On behalf of the Institute of Peace, it's a real pleasure for me to welcome you to this morning's discussion with a number of the founding members of the Syrian National Council and organization whose formation was announced in Istanbul only about some days ago. I'm Steve Heidemann, I'm a senior advisor for the Institute on Middle East Initiatives and we are delighted to see all of you here this morning. As I'm sure this audience is aware, the Syrian opposition almost since the very start of the uprising in March has confronted a number of very significant questions, questions about its seeming fragmentation, questions about its lack of experience, questions about the difficulties it has faced in developing a unified leadership structure that would not only provide a more coherent leadership for the uprising itself, but would also help to demonstrate to the international community the viability of the Syrian opposition as an alternative to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And now after an extended period of challenging and I think it's fair to say at times difficult discussions among the opposition, it has created the Syrian National Council as the unified leadership structure that the opposition has been struggling to develop for some time. The SNC was formally introduced to the world only 10 days ago. I think within that very short period of time it has become clear that the SNC is a significant step forward for the Syrian opposition. Perhaps the best indication of that has been the response of the Syrian regime itself to the formation of the SNC. You are probably all aware that foreign minister of Syria Walid Mualim warned the international community not to extend recognition to the Syrian National Council. And I think that speaks highly of the extent to which it views the SNC as a potential threat. At the same time, it's also clear that as a very young umbrella organization working with a number of different groups within the Syrian opposition that the SNC continues to face a number of significant challenges as it consolidates itself, both in reaching out to activists within Syria and in demonstrating its credibility and its legitimacy to the international community. And so we are very pleased at the US Institute of Peace to be able to host the first opportunity for Washington audiences and for the audiences that are joining us on the web and on Twitter. What would an event be if it were not webcast and tweeted to interact with a number of individuals who have played central roles in the formation of the SNC and have been deeply involved in the extended discussions among the opposition that resulted in the formation of the SNC? These are people who even though they are working outside of Syria have been very much on the front lines of the opposition to the Assad regime and we're delighted to have them here with us this morning to talk with us about and to answer your questions concerning what the SNC is about, how it sees its role, what its priorities are and what its agenda is for the immediate future. Unfortunately, we hope to have with us today by Skype a prominent member or leader of the Syrian uprising, an SNC member, a man who has been on the front lines, physically on the front lines of the Syrian opposition since it began and who dedicated himself to advocating for democratic change in Syria for much of the past two decades. I'm referring to Mr. Riyadh Seif whose biographical information we presented to you in the materials prepared for this meeting. As I'm sure you all know, Mr. Seif was attacked by agents of the Syrian regime last week. His arm was broken in the attack. He sustained other injuries which fortunately are minor. However, we received credible information that if he were to participate in the event this morning, he would be placing himself at risk, including the possibility of targeting by one of the regime's assassination squads. And so we decided with enormous respect for the difficulty of the conditions under which he works and with recognition of his commitment to political change in Syria, that it would be best if Riyadh Seif were not participating in the event this morning. Before we get underway and turn the panel over to our eminent speakers, I wanted to make sure you were all aware of the procedures that we're going to be following this morning. You have bio information on our speakers. There is in addition a packet, Osama I believe you have a copy to show the audience, a packet with further information about the SNC that is available for you to pick up on the table outside of the room. Each of our speakers will be making brief opening comments, five to 10 minutes. We want to move very quickly into the interactive piece of our activity this morning. After we have heard from our speakers, we're going to open the floor to questions, but we ask that you please write down the question that you would like to pose to a member of the panel that you identify which panelists you are addressing with your question or whether you would like the question to be addressed by the panel as a whole. You should have index cards for doing this. Those will be collected. They will be brought to the front of the room and filtered so that we have a chance to cluster, like questions, avoid duplicates. I will do everything I can to ensure that as many of your questions as possible are addressed to the members of our panel this morning. In addition, because the event is being webcast and we are tweeting about it as it unfolds, we invite those of you who are watching the event on the web or who are receiving tweets about the event to contact us with questions, and we will do our best to bring those to the attention of our panelists as well. So without any further ado, let me again welcome you and let me turn the panel over first to Professor Najib Ghadban who will provide some background on the SNC and the dynamic surrounding its formation and its next steps. Najib, please. Good morning. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you for your SIP for this opportunity. In my brief remarks, I would like just to introduce some maybe points about the road to the formation of the Syrian National Council. I think it's, I feel it's important to emphasize at the beginning that the Syrian Revolution is situated within the Arab Spring and sometimes I think when people look at Syria, they try to look at it as focus on strategic stability in Syria, et cetera, and kind of overlook the right of the Syrian people to be part of this movement which demanding nothing less than freedom and indignity for Syrians. The second maybe introductory point, the road to forming SNC really started with the coming to power of Bashar al-Assad in 2000. We went through several phases, the first of which was known as the Damascus Spring Movement and our colleague who was supposed to be with us, Riyadh Saif, was a leading figure of that movement. That movement expressed itself in the desire of prominent Syrians inside and outside Syria basically to revive civil society, to bring political life back after it was frozen for three decades outside the father. And that movement issued some documents. Many of you are aware of the document of the 99, the document of the 1000, which included basic demands which are in fact endorsed right now in the SNC. Again, early on the document of the 99 was a very basic demands of lifting emergency laws. This would be one of the first demands of the revolution to release political prisoners, to allow exiles to go back. And then the statement of the 1000 added to that the necessity of reform, both economic and political. And of course that movement was nipped in the bud six months later and ended in the imprisonment of our colleague Riyadh Saif in here since he's not with us. I'll in fact refer to him several times because out of the 10 years of Bashar's rule he spent about eight years in prison under Bashar. We move on to 2002, 2003. Again, there was revival of those demands. This is when the US was ready to invade Iraq. Many voices inside and outside were telling the Bashar regime to reform the country. That would be the best guarantee to basically be able to withstand any external pressure. Then we come to October 2005 and this is the formation of something called the Damascus Declaration. And I think that movement was so significant because it's finally stated that the only way for Syria to move forward is to have comprehensive democratic change in the country. And the document received the most endorsement from individuals, from activists, from political parties. And it became the consensus, if you will, of the Syrian opposition. Then there was another attempt at forming the National Salvation Front, which is again trying to bring together various groups into a one front. And I think the idea, and this is, we continue this process with the SNC to emphasize that one of the maybe argument of the regime is that there's no viable alternative to the Assad regime. And I think it's been always our challenge to prove the opposite. So we come to 2010, things were not looking good for the Syrian opposition in 2010 and as they were not looking good for any actually of the Arab countries. It was a very dismal point. I remember I was attending a conference in Morocco about democracy and human rights in the Arab world October of 2010. And we looked around as we kind of were exchanging our experiences regarding democracy and human rights. And it really looked really, really terrible picture, I mean, for all countries. But then it was the Tunisian Bouazizi who let himself on fire and basically sparked the Arab Spring. And the discussion for Syrians was, would it happen in Syria? Osama remembers, I hosted a conference at my university on January 20 and 29. And we were talking about 10 years of Bashar's rule. And one of the question was, could it happen in Syria when, how, and under what circumstances? Again, most I think said that it's really, it's difficult to happen. But I think people underestimated a lot of the undercurrents that were taking place in all of those countries, including in Syria, where a whole generation was born, in fact, under the Assad regime. But they were looking for better opportunities which the regime could not provide. I think I would come to a point which is significant in this process of formation, the formation of SNC. And I would consider it like an important step. It was what I call spontaneous phase of individuals, of groups, trying to talk, trying to discuss things, and to see how can we prepare for something like what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. And at the same time, that phase, I'm talking here January to March 15 phase, we were still, many of us, hoping that Bashar would take the actually the initiative and bring about reform to the country. But he was, again, proving us over and over, kind of that he's not that kind of a man. I refer you to the interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal, end of January, in which he said, all we could do is improve media laws, allow some NGOs, et cetera. That's the vision he presented. It was very frustrating. And I think all Syria needed was a spark for the Syrian version of the Arab Spring. And it came in the city of Dar'a with the children. You know the story. So the second phase was many of us inside and outside felt especially as much as we were inspired by the young people who took into the street, by how not only actually brave they were, how kind of very open-minded in terms of emphasizing the peacefulness of the nature of the revolution, emphasizing national unity in order to deprive the regime of the opportunities to repress this movement. Yet we were shocked by the level of response on the part of the regime, which was basically to open fire and kill demonstrators, peaceful demonstrators. It was extremely shocking. So that phase, I think Syrian communities abroad inside tried to do something. So it was around the world, you see Syrians demonstrating in front of this country, the White House, Syrian embassy. I remember the first demonstration in front of the White House had 22 Syrians.  