see a lot of this information.And we, I think at the moment we do a lot of the, the Ram the CPU, that kind of stuff, but we're working on adding just more and more of these observability metrics uh, so people can can know it could, because it also helps with Let's say you might be lacking an index on a particular table and not know about it.And so if we can expose that to you and give you alerts about that kind of thing, then it obviously helps with the developer experience as well.[00:42:29] Jeremy: Yeah. And th that brings me to something that I, I hear from platform as a service companies, where if a user has a problem, whether that's a crash or a performance problem, sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between is it a problem in their application or is this a problem in super base or, you know, and I wonder how your support team kind of approaches that.[00:42:52] Ant: Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a great question. And it's definitely something we, we deal with every day, I think because of where we're at as a company we've always seen, like, we actually have a huge advantage in that.we can provide. Rarely good support. So anytime an engineer joins super base, we tell them your primary job is actually frontline support.Everything you do afterwards is, is secondary. And so everyone does a four hour shift per week of, of working directly with the customers to help determine this kind of thing. And where we are at the moment is we are happy to dive in and help people with their application code because it helps our engineers land about how it's being used and where the pitfalls are, where we need better documentation, where we need education.So it's, that is all part of the product at the moment, actually. And, and like I said, because we're not a 10,000 person company we, it's an advantage that we have, that we can deliver that level of support at the moment. [00:44:01] Jeremy: w w what are some of the most common things you see happening? Like, is it I would expect you mentioned indexing problems, but I'm wondering if there's any specific things that just come up again and again,[00:44:15] Ant: I think like the most common is people not batching their requests. So they'll write an application, which, you know, needs to, needs to pull 10,000 rows and they send 10,000 requests (laughs) . That that's, that's a typical one for, for people just getting started maybe. Yeah. and, then I think the other thing we faced in the early days was. People storing blobs in the database which we obviously solve that problem by introducing file storage. But people will be trying to store, you know, 50 megabytes, a hundred megabyte files in Postgres itself, and then asking why the performance was so bad.So I think we've, we've mitigated that one by, by introducing the blob storage.[00:45:03] Jeremy: and when you're, you mentioned you have. Over a hundred thousand instances running. I imagine there have to be cases where an incident occurs, where something doesn't go quite right. And I wonder if you could give an example of one and how it was resolved.[00:45:24] Ant: Yeah, it's a good question. I think, yeah, w w we've improved the systems since then, but there was a period where our real time server wasn't able to handle rarely large uh, right ahead logs. So w there was a period where people would just make tons and tons of requests and updates to, to Postgres. And the real time subscriptions were failing. But like I said, we have some really great Elixir devs on the team, so they were able to jump on that fairly quickly. And now, you know, the application is, is way more scalable as a result. And that's just kind of how the support model works is you have a period where everything is breaking and then uh, then you can just, you know, tackle these things one by one. [00:46:15] Jeremy: Yeah, I think any, anybody at a, an early startup is going to run into that. Right? You put it out there and then you find out what's broken, you fix it and you just get better and better as it goes along.[00:46:28] Ant: Yeah, And the funny thing was this model of, of deploying EC2 instances. We had that in like the first week of starting super base, just me and Paul. And it was never intended to be the final solution. We just kind of did it quickly and to get something up and running for our first handful of users But it's scaled surprisingly well.And actually the things that broke as we started to get a lot of traffic and a lot of attention where was just silly things. Like we give everyone their own domain when they start a new project. So you'll have project ref dot super base dot in or co. And the things that were breaking where like, you know, we'd ran out of sub-domains with our DNS provider and then, but, and those things always happen in periods of like intense traffic.So we ha we were on the front page of hacker news, or we had a tech crunch article, and then you discover that you've ran out of sub domains and the last thousand people couldn't deploy their projects. So that's always a fun a fun challenge because you are then dependent on the external providers as well and theirs and their support systems.So yeah, I think. We did a surprisingly good job of, of putting in good infrastructure from the start. But yeah, all of these crazy things just break when obviously when you get a lot of, a lot of traffic[00:48:00] Jeremy: Yeah, I find it interesting that you mentioned how you started with creating the EC2 instances and it turned out that just work. I wonder if you could walk me through a little bit about how it worked in the beginning, like, was it the two of you going in and creating instances as people signed up and then how it went from there to where it is today?[00:48:20] Ant: yeah. So there's a good story about, about our fast user, actually. So me and Paul used to contract for a company in Singapore, which was an NFT company. And so we knew the lead developer very well. And we also still had the Postgres credentials on, on our own machines. And so what we did was we set up the th th the other funny thing is when we first started, we didn't intend to host the database.We, we thought we were just gonna host the applications that would connect to your existing Postgres instance. And so what we did was we hooked up the applications to, to the, to the Postgres instance of this, of this startup that we knew very well. And then we took the bus to their office and we sat with the lead developer, and we said, look, we've already set this thing up for you.What do you think. know, when, when you think like, ah, we've, we've got the best thing ever, but it's not until you put it in front of someone and you see them, you know, contemplating it and you're like, oh, maybe, maybe it's not so good. Maybe we don't have anything. And we had that moment of panic of like, oh, maybe we just don't maybe this isn't great.And then what happened was he didn't like use us. He didn't become a supabase user. He asked to join the team. [00:49:45] Jeremy: nice, nice.[00:49:46] Ant: that was a good a good kind of a moment where we thought, okay, maybe we have got something, maybe this is maybe this isn't terrible. So, so yeah, so he became our first employee. Yeah. [00:49:59] Jeremy: And so yeah, so, so that case was, you know, the very beginning you set everything up from, from scratch. Now that you have people signing up and you have, you know, I don't know how many signups you get a day. Did you write custom infrastructure or applications to do the provisioning or is there an open source project that you're using to handle that[00:50:21] Ant: Yeah. It's, it's actually mostly custom. And you know, AWS does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. They just provide you with a bunch of API end points. So a lot of that is just written in TypeScript fairly straightforward and, and like I said, you never intended to be the thing that last. Two years into the business.But it's, it's just scaled surprisingly well. And I'm sure at some point we'll, we'll swap it out for some I don't orchestration tooling like Pulumi or something like this. But actually the, what we've got just works really well.[00:50:59] Ant: Be because we're so into Postgres our queuing system is a Postgres extension called PG boss. And then we have a fleet of workers, which are. Uh, We manage on EC ECS. Um, So it's just a bunch of VMs basically which just subscribed to the, to the queue, which lives inside the database.And just performs all the, whether it be a project creation, deletion modification a whole, whole suite of these things. Yeah. [00:51:29] Jeremy: very cool. And so even your provisioning is, is based on Postgres.[00:51:33] Ant: Yeah, exactly. Exactly (laughs) . [00:51:36] Jeremy: I guess in that case, I think, did you say you're using the right ahead log there to in order to get notifications?[00:51:44] Ant: We do use real time, and this is the fun thing about building supabase is we use supabase to build supabase. And a lot of the features start with things that we build for ourselves. So the, the observability features we have a huge logging division. So, so w we were very early users of a tool called a log flare, which is also written in Elixir.It's basically a log sync backed up by BigQuery. And we loved it so much and we became like super log flare power users that it was kind of, we decided to eventually acquire the company. And now we can just offer log flare to all of our customers as well as part of using supabase. So you can query your logs and get really good business intelligence on what your users um, consuming in from your database.[00:52:35] Jeremy: the lock flare you're mentioning though, you said that that's a log sink and that that's actually not going to Postgres, right. That's going to a different type of store.[00:52:43] Ant: Yeah. That is going to big query actually. [00:52:46] Jeremy: Oh, big query. Okay. [00:52:47] Ant: yeah, and maybe eventually, and this is the cool thing about watching the Postgres progression is it's become. It's bringing like transactional and analytical databases together. So it's traditionally been a great transactional database, but if you look at a lot of the changes that have been made in recent versions, it's becoming closer and closer to an analytical database.So maybe at some point we will use it, but yeah, but big query works just great. [00:53:18] Jeremy: Yeah. It's, it's interesting to see, like, I, I know that we've had episodes on different extensions to Postgres where I believe they change out how the storage works. So there's yeah, it's really interesting how it's it's this one database, but it seems like it can take so many different forms. [00:53:36] Ant: It's just so extensible and that's why we're so bullish on it because okay. Maybe it wasn't always the best database, but now it seems like it is becoming the best database and the rate at which it's moving. It's like, where's it going to be in five years? And we're just, yeah, we're just very bullish on, on Postgres.As you can tell from the amount of mentions it's had in this episode.[00:54:01] Jeremy: yeah, we'll have to count how many times it's been said. I'm sure. It's, I'm sure it's up there. Is there anything else we, we missed or think you should have mentioned.[00:54:12] Ant: No, some of the things we're excited about are cloud functions. So it's the thing we just get asked for the most at anytime we post anything on Twitter, you're guaranteed to get a reply, which is like when functions. And we're very pleased to say that it's, it's almost there. So um, that will hopefully be a really good developer experience where also we launched like a, a graph QL Postgres extension where the resolver lives inside of Postgres.And that's still in early alpha, but I think I'm quite excited for when we can start offering that on the on the hosted platform as well. People will have that option to, to use GraphQL instead of, or as well as the restful API.[00:55:02] Jeremy: the, the common thread here is that PostgreSQL you're able to take it really, really far. Right. In terms of scale up, eventually you'll have the read replicas. Hopefully you'll have. Some kind of I don't know what you would call Aurora, but it's, it's almost like self provisioning, maybe not sharing what, how you describe it.But I wonder as a, as a company, like we talked about big query, right? I wonder if there's any use cases that you've come across, either from customers or in your own work where you're like, I just, I just can't get it to fit into Postgres.[00:55:38] Ant: I think like, not very often, but sometimes we'll, we will respond to support requests and recommend that people use Firebase. they're rarelylike if, if they really do have like large amounts of unstructured data, which is which, you know, documented storage is, is kind of perfect for that. We'll just say, you know, maybe you should just use Firebase.So we definitely come across things like that. And, and like I said, we love, we love Firebase, so we're definitely not trying to, to uh, destroy as a tool. I think it, it has its use cases where it's an incredible tool yeah. And provides a lot of inspiration for, for what we're building as well. [00:56:28] Jeremy: all right. Well, I think that's a good place to, to wrap it up, but where can people hear more about you hear more about supabase?[00:56:38] Ant: Yeah, so supeabase is at supabase.com. I'm on Twitter at ant Wilson. Supabase is on Twitter at super base. Just hits us up. We're quite active on the and then definitely check out the repose gets up.com/super base. There's lots of great stuff to dig into as we discussed. There's a lot of different languages, so kind of whatever you're into, you'll probably find something where you can contribute. [00:57:04] Jeremy: Yeah, and we, we sorta touched on this, but I think everything we've talked about with the exception of the provisioning part and the monitoring part is all open source. Is that correct? [00:57:16] Ant: Yeah, exactly.And as, yeah. And hopefully everything we build moving forward, including functions and graph QL we'll continue to be open source.[00:57:31] Jeremy: And then I suppose the one thing I, I did mean to touch on is what, what is the, the license for all the components you're using that are open source?[00:57:41] Ant: It's mostly Apache2 or MIT. And then obviously Postgres has its own Postgres license. So as long as it's, it's one of those, then we, we're not too precious. I, As I said, we inherit a fair amounts of projects. So we contribute to and adopt projects. So as long as it's just very permissive, then we don't care too much.[00:58:05] Jeremy: As far as the projects that your team has worked on, I've noticed that over the years, we've seen a lot of companies move to things like the business source license or there's, there's all these different licenses that are not quite so permissive. And I wonder like what your thoughts are on that for the future of your company and why you think that you'll be able to stay permissive.[00:58:32] Ant: Yeah, I really, really, rarely hope that we can stay permissive. forever. It's, it's a philosophical thing for, for us. You know, when we, we started the business, it's what just very, just very, as individuals into the idea of open source. And you know, if, if, if AWS come along at some point and offer hosted supabase on AWS, then it will be a signal that where we're doing something.Right. And at that point we just, I think we just need to be. The best team to continue to move super boost forward. And if we are that, and I, I think we will be there and then hopefully we will never have to tackle this this licensing issue. [00:59:19] Jeremy: All right. Well, I wish you, I wish you luck.[00:59:23] Ant: Thanks. Thanks for having me. [00:59:25] Jeremy: This has been Jeremy Jung for software engineering radio. Thanks for listening. 

