How's everybody doing? We wanna welcome Portage and welcome those who are online with us. And I wanna invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to First Thessalonians chapter four, First Thessalonians chapter four. This is the last installment of our series entitled The Battle and all fall, we've been talking about the subject of spiritual warfare, the battle that all of us experience and face in following Jesus. And as I've said every single week, I'm gonna say it again because I wanna get it down deep on the inside of us. The Christian life is not like a battle, the Christian life, thank you, you guys have got it, A plus gold star. And remember that we're not wrestling with flesh and blood but our battle is against principalities, powers and spiritual hosts of wickedness. People are not the enemy, this is a spiritual battle even when it looks like a physical battle. The real root of the battle that all of us, I'm not talking about inner family squabbles and things like that, but I'm talking about the battle that we experience in our mind, in our heart and our attempt to follow Jesus, it's a spiritual battle. And this is the final installment of this series and it is entitled The Return of the King. Today we're gonna be looking at one of the central doctrines of the church which is the second coming of Jesus, the coming, the return of Christ. And so I wanna draw your attention to the text. First Thessalonians chapter four, beginning in verse number 13. Paul writes this, he says, but we do not want you to be uninformed brothers about those who are asleep or those who've died in Christ. That you may not grieve as others do who have no hope for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again.  For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven and with a cry and a command with the voice of an archangel and with the sound of the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore, encourage one another with these words. Chapter five, verse one. Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need that anything be written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord, you should underline that if you have your Bibles, the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying that there is peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night nor of the darkness. So then let us not sleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober having put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we might live with him. Verse 11, therefore encourage one another and build one another up just as you are doing. So Paul encourages believers to encourage, strengthen, build one another up, reminding ourselves that our hope is in the fact, it's in the reality that Jesus Christ is going to return to the earth just as he came the first time. How many know that Christmas season right now is upon us? Shortly to be upon us. In fact, I think it was the end of July, the beginning of August, Jane and I walked into a store and they already had Christmas stuff up. To me, that's a cardinal sin. Those people should be penalized for that because I grew up in a time when you didn't put Christmas stuff up until after Thanksgiving. Can I get a