So you see Syrians wanted to do something about what was happening in Syria. Then we moved to the next phase, which was the conferences phase. We had three or four conferences trying to come up with a body that represent the Syrian aspirations, the Syrian revolution. And unfortunately, those conferences really could not produce what we were hoping for. One thing, I mean, people needed to get to know each other. I mean, Syrians were not allowed. We're not giving that luxury of meeting. I mean, it's like whenever you have three Syrians, they suspect one of them is kind of an agent for the secret service. So you know that culture. So it really took a while for people to get to know each other, to exchange ideas. And I think one of the problems with these conferences, they did elect bodies. But they tried to get into the idea of having more representative bodies. And so getting into the whole notion of setting quotas for this group or that particular trend and so on and so forth. It was really the third conference, Al-Enqa's conference on July 15 that finally led us to think in a different way to come up with this council. The Al-Qa's conference was supposed basically to take place both inside and outside Syria. The day before the conference, the Syrian security forces stormed the headquarter in the neighborhood of Damascus, killed 19, injured 200. And basically it was a message, this kind of activities is not allowed. We were outside, we were shocked and we couldn't really do much about it. But then we started to think, maybe we need to do this in a different way. A small group of us, we call ourselves independence, technocrats call us whatever, decided to take the initiative and present a simple idea that what we need now to bring a group of Syrian activists who in fact would be able to chart a roadmap for forming a body which would represent the Syrian revolution. And I think this is how the process started and kind of we had of course to get in touch with the forces inside Syria, particularly the local coordinating councils and that took three weeks. And then to extend these consultations into the traditional political parties and to other prominent individuals. And finally, we came up with the formula, first it was sometimes in August, we formed the core group of SNC. This time really we emphasized qualifications and merit as the main kind of requirement for joining SNC, but without overlooking the question of representation. But we did not start with the representation as the main criteria for inclusion. As we were conducting more further consultation, we had to take into account the question of representation. But finally, I think you see more basic information about the SNC, what I wanna emphasize and I have what, two minutes? Okay, I'll end in two minutes. Couple of points. First, we succeeded in creating a balance between the inside and our outside. And from the very beginning we believe that any credible council must have representation, especially from the coordinating councils.  Everything is about coordination now. So those are the young revolutionaries basically. Secondly, we try to again strike a second balance between what we call the independent technocrats and the political representation, which again would include ethnic, religious, geographic representation, which I think we had to take into account. Thirdly, we had to deal with the question of the representation of the Islamist. And again, this time, I mean, I think one of the first things that may be been said about this Islamist are overrepresented in this body. Based on the figures we have, and we did extensive mapping, the first actually, the core group of the 140 members, I think we had even percentages. And the percentage for Islamists in that was 21%, if I remember. And that would even be lowered this time because other groups joined, including more independent leftist liberals and other forces. So what's helped with solving this issue, the belief of the Islamists, that they are part of this process, part of this revolution, but they're not really eager to try to be the leading maybe force of this. Let me end by just mention that our work is still work in progress. We are very modest about our claims at this point. I think my colleagues are going to this other aspect of this, but we realize that one of the main challenges facing us, and I'll end with that one, is after the announcement of the council, we received a very impressive support inside Syria. That Friday after the announcement was called the Friday of the National Council, of the Syrian National Council. And the sign was carried that this SNC represents me. And as a result of that, I think it was a clear message that we are in fact in the process of forming a viable alternative to the Assad regime. It was so serious, as Steve said, that the regime in fact recognize us nicely. And we were in fact honored by that. But more seriously, I mean, the regime is really kind of going after the activists. I just want to mention, we talked about Riyadh Safe, but the same Friday they assassinated one member of this general secretariat, our colleague, Mashal Tammu, who's been very active throughout the 10 years of Bashar's rule. And again, it was a message how serious the regime is taking us. So our challenge, we feel that we have to deliver to those young people, we have to show them that we represent them, that we are able to voice their message. And at the same time, while we are still in the process of completing the formation of SNC, thank you. Thank you very much, Najib. You've touched on one issue that I'm sure we'll come back to again already, which is how the imperative to organize the SNC in a fashion that provides for representation of critical constituencies might introduce tensions when it comes to overcoming some of these representative groupings and building a more cohesive sense of the SNC's priorities and its agenda. I know you've been wrestling with these issues, but I introduce it as a question that we may want to come back to. Dima, please. Thank you for having us today here. The Institute of Peace. I would like actually to start by just talking a little bit about my personal experience and how I got to be here today. And it's a very, it's an honor to be among my colleagues here today. Having grown up in the Assad rule, Syria, I was very impressed when the revolution started and just seeing people taking the streets, asking for freedom, freedoms that we generally take for granted and facing bullets, I felt tremendous respect for them and pride in being Syrian. And I really, at many times, I wish I were in Syria alongside with them because having lived there, these are feelings that I think we all felt. And as the Assad regime brutally dealt with these demonstrators, killing them, torturing them, detaining them, the other things that we had to deal with were some misconceptions that this was a Muslim movement that minorities and certain sects weren't participating because they felt protected by the Assad regime. And among those were Christian Syrians that a lot of people in Syria and outside felt were pro-regime, that they were not participating in the revolution. So I felt it was very important to deliver a public message that that is not true, it's a misconception. Being a Christian Syrian, I felt very insulted that this would be what most people considered was the case. True that the Assad regime at some point gave a false sense of protection to certain minorities, but that was at the expense of the majority. And first and foremost, we're Syrian and this is a human rights issue. All religion aside, we need to make sure that we focus on the human rights portion of it. So I started participating in events and speaking as a Christian Syrian. And in fact, we have a lot of information about Christians actually going to mosques and participate to participate in the demonstration. So it had, the demonstration starting from mosques had nothing to do with it being a Muslim movement. It was just a place that made sense for people to gather on Fridays. And that's why Fridays also became the days of demonstrations. So to segue into the SNC, it became very important to reassure all people in Syria regardless of religion, political affiliation, ethnic background that they are represented. They are Syrian first and foremost and there will be no worries after the Assad regime is overthrown for them to be just as Syrian as everybody else. And I think Najib did refer to this in terms of the formation of the SNC taking into consideration all different backgrounds in ensuring all the groups are represented. So that in terms of the selection of the SNC, we wanted to make sure that all the groups within Syria regardless of their geographic location, their ethnic background, their political affiliation, any sectarian within even religions like Sunnis, Alawai, Druze, they're all represented. And that was taken into account in the matrix of the selection criteria. So when we look today at the SNC, we have participation from all groups within Syria. The Kurds have representation. There's seats for Assyrians, which actually is one of the smaller groups within Syria. There's many Christian Syrians in terms of the different sects of Muslims. There are representatives of all different sects. And this is a continuing process. This doesn't stop here. Right now the General Assembly has 230 members and those are divided. Is that 75 of them are from the interim committee that was announced back on September 15th. We have large representation of the grassroots movements and we have several seats for Muslim Brotherhood, for Kurds, for independence. And we have a few that are open still for people to be elected from the different groups that are still joining the SNC. We also have women representation. Of the 74 core group, there were 11 women, which is about 15%. And the demographic is in terms of the age, the experience in Syria abroad is very inclusive and is all taken into consideration. The amount of activism was also a factor in selecting the SNC members. The important thing at this point is for all Syrians to feel represented by this council. And we believe that the matrix that we used had taken care of that. And this was evident, as Najib I think mentioned, is that the Friday after the SNC was announced, the demonstrations were overwhelmingly supportive of the SNC in all areas, in all regions in Syria. And actually for, I think for the first time we had, the Kurds in the Northeast were mobilized also and they came out in large numbers as well. Especially after Mashal Tammu was also assassinated, they felt that they also were not protected by the regime and they are very much so part of this revolution. So in terms of the diversity, we feel we're very representative of all segments of the Syrian society and we are continuing that work. It's an ongoing process and we hope to one day have every Syrian feel represented by the SNC to make the transition to a post as a Syria, a very smooth one and supported by everyone. Dima, thank you very much also. You singled out what could be one of the critical factors in determining the fate of the SNC and that is the extent to which minorities in Syria perceive that they themselves have a viable future in a post Assad Syria. And it will be interesting to hear your sense and the sense of our colleagues on the panel about how the rise of an armed resistance affects this challenge on the part of the opposition. What new kinds of concerns might it create about the possibilities for creating an inclusive pluralist opposition that is seen by minorities as offering them a better future alongside of their Sunni fellow Syrians. Murhaf, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Steve. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is an important day in the young history of the SNC. Thank you for hosting us. I'm going to try to be as brief as I can. There are a million things to say about the Syrian revolution. I'm trying to, I will try to contain myself to only seven points that I feel are strategic. I agree completely with Najib. The Syrian revolution has to be viewed within the Arab context, the context of the Arab Spring. The Syrian revolution is cross-national. It is non-sectarian. It is non-ethnic. It is a revolution against 48 years of single-party rule, against 41 years of family rule. Point one, the bloodletting that has taken place in Syria and that continues to take place could have been avoided. I take, for example, the case of Dar'a. Initially, as you remember, there were teenagers that had been caught writing graffiti on the wall. They were arrested. Their fathers came to extricate them the following day from the hands of the cousin of Bashar al-Assad, the head of security there. And they were told to go make other kids. And if they were not men enough to make other kids to bring their wives to the muhabarah so they could make kids for them. I'll give you another example, the March 30 Parliament speech of Bashar al-Assad where everyone was expecting, really, that he offer a package of reforms to put this behind. And all he could do was to blame this crisis on a foreign conspiracy. So had he handled this situation well, there would not been a tragedy. And this goes to show that the uprising is more a product of Assad's mismanagement than it is a foreign conspiracy, which leads me to point two. The Assad regime's narrative that this is a foreign conspiracy is, to my mind, an insult to human intelligence. Assad wants people to think, certainly domestically, that the aim of this alleged foreign conspiracy is to break Syria's resistance to Israel's hegemonic ambitions. He claims that foreign powers, including the US, are in cahoots with Salafist gangsters who are shooting at both protesters and security forces alike. Of course, these foreign powers are in cahoots with Amnesty International and with Human Rights Watch and with the UN Human Rights Commission and with Al-Jazeera and with Al-Arabiya and with the International Red Cross, and I could go on and on. But, of course, that argument, his argument, does not explain why soldiers are defecting daily. It does not explain why anti-regime demonstrations are ruthlessly crushed while those supportive of him are not. Why sharpshooters atop buildings snipe at protesters and not at regime supporters. Why private hospitals are prohibited from taking the wounded to treat them and instead have to transfer them to public hospitals where, although they are wounded, they are arrested and detained. This foreign conspiracy argument is laughable even those in the resistance camp, including, mind you, Iran and Hezbollah, have called on Assad to meet popular demands. Point three, the Assad regime is unwilling to institute reforms. Significant reforms would cause the Assad regime to collapse and I totally identify with a very recent secret survey that was conducted by Professor Angela Hocken of Pepperdine University, a survey that was conducted in Syria, how she managed to do this I will never know, but in which she finds that eight out of ten Syrian surveyed want to see regime change and won't be satisfied with mere reform. Point four, the Assad regime is unwilling to share power. In Assad's proposed political reforms there are going to be political parties that will need to register in view of competing for parliamentary seats in February 2012. What Assad does not tell us is that these political parties need to have the consent of the Minister of the Interior in order to establish. What he doesn't tell us about the media laws is that media has to have the consent of the Information Minister in order to publish or to disseminate. And any criticism of the government is penalized, a fine of $25,000. What he doesn't tell us is that article eight of the Constitution, which makes of the Ba'ath Party superior to any political force and dominant of any political force in Syria will not be abrogated. Here the Assistant Secretary General Pheytan was courageous enough to come out and say it will not be abrogated. And what Assad does not tell us is that he has the very firm intention and determination of running for president again in 2014 and he will be the only candidate and he will win by 99 plus percent. You know, these so-called reforms I think are an accurate reflection of regime thinking. It is the continued regime hegemony that it wants over Syrian society. And this, the Syrian street has spoken to. Number five, the Assad regime will collapse. There is too much blood. The distance between regime and society is far too wide. The security forces are beginning to show signs of erosion other than the emergence of a free Syria army. The defense minister, as you know, General Ali Habib was replaced for quote-unquote health reasons. And shortly thereafter, the deputy chief of staff, General Antakiali, died of a quote-unquote heart attack. I don't believe it. But my disbelief or my non-belief is I understand not evidence enough. And I think if in the end the military or units of the military do not topple the regime, it is going to be the crumbling economy that will. As you know, Syria has lost its tourism income, which was roughly a quarter of its entire income. With sanctions on oil, it has lost a third of its income. And so that is making the economy truly suffer. And I think it will tumble fairly soon. Six, the Assad family will not go away easily. The Assad's are of the view that Syria is their family farm and that Syrians are their cattle. Rami Mahloof, the corrupt cousin, makes this point very bluntly in a recent New York Times interview, in which he says, do not expect us to sail on about and to go away. To survive the Assad regime, of course, is attempting to push society to sectarian strife. It is carrying minorities into thinking that they are doomed if it's not for Assad. And simultaneously, the security forces are resorting to bestial brutality against the population so as to force the militarization of the revolution. The Assad regime would like nothing better than to battle an armed force that the security forces can then sweep away. Seven, as a result of all the above, Syria may be moving towards civil war with very grave consequences, not only for Syria and Syrians, but for the entire region. And so it is incumbent upon the free world to assist the Syrian National Council in getting rid of this regime, not through military intervention, but at least by cutting the cash flow to the regime with which it finances the security forces that are brutally brutalizing the population and by staring the Assad regime down into at least allowing international monitors to act as a buffer and as a deterrent to the security forces. The Syrian National Council proposes the establishment, as Dima said, of a civil democratic government in which Syrian citizens are equal before the law. No clan and no sect is responsible for Assad's misdeeds. And finally, what is happening in the Arab world in general and in Syria in particular is historic. The winds of freedom and democracy are sweeping across the entire region. The barrier of fear has broken. Do not let the cause of freedom down. Do not let the Syrian people down. Thank you. Thank you very much, Murhaf. You raise a very, very important point. You identified as laughable the narrative of the regime about the role of the international community and international conspiracies as forces behind the Syrian uprising. And yet this narrative has had an effect on debates among Syrians about what the international community might do to assist the Syrian uprising. And it is precisely this question of the role of the international community that our final speaker, Mr. Osama Munajid, will be addressing in his comments this morning. Osama. Thank you. Thank you, S.I.P. Ladies and gentlemen, imagine this. Imagine a new Syria, a democratic country where the universal human rights of all Syrians are respected without any discrimination. Imagine a country where Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, and all other ethnic and religious groups share a life of freedom, dignity, and equality. A country where political pluralism mirrors Syria's rich cultural diversity. Imagine a Syria where civil society exercises its rights to actively participate in shaping up national development policies. Imagine a country where freedom of speech unleashes the long suppressed creativity and entrepreneurship of the Syrian people. Imagine a new Syria governed by the rule of law and an active and obliging member of the international community committed to contributing to peace and stability in the Middle East and respectful of all nations and international agreements. This is the Syria that the Syrians imagine. This is the Syrian dream, for Syrians have dreams too. And we all, we are all too aware that this dream of freedom is priceless and has a cost, which we Syrians are prepared to pay to fulfill our aspirations and bring forth our dreams. But for this dream to come true, we need to support, we need the support of the international community. We need your support. We now stand seven months into the revolution against the Assad regime. The atrocities committed so far are beyond the wildest imagination of most. Thanks to the coordinating committees and the youth groups on the ground who feed us with daily updates, document the atrocities and continue to do all the groundwork against all odds. We know that more than 4,000 unarmed civilians have been killed, including over 400 women and children. There are more than 45,000 people imprisoned. You have heard of and seen the mutilated bodies. You have also heard eye witnesses, eye witness accounts of torture, not only of the activists themselves, but also their families and relatives and loved ones. The amount of grief and sorrow is unimaginable. The country is anguished with missing husbands, raped daughters, humiliated elders and dead sons. The crimes being committed against the Syrian people by this mafia regime are sickening. If things continue as they are and nothing changes, with a fast forward snapshot into the future a year or two from now, what can we expect to happen if the international community remains silent? How many more human rights violations can we expect? How many more deaths, tortures, and how will we, or you, as members of the international community feel if we take no action? Can our collective consciousness take on another hammer of 1982? The Syrian people have voiced their wishes. People demand the fall of the regime. And so you have heard from my colleagues we now have a unified and organized opposition, the Syrian National