Millionaires just think different. Either they grew up with that thinking or they developed it themselves. It takes effort but you can develop it and it will change your life. Millionaire Thinking carries with it many differences but these are what I call the big 5. What do you think are the Big 5 Differences in Millionaire Thinking? a. Awareness of Possibilities around them the Average seem to Miss. b. Not Connected to Group Think but to their Own Dreams and success with them. c. The Pattern and Power of their Thinking Commands the Environment and Atmosphere of any gathering and any meeting. d. They think Vertically and not Horizontally. e. They Never participate in Negative Thinking especially with others. BONUS: Their Thinking carries a Never Fit In Focus as they know they never will fit in.

Thank you for joining us for our Sunday Service! "Serving God Horizontally" - May 01, 2022 Connect with us! Facebook: /LincolnParkALWC Instagram: @lpabundantlife www.alwclp.org

00:00 - Memento Mori in English 05:25 - Turkish explanation of English PodcastVocabularyTrope - something such as an idea, phrase, or image that is often used in a particular artist's work, in a particular type of art, etc.:Inevitability - the fact of being certain to happen and unable to be avoided or preventedDelighted - very pleasedTough - difficultMutual - for each otherProfound - showing a clear and deep understanding of serious mattersQuantitative -relating to numbers or amountsAwareness - knowing that something exists, or having knowledge or experience of a particular thingExtent - area or length; amountI heard about this phrase a lot. Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you have to die') is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. Pretty negative thought. But recently, I've comprehended the deeper and more positive meaning of it:To be in a moment, to value what you have.Seems like another positive mantra. But let's see how it is applicable to real, daily life. Sure, it isn't easy to count and be aware of every minute of my life and try to be delighted. Life is tough, though. But for me, the interpretation of Memento Mori is:"Remember that absolutely everything in this world is finite, so try to create a Vertical Value of what, and for who I have in my life. Things, People, Knowledge, Teaching."From 2017 to 2020, I was a member of a Business Platform. 50-80 business owners were coming together in a Hotel once a week to network. So for three years, I met and added to my contact list thousand of new people. I indeed made some value as an income and network from those people, and for sure, they made an income and network from me. But how many of those people do I remember or have a connection with now? Only four...From this experience, I understood one valuable lesson for myself:The more people I tried to reach, the shorter the mutual value of those relationships was since I spread the value and my time Horizontally.I had many new people on my list and surroundings but less concentration, resulting in less value to each person I was able to give or receive. The relationships with those new people were a "fast-food" relationship. They were consumed fast and finished fast.I had a clear idea that I needed to change my Mindset from Horizontal Values to Vertical ones - the profound value of people, things, the knowledge that I already have—flourishing and advancing them.When I started concentrating not on new people, but on the people close to me ( family, business partners, friends, and students) I began to create and receive more qualitative and quantitative value than before. I had limited concentration on the limited people.  The same thing about clothes, gadgets, tech devices. I don't have enough time to wear or use them all. So minimalism, in this sense, is a complete solution. It gives me an awareness of caring for the things I already have and using them to their full potential and extent.So, Memento Mori reminds me to be in-depth with what I have by preferring Quality over Quantity. Because the higher the quality of everything in my short life, the higher the happiness and pleasure I receive. And it is never about money.What do you think about Vertical and Horizontal Values? Comment below your thoughts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rustemtemriyev.substack.com

Growing horizontally, the seventh episode of the series The Tale and The Tongue, follows a conversation with graphic designer Katharina Hetzeneder. In Barcelona, she began to question the contribution of graphic design to social and political change. Katharina highlights the difference between working collectively and working with collectives; Katharina talkes about the notion of home and the influence of the rural—a reality she knows first-hand—and her relationship with and in urban environments. The conversation with Katharina Hetzeneder took place on 30 December 2021. For many people the year ends by returning to the past, just before they start to flirt with expectations and promises from the recent future. This podcast episode is both, a spell for ending and beginning another year. It is sustained by a desire for conversation, between people but also within collective events larger than individualities.

Growing horizontally, the seventh episode of the series The Tale and The Tongue, follows a conversation with graphic designer Katharina Hetzeneder. In Barcelona, she began to question the contribution of graphic design to social and political change. Katharina highlights the difference between working collectively and working with collectives; Katharina talkes about the notion of home and the influence of the rural—a reality she knows first-hand—and her relationship with and in urban environments. The conversation with Katharina Hetzeneder took place on 30 December 2021. For many people the year ends by returning to the past, just before they start to flirt with expectations and promises from the recent future. This podcast episode is both, a spell for ending and beginning another year. It is sustained by a desire for conversation, between people but also within collective events larger than individualities.

What's up, Business Nerds? James Manske dropped by and said hi to y'all. Join us as we talk about his book, his businesses, how he managed to write his book, and what to learn from it. All that sort of stuff. And Oh! He Does coaching as well, see his website link below. Also, Rob Anderson jumps in somewhere in the middle of the conversation and shares his two cents. Amazon link to James's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Horizontally-Business-through-Horizontal-ebook/dp/B093QKLN89 James's Website here: https://jamesmanske.com/

Y'all I honestly love Olivia Newton-John! What Abba was to Muriel, ONJ is to me. Today my friend Kevin joins me. We talk history, favorite things, my favorite Duke (of Hazards) and the power of Xanadu to “make” young boys gay (

On this episode of the Law of Attraction podcast, Natasha talks to Billionaire investor and businessman Grant Cardone. Grant's resume speaks for itself: -Grant runs 7 businesses -Has scaled a Real Estate Portfolio to over 1 Billion Dollars -Is the Bestselling Author of "The 10X Rule" and "If You're not First, You're Last" -Is a Professional Sales Trainer and Speaker - Is the Creator of Cardone University, a Sales training software with over 50 Million Users On today's episode of the podcast, Natasha and Grant talk about: -Why Entrepreneurs often fail to Scale -How to quickly turn ideas into profits -Why Following your heart is wrong -How to attach a scalability factor to your services and products -How to look at products and problems "Horizontally" instead of "Vertically" Episode Resources: Grant Cardone | YouTube Grant Cardone | Instagram Grant Cardone | Website Grant Cardone | Podcast Natasha Graziano | Instagram Natasha Graziano | YouTube Natasha Graziano | Website