Council, with whom the international community can engage with, as a legitimate body representing the vast majority of the opposition groups, who will act on behalf of the people. Having been legitimized by the people in Syria to work towards meeting the demands until the Assad regime topples and free and fair elections are held, what is the responsibility of the international community today? What can the international community do to assist the Syrian people and the Syrian National Council now? We need fast action from our friends close and far. From our neighbors, Turkey and the Arab countries, we need immediately an official recognition of the Syrian National Council as the sole representative of the Syrian opposition and as a legitimate representative of the Syrian people. This will provide the Syrian opposition with the moral backing and political recognition and support that it needs. By knowing that they have a legitimate representative speaking on their behalf, the moral and revolutionary stamina of the Syrian youth who are risking their lives on a daily basis will be significantly enhanced. We need the international community to conch all communications with the Assad regime and I'm specifically referring to regional here and regional powers in Turkey to conch all communications with the Assad regime to isolate it from the rest of the world and to make it clear to the regime that nobody condones implicitly or explicitly its violent repression of the peaceful uprising. Withdraw all of their ambassadors from Damascus to immediately optimize the regime and to send a clear signal that these governments regional and the Gulf and Turkey will not tolerate the current barbaric behavior of the Assad regime. This will encourage other governments in the region and elsewhere to take similar actions that will lead to the complete diplomatic isolation of the regime. Freezing the membership of the Syrian government in the Arab League and halting the activities of all the specialized agencies of the Arab League in Syria, banned Syrian satellite TV, state satellite TV, as well as private TV channels funded by the regime from broadcasting using Arab satellites such as ArabSat or Nilesat. This will reduce the influence of the Assad regime's propaganda among Syrian communities in the diaspora and undermine the regime's remaining support among these communities. Impose economic sanctions similar to those imposed by the EU and the US to deplete the financial resources of the regime and help undermine the support of the business community. Freeze the assets of all Syrian officials directly or indirectly involved in the violent repression of the uprising or in the financing of the regime. And kick regime business agents out of their countries. This will send a clear signal to Assad and his cronies that they will not be allowed to use these countries to launder their fortunes or to hide the stolen wealth of the Syrian people. What is needed from Europe and the United States? Again, recognize the Syrian National Council as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. And as the only feasible and legitimate alternative to fill the political vacuum during the transitional period following the downfall of the Assad regime. The regime and its apologists can no longer hide behind the threat of civil war, political chaos, or a takeover by Muslim extremists as an excuse for the continued survival of the Assad mafia regime. Cut all political and economic ties with the regime to ensure its international isolation and to encourage all other countries to follow suit. Set up these sanctions on all individuals and businesses involved in financing the regime. Not only Syrians, but Arabs and other nationalities alike. Impose strict sanctions on the oil sector. Not only oil exports, but also all related upstream activities. Oil revenues contribute about third of the Syrian government's budget and these sanctions will dry up this important source of funding of the Syrian repression machine. Consider alternative options outside the mandate of the United Nations. To isolate the Assad regime and this could include collaborations between OECD, the Gulf GCC countries to impose and enforce economic sanctions. Show your clear support to the SNC, including meetings of high level officials with SNC representatives. This will have tremendous positive effect on the morale of the Syrian people and would encourage greater media exposure and coverage of the situation in Syria. While we greatly appreciate the efforts of the United States and the European Union to assist a UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Syrian regime, we are understandably very disappointed with the recent veto by Russia and China. However, some UN Security Council members chose to accept the narrative of the Assad regime by blaming the violence on armed terrorists and Muslim extremists. Then the US and EU should push for a new UN Security Council resolution to send UN monitoring mission to Syria. If the Syrian regime allowed such missions, the regime will certainly lose. If they do not, they will equally lose. Ladies and gentlemen, we believe in the moral and diplomatic power of the international community and in its ability to take action to help us topple the Assad regime and bring down one of the last vestiges of extreme totalitarianism in the world. The international community has done so before and we implore it to act again to fulfill its international responsibility. Edmund Burke once said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. As good men and women, we all have responsibility towards Syria and to make the Syrian dream come true because Syrian's dream is your dream as well. Together, we can make this happen. Thank you. Thank you, Osama, very much.


In volleyball, state tickets will be punched on Saturday, but in 5A, there were still some semifinal games left to be played, and they look to be good ones on paper as all four top seeds in the regions made it to the final four in Little Falls. Royalton dropped the first set against Belgrade Bruton El Rosa, and in the second set they trailed 24-21. Two straight points for the Royals had them down one, and Emily Malikowski spikes it off the block, and Royalton ties it up at 24. Now set point for Royalton, Malikowski comes up big again getting the kill. The Royals end the set on a 5-0 run to win it 26-24. The third set was all Jaguars though, Allison Gruber with the huge kill that would put them up 20-12. They would win the set 25-19, and in the fourth, Royalton trying to stay alive down four, but Gruber proved too much another kill. Jaguars take the set, Royalton comes up short, they've fallen four sets to the Jags. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Okay, good morning and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining the class BC 205. Yeah. Yeah. Keys to supernatural ministry. We're going to get started. I have just turned on the recording. So this lecture will be recorded and we will make it available to others. And to those who want to watch. Very good. Let's just have a word of prayer together, then we will get started. Shri Kumar, would you like to pray with us please? Let me get started. Yes, Master. Yes, Master. Thank you very much for this wonderful morning. We surrender ourselves for Lord before you pray that Father God that your spirit of wisdom and spirit upon the understanding of Lord Master enlightened us once again a father so that we can graph the revelation and Lord Master so that we can be at five and be rooted in your world. So that we can be a strong testimony and a witness for Jesus, Lord Master so that we can be a productive weapon and a vessel for your kingdom and for the body of Christ God. Father, we surrender our heart, our mind, our soul and our body.  We find every spirit of distraction, we find every spirit of darkness which is trying to disturb and distract them of Father God. We pray Father God, let your Holy Spirit take control of everything and Lord Master let your grace overshadow on each one of us so that Lord Master every single word what we are going to hear of God. Let it edify us so that Lord Master so that your church can be built up to us so that the kingdom of God be established to us. We give you all the glory, honor and praises of God that these were deeply rooted in our heart and in our spirit of God. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Alright, good morning everyone once again and thank you for connecting to this class. So, we are in this course we're talking about keys to supernatural ministry and last week was just a general, you know, welcome and just an open discussion we didn't actually get into the content but we will start today. So, like we mentioned in last week in this course, we are putting together things that many of us have already learned. You know, most of us would be aware of these things because you may have heard it in the earlier courses or you heard the preaching and the teaching and so we are familiar with these truths. But our goal is to learn how to put them together in our lives in practical ways and then how to live it out, how to exercise this. What are the keys that will enable us to experience the supernatural? And that's our goal. Our goal is, okay, you know, I know certain truths but how to bring it together in practical situations so that we can experience the supernatural. Right. So, the way we've divided this course is in four sections as I mentioned last week. This introductory session which we'll get started today has more to do with just to just reaffirm some of the things we know that it is possible for every believer to be used by God to manifest the supernatural. I'm not going to spend too much time on it because I think all of us are pretty convinced that God will work through all of us. So, I'm just going to remind us of certain truths. So, not too much time on it. But the next section, which is where we're going to spend most of our time, I'm just talking about these keys, the different things and how do they work together, you know, in causing the supernatural to take place. There is no formula. You know, I wish we could get everybody a formula saying A plus B plus C is equal to a miracle. You know, and all of us can use it A, B and C, but it's not as simple as that. I mean, there's more than A, B and C. There are many keys God has given to us and in different situations, God will use different combinations of these to cause the miracle. And so you'll have all kinds of things. You'll have sometimes it's just a simple prayer and a miracle happens. Sometimes you lay hands, a miracle happens. Sometimes you don't lay hands and a miracle happens. So it's just different. God uses these things in a variety of ways. And so our goal is to understand all the keys that are available and basically learn to be led by the Holy Spirit in engaging these keys in order to see a miracle happen, whether it's for our personal lives. And more importantly, when we ministering to people because we want to see God do something for them to help them to deliver them to change the situations. Right. So that's our goal. God, you know, work miracle in people's lives so they can be helped and things can happen for them. So learning how to work these keys. Then we talk a little bit about personal preparation in the third section is what can I do to position myself to be an instrument that God would use. And then lastly, in the fourth section, we just talk about pursuit. That means, you know, look, we are making this journey. We should continue in this journey. Don't give up. Don't quit. And we continue in our pursuit of the supernatural because the church is making a journey. We are going from glory to glory. If we were already at the final level of glory, then there is no need to go from glory to glory. Right. So we're not there yet. God is taking us there. And so we have to be the endurance keep making this journey as God takes the church from glory to glory. So that's the last section where we just encourage us to keep on the journey and don't give up. Okay. So feel free as always to ask questions to, you know, bring up things that you want clarity on and we can discuss that. So today, the goal is rather simple, which is to establish for us the fact that, you know, the possibility of a supernatural life in ministry for all of us. You know, on what basis can we say that, you know, as we talk about supernatural life in ministry last week, we just tried to have a little discussion on some of the objections that we face. And one of the objections, the common objections that we that at least I have faced here is that, hey, you know, even the people outside the church, two supernatural things, you know, meaning there are these fortune tellers and suit sayers and people who practice black magic and others, they also do it. So they do it.  