Job's commitment to mercy ministry teaches us two main lessons about suffering. First, Godly people alleviate the suffering of others. Second, godly people suffer well themselves, trusting in God through it all. - Sermon Transcript - Turn in the Bible to Job 31 as we continue to move through this book. As I study the various books of the Bible, I realize that God in his wisdom has given us this incredible holy library of 66 books. And that each book of the Bible has a different role to play in our salvation, actually an array of roles. The central role of the book of Job is to address the problem of human suffering in the world. There are many other themes that come, but that is the central role. And in this book, we see an amazingly godly man, Job, being brought through wrenching trials, the dimensions of which we can scarcely imagine. And in this sermon today, today's sermon, we're going to see that Job, an amazingly godly man, cared very much about the sufferings of other people around him long before he ever came into suffering himself. He yearned to use his resources, his time, his energy, his money, all of the things are in his life to alleviate the suffering of others. That was part of what made him a blameless and a godly man. "The central role of the book of Job is to address the problem of human suffering in the world." And he recounts this track record in this chapter, Job 31. But this chapter, Job 31, his final defense, as we've been saying is set in the larger context of the sorrow and the misery that God had brought in his life. And so we can derive two lessons, a vertical lesson and a horizontal lesson from the themes today. Horizontally, first, godly people alleviate the suffering of other people around them. And then secondly, vertically, godly people suffer well themselves and do not murmur or chafe against God. They trust in God through it all. These are the two great lessons on suffering that I see through this chapter today. Now, as we deal with the issue of our horizontal awareness of the suffering of people around us and our sacrificial service to the poor and needy, I'm mindful of how difficult this topic is for all of us. I. Life in a Bubble It is very difficult for us as selfish sinners to care about the suffering of others. We really would like to move through life in this world in a protected bubble until we finally get to heaven and are free from it forever, no more death, mourning, crying or pain. We actually would like that to some degree. Now this was underscored for me by two experiences I had on the mission field. The first was in the summer of 1986, my first time being outside of the United States, I went on a 10-week summer mission trip to Kenya. And at the end, the last week, we spent at a resort area on the Indian Ocean coastline in Mombasa. And it was a very nice resort. And we were there enjoying good food and fellowship together on the final week together. Some of us wanted to go into the city of Mombasa. And we went and we were in an air-conditioned van moving through this city of Mombasa. And for the first time in my life, I saw poverty in a city, not in the United States. I saw that the difference between the poor in the U.S. and the poor in other countries was almost immeasurable. And it was shocking to me, the things that I was seeing in that area of Mombasa. And the more streets we moved through and drove through, the more uncomfortable I became with the shocking disparity between my lifestyle and the lifestyle of the people I was seeing outside that air-conditioned van. And it wasn't long after that, that van ride, that air-conditioned van ride became a kind of a symbol or a metaphor of me on this issue of ministering to the poor and needy, that my flesh, my heart desires, something like that for the rest of my life, I would like to just move and see it through tinted glass and be in a comfortable cushioned seat and have the air around me conditioned and just move through life like that. The second experience came a year later on my second mission trip, this one in Pakistan. I was on a team ministering to Afghan refugees who were fleeing from the Russians who had invaded to support their toppling communist regime, summer of 1987. Now those refugees, the Afghan refugees that we'd seen, I'd never seen such poverty in all my life. I mean, no, there were no one. I still haven't seen anyone as destitute as those people. They had fled with only their tattered clothes on their backs. And they had been through such experiences we can scarcely imagine. Almost every one of them had seen a loved one killed by a helicopter gunship or a landmine or something like that. The horror on their face was extraordinary, and we sought to minister to them. But the experience that sticks with me was not even those Afghan refugees, it was something that was churning in me. And as I looked and saw their needs and all that, but we're just moving through the city of Peshawar, and we're going to do some errands in Peshawar, Pakistan. And a number of poor Pakistani people would kind of come and accost you. They'd wait outside the bank when you went to get money or something. They were waiting for Westerners and they were coming at us. And as I encountered them, they would inevitably kind of point to their mouths and their stomach saying that they're hungry. They couldn't speak our language, but we knew what they wanted. And it was disturbing to me. The missionary that we were working with was dealing with it all the time and was used to it, didn't say a lot about it. He said that the beggars were frequently organized into somewhat like professional syndicates, somewhat like a prostitution ring with a pimp and all that. There would be individuals that would take advantage of poor people and would take a lot of the money that you gave them. And that there was this whole system going on. But he said, "Look, if you're concerned about them, all you have to do is just go to a Pakistani bakery and buy some of that naan, that beautiful, warm, delicious, flatbread, and just get a bunch of it and just have it ready. And when people would come, just give them the bread.” So I thought this was a great idea. So I went to a bakery and bought five or six of these loaves and carried them around in a bag with me. And wasn't long before a woman came doing the same thing, pointing to her mouth or her stomach. So I was excited. I triumphantly pulled out the naan and handed it to her and she became enraged and took it from me and threw it to the ground and walked away. She wanted money, she didn't want bread. And what was really troublesome to me at that moment was my heart reaction. I was actually relieved by this. It's, "Oh, okay." So I actually didn't feel I had as much of a burden now for the poor and needy, because of this woman's reaction. The whole thing's kind of a sham or a scam or something like that. Well, the problem was the day continued, there's more things going on. And another woman came up and she had a little child and she did the same thing pointing to her mouth in her stomach. And I took out a piece of bread and she immediately ripped it in half and gave it to her child and ate it herself. And it was gone in seconds. I gave her the rest of the bread I had and I realized it isn't a scam, it isn't a sham. There are genuinely needy people in this world. And the fact of the matter is I was looking for a neat solution to ministry to the poor and needy. I was looking for a way out to some degree. I realized that fully facing the problems of haves and have nots of poverty, of suffering in this world would be costly for me. And I would have to kind of get out of the air-conditioned van more than I was comfortable doing. And it was even more troubling to have a tour of my own heart in this matter, the wickedness and the selfishness of my own heart. That tour has continued to this present day. The fact of the matter is, Christ means to use the issue of poverty and the suffering of others, not just poverty, but suffering of any sort going on in other people's lives. Even among wealthy people, people that are going through cancer treatments or different things, just the suffering of others. He means to use that suffering to challenge us. And I mean that continually, a continual test, a continual challenge. He does not want us to feel comfortable ever, like we have a silver bullet or a neat solution to this problem. He means to bring us all, I think, to a point of desperation and self denial, where we look up to God and ask him what he would have us do. That we don't rely on ourselves to meet the needs, but we look to God. Jesus did this with his own disciples. He constantly challenged his own disciples. For example, the feeding the 5,000. Disciples came to Jesus late in the day, "Send the people home." And Jesus said, "They don't need to go away. You give them something to eat." Wow, what a moment that was. "Christ means to use the issue of poverty and the suffering ... to challenge us. " And John's gospel, then John's account, John tells us that Jesus sought out the issue with Philip and said, "Where are we to buy bread that all these people may eat?" And then John tells us, "Jesus only did this to test him because he knew what he was going to do." You just look that up. That's John 6. Jesus intends to test us on this issue. He brings the thing up and tests you to see how you will respond. So the issue is, are we going to be aware? Are we going to see what's going on in the world around us? We're going to face the huge overwhelming needs of many sorts. Will we look upward and trust God for the resources to meet needs? And then will we be sacrificial servants to alleviate suffering of others in the world or not? Now we need help on this issue, because from infancy, every one of us has been fanatically committed to self-interest. Augustine, in his classic Confessions, he describes the staggering level of selfishness, even in an infant nursing at his mother's breast. What was he like a moment before his needs started to be met? Well, you moms know exactly what he was like, depending on the circumstances, howling with rage. Inarticulate, unable to speak what was on his mind. But he wasn't thinking about you, Mom, and what your needs were at all, fanatical commitment to self-interest. And all of us are like this. Not just some of us, all of us. We grow up in that same mode. And only Christ, only the power of the Holy Spirit, only the grace of God, can break that fanatical commitment to self-interest so that we might love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that we might love our neighbor as ourselves. And to this end, we are given the greatest possible example. I don't mean Job, we'll get to him in a moment. But I mean Jesus Christ. Jesus entered the world before his incarnation with his eyes wide open, knew very well he was going to be swimming in a sea of misery. He was a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. What were his daily days of ministry like? What was it like? It was a river of sick, hurting people coming to him for healings. That's what his day was like. Crowds bigger than you can imagine. Crushing him, all of them sick or broken or paralyzed or in some agony in some way. He was just drawing the poison of sorrow and suffering into himself. Second Corinthians 8:9, "For you know the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor that you through his poverty might become rich." So Jesus left the comfort and ease of heaven to alleviate our sufferings. Now in Scripture, God has given us, aside from the central glorious example of Jesus, many other examples as well. And I think in the Old Testament, there may not be a greater example of mercy ministry or care for the poor and needy or justice ministry, whatever you want to call it, than Job and the way he accounts himself here in Job 31. Job lived out what James calls a pure and faultless religion. James 1:27, "Religion that our God and father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." Now let's remember the context here in the midst of Job's sorrows and sufferings that we know about. We've talked about this many times. Job 31 is his final defense against the accusations of his friends. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar have accused him of suffering because of his own wickedness. But as you remember from the very beginning, Job is introduced to us as a blameless and upright man who feared God and shunned evil. Now, God allowed Satan to assault Job, to steal from him his wealth, his children, and his health. And then in the cycle of debate and discussions that follow, that make up the bulk of the book, there's all these discussions from Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. They came to be with him and they followed their theology, the law of sowing and reaping, you reap what you sow, and God is just inactive in this world. So the only possible explanation for the magnitude of Job's suffering is that he must be a great sinner. They have no evidence, but this is where the theology led them. And so Job 31 is his defense against this. He's refuting this vigorously. Now we've already looked two weeks ago in an overview fashion over this whole chapter, magnificent chapter of eight different elements of Job's righteousness. Last week, we focused on Job's commitment to absolute sexual purity. Today, we're going to zero in on his care for mercy ministry. And this is a direct answer to a Eliphaz's outrageous accusation against Job. Job 22:5-10, Eliphaz said this, and just keep this in mind. This is the blameless and upright man that God boasted about to Satan. Eliphaz said this, "Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless?" Now this is Eliphaz way out on a limb, no evidence. He's just saying these things. “You demanded security from your brothers for no reason, you strip men of their clothing, leaving them naked. You gave no water to the weary. You withheld food from the hungry though, you were a powerful man owning land, an honored man living on it. And you sent widows away empty handed. You broke the strength of the fatherless. That is why snares are all around you, why sudden peril terrifies you.” So we're going to see in this chapter, in the sermon today, just three kind of main areas of Job's mercy ministries, concern for mercy. First in verse 13, fair treatment for his servants. And then secondly, in verses really throughout, but 16-20, especially sacrificial care for the poor and needy. And then thirdly, justice for the needy in court, exerting influence and justice for the needy in court. These are the three main areas. So we'll walk through each of these so that Job can give us help, that Job can be a role model, so that Job can stand and say to us in Christ, “follow me as I follow Christ." That's what ultimately the benefit that we'll have from this. So let's talk first about the cost of Job's care for the poor and needy. This is not without charge. It's costly. It was energetic and costly for Job to serve the poor and needy. II. The Cost of Job’s Care for the Needy Now remember a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the contrast between Confucius' version of the Golden Rule and Jesus' version. I don't know if you remember that. The Golden Rule, Matthew 7:12 says, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the Prophets." It just sums up the second great commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself." If you think about it, that means activity, it means energy, it means self-denying, sacrificial work. Effectively it's saying, put as much energy into caring for the needs of your neighbor as you do into caring for your own needs. Put as much thought and creativity into caring for the needs of your neighbor, as you do into caring for your own. So Christ's Golden Rule is harder to obey than Confucius'. Confucius’ basically is negative, don't do to others what you would not have them do to you. It's a simple ethic of “do not harm.” Do no harm. Christ turns around and says, "Actively do good as you would have it done to you." "So Christ's Golden Rule is harder to obey than Confucius'. Confucius’ basically is negative, don't do to others what you would not have them do to you. ... Christ turns around and says, "Actively do good as you would have it done to you."" Remember, Christ's parable of the Good Samaritan taught to, I guess, a lawyer who tried to justify himself. There’s always the danger on this issue of mercy and ministry. We're always trying to justify ourselves and our behavior. We're fine as we are. We care about poor people like we should. He said, "Well, who is my neighbor?" And he told the parable, "The Good Samaritan." You remember how this man went down on the road to Jericho and was waylaid by highway robbers who violated Confucius' rule of do not do harm. They attacked him and etcetera. They also violated the Golden Rule. But then along come two others. You remember a priest who saw him bleeding there by the side of the road and walked by on the other side of the road and just kept going and did nothing. So he fulfilled Confucius' edict to not do harm, but he didn't do anything for him. He saw him and just walked on. Same thing with the Levite, exact same thing. He saw him. Jesus makes it very clear. Both of these saw, but they walked on, on the other side of the road. So the seeing and other side, that's what I mean by the bubble, that air-conditioned bubble that we're looking for. I see it, but I don't want to see it. And I'm over here and there's a space. And then along comes the Good Samaritan who sacrificially cares for him. So Job did that. Job lived a life of active service. It was costly for him to care for the fatherless and the widow. It was costly for him to feed hungry and clothe the naked. It was costly for him to house the stranger. This is the pattern that Jesus commends to all his servants. And it's on the basis of this, he says in Matthew 25, that he's going to evaluate the entire human race. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory and all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he's going to put the sheep on his right on the goats on his left.” And he's going to say to those on his right, the sheep, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Take your inheritance the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick, and you look after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me." And they said, "When?" And he said, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me." Then he turns it around on the goats and said, "You did not do these things for me." Priest and the Levite walking by on the other side, "You didn't do it. So depart from me you who are cursed," he says. That's what's going to happen on Judgment Day. It’s a costly sacrificial service. III. The Patterns of Job’s Care for the Needy Now let's talk about the patterns of Job's care for the needy. Now Job's speech, his talk is in the form of an oath that he's taking in a court. If I have done this, and if I have done that, and if I have done the other, then may I be cursed? That's basically the pattern that we have in his language here. So verse 16, verse 17, verse, 19 verse 21, they all have “if, if, if, if.” So, but he's denying that he did those things. So you turn it around, they become then the assertions he's making about his life. So first one, fair treatment for his servants in verse 13. Verse 13, "If I have denied justice to my man servants and maid servants, when they had a grievance against me…..may I be accursed?" I didn't, I didn't deny justice to my men servants and maid servants when they had a grievance against me. Job was a great man running a great estate. He had lots of livestock. He had many servants that cared for the livestock as you remember. If any of them Job said, at any time had a grievance against him, say, I didn't run a perfect estate. Inevitably there would've been some things that would've happened, some mistakes, some ways that I could have been a better master to them as servants. I could have done better. So if they ever brought a grievance to me, I made certain that I heard them, that I listened to them and that I addressed their grievance. That's what he's saying. He was humble enough to listen to them. Great men of those days, they wouldn't listen to these people at all. They wouldn't even get a day in court, so to speak. They wouldn't even be heard. Job made certain that they were heard, made certain that their needs were addressed, was humble in that respect. Modern day application, some of you may be important, powerful people in your companies. You may be employers. You may be bosses. The question is, do you deal justly with people who have a grievance against you? Very easy to get defensive and use your position of power to make life difficult, to make their work lives miserable. Second main pattern is just sacrificial care for the poor and the needy. In verse 16, he said, "If I've denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of the widow grow weary." So this is a lifestyle of active care for the poor and widows in the community. He did not deny their desires, the basic commodities of food, of clothing, of shelter. He saw that they got it. He didn't send them away empty handed without their desire met. So over 17 bread for the hungry. If I had kept my bread to myself, not sharing it with the fatherless. John Calvin, in his sermon on this text, he uses the image that frequently the New Testament uses of a steward who's put in charge of the master's goods to manage them. And the master gives specific instructions that this amount of these resources go to this person and these resources must go to this person and all that. He gives specific instructions. And then the steward doesn't do what the master told him to do. He doesn't embezzle. He doesn't hold it to himself. He just doesn't distribute the goods the way the master told him to. "That master,” said John Calvin, "will have every right to be angry with the steward because by his not following out the generous commands of his master, he made the master look stingy. He made the master look unjust." And so it is when we withhold resources that the Lord has given to us, that he means to distribute, then we actually make God look bad. As it says in Romans, "The name of God is blasphemed because of you." Romans 2:24. We don't want to do that, we want to make our God look generous. Now we cannot give a specific rule about how much to give or when to give or etcetera. It's hard to know. It takes wisdom. Jesus said in Mark 14:7, "The poor you will always have with you” and you can help them anytime you want." And that, just that freedom, it's just like they're always going to be around you. You're not going to solve the problem of poverty in the world. So you're always going to have opportunities. And part two, you can help them anytime you want. Implied in that is you can help them as much as you want. Part three is, we'll talk about how much that was on judgment day. That's how I hear that. You're always going to have poor. We can't solve this. It's going to be with us till Jesus comes back. Secondly, it's up to you what you do. You have choices to make in this matter. And third, sheep and the goats, we're going to talk about it on judgment day. So God leaves it to us to be wise stewards, to give in proportion to our income, wisely learning the condition of the poor. Expecting in some cases, perhaps to get taken advantage of like that beggar syndicate. I didn't know anything about that. I didn't realize that a good chunk of the money that I gave would go to some unscrupulous wicked person. But that doesn't free me from caring for the genuinely hungry there. Job was lavishly generous with any person, poor person he knew. We tend to be stingy. We also feel excessively proud of ourselves when one out of a hundred times we help someone. And then we feel like we boast, “that was a big moment for me, Lord, you did see that,” right? “You saw what I did there. That was generous of me, don't you think?” So we like that. I know it's hard. I know it's hard, brothers and sisters, to get this right. I understand. I've been fighting this struggle, I struggle with this issue my whole Christian life. I understand. I don't think we're going to reach Job's level. But the dynamic of the Christian life is to see some defect in yourself and take it to God in prayer and say, "Change me, make me a different man or a different woman a year from now than I am now. I'm not very generous to the poor and needy, honestly. I don't sacrifice much for them. Will you please transform me?" He also talks about giving guidance to the orphan and the widow. Verse 18, "But from my youth, I reared the fatherless as would a father. And from my birth, I guided the widow." So he basically just kind of grew up in an atmosphere of caring about the poor and needy. Obviously, he doesn't care for widows as an infant. But I think what he's saying is these foundations got built in his soul from an early age. Says a lot about Christian parenting, doesn't it? That you’re raising people up, kids up to care about others from childhood. And then look at the level of care. He said that the fatherless grew up with him, implies adoption or an active care for the orphan, giving him an education, rearing him as a father would a child. This was the level of Job's piety. It was very costly. It's hugely inconvenient to open your home and your lifestyle to an outsider. But to be the father to the fatherless involves a lot more than just giving a little bit of money. In Job's case, it meant pouring wisdom into the young man, seeing him grow up. And then when it came to the widow, it wasn't again, merely a matter of money. It was guidance. She was stripped of her protection often, legally. But she could come to Job and he was a safe haven for her. He would give her good advice, not just money, but guide her and get her into a good situation. So Job spent himself on behalf of the poor and needy. It was time. It was money. It was energy. Those commodities. And he speaks of clothing for the shivering. Verses 19 and 20, "If I've seen anyone perishing for lack of clothing or a needy man without a garment and his heart did not bless me for warming him with the fleece, from my sheep." So Job took his massive resource. Remember he had 7,000 sheep and he used a large portion of the wool that he had sheared from his sheep to make certain that the poor, the naked that he knew, were clothed. He rescued them from perishing in the cold. And he saw them. It was a key moment. He looked at them, he saw them with compassionate eyes. And he cared for them. He also speaks of housing for the stranger, verses 31, 32. He said that, "The men in my household have never said, who has not had his fill of Job's meat? But no stranger had to spend the night in the street for my door was always open to the traveler." So he was open for hospitality. I mean, back then, you didn't have hotels and inns generally. And so if there was a stranger coming into the community, as Jesus said, "I was a stranger, you invited me in." And then finally, this issue of justice in court. In verses 21-22, he says, "If I have raised my hand against the fatherless, knowing that I had influence in court, then let my arm fall from the shoulder, let it be broken off at the joint." It was easy for the poor and the widow to get dominated in court. It's easy for the powerful, the wealthy to set up the system and gain the system so that they can take advantage of people who can't get good legal counsel or can't get somebody to stand up for them in court. This is why Jesus said very plainly that the teachers of the law, he cried out, “woe to them” because they devoured widow's houses. What does that mean? They were able legally to confiscate widow's property, take advantage of them. So instead, a truly godly man would come to the aid of widows in a court of laws. It says in Isaiah 1:17, "Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow." Now, what were the reasons for Job's care for the needy? This is as important as what he did. IV. The Reasons for Job’s Care for the Needy And his reasons, as we've seen in Job 31, was a God-centered piety, everything centered on God. From the beginning, we're told of Job that he “feared God and shunned evil.” Things came again and again in Job's heart to God, to that vertical dimension. He was always thinking about God, how will God see this? What will God do about this? And he knew that he was accountable to God. For example, his reason for making certain he didn't deny justice to his own servants is that someday he himself would have to give an account to his own master. He knew that while he was a master temporarily, at least he was also a slave of God. So look at verses 13-14. He said, "If I have denied justice to my men servants and maid servants, when they had a complaint against me, what will I do when God confronts me? What will I answer when called to account? Someday," Job said, "I'm going to have to give an account for how I have treated these people. I'm going to have to give an answer to God for what I've done." And fundamentally, as he says in verse 15, God made us both. Verse 15, "Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?" John Calvin said, "Whenever you look at another human being, no matter what their circumstances, you're really looking in a mirror. You are both created in the image of God. There's no significant difference between you." So this is the foundation of all of our ethical treatment of other human beings. This person is a human being created in the image of God, fashioned in the womb by his meticulous care, just like you. Job also feared God's judgment. Verse 23, "I dreaded destruction from God. For fear of his splendor, I could not do such things." Job knew that God would be highly motivated to defend the poor and needy against their oppressors. He says in Proverbs 14:31, "He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker. But conversely, whoever is kind to the needy honors God." So turning it around positively, whenever you are kind to the needy, you're honoring God, you're worshiping God, you're elevating God and presenting him as glorious and loving. And that's ultimately a positive motivation, isn't it? The delight you bring to others, the happiness you can bring in somebody's circumstance. Look at verse 20, 19 and 20. He said, "If I've seen anyone perishing for lack of clothing or a needy man without a garment and his heart did not bless me for warming him with a fleece from my sheep." How sweet is that? Somebody's in a extremity, an extreme situation and you're able to step in with some resources. Might just be counsel, might be friendship, but it could be money, some care and the burden is gone. You've taken care of it and there's a joy that comes from it. Now I know not everybody's going to say thank you. I know not everybody. Some people act as though you owe it to them. We understand that. There's going to be some bad behavior on both sides of the equation, but that doesn't matter. No matter what happens, ultimately, what matters is vertically God sees it and he's pleased. There's a joy and a delight in all of this. V. Applications All right. So what applications can we take from this? Well, first of all, Job is to all of us, spiritually, a father. We are like his children. It's like, "Teach me, dad, how to be, what kind of man should I be? What kind of woman should I be?" To have a godly father who can set a good role model for us and set a good example. So I don't think we're going to reach Job's level. You read this chapter. If you take it all as gospel truth, that this is how he lived his life, it's a very, very high standard. What you can do is take counsel in prayer with yourself. If you're married, husband and wife, get together and say, "How can we grow in care for the poor and needy? What can we do?" There are ministry opportunities right here in Durham. There are ministry opportunities around us. So we have to ask, not just individually, but for us as a church, the elders of our church, we have to ask what mercy ministries does God want us to do that we're not doing yet? I can't imagine not asking this. Oh, it's inconceivable that we aren't doing any mercy ministries God wants us to do that. Just can't be, there must be some opportunities that we're missing, there must be some things. Maybe up to this point, there hasn't been an open door, but now there's an opportunity. How can we do that? And as we do, we need to keep proper priorities. We need to care for the body, but care more for the soul. They're not equal in importance. The social gospel in the 19th century basically said, fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man, God has no active wrath or justice against any sinners. It's all fine. It's like a universalism kind of thing. The real issue is alleviating temporal suffering. That's what the social gospel is all about. The soup kitchens, all that kind of thing. There was no concern for proclaiming a gospel of salvation to sinners who were under the wrath of God, because they didn't believe in that. That was a social gospel. But the problem was fundamentalists in the 19th and on to 20th century overreacted the other way and did nothing for the body, many of them. Preached the gospel and that was it. And so there was a detachment that seems a lot like that air-conditioned bubble ride I was talking about that fundamentalists just didn't get involved in alleviating temporal suffering. And then Carl F. H. Henry came along the uneasy conscience of the modern evangelical and there started to be a concern. John Stott talked about two wings of a bird, the gospel, and then alleviating temporal suffering. I don't think it's helpful because I think they're not equal. Do you remember when Jesus fed the 5,000? Remember that? John 6. What did they do the next day? Came back for more food. Remember? It's like, "Well, this is a good gig. Jesus can do this effortless. I could quit my Job. It's like we've won the lottery here. I mean, he waves his hand and a five loaves and two fish and look at that. And that was good. Those are good loaves too. Did you taste that fish? It was good. Jesus is an excellent chef." Jesus rebuked them for that constant pressure for the stomach. He said, "Do not labor for the food that spoils, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you." So they're not equal. They're not like two wings of a bird. One is far more important. A number of years ago, I spoke at a conference Gospel Coalition put on about mercy ministry and they're talking about that. And the slogan’s very helpful. Christians should care about all human suffering, but especially eternal suffering. There is no suffering worse than that of eternity in hell. Depart from me ye who are cursed into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. But Christians should also seek to alleviate temporary suffering too. Jesus did, and Job did. So that's what stands in front of us. So the call to us is to get out of the bubble and to make steps toward people that are broken, people that are hurting. People, we tend to go away from suffering. We need to go more toward it, ask God to work this in you. But realize, no matter how much you do in mercy ministry, no matter how sacrificial you are, even if you got close to Job's level, none of those things would ever save you from your sins. Job wasn't saved from hell because of his mercy ministry. And after this chapter, a few chapters later, he's repenting of his sins vertically. He needed to repent and have a savior as much as any human being. And so we are saved because Jesus left his throne and came and was born of the Virgin Mary and lived a sinless life and died an atoning death for sinners like you and me. And by faith in Christ alone, our sins are forgiven. Not by our mercy ministry, our justice or any of that. But having been saved, how then shall we live? Job 31 tells us. Let's close in prayer. "Christians should care about all human suffering, but especially eternal suffering. There is no suffering worse than that of eternity in hell." Lord, thank you for the role model that Job is for us in this issue of justice and mercy. Father, we know that this is a challenging topic. We know it searches us. We are so selfish. Father, I pray that you would enable us to be more generous than we've ever been before. Show us individually and show us also as a church, what mercy ministries and what alleviation of suffering that you're calling us to do. Help us to be willing to do it even if it's sacrificial, maybe especially if it's sacrificial. Transform us, Lord. Make us different. Help us not to be selfish and self-focused, but instead to live for others as you did. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Agreeing that story splitting is necessary when doing Agile is the topic of Episode #22. This episode, #24, is tips on the mechanics of story splitting.  We start by focusing on the Acceptance Criteria and looking at what makes up the Acceptance Criteria and when the Acceptance Criteria make the story too big, then taking those elements and slicing them VERTICALLY (not Horizontally - also discussed in Episode #22).   The main elements you capture in the Acceptance Criteria: 1. Data Elements and Data Requirements (To Login the Data Required: Name, PIN Number, Accounter Number Optional: Location, Language Preference) 2. Business Rules (Happy Path: User enters a valid password;  Negative Path: User enters an invalid password; The system times out before a password is entered) 3. Process Flow and Process Steps (1. Log into the account 2. Make a Deposit 3. Check the Balance 4. Make a Withdrawal)