We stopped it now for last year this year, but we should run weekend schools where we are just sharing with our own congregation people on various aspects of supernatural, this prophetic or gifts of the spirit and so on. So sometimes people, the city would outside church people, but from not from our church, but from other churches would, you know, we left and I have nothing against them. But, you know, I received emails, I received phone calls from people are they judging why are you doing this, why are you running a weekend school on gifts of the spirit or, you know, they challenged that. And common reason is, even the unbelievers do supernatural things. Well, look at Jesus. He faced the same accusation.  And then Jesus said, Look, if you're telling me I'm doing it by Bilzebub. Then by whom are your children doing it?  They're also doing the miraculous thing. Where is their source of power?  Yes, we know the devil works miracles, but not every miracle is Bilzebub. Bilzebub does some but God does much better, much greater. Right. So you can't just class for every miracle as a one from the devil. And one of my responses would be, Look, there are counterfeit notes, but you don't throw away the original just because there is counterfeit. The fact that there is counterfeit only goes to say that the original is very valuable. That's why they're copying it. You know, so the only way the best way to deal with counterfeit is to be very good with the original, to know the original. So then you go for the original. The solution is not to throw away the original. Go with the original, but get to know it very well. And that's why we must be so firmly founded in this truth that the supernatural is for us today. It is for every believer. God wants to work through every believer supernaturally. No questions asked. And be so established in that truth. So when people question it or challenge it, it will not shake you. You just keep doing what you're called to do. Right. So why do we say that the supernatural is a possibility for every believer? We look at just four simple things and these are familiar things. I'm just, you know, like I said, we're just reminding you getting this established and we will move forward. First of all, the Lord Jesus himself has invited every believer into this ministry. He's invited every believer and you can see the progression. You know, so when Jesus came and he started his earthly ministry, he went about preaching and he went about teaching. And then he also went about healing, delivering and working miracles. So he healed the sick. He cast out demons and he worked miracles to meet the needs of the people. And those days it was multiplying five loaves into a fish, calming the storm, those kinds of miracles. He did those, but he did miracles. And you know, Jesus could have, could have, and many of us would have expected that, you know, he'll just do the ministry very powerfully and he'll go. But that's not it. He was doing the ministry and then he turned around to his 12 disciples and said, I want you to start doing the same thing. And we are familiar with Matthew chapter 10. Let's read the scriptures. I mean, I know many of us are familiar with these scriptures, but I think it's just good to read them again. Matthew 10, let's read verse one, then verse seven and eight, please. Somebody could read it for us. We could move fast on this, right? Matthew 10, verse one. Go ahead, please. Matthew 10, and when he had called his 12 disciples to him, he gave them power or unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease. Seven and eight. And as you go preach saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons, freely you have received, freely give. Thank you, sir. Thank you. So very interesting. He's extending the same ministry to his 12 disciples.  All of you watch me. He didn't do that. He called his 12 disciples and said, look, I'm giving you authority. I'm giving you the same authority. You go. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Heal all manner or sickness and disease. I'm giving it to you. And then he didn't stop with just the 12. Some people say, well, he needed 12 more people to help him, you know, to get the message across faster. And those days, they didn't have internet. They didn't have, you know, all these things. So he had to appoint 12 more people to do the work. Okay. Maybe, maybe that's a good reason. But then he didn't stop with that. You go to Luke 10. Let's read what happened in Luke 10. Look chapter 10. Somebody could read those verses, please. Luke 10, chapter 1. After this, this things, the Lord appointed 70 others also and sent by them two by two before his face into every city and place. Every himself was about to go and 17 to 19. Then the 70 returned with joy. The Lord even, even the demons are supposed to use your name. And we said Satan, when he said to them, I saw Satan falling like lighting to far from Evan. Okay. Thank you. So what do we see in Luke 10? He's appointing another 70. So he didn't stop with 12. He picked out another 70. And, you know, and he said to the 70, go to the same thing.  And so, you know, that was in verse nine and they come back in verse 17. They say, Lord, the demons are subject to us in your name. And to the 70, he says, you know, I'm giving you a thought to try down serpents and scorpions and all the path the enemy. So he extended to 70. Then, you know, as always, we Christians are very good in arguing. So they will say, well, you know, Jesus was following Moses example. Moses chose 12 spies, but Moses also had 70 elders. So that's why Jesus had 12 disciples and he appointed another 70. That'll be the argument. Okay. Fine. If you're arguing like that. Well, two things. Let's go to Mark nine. What do we see happen in Mark nine? Here is an unnamed person. Mark chapter nine and verse 38 to 40. Somebody could read that, please. Now, John. Now, John answered him saying, teacher, we saw someone who does not follow us constitutional demons in your name. And we forbid him because he does not follow us. But Jesus said, do not forbid him. For no one who works miraculously in my name can soon afterwards speak the will of him. For he who is not against us, he's honor sign. So there goes the theory that Jesus was following Moses example. Moses had 12 spies, 70 elders. Okay. So Jesus appointed 12 apostles and other 70. But here's the 71st person. Mark chapter nine. There is an unnamed person, unnamed. You don't even know his name. And he is not. We can mute the mic. Somebody's mic is on. Thank you. He's not part of the 12. He's not part of the 70. And he was not even officially commissioned by Jesus. So the 10 were officially commissioned their official representatives. The 70 were officially commissioned. So they're official representatives. Here is an unofficial man. Meaning he wasn't commissioned directly by Jesus. So I'm just imagining. Okay. I'm just imagining this man.  And you know, Jesus called the 70 people and he said, okay, 70. You know, I'm pointing all of you.  And I want you to go and heal the sick. And I want you to cast out demons. I want to do this. So here's this man in the crowd saying, Hey, I'm not in the 70, but I heard what Jesus told them. He told them to use his name. So I'm going to use it. And so he goes out. He's not part of the 12. He's not part of the 70, but he goes out and he uses the name of Jesus. And he's casting out demons and he's working miracles. So the news goes back to the disciples and disciples. Hey, he's not one of the 12. He's not one of the 70 unofficial. Let's report it to Jesus. And they reported to Jesus. John, now this is John. He's like the beloved, the closest to Jesus other than Peter and James. He comes. He says, Lord, I got a, I got an incident report. There's an unofficial man. He's using your name. He's casting out demons. He's doing all these things. And then Jesus says, do not forbid him. Okay. That means Jesus is not against people who believe in him using his name. They're not part of the 12. They're not part of the 70, but this man believes in Jesus. He's using his name. And so Jesus, do not forbid them. Don't stop him. No one who can work a miracle in my name is going to speak against me. So we see right here in the gospels, he's setting a pattern. He's saying, look, if you believe in me, you can use my name. You don't have to be one of those 12 apostles and none of us are. You don't have to be one of the 70 unofficial, but here we are today. 2000 years later, we believe in Jesus. We can use his name and work miracles in his name. And to add to this, we go to Matthew 28, which is the great mission, which many of us know, sorry, Matthew 28 versus 18 to 20. Somebody could be there for us, please. Jesus came and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Amen. Amen. Thank you. So, you know, this is the great commission, which he's giving, of course, to the apostles and the early disciples. And what is the commission? Go make disciples and do what? Verse 20, teach them to observe. That means to do all that I have commanded you, which includes heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast our demons. That means through the great commission, the invitation of Jesus to do the works he did has been extended to every believer in our day and time. Because he said, tell them to observe or to do everything I've commanded you. And he did command the 12, he did command the 70 to do the works he did. So that invitation is extended to you and me today. No questions asked. Right there he has said, go make disciples of all nations includes us from different parts of the world. Observe everything he had commanded the disciples. Do it. So that's the first reason why you and I believe that supernatural life in ministry is for us today. Second reason is what we have learned about sonship glory. That means the very glory that Jesus Christ walked in on this earth as the son of God has been given to every believer. The very glory that Jesus walked in as the son of God has been given to every believer. The glory is the expression of God's nature. It is the expression of who God is and what he does. And that glory, which was expressed through Jesus, which Jesus walked in with Jesus carried and which Jesus demonstrated has been given to every believer. Now, if we don't know it, that is not Jesus's fault. And if you don't walk in it, that is not Jesus's fault. But the fact is the truth is the glory has been given to every believer. So what are we talking about? We will look at these scriptures. Let's go to John chapter 1 verse 14 and then John 2 verse 11. Somebody can read these verses for us please. John 1 14 says, And the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John chapter 2 verse 11 please. John 2 verse 11. 