Agreeing that story splitting is necessary when doing Agile is the topic of Episode #22. This episode, #23, is tips on the mechanics of story splitting.  We start by focusing on the Acceptance Criteria and looking at what makes up the Acceptance Criteria and when the Acceptance Criteria make the story too big, then taking those elements and slicing them VERTICALLY (not Horizontally - also discussed in Episode #22).   The main elements you capture in the Acceptance Criteria: 1. Data Elements and Data Requirements (To Login the Data Required: Name, PIN Number, Accounter Number Optional: Location, Language Preference) 2. Business Rules (Happy Path: User enters a valid password;  Negative Path: User enters an invalid password; The system times out before a password is entered) 3. Process Flow and Process Steps (1. Log into the account 2. Make a Deposit 3. Check the Balance 4. Make a Withdrawal)

Welcome Back Listeners! Last week Pastor O-Mar Stennett began a new series called Reconnect and Refresh. He looked at the importance of Reconnecting With God. Today, we look at Reconnecting Horizontally - Reconnecting With Others. As we listen and learn how to Restore Broken Relationships, let us not be mere hearers of the Word but doers also. Message Text is St. Matthew 5: 21-26 Be blessed!

Dr. Faerron Guzman talks about designing on the ground experiences for students in Global Health, the importance of having a democratic perspective in teaching, and what he's learned by being a student and a faculty member in different countries.

From Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: the Westminster Model and Multi-level Governance A stark comparison between the ‘Westminster Model' (WM) and Multi-level Governance (MLG) allows us to consider the difference between accountable government and the messy real world of policymaking. The WM may be used as an ideal-type to describe how power is centralized in the hands of a small number of elites: We rely on representative, not participatory, democracy. The plurality electoral system exaggerates the parliamentary majority of the biggest party and allows it to control Parliament. A politically neutral civil service acts according to ministerial wishes. The prime minister controls cabinet and ministers. We may also identify an adversarial style of politics and a ‘winner takes all' mentality which tends to exclude opposition parties. The government is responsible for the vast majority of public policy and it uses its governing majority, combined with a strong party ‘whip' to make sure that its legislation is passed by Parliament. Power is centralized and government policy is made from the top-down. In turn, the government is accountable to public, via Parliament, on the assumption that it is powerful, responsible and takes responsibility for public policy. In contrast, MLG suggests that power is spread widely across the political system: Vertically – at supranational, national, regional and local levels ((hence multi-level). Horizontally – shared between government departments and a range of non-governmental and quasi-non-governmental (quango) bodies (hence governance rather than government). The hook is that we are witnessing a major transformation: from national governing institutions to supranational and sub-national governing institutions; and, from central government to the different levels of government and non-governmental organizations that interact with them. MLG identifies blurred boundaries between formal and informal sources of authority which make it difficult to identify clear-cut decisions or power relations. [for more see Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: the Westminster Model and Multi-level Governance]

There are two ways to look at life: horizontally and vertically. Lots of people have a horizontal perspective, but Pastor Dave Cover challenges us to look vertically for a more joyful, fulfilling life. Join in as he discusses and prays throughhttps://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalms+118%3A8-11&version=ESV ( )https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalms+118%3A8-11&version=ESV (Psalm 16.8-11): I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Interested in more content like this? Listen to the prayer over Psalm 16.1-8: What Turned My Prayer Life Upside Down. Like this content? Make sure to share it with others and leave us a rating, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit ourhttps://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ ( )https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us onhttps://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO ( )https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook),https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO ( )https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), andhttps://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo ( )https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.