11. The first of his signs, Jesus said that Kana in Galilee and manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him. Thank you. Alright, so verse 14 of John 1. It's saying the word, this is the eternal word, became flesh. That is the Son of God, Jesus became flesh, embodied, came in human form, the word, eternal word became flesh and dwelt among us. And he carried the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, as a son of the Father, as the only begotten of the Father. He carried what we refer to as sonship glory. So he had eternal glory, which is the glory of the deity. But in his incarnation, he left the glory of the deity aside, and he came in what we refer to as sonship glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father. So the glory is the substance of God. It is the expression of God's nature. And what happened to this glory that Jesus walked in, which he carried.  You could see the word juice of God, full of truth. You could see the light of God, the purity.  John 2.11 says the signs Jesus did, the signs, this is the first sign John chapter two, but all the signs he did revealed or manifested sonship glory. So sonship glory is revealed through the virtues of God, the grace of God. It's revealed through truth, through truth, which is the purity of God. And it's also revealed through the signs, which is the power of God, sonship glory. So he walked as a son of God in this aspect of the glory of God. Very interesting. When you go to John chapter 17. That's read verse two verse five and verse 22, please John 17 verse five and 22. And now, oh father, glorify me together with yourself with the glory which I had with you before the world was verse 22. And the glory which you gave me, I have given them that they may be one just as we are one. Thank you. So John 17. Jesus is praying and verse five is his father. Glorify me with yourself with the glory which I had with you before the world was. So Jesus on the earth is praying to the father is his father. Please give me that glory that I had with you. That is the eternal glory, the glory of the deity. That means on the earth at that moment, he had the glory as of the son of God. He had what we call a sonship glory. But he's praying and saying father, please restore or give back to me that eternal glory, the glory of the deity. So I want you to see the difference on the earth as the son of God, he was walking in sonship glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the father. The sonship glory is revealed through grace, truth and power. Grace, meaning the virtues of God, truth, meaning the purity of God, science, meaning the power of God. But Jesus in his sonship glory is praying and John 17 finds his father. Glorify me with the glory which I had with you, which is the eternal glory, the glory of the deity. The glory, the eternal glory, the glory of the deity is expressed through omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. So he's praying, God. And sure enough, when Jesus ascended and was after death by resurrection and he ascended to heaven, he received once again the eternal glory, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. But on the earth, he was walking in sonship glory, grace, truth and power. And that glory, verse 22, he says, Father, the glory which you have given me, I have given them, whole believers, his followers. That means the sonship glory has been passed on, has been given to the followers or believers of Jesus Christ. So that's why we must understand the same glory Jesus walked in as the Son of God is in you. So how do you know that verse 22, the glory which you gave me, I have given them each one, each one of his followers. He's praying that, so he's praying for each one of us. So you have sonship glory. You have divine nature. You have the glory of God in you, which is the capacity to reveal who God is and what he does through virtue, grace, that is virtue, through truth, that is purity, integrity, and through science, which is power. So all these three aspects reveal or manifest sonship glory. So every believer has been given that. And so that's why if you go to, we'll just look at those scriptures from 1st John, 1st John chapter 2. Somebody could read that for us, 1st John 2. I will finish this and then we will take up questions. So if you have questions, we can discuss them and I'll just finish this. 1st John 2, somebody could read verse 6 and also we'll read chapter 4 verse 17, please. 1st John 2 verse 6, somebody. He who says he abides in him ought himself also to walk just as he walked for 17. Love has been perfected among us in this that we may have boldness in the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in this world. Thank you. So John is saying, if anyone says you abide in Jesus, you have to walk as he walked. Now that's a very big statement. Walk as Christ walked. How did he walk? Grace, truth, power. We have no right to say, well, you only have to walk in grace. No, John didn't say that. He said you have to walk as he walked in grace, in truth, in power. Because that was a sonship glory. He walked like that as a son of God. And 1st John 4, 17 is an amazing verse because it's saying, look, you know, we have confidence in the day of judgment. We're not afraid of judgment day because we have the love of God in our hearts. And not only that, right now, as he is, so are we on the earth. That means we are like Jesus in the earth. And I know the practical side is we are all becoming like Jesus. But as far as God is concerned, he says, look, I've given it to you. I've given you the capacity to be like Jesus on the earth. And I know we all have our soul and our flesh to deal with. So that's why we are becoming like him. We are turning into it. But as far as God is concerned, he says, look, I've given you the capacity. So that as Christ is, same way you will be on earth. And so it is not wrong for any of us to desire to be like Jesus on the earth in all aspects in grace, truth and power. So that's sonship glory. The third aspect, third reason why we say, and I'm moving through this fast. My goal is to, you know, finish this section today. Sorry. And the next week we get into the keys for supernatural ministry. These are things we are most of us are familiar with already two more things. So first, we saw the invitation of Jesus. Second, it's the sonship glory, the capacity God has given to each and every believer to be like Jesus. Right? The third is the empowering the Holy Spirit. The same Holy Spirit who anointed Jesus is anointing you and me today. Same Holy Spirit.  We know that look for 18 and 19 Jesus said, you know, the spirit of Lord is upon me. Or he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to preach deliverance to the captives, liberty of sight to the blind to heal the broken hearted and deliverance to those who are oppressed and to proclaim the acceptable ear of the Lord. He said, the Holy Spirit is on me for me to do all this. So everything he did, he did by the anointing, he did by the empowering of the Holy Spirit. He ascended to heaven. And then he said, the same Holy Spirit will come on you and you'll receive power. He did not indicate any change in either the person or the power. He didn't say, well, I had Holy Spirit, you will receive junior Holy Spirit or something else. He didn't say anything like that. There is no other Holy Spirit. There's only one Holy Spirit and the same God who anointed Jesus anoints you and me. And there is no indication, no mention of any reduction in power. He didn't say, you know, you will receive 50% power. No. He said, you will receive power. He was anointed with power. He said, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. So the power is available now. What we have to learn is how do we flow in it, how do we grow in it and so on. So we have a learning process because, you know, we have come out of darkness. We have come out of all the things that we've gone through and we are now learning about the kingdom of God and learning about the keys of how God works and so on. So it's a learning process for us. And so that's why it takes us time and we are learning from our mistakes. We are overcoming our ignorance and, you know, we are journeying into this. But the point I want to emphasize is the same Holy Spirit and the same measure of power that went through Jesus is available for every believer. And the last one is the authority he vested in us, which means he gave us his name. So let's go to John 14. Again, it's a very familiar passage. We'll just read two verses. We will read three verses. John 14 will read verse 12, 13 and 14. John 14, 12, 13 and 14. Please, somebody could read that. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. Thank you. So in verse 12, he said, the works I do, whoever believes in me, the works I do, he will also do. And even greater works. So Jesus kept room for us to go beyond him. Now, there's a reason, because many, and this is again another common objection question that keeps, you know, people, I'm talking about church people, hit us with, oh, can you show me in the Bible where Jesus prayed for, you know, somebody without whose organ had failed or whose organ has been taken away for that to be put back or where did Jesus pray for somebody's debts to be canceled or whatever, you know, the different, different miracles that we need in our day and time. So people question those things. Well, Jesus said, the works I do, and the greater works, that means there is space for much more. Things that have not yet been recorded in the scriptures. Greater works. The works I do and greater works, if it's aligned to the character and nature of God, go ahead. Pray for it. Right. So the works I do and greater works. But how is that going to happen? 13 and 14. In my name. In my name, Jesus said. So by what we understand, by giving us his name, he's giving us his authority. It's everything, everything that he is, is there in his name is given to us. So go in my name. So that authority we must understand when we say in Jesus name, we are standing in his place on his behalf, representing him to do everything he would do if he were present here physically. That's what we are saying. And we say in Jesus name, you're saying, I'm here. Standing in the place of Jesus, standing on his behalf, representing him to do everything he would do. If he was standing here physically right now, that's what you and I are saying when we say in Jesus name. And that's the authority vested in us. He said, do the works I do and even greater. So don't hesitate to ask for things that are not recorded necessarily in the Gospels or anywhere in scripture because greater works. Things that matter to our day and time, to people in our day and time, greater works. And Jesus also mentioned in Matthew 16, he said, you know, I'm giving the church the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Keys represent authority. It's the authority of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is vested in the church. Right. So to sum up what the goal of this introduction is this on the basis of these four things. And, you know, we could we could explore scripture and add to this list, but I felt these are major, major truths. One is the invitation of Jesus. It's just so clear. Sonship glory number two. Third, the anointing of the Holy Spirit. And fourth, the authority vested in each and every believer is telling us. We can do the work she did and greater works. So we must journey into it. Right.  So we must be convinced this is what this is the possibility for us. So I see a question there. Why can't believers demonstrate the same power as Lord Jesus did 2000 years ago? So the answer to that Abishak is, look, first of all, we must know the truth. So much of the church, and I say church, I mean believers, be us people. We don't know the truth. We don't know the possibility. So you will never walk in truth that you don't know. We don't know the truth. Or we don't embrace the truth. So even if we have heard it. We don't receive it. We don't present to it. So there's one important aspect of the kingdom of God. Jesus taught us. He said the kingdom of God suffers violence and a violent ticket by force. So this is, you know, the two sides to the kingdom. On the one hand, we receive it like a child. On the other hand, we pursue it like a warrior. And both are important. Most people like the child part and others sit and receive it. But Jesus also said, you have to pursue it like a warrior. You're to press into it. That requires commitment. That requires some serious work from our side. Most people don't like to do that. So we can never possess the kingdom if you're not willing to pursue it. So that's another reason why the church doesn't. Not too many people are willing to pursue the truth. Right. So, but. And the third part is that we are progressing into it. You know, we are learning your understanding. We are pressing into it. And that the more we be turning into it, the more miracles we will see. And Paul, the apostle said in Ephesians five, right. Jesus is coming back for a glorious church. That means I believe the church will come to this place of where it is called. It is where it is the glorious church, meaning a church that is truly manifesting the glory of God. He's coming back for that church. And we are very close to it. Why? Because all over the world, people are proclaiming this truth, proclaiming truth. And, you know, first the way God works is first truth is proclaimed. Then the church rises into the truth that we proclaim. Because unless the truth is proclaimed, the church never graduates. It never goes up. Right. So keep proclaiming, keep proclaiming, keep proclaiming the truth. And the church will slowly rise up to that truth. Right. So sooner than later, the church will be walking in this truth. Church means every believer will be walking in this truth, but we ought to keep proclaiming it. This is what the Bible says. This is the truth we're going to pursue. And then soon the church will start walking in it. So we will see it.  To gain things that are the works of God being manifested. Okay. Good. Any other question? So the next one here, question is the sons of glory. That Jesus has given us is manifested in grace through the power. Please provide more details. So the example. So, so grace talks about the word truth of God in this context of what grace is in the New Testament is used in different contexts. Right. right? So the context will determine what the meaning is, how we should understand the word. There's the same word, grace carries, but the context determines the meaning, right?  So when we walk in godly character, we are displaying the glory of God.  When you are generous to people, you're displaying the glory of God. When in a situation of great turmoil, you're walking in peace, you're demonstrating the glory of God, that's grace. Truth has to do with integrity, with light, with holiness, with purity. So in things that are very corrupt around you, you're walking in holiness, you're manifesting the glory of God, because holiness is an aspect of God's virtue. When we refuse to do any things that are wrong, things that are displeasing to God, we are manifesting the glory of God in that situation, right? And power is what this course is about. It is about demonstrating the healings, the miracles, the deliverances, the things in people's lives. And God works powerful things. And he works in powerful ways in order to minister to people, to minister into their life situations, whether it's healing, whether it's deliverance in their family situation, whether it is financial miracles, provision coming in, maybe a manifest in the power of God, in our day, in our time, in our context, right? So I hope that helps, Christopher. Okay, Dinesh, you have a question or you are? Yeah, question. And no one's race, Paul's hopes are coming in the name of Jesus. How can we can believe, we can trust our unsaved people, unsaved souls can differentiate us. My friend raised a question, I was not able to answer. Enig, help me, help me. Sure, sure. So this whole question about false prophets, people who do things. So we have to, I'll make a few comments. First is we have to differentiate between bad prophets and false prophets. And I'm using the word bad just as a tag. What do I mean by bad prophets? Meaning they are genuine ministers of God, just that maybe they may not behave or they may make some mistakes or things like that. So they're not false, they're genuine, but they may intentionally, maybe unintentionally do some mistakes. So we shouldn't call them as false prophets, just that they're still in a stage of growth, development or learning, understanding that they make mistakes along the way. So that's why I just quote unquote, call them bad. That means they made some mistakes. They're not false. They made mistakes, but then there are false, false means they are not true. And they are only using the church or the opportunity to mislead people, to hurt people. So what are some of the tests the Bible is giving us? And I'll just quickly mention this. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, you will know them by their fruit. And so we look for what is the actual outcome? Look for the fruit. Don't look at just the performance or the ministry that you see. What is the fruit?  That's fruit. The ministry, what they do, that is the expression of the work, what they're doing, but the fruit is how our people's lives changed for the long term. So Jesus said, by the fruit, you will know them. Secondly, Jesus said, they will do the will of the Father. Again, this is all in Matthew 7. Not everyone says to me, Lord, Lord, but He does the will of my Father. So that's the thing. It's the will of God being done. So the will of God is all of the Word of God. Is all of the Word of God being done? Are they walking in all of the Scripture? You know, walking in holiness, walking in humility, or walking in all of the Scriptures? It's the will of God being done. So that's the second thing. Third is, are they in a relationship with Jesus? Because he said there in Matthew 7, I never knew you. So a false prophet does not have a personal connection with Jesus. They may use things around him, but they don't know him. They're not in that personal connect. And all these three things are in Matthew 7 itself. So we look at these three things. Now the first, what is their fruit? Second, is the will of God being executed or followed? Third, are they speaking from a personal relationship with Jesus? Are they glorifying Jesus? Are they exalting Jesus? Are they pointing people to Christ? If this doesn't happen, then you question what is being done. But I want to just say one thing. You don't judge any preacher by one sermon. And that's being very unfair. You don't read one page in a book and judge the whole book. Or like we normally say, don't judge a book by its cover. So don't judge a book by one page that you read. If you want to really judge the book, read all the pages. If you want to really judge a preacher, listen to, look at his ministry, listen to a substantial amount of what he teaches and preaches before passing judgment. Because even it happens to me all the time, somebody hears one message I preach and then they send me some harsh email. I'm like, I don't let these things bother me, but I'm just saying that this is so unfair.  Judge me based on those 20 years of sermons, not just one sermon. Because people may not understand the context in which that sermon is being preached. So it's so easy to misjudge. So look at, take a comprehensive look before passing judgment. Okay. All right. I hope that helps. I know I've already gone over time. And Charles, I know you have a question here, but I don't want to hold up the whole class. Is it a question that we can ask Handel next week, Charles? I think we, maybe you can handle it next week, but it was a short one, referring to the book of 1st June. So we are looking at the present continuous tense. As he is, so we are. And the people are saying that because he is a spirit, then we are spirits because he is God, then we are gods. And we are not affected by sin. It's really disturbing my mind to see that people are misbehaving because of that scripture. As he is, so we are. It is disturbing me a lot. I wanted more, more explanation because there are some myths that I meet and they tell you that and you find especially university students that end up aborting because they, even if they, they have primarito sex, even if they do, they steal, they cannot sin because they are Jesus. So things like that. Yeah, Charles. So like how we learned in our course on interpreting scripture, right? Our immediate response is all scripture must be interpreted in the light of scripture, right? So what else did John write in that whole book, right? What's he writing to believers? He's telling, he's teaching us read chapter one all the way to the end of chapter five. He's teaching us believers that we shouldn't live in sin, right? We shouldn't walk in hate. We should walk in love. So there's so much more he's teaching in the middle of all that he's telling us that we have confidence in the day of judgment because as he is, so are we. But it doesn't, he's not excluding the fact that as believers, we must purify ourselves. You know, first on three, one and two, he says everyone who has to so purify himself. So we have to do that. We have to purify ourselves. So there's, you know, so basically the answer is very simple. Every scripture has to be interpreted and understood and applied in the light of the rest of scripture. What does the rest of scripture teaches us? It teaches us to live holy lives, right? So it is true we are called to walk as Christ walked, but he sanctifies us. We live holy lives. We live sanctified lives, you know, so the rest of scripture has to be followed. Yeah. All right. So let's wrap up here. I've taken 10 more, 10 extra minutes today. Are we going to close in prayer? We'll dismiss and we'll meet again next week. We'll take things forward. Okay. So next week we get into the second section, which is the keys for supernatural ministry. Could somebody please close in prayer and leave a dismiss?  Therefore, Lord, continue to teach us through our past and our teacher, that in all you who is our great teacher will be able to understand and be able to apply the life principles and the spiritual principles and the biblical principles in our lives, in our families and in our ministry. That as we depart, Lord, continue to bless us till we meet again in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for being on the class today. Enjoy the rest of your day and we'll meet again.