Introduction Waiting on the Power of God Well, after Jesus was crucified, and after He rose from the dead, He appeared to His disciples in the upper room. You think about that scene, the disciples were there in the upper room with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, and Jesus came and stood amongst them and He showed them the physical evidence of His crucifixion, his suffering for them, and He said, "Peace be with you", “and He breathed on them and said receive the Holy Spirit.” And then He said these incredible words, "If you forgive anyone their sins, they're forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they're not forgiven." And then a week later, they were still in the upper room, and the doors were still locked for fear of the Jews. They knew that Christ had conquered death. They knew it! But they still were fearful of the work that the Lord was laying on them, the work of the Great Commission. They were fearful of what would be asked of them to change the world as would be later said of some of the disciples, “these men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” They were afraid of what it would take to turn the world upside down, or really, right-side up. And so, they were there in the upper room, and they were there also because Jesus commanded them not to leave, that they should wait in that upper room until they were clothed with power from on high. And He gave them over that period of time many convincing proofs that He was alive, and then He ascended into Heaven with the statement that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came on them, and they would be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the ends of the earth. And they went back and they waited, they waited there in the upper room and then on the day of Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit fell on them. The third person of the Trinity was manifested first in the sound of a violent, rushing wind, and then “tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each one of the, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them,” and a crowd was gathered hearing the sound of that mighty rushing wind and they poured out into the streets, fearless of any consequences that might come on them, in the very same city where their Lord had been crucified only just a short time before that, they had no fear of death, and preached boldly the Gospel. And 3000 were converted that same day. Two Patterns of Resurrection and Power Now, in all of this, two patterns, two lasting patterns were established, that it's worth it to us to study and to understand. The first is the pattern of Jesus' death and resurrection. The pattern of dying and rising again, that was not meant just for Jesus, but was meant also for his witnesses as he said, "Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself a single seed, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit." And so, the Church individually and collectively needed to follow that pattern; to be willing to die and have God raise them up, to be willing even to physically die that others might be saved. But of course, all of us tend to preserve our lives. We don't want to suffer and die. And so the second pattern is needful. There you have the Church, understanding all of the facts, understanding the Gospel, aware of the doctrine, aware of the truth, but still it seems powerless, captivated by fear. And then the Holy Spirit pours out and the Church is unleashed in a powerful way. Now, Martyn Lloyd-Jones in 1959, preaching about a revival that happened 100 years before that, in 1859, said that this is the lasting pattern. We see this again and again in Church history, this is what he said. He was speaking at an assembly there on the 100th anniversary of an incredible revival that swept through Great Britain, 1859. And Lloyd-Jones central point there is the Church doesn't really change and neither does the world. The basic issues are always the same, man in his sin, the Gospel is the power of God for salvation. The Church in a weak and almost helpless state unable to meet the challenges of its day, knowing the truth, doing some good ministries, but unable to make significant progress. Suddenly the power of God is poured out from on high, the Church is revived. It moves out in power and many in the world are saved, and they are transformed genuinely. He would say revivals tend to follow their course, they at some point get dissipated in their strength and effectiveness, and the Church returns to its weakened state, needing again the power of God to be poured out from on high. Now Lloyd-Jones is very clear in the distinction between the filling of the Spirit that we have in Ephesians 5:18, where we're commanded to be filled with the Spirit, and what he called the “Baptism of the Spirit.” Now, in this sermon, I'm going to argue that that nomenclature is misplaced, and be bold enough to challenge Martyn Lloyd-Jones on that, but that there's a real experience that our brothers and sisters have had over 2000 years of Church history that we should not discard, no matter what we call it, that there are real experiences of the Holy Spirit being poured out on the Church and the Church being, and this is the normal word, “revived”. Revival comes, and there's tremendous progress made in personal holiness and an evangelistic fruitfulness as a result of that. Lloyd-Jones says, “This is precisely what happens in revival, it is God pouring forth His Spirit, filling His people.” Again, it is not that which is talked of in Ephesians 5:18 which is the command to us, go on being filled with the Spirit. That is something you and I do, but this revival is something that is done to us. It is the Spirit falling upon us, being poured out upon us. These are the terms, “I will pour forth my Spirit,” God alone can do that, but it is you and I were responsible for going on being filled with the Spirit. We must not grieve the Spirit, we must not quench the Spirit, we must give obedience to the Spirit, and as long as we do that we shall go on being filled with the Spirit, but this is different. This is the Spirit being poured out upon us until we are filled to overflowing. The Spirit's Work in Filling Us Now, the Holy Spirit is responsible. The third person in the Trinity, is responsible for taking the finished work of Christ on the cross and applying it worldwide. That is the work given in the Trinity, the work given to the Holy Spirit of God, and He does it very well. For 20 centuries He has made certain that the unconverted elect in every generation are brought from death to life. That Jesus's name is the most famous on planet Earth in every generation, that's the Spirit's work, and He sees to it, but He does that in two different rhythms or patterns, I could say. And what I'm going to say in this sermon today is there are the ordinary ministries of the Spirit and the extraordinary ministries of the Spirit, and both of them are essential for the journey that the Lord has the Church on until His work is finished in this world. Some folks, including Martyn Lloyd-Jones, call the extraordinary ministries of the Spirit the Baptism of the Spirit. I think that's wrong. It's a wrong name for a true experience. Today, I want to talk about the Baptism of the Spirit happening to all Christians, every Christian, at the beginning of their Christian life. And then the filling of the Spirit, in ordinary and extraordinary measures. So I'm going to just lay my cards on the table. I believe that Baptism in the Spirit happens to every single genuinely-born again person, and it happens once and never needs to be repeated again. It happens at conversion. Pentecostals and other charismatics who say that you should seek the Baptism of the Spirit are not following a biblical pattern, for there are no such commands in the New Testament. There are no commands to seek the Baptism of the Spirit. The filling of the Spirit happens again and again in the Christian life. And it empowers Christians to make progress in the two journeys that we talk about so much in this church; the internal journey of sanctification, of holiness, and the external journey of gospel advancement, evangelism. Ephesians 5:18 is a command to us that we should seek the filling of the Spirit. We're going to talk about that. The filling of the Spirit, as I've said, comes in both ordinary and extraordinary measures. The ordinary filling of the Spirit has been, and continues to be sufficient to make overwhelming progress that the Lord wants us to make and it should not in any way be denigrated. But the extraordinary filling of the Spirit, sometimes called revival, is also awesome and wonderful and powerful and should be sought through prayer. And it should not be in any way minimized either. Neither should it be over-emphasized as though until we get a revival, nothing will happen. That is not helpful. So therefore, a healthy Christian should see both the ordinary ministries of the Spirit and the extraordinary ministries of the Spirit as beneficial for the spread of the Gospel and growth and holiness. So there's the sermon. I would advise you to continue to listen after that, but you got it in a nutshell now. And so I want to talk about these things, and we need to begin with the terminology; Baptism. Baptism of the Spirit. What is the Baptism of the Spirit? John the Baptist Now baptism itself began in the Bible with John the Baptist. You do not see baptism at all in the Old Testaments, it's not an Old Testament thing. The word from the Greek, “baptizo”, means to immerse or plunge something, to plunge an object, or a person, in a vat or a container or a large amount of liquid. Now, that's how the word is used. So, we Baptists, who believe in complete immersion, all we're saying is we believe in complete baptism. Alright? So a baptism sprinkling, those things don't make any sense. The word means to immerse or plunge. So John the Baptist came along, the habit had been n between the Old Testament and New Testament period, intertestamental period, as Jews have been scattered because of the judgments of God from Palestine to that region of the world, more and more Gentiles became what was known as God-fearers, and wanted to become Jews, they wanted to become monotheists in the Jewish patterns. And so they were accepted in after certain rituals, the men had to be circumcised and both of them had to be bathed, they had to have a bath. They were immersed in water to cleanse them of their pagan ways. This isn't commanded anywhere in the Bible, it was just something that the Jewish leaders did. Well, along comes John the Baptist, and he is preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, "Repent for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." And he was baptizing Jews, this was shocking, but he was effectively saying by immersing Jews in the Jordan River, he was saying, “You're no better than pagans. You're no better than the Gentiles, you are following the same idolatrous patterns, and you need the same cleansing.” He was predicted in Isaiah 40, “the voice of one calling in the desert, prepare the way for the Lord, make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.” That was John the Baptist. And Jewish people were just powerfully attracted to his bold preaching, and they came and they received this immersion, this plunging in water by John. They were confessing their sins. Now, the central work of John was to prepare the way for Jesus, to get the people ready for Jesus. And he did this by heightening expectations of this one who was going to come. Jesus said of John the Baptist, he was the greatest man who had ever lived up to that point. “Among those born of women, none had risen greater than John the Baptist.” Jesus' Baptisms: Holy Spirit or Eternal Fire But listen to what John said about Jesus, "I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor, gathering up the weed into His barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire." So there John said Jesus would baptize the people in a greater baptism than he did. He will baptize them in the Holy Spirit and in fire. Now, the unquenchable fire that John the Baptist speaks of is an interpretive key to his thinking. “Unquenchable fire,” to me, must refer to Hell, it must refer to the Lake of Fire. The word baptize means to plunge. And He said that Jesus has the power, the authority to plunge people into unquenchable fire, and this He will do at the end of the world when the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, He will gather all the nations before Him, and He will separate them, one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And He'll put the sheep on his right, and the goats on His left. And the sheep represent those that are redeemed and lived a Godly life by the power of the Holy Spirit, but the goats represent the unregenerate. “And He will say to those on his left, ‘depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” Jesus has the power to do that, the authority to do it, and it will happen. However, Jesus will never both plunge someone in the Holy Spirit and in unquenchable fire. It's an either/or proposition. We must understand, therefore, that John is speaking to a mixed group. Some of them he called the brood of vipers, the Pharisees and Sadducees and the religious leaders, but others were just humbly confessing their sins, so he's speaking to a mixed group. And I think we, therefore, need to understand Jesus will either baptize you in the Holy Spirit, or He will baptize you in eternal fire, that's the greatness of Jesus. John only baptizes in water, it's a symbol. Jesus does the real baptism. Baptism of the Spirit Happens at Conversion So what is this Baptism of the Spirit? Well, the Baptism of the Spirit happens by Jesus to genuinely converted persons. It happens at conversion. Look at the text that Jim just read for us, 1 Corinthians 12:13, "We were all baptized by one Spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greek, slave or free, and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." So when does the Baptism of the Spirit happen? First of all, notice it happens to all of us. We were all baptized. There's not a group of people that are Christians, but not yet baptized in the Spirit, and so all Christians are baptized in the Spirit. When does it happen? According to the verse, it happens when we were made members of the Body of Christ. It is by the Baptism of the Spirit that you become a member of the Body of Christ, when you are converted. That's when it happens. So the immersion that we have, the spiritual immersion we have at conversion is positional language. We have been plunged into a spiritual ocean of God, of grace, and in that we live and move and have our being once we are converted. And it never needs to happen again, we are immersed in the Holy Spirit. We have been rescued from Satan's filthy, cesspool of sin, and we have been plunged into grace and into the cleansing. And we stand in that grace forever, that's true of every single Christian all over the world, Jews and Greeks, slave and free. So ethnicity doesn't matter, socio-economic doesn't matter, what matters is are you born again? Have you trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior? If so, you have been baptized by the Spirit into this one body, the Body of Christ. Now, but beyond this, once for all, plunging into the ocean of Christ's cleansing Spirit or grace by the Spirit. We're also given the text that says one spirit to drink. We have the freedom to drink of the Holy Spirit. This drinking, I believe, refers to an ongoing experience of refreshment that we have through the Holy Spirit in Christ. It reminds me of two magnificent texts in John's Gospel. The first is the statement He made to the Samaritan woman at the well, remember? How she was very proud of the well that Jacob, their father, their ancestor, had given to them. And Jesus said, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is who's speaking to you, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water.” She's intrigued, she says, “Well who are you? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us this well and he drank from it himself, as did also his flocks and herds.” Jesus said this, “Everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again. But whoever drinks of the water that I give him shall never thirst, indeed the water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” In other words, you can drink from that whenever you want. It's an internal heart experience of drinking the living water. John chapter 4. A few chapters later, John 7, this happened at the assembly of the Jews at the Feast of the Booths, and they were all assembled there, and in the last and greatest day of the feast Jesus stood and cried out in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive. Up to that time, the Spirit had not been given since Jesus had not yet been glorified. So you have that same kind of image, the image of living water. Three Observations from John Piper Now, John Piper commenting on this, John 7 text, said some very important things. First, he says, the gift of water is free. The condition you must meet is need. “Is anyone thirsty?” Well, that's the condition, and the action you must take is to drink, receive the gift. There's no thought here of earning or meriting. Anyone who knows his own thirst is invited. Are you thirsty? Come. Secondly, the human soul has thirst. We know He's not talking about physical thirst, that's clear, but what He is saying is that the soul has something like physical thirst. When you go without water, your body gets thirsty, and the soul when it goes without God, gets thirsty. Your body was made to live on water, your soul was made to live on God. That's the most important thing you need to know about yourself, you were made to live on God, you have a soul, you have a spirit, there is a you that's more than body, and that is your soul. If it does not drink from the greatness, and wisdom, and power, and goodness, and justice, and holiness, and love of God, you will die of thirst. Third, implied in the word thirst is that what Jesus offers is satisfying, it is refreshing. The aim of all theology, of all study, all Biblical learning, all preaching is to spread the satisfying banquet for you to eat with joy and to protect the kitchen from poison. The aim of cooking is eating, the aim of digging wells and clearing out Springs is drinking. Everything Jesus came to do and to teach is aimed at providing the soul with food and drink that will satisfy forever. Now to come to Jesus and drink is the same as believing in Him. John 7 says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” So, John Piper says, “So be done forever with the sad notion that saving faith, that believing in Jesus is a mere decision to ascent to facts. No, it is a coming to Him as to a feast, it is a recognizing of a treasure, it is a banquet, a spring in the desert when we are dying of thirst.” The Effects of the Living Water Now what will happen to you when you come? John 7:38 says, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” Literally it says out of his belly. The point is our inner being, call it your belly, your heart, soul, spirit. What does that mean? What it means is when you come to Jesus to drink, you don't just get a single drink, you get a spring, you get a fountain, you get a well, you get Jesus. Rivers of living water will flow within you because He is a river maker. And that's inside you. That's the point, you'll never have to search again for some source of satisfaction for your soul. Every river that needs to flow for the joy of your soul is within you, if you're a Christian. And that's what I think it means in verse 13 of our text today. 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greek, slave or free and listen, we were all given of the one Spirit to drink.” So what that means is, your soul is going to experience a perpetual cycle of satisfaction and thirst, satisfaction and thirst. You're going to get thirsty, come to Jesus and drink again. And if you're a Christian, the spring of water is already inside you, it wells up to eternal life, and you can drink of him any time you want. Now the devil is there standing offering you poison. Sweet, addictive poison, but it will kill your soul. Well, it will seem satisfying, but it really isn't. It's addictive and it doesn't satisfy. You were meant to get thirsty, to feel your need for God again and again and to drink from Jesus. Now water baptism, which we do regularly back here, is just an outward, visible symbol of the real baptism Jesus, we hope, we trust, has already done in that person. As a Baptist church, we will not do the water baptism if we don't have signs, evidence, that Jesus has already baptized that person in the Spirit, does that make sense? So we're just looking for evidence. They'll talk a certain way, they're living a certain way, it's the beginning of the Christian life, they don't have to be mature at all. Like the Ethiopian eunuch, you can be baptized right there and then. You have to talk like a disciple, you have to talk about your past sins like a disciple, you have to speak like a converted person and then we'll baptize you, because that's the evidence that we have that Jesus has already baptized you into the Body of Christ. Alright, well, what about the other outpourings of the Spirit? The Other Outpourings of the Spirit Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have used the phrase Baptism of the Spirit to speak of a second experience of grace, or third, or fourth, or whatever, experience of grace. It happens separate from conversion. They press in on individuals and say you need to seek the Baptism of the Spirit. This needs to happen to you. The problem I have is that there are no such scriptures that give us the right to press that on other people. There are no commands like that. They also tend, some of them anyway, to link it to pursuit of holiness as though there tends to be like a silver bullet for all the sin patterns in your life, and you receive this second work of grace that then kills that sin pattern, and that's just not the way the Bible teaches sanctification. Now Martyn Lloyd-Jones uses the expression, “Baptism of the Spirit” to speak of an individual or group transformation that comes as, to some degree, Heaven is open and that person has an overwhelming, powerful experience of God that was unlike anything they've ever had before, and maybe they'll never have one like that again, and it changed their entire approach to life. And it can happen to groups, and the word generally given to that is revival. I think the only error that Lloyd-Jones had is calling it baptism. I just think that's not helpful, but other than that it's a real thing, and it's beneficial. And he would say, it's a repeat of the day of Pentecost and you have evidence for that scripturally. If you look at Acts chapter 4, don't turn there. But just, you know, how Peter and John were arrested, and then they were hauled in and they were threatened, and they were let go, and they go back to the church, and the church gathers to pray. I've talked about it I think even last week. And there in Acts 4:31, it says after they were praying, the place with their meeting was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God boldly. That seems like a miniature second day Pentecost. Without in any way minimizing the uniqueness of the day of Pentecost that will never be repeated again. Yet there is some degree of re-enactment. So that the two cycles, the two cycles that I talked about that are essential of dying and rising again so that fruit can come, and of the Spirit poured out on people who don't do enough or much out of fear or selfishness, until the Spirit comes, both of those get re-enacted again and again. What Does it Mean to be Filled with the Spirit? The Command in Ephesians 5:18 Alright, so let's zero in on the ordinary ministry. Ordinary ministries of the Spirit. What does it mean to be filled with the Spirit? Turn in your Bibles, if you would, to Ephesians 5:18. We're going to look at that, that's a key passage