Aaron bit of a tough road trip. What does this team have to do to get back on track in the Tampa series? Yeah, I was trying to think through the games, you know, just look, it's a little things. You know, I look back to either base running mistakes, mistakes in the outfield, not coming up, you know, with just a clutch hit, you know, taking our singles when we can. You know, so there's a bunch of things, you know, even me personally know a couple of things I need to work on to, you know, kind of help put this team in a better position to come out better outcome, especially with a tough team like Tampa was going to give us their best. This team was really expected to be an offensive jug or not. You had a good day at the plate, but the team as a whole has been inconsistent offensively.  Yeah, it's tough to say, you know, we, yeah, kind of just inconsistent. You know, that's the word I keep coming back to this is not consistently, you know, having quality at bats, you know, putting the ball in play when we need to situational hitting. It's just a kind of all that together, you know, isn't a good recipe. So, yeah, we just got to kind of grind it out.  We can go next to Brendan Cuddy, please unmute Aaron. Aaron, understanding you're just 12 games in, what's the mood or level of frustration among you guys right now? You know, I think after any loss, it's frustrating.  You know, if we take a loss, that's personal and that, you know, something that we, you know, we take a lot of pride in our craft and what we do and, you know, showing up ready to play and, you know, showing up ready to win. And, you know, it's happening to get it done lately and, you know, it's just time to regroup and, you know, figure out what we need to work on, figure out what guys need to improve on and, you know, get back to it. Go next to Marley Rivera. Hi, Aaron. Martin asked your manager whether, because the Tampa Bay Rays continue to talk about, you know, the throwing at their head and so on. How do you focus on the field without shutting out the outside noise? It just goes back to, you know, we got a job to do, you know, I got a job to do on the field, you know, it's a show up every day.  That's my job. I got to do that. You know, the outside noise, it's really just noise. You know, I got to focus on what I got to do on the field.  And I've just got to play the game. That's really all. But is it tough, you know, the fact that it seems like your games are just getting just, there's this heightened every time the game starts, even when nothing has happened yet, the tensions are already high. Yeah, tensions are high. You know, we've kind of gone back and forth with the race.  You know, but I think the most important thing is just focusing on the game.  And I think that's, you know, the best way, best outcome for both sides.


Hi all, I'm Swati Sehgal working as a principal software engineer in the ecosystem engineering group at Red Hat. Our focus has been to enable virtualized networking functions on Kubernetes and OpenShift for our customers and partners. NFE is an approach is widely adopted by telecommunications industry for deployment management and scaling of networking functions. The idea is that rather than procuring and deploying applications on custom proprietary hardware, there's a shift to deploying these virtualized networking functions also referred to as VNFs as software applications running on virtual machines or in containers on commercial off the shelf servers. Leveraging virtualization and cloud technologies leads to significant simplification of deployment and management of networking infrastructure, agile service delivery, cost reduction, efficient scalability, and widening of supply choice. Such applications have stringent throughput and latency requirements, and it is extremely challenging to achieve performance comparable to customer-built hardware. Because the processing of communication protocols place a significant burden on the CPUs, hardware acceleration plays a key role. It not only leads to efficiency, but also improves performance as the CPUs can perform more useful tasks while IO transfers are taking place, allowing the VNFs to efficiently scale in high-bandwidth networks. In addition to hardware acceleration, in case of multi-numer systems where Numer stands for non-uniform memory access, system memory is divided into zones called Numer nodes which are allocated to particular CPUs or sockets. Access to memory that is local to a CPU is faster than memory connected to remote CPUs on the system. Normally, each socket on a Numer system has a local memory node whose contents are accessible faster than memory in the node local to another CPU or the memory on a bus shared by all CPUs. Similarly, devices such as physical NICs are placed on PCI slots on the compute node hardware. These slots connect to specific CPU sockets that are associated with a particular Numer node. For optimal performance, CPUs, memories, PCI devices should all be allocated such that they have access to the same local memory as the performance impact of Numer misses are significant. Kubernetes has recently turned heads in the telco industry as it has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and it's attracting performance sensitive workloads that are very demanding and need the speed and raw performance as they're directly running on bare metal. In today's presentation, we'll focus on Numer alignment of resources and the current gaps in Kubernetes scheduler and the work we've been doing to solve that. Without further ado, let's dive straight into the problem we're trying to solve in Kubernetes. Here's an example of a Kubernetes cluster. We have two workers, worker one and worker two, each running Kubelet, which is a node agent that communicates with the control plane and makes sure that the containers are running in a pod. For simplicity, we are only considering CPUs and devices in this cluster. The most important thing to note here is that from Kubernetes scheduler's point of view, resource-wise, both the nodes are completely identical. Both have four instances of device A, four instances of device B and eight CPUs each. So if the workload request a device A and a device B, both the nodes should be able to run the pod, but that is not what happens. When the pod gets scheduled on worker one, the pod is rejected with topology affinity error. Here is how this looks like in command line. When the same pod is scheduled on worker two, the pod runs without any problem. In the command line, we see the pod running here. So what has changed? And why on one node, the pod runs fine? Whereas on the other node, it is rejected with topology affinity error. To understand this, we need to look into how resource management works in Kubelet, how Kubelet is configured, and how the resources are distributed across NUMA. In Kubelet, there are four resource managers that are responsible for handling resources as well as alignment of those resources. First one is device manager. This became a beta feature in Kubernetes 1.10. Device manager was introduced as part of device plug-in framework as a vendor-independent solution for vendors to be able to advertise their resources to Kubelet and monitor them without writing custom Kubernetes code. Second one is CPU manager, which became a beta feature in Kubernetes 1.12. A node in Kubernetes cluster runs multiple pods, and some of these pods can be running CPU intensive workloads. Lead-in-sensitive applications can get affected by noisy neighbor problems. So for performance and lead-in-sensitive applications, exclusive allocations of CPU is important to minimize CPU throttling effects, context switches, and processor cache misses. Static policy of CPU manager in Kubelet allows us to assign exclusive CPU to each of the container according to the CPU request. The third one is topology manager. This became a beta feature in Kubernetes 1.18. Topology manager is in Kubelet. It's a component that coordinates the topology of resource allocation, allowing a workload to run in an environment optimized for low latency. Prior to this feature, the CPU and device manager in Kubernetes made resource allocation decisions independent of each other. This led to undesirable allocation on multi-socket systems, where CPUs and devices could be allocated from different numeral nodes incurring additional latency. The most recent addition to the resource managers is the memory manager, which became beta in 1.22. It enables guaranteed memory and huge-page allocation for pods in guaranteed course class. Prior to this feature, topology manager in Kubelet aligned CPU and PCI devices, but there was no way to align memory. Now that we have some background information on how resource management is handled at node level, let's get back to the example I showed initially. Let's zoom in on how the nodes are configured and look at the resource distribution across Noma to understand why we were getting the unexpected scheduling behavior. So here we are. Kubelet has configured such that topology manager policy is single-luminode. CPU manager is configured with static policy. And in case, given that topology manager is configured with single-luminode policy, it means that all the resources should be strictly aligned on the same Noma node. In case it is not possible to align all the resources, the pod is rejected with topology affinity error. If the pod is part of a deployment or a replica set, it can result in runaway pod creation because the subsequent pods could land on nodes where resource alignment is not possible. Now, if you look carefully at the resource distribution of the devices across Noma on Worker Node 1, all the instances of device A are on Noma Node 0 and all instances of device B are on Noma Node 1. There's basically no way a pod requesting an instance of device A and an instance of device B can be fulfilled from a single-luminode on Worker 1. But if the pod is scheduled on Worker 2, this request can be fulfilled as the resource distribution across Noma nodes is such that it allows the workload resources to be allocated from the same Noma node. This clearly shows that even though we have topology manager taking care of resource alignment based on hardware topology, the scheduler is topology unaware leading to suboptimal scheduling decisions. So in order to optimize cluster-wide performance of workloads, resource utilization and enhance the overall system, the default scheduler should consider resource availability along with underlying resource topology in order to increase the likelihood of the pod to land on a node where it will fit. So what are we doing to solve this problem? In order to solve this problem, we had to create a few components and make enhancements to some of the existing ones. We needed a component that exposed resource topology information along with the granularity of Noma Node and basically had to enhance the scheduler plugin under the scheduling process itself with the help of a scheduler plugin to take the information into consideration. For exposing resource topology information, we added a software component called NFD Topology of Data in Node Feature Discovery, which is often referred to as NFD. This project is part of Kubernetes SIG repo. NFD is a node-fleecing agent exposing hardware capabilities in the form of node labels, annotations and extended resources. The software component called NFD Topology of Data, as I mentioned, collects information about the resources allocated to the running pods along with the associated topology information using the pod resource API. And basically, we are able to determine the available resources with Noma Node granularity and we expose that information as CR instance per node. Pod resource API is a cubelet endpoint for pod resource assignment and it was enhanced to add support for CPU IDs, device topology and an additional endpoint to obtain information of allocatable resources. The second part is the topology where scheduler plug-in, as you can see over here. Kubernetes SIG repo also houses a repository for out-of-trees scheduler plugins based on the scheduler scheduling framework and we contributed no resource topology scheduler plug-in there. This uses the CRs created by NFD to make a Noma wear placement decision. Essentially, the scheduler plug-in runs a simplified version of topology manager alignment algorithm to determine if the node is suitable to assign the pod to a particular node. Node resource topology API is the CRD API which acts as a glue between NFD and scheduler plug-in. The important thing to note here is that topology manager will still run its alignment algorithm at a node level for resource allocation. Here are all the relevant links for the components that I just mentioned. If you'd like to learn more and have questions, please contact us on Slack. Thank you very much.