on this, Ephesians 5:18. As I said, there is no command anywhere that you should seek the Baptism of the Spirit, but there is most certainly a command that you should be filled with the Holy Spirit. And it's in a section of Ephesians where Paul is telling them that they should “live a life worthy of the calling they have received,” Ephesians 4:1. Live a Christian life. What does that mean? Many things. But there in Ephesians 5:18, he says this, “Do not be drunk with wine or get drunk on wine instead. Which leads to debauchery, instead be filled with the Spirit.” So once we have been baptized by the Spirit at conversion, we now begin the daily Christian life. It's a life of, as I've said, of two journeys; the internal journey of holiness, of becoming more and more like Christ, the external journey of evangelism, missions of leading lost people to saving faith in Christ. That's what we were left here on Earth do. And it's only by the power of the Spirit that we make progress in those two journeys. Now, Ephesians 5:18 is a fascinating thing grammatically. It is what's known as a passive imperative. Passive imperative. So imperative is a command; You must, something you must do. Passive is you must have something done to you, so you must have something done to you. So what is it we have to have done? You must be being filled with the Holy Spirit, that's something that has to happen to you in an ongoing sense. So since the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost as wind and fire. Think of those images. Wind, think of the old tall ships, the clipper ships, remember? With all that sail. And then the wind would come and the sails would luff and billow, and then they would be fat with wind and the ship would start to move. So you're filled with the third person of the Trinity. He is filling your mind, he's filling your soul filling your heart, your emotions, you're filled with the Spirit, that feeling like a wind, and the ship just moves. Your ship, the Church's ship just moves in a certain direction where the Spirit causes him to go. Or what about the fire, the image of fire? Comes in tongues of fire. Here, I'm not talking about something that's fake dear friends. I'm not talking about a painted fire, or one of those fake cellophane orange plastic things that blows with a fan. You know? It's like we're deceived by this, and these little tongues that dance and all that. That's not a fire. A two-year-old could say that. So we're not talking about a fire painted on a wall or fake, I'm talking about a supernatural fire that comes and fills your soul with heat and light because God is there. You think about the burning bush, the supernaturally burning bush that caused Moses to turn aside and see this wonder. Why the bush is burning, but it is not burned up. Or think about Elijah and Mount Carmel, and fire came from Heaven and burned up that sacrifice. I'm talking about a supernatural fire that fills you. The Continual Need for the Spirit's Filling Now, we need to be filled with the Spirit. It's a continual need. Baptism happens only once, but we can lose the filling of the Spirit. How does that happen? Well, there are two different kind of ways, I think, that that happens. One of them I don't necessarily even know that we have lost. The filling of the Spirit, just has to do with the wisdom of the Spirit and the way he deals with us. Imagine that you have a really phenomenally Spirit-filled Tuesday. You're just so filled with a sense of God's love for you. I'm going to talk about what the Spirit does in a spirit filled person in a moment. But you just had a spiritual day, but then you went to bed and you woke up. And maybe you're a morning person, and especially, maybe you're not, and you don't feel right now, what you felt yesterday. Does that ever happen to you? I'm not in any way saying you've sinned at all, you just don't feel what you felt last night. Doesn't mean you've done anything. What it means is the Spirit wisely steps back and says, "Follow me, come after me, pursue me." So you have that morning quiet time, you get in the word. You seek Him, you drink and drink until you are filled with the Spirit, so that's just normal. You haven't done anything wrong, it's just He is urging you to pursue Him. So many Psalms are like that. Why do you stand far off, why are you not here? Why do I not feel you close right now? He's just saying, come, come and seek me. Christ is saying through the Spirit. And so, imagine back in the days of the clipper ships and all that, the ship is off a few points from optimal direction for the wind. So the ship's captain then will turn you a few points towards the wind, and then suddenly those sails are filled again. So again, there's no sin involved in that case. Alright? But then there's the other case in which, friends, you grieve the Holy Spirit because you sinned, you violated your conscience, you violated the Word of God, and you know what you did. Or if you don't, you just know the Spirit is gone but you need to find out why. And so you go to Him and you say, "Search me, oh God, and know my heart, and show me, and show me what I've done wrong." Psalm 139:23-24. And lead me in the way of everlasting. And then He convicts you of sin, and then you are aware, and you confess your sin. And you ask to be filled again with the Holy Spirit and because it's a command from God, you can turn it around and make it a promise. “You commanded me to be be being filled with the Spirit. Now, fill me, Oh Lord, fill me.” We need to do that the rest of our lives. Now, at that point then the ordinary ministries of the Spirit kick in. They've already been at work, but let me say what they are. The Effects of the Spirit's Filling Look at Ephesians 5, what happens? When you are filled with the Spirit, you're going to speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Horizontally, you're going to be talking the scripture to other people. You're going to be encouraging other people with the scripture. You're going to be “singing in your heart, making music in your heart to the Lord.” You're just happy in Jesus, there's a song in your heart, you're filled with the spirit. It's the ordinary ministry. And the Spirit also is going to mount you up and dress you and get you ready for battle with your temptations. It says in Romans 8:13, "If you, by the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." He's going to get you ready for battle, He's going to cause you to fight your temptations, He's going to cause you to fight sin, that's what it means to be filled the Spirit. You're going to see the fruit of the Spirit in your life. Galatians 5 says, “fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.” These attributes, look at each one, it's a package. You don't get some of them and not others. Like Tuesday is the first three fruits of the Spirit. You get the whole thing. When you're filled with the Spirit, these things characterize you. So it's a good diagnostic test. At any moment you just stop and say, "Are these things characterizing me right now?" And if they're not, you're not filled with the Spirit. Pursue Him, go after Him, fruit of the Spirit. Energetic service happens when you're filled with the Spirit. You just serve the Lord. You do good works that God wants you to do, as it says in Romans 7:6, "We serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code." So you serve Him, you do good works. You witness boldly. Filled with the Spirit. Spirit-filled people are fearless like Peter and John before the Sanhedrin. I love their boldness, they are unafraid. “‘He is the stone, you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’ Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven, given to men, by which we must be saved." Complete boldness there. No fear of death at all. Bold witness when you're Spirit-filled. What else? What Are the Ordinary Ministries of the Spirit? Communications of God's Love Well the Spirit will communicate God's love to you. Ordinary ministry of the Spirit, He will communicate, He will tell you that God loves you. “The Spirit will testify with your spirit that you are a child of God”, Romans 8:16. Romans 5:5 says that the Spirit pours God's love into our hearts. And that's some of these transcendent experiences that people have. It can go up, and I'm getting into the extraordinary ministry, but I don't want to do that right now. I'll get to that in a second. But you can have such a sense that God loves you and imagine just pursuing that and saying Lord, I don't really sense that you love me, I don't feel like I should that you love me. But the Spirit, ordinarily just says it. Let me say something about ordinary/extraordinary. Okay, let me just say that everything the Spirit does is supernatural. So the things that He does in the Spirit-filled life, they are supernatural, but for the Christian, they can and should be ordinary, can experience them every day. We'll get to the extraordinary in just a moment. Illumination of the Scriptures What else does the Spirit do? He illuminates the Scriptures. You sit down, have your quiet time, the Spirit moves. You say, "Open my eyes, Lord, that I may see wonderful things in your law." Psalm 119:18. Like Jesus did with His disciples. Then He opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit illuminates the Scriptures to you and makes them clear. The Holy Spirit convicts you of sin. Like I said, Psalm 139; Search me, oh God, and know me. You just say, "God, show me, show me where there are flaws, where there are sins, things I haven't seen, things that are hurting my walk with you. Show me." He'll convict you of sin. He will also guide you and direct you which way to go. Like Isaiah 30:21 says, "Your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, 'This is the way, walk in it.'" We have clear examples of this in the book of Acts where Paul and Silas didn't where to go, and the Holy Spirit said, "Not there, not there." And then they got the vision from the man of Macedonia and went over to Greece. The Holy Spirit will guide you, He'll direct you in patterns of ministry. The Holy Spirit, as we've been seeing in 1 Corinthians 12, gifts you for spiritual gift ministry. So that you can do your spiritual gifts and build the Body up. And He will unite us, we are to “keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” So, in a healthy church, He makes us one in the Spirit, loving each other and delighting in each other. Conviction of Sin What does He do to non-Christians? Well, He gives them, He delivers enough information to them for them to be saved. He gets the message of the Gospel to them, and then He “convicts the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and the judgment to come.” John 16. And if they are elect and if today is the day, He'll convert them. He converts them, as it says in Ezekiel 36, “I will give you a new heart, and I'll put a new Spirit in you, and I'll remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” Alright, so, friends, those are the ordinary ministries of the Holy Spirit. Can you see why I'm saying that we should not denigrate them or say unless a revival comes, God's doing nothing? That is just not true. He's doing all of these things every day in countless hundreds of millions around the world. Extraordinary Ministries of the Spirit? Ecstatic Experiences in Individuals But now let's talk about the extraordinary ministries of the Spirit. I could begin with ecstatic experiences in individuals, and I could give you lots of examples of this, but let me zero in on a man named D.L. Moody. D.L. Moody was a pastor of a significant church in Chicago. He preached the Gospel clearly, people were being converted, he was satisfied with his ministry, but two women sitting right in the front pew were not satisfied. And they were fervently praying during the whole service. Finally, he was curious, and he went up, and to talk to these two women. “What are you doing?” “Well, we're praying for you.” And I wonder what was going on in inside his heart. Actually, I don't wonder too much. He said, "Why don't you pray for the people?" They said, "Because you need the power of the Spirit." He said, "I need the power. Why? I have the largest congregation in Chicago and there are many conversions week after week." But the women would not be deterred, they kept on praying for the Holy Spirit to be poured out on D.L. Moody. Soon after that encounter, the Great Chicago Fire came. Devastating. Swept away much of the city, including the building where they had been meeting. Destroyed completely by fire. Moody thought in his mind about these two women, and he went back to that, and he began to cry out in his heart for the Holy Spirit. This is actually what Moody said, "I began to cry, as never before, for a greater blessing from God. The hunger increased, I really felt that I did not want to live any longer. I kept on crying all the time, that God would fill me with His Spirit. Well, one day, in the city of New York. Oh, what a day? I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it. It is almost too sacred an experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for 14 years. I can only say God revealed Himself to me and I had such an experience of His love, that I had to ask Him to stay His hand." This is an overwhelming outpouring of God's presence into a man who was already fruitful and faithfully walking with him. He never had that experience again. Let me continue the quote. "I had to ask Him to stay His hand. I went back to preaching again. The sermons themselves were not different, I did not present any new truths, and yet now, hundreds were converted. I would not now be placed back where I was before that blessed experience if you should offer me all the world, it would be to me as the small dust on the scales." After that experience, DL Moody began his work as an itinerant evangelist in England, Ireland, Wales, and the US. From 1871 to 1899, he preached so effectively that hundreds of thousands and maybe millions were converted through his preaching ministry. He traced that level of fruitfulness back to that experience in New York. But that can also happen to groups. Revivals: The Outpouring on Groups As groups meet together to pray and they seek the face of the Lord. Just like Acts 4:31, they're all meeting to pray and the place where they're meeting is shaken. There are experiences like that as well. John Wesley right before the first grade awakening, spoke of this prayer time that he had with a man named Hall Ingham. George Whitefield was there, Hutching and Charles Wesley, his brother. He said, "We're present at our love feast in Fetter Lane with about 60 of our brethren." Listen to this. "About three in the morning, while we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us insomuch that many cried out for exulting joy and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from the awe and amazement at the presence of His majesty, we broke out with one voice, 'We praise Thee, O God. We acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.'" And God does this kind of thing powerfully. Now, 125 years later, Charles Spurgeon was preaching, and he prayed on a particular Tuesday evening, January 4th, 1859. He was speaking to a vast gathering that was convened at Exeter Hall. Spurgeon at that point was 24 years old, a preaching prodigy, the most famous preacher probably in the world, at that point. But that meant nothing to him, he was not in any way satisfied with his ministry. This is what he said, "We must confess that just now we have not the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that we could wish. Oh, if the Spirit of God should come upon those assembled here tonight and upon all the assemblies of the saints, what an effect would be produced? We seek not for extraordinary excitements, those spurious attendants of genuine revivals, but we do seek for the pouring out of the Spirit of God. The spirit is blowing upon our churches now with His genial breath, but it is a soft evening breeze. Oh, that there would come a rushing mighty wind that should carry everything before it. This is the lack of our times, the great want of our country." Well, Spurgeon's desire was fulfilled. That year, 1859, was the greatest, most effective year of his entire ministry. In the spring of 1859, a widespread awakening began in Northern Ireland and spread to Wales. By the end of that year, Spurgeon could write, "The times of refreshing have come at last from the presence of the Lord, they have at last dawned upon our land". Spurgeon on God's Mighty Acts In one of Spurgeon's most powerful sermons during that year of revival, a sermon entitled "The Story of God's mighty acts." Let me tell you, you can listen to someone reading that sermon on YouTube. I listened to it as I was driving in, part of it. I would recommend it. I'd rather hear Spurgeon preach it, but that would be weird at this point, but there's a guy reading it, and it's very effective. He was preaching on Psalm 44:1. The text says; “We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what you did in their days in days long ago”. Spurgeon catalogued the mighty acts of God across, at that point, 18 centuries of Church history. He traced out the spectacular advance of the gospel over the first 100 years after the death of Christ, how the Gospel spread rapidly across Europe into Asia for 100 years, and how heathens were baptized in huge numbers, sometimes even thousands in rivers. Spurgeon said this, "The first spread of the Gospel is a miracle never to be eclipsed. Whatever God may have done at the Red Sea, He did still more within 100 years after the time when Christ first came into the world. It seemed as if a fire from Heaven, ran along the ground." I picture a molten lava. Hot, red, igniting everything in its way. Hundred years after Christ ascended into heaven, it's true, there were congregations in northern Britannia, in Germania and other places in the Roman Empire. The Gospel was spreading powerfully, it's incredible. Spurgeon in that sermon traced out other examples of mighty outpourings; the Reformation, Luther's courage in facing the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, and then the first great awakening, 125 years before that, under Whitefield and Wesley. Spurgeon said this, "Within a few years from the preaching of those two men, England was permeated with Evangelical truth. The Word of God, was known in every town and there was scarcely a hamlet into which the Methodists had not penetrated. In those days of the slow coach, when Christianity seemed to have brought up the old wagons in which our fathers once traveled, where business runs along with steam." Now, you need to understand, in Spurgeon's day, steam was a new thing. So I thought about translating this into the digital age, but I'll just read what he wrote. "Where business flies along with steam, it seems the Gospel creeps along with a horse drawn cart. Yet the things that we notice what God did, the wondrous things that God did in olden times by His grace, we trust He will yet do again." Spurgeon said this, "The old stagers in our church believe that things must grow gently by degrees. We must go step-by-step onward. Concentrated action, continued labor, they say, will ultimately bring success. But the marvel is all of God's mightiest works have been sudden. When Peter stood up to preach, it did not take six weeks to convert the 3,000. They were converted at once and baptized that very day. They were that hour turned to God. So it is in all revivals. God's work has been done suddenly as with a clap of thunder, God has descended from on high, not slowly, but suddenly." Seek the Extraordinary Outpouring Today Friends, this is the extraordinary ministry of the Holy Spirit. God can still do that in our day. And Spurgeon made the point as did Lloyd-Jones, that it always starts with extraordinary thirst an extraordinary prayer. It starts with individuals, maybe you, maybe you, maybe you, maybe me, not okay with the status quo. You look at your life and you're not okay with your level of sanctification, you're not satisfied with the progress you're making. You look at the church and you're not okay with the number of people that we've baptized. You're not okay with the impact First Baptist Church has on Durham and Raleigh and Chapel Hill. You're not okay with it. The status quo is not enough. And you begin to pray. As Jeremy Lanphier did two years before the revival in Great Britain, 1857, he started a businessmen's revival in New York City that started with one man, him, praying. By the end of that hour, the last 10 minutes, there was no one paying, just him, for 50 minutes. Then at the end of the hour, five other people came and joined him to pray. Terrible economic reversals happened, a fear of Civil War, which was soon to come in the United States. Many other things. Those are human factors, but really what happened is the Holy Spirit was poured out. And within several months, a quarter of a million people in the New York area were converted, very rapidly. I think it was Spurgeon thought about that and said, "Why can't something like that happen here?" And began praying. So it could start. Start that way with some of you. Maybe two people who sit in the front pew and pray for the pastor, that he would have the Holy Spirit. I don't know if D.L. Moody felt offended at that point. I promise you, as best I can, I will not feel offended if you pray for me to have the Holy Spirit because I'm not satisfied. I've been here for 21 years. I'm not satisfied with the holiness level of my life, I'm not satisfied with the fruitfulness in our church, and I'm asking God to work a revival in our church, in our lives, that begins with extraordinary prayer. I don't know who's going to start it. I don't care. And frankly, I don't even care if it starts with our church. I just want to see God move mightily and powerfully in our area. Friends, Repent and Do Not Harden Your Hearts Let me say one last thing, and I'll be done. There may be some of you that are here today that came in here unconverted. I want to tell you something, a regret that D.L. Moody took with him to his death bed. Before the Chicago Fire came, he preached the Gospel and preached it powerfully. He made it very, very clear that Christ had died for sinners, that He had been risen from the dead, and that salvation was available. But what he didn't do, is he said, "I'm not going to tell you what you individually need to do about this. Come back next week and I'll tell you then." The Chicago fire happened the very next day. D.L. Moody said, I never saw those people again, that congregation. Maybe there were individuals he saw, but that assembly was wiped out by the fire. And he regretted not pressing on the consciences of his hearers the need to flee to Christ while there was time. Friends, you don't know if you'll be alive tomorrow. You've heard the Gospel today. You've heard that Christ died for sinners, you know that you're a sinner, you know that you're outside of Christ. Don't leave this place still outside of Christ. You don't need to get up or come forward to do anything, you just need to call on the name of the Lord and you'll be saved. God will forgive you of your sins today. “If you hear His voice, don't harden your hearts.” Prayer Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time we've had to study. Sometimes I fear that my words in my own heart and in the lives of many here are like a painted fire, that they don't have a real effectiveness. Lord, I pray that you would please overwhelm all of that by the moving of your Spirit. I pray that you would pour out the Spirit in influence and in power on me and on my brothers and sisters here and on everyone assembled here. I pray that 2020 would be the greatest year of evangelistic fruitfulness this church has ever known. I pray that you would give us a sense of the presence of the Spirit in this that we have never had before. And I pray it would begin with extraordinary prayer, that we would realize that we are weak and feeble until the Holy Spirit is poured out from on high. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

In this video I look at the literary art of the whole book of Exodus.The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisartwebsite: https://www.thebibleisart.comemail: thisdivineart@gmail.comtwitter: @johnbhigginsmusic: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)| Transcription |The book of Exodus is organized into 3 sections that follow the Israelites from Egypt through the wilderness to Mt. Sinai. So the literary structure looks like this. Israel in Egypt, Israel in the wilderness, and Israel at Mt. Sinai. Exodus is a journey narrative like many of the great stories from The Odyssey, to the Aeneid, to The Divine Comedy, to Pilgrim's Progress, to Lord of the Rings. And the central idea is that the physical journey symbolizes a moral, spiritual, intellectual, or theological journey where the travelers begin in one moral or spiritual place and move to another. In Exodus, Israel begins in slavery and journeys to freedom, Sabbath rest at Mount Sinai. And the symbolic structure works both vertically and horizontally. Horizontally they move from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, one location to another miles away. Vertically, they begin low, at sea level at the Nile river and move up to a mountain.The Israelites begin as servants to Pharaoh and end as servants to God. They begin in Pharaoh's house and end God's house, the tabernacle. They begin by listening to Pharaoh and his laws and end by listening to God and his laws. They begin by building for Pharaoh, remember the storage cities of Pithom and Ramses, and conclude by building God's house.So the author has written all of these symmetries that develop throughout the journey, but the structure of the story goes one level deeper. But to understand the symbolism of why the author structured the book into three sections, we have to review some of the details of the book of Exodus.In Egypt, Israel is enslaved and God calls Moses at the burning bush to deliver his people. God then plagues his people with all manner of elements including raining down fire and delivers his people through the sea. In the Wilderness on the way to Mt. Sinai, God leads his people in a pillar of fire and cloud that illumines their way. Israel complains about the food and God provides them with manna, bread from heaven. When they arrive at Mt. Sinai the firey glory-cloud rests on the mountain and the elders travel up into it to have a meal with God. Moses receives the law as well as the instructions for building the tabernacle.Now why have I summarized the book? The climax of the book, and the thing that gets the most space is the tabernacle - the detailed instructions and then the account of the actual construction. The tabernacle occupies 40% of the book of Exodus - 16 out of 40 chapters. But not only did Moses spend a lot of time talking about the tabernacle, he designed the book to be a literary tabernacle. Just like the Book of Exodus is organized into three sections, geographically designed as Israel journeys from Egypt through the wilderness to Mt. Sinai, so the Tabernacle is organized into three sections through which you may journey: the courtyard, the holy place, and the holy of holies.But the numerical connections are only the beginning. The events throughout the book correspond to objects in each section of the tabernacle.For instance, in the courtyard there is the altar for offerings and the bronze basin for washings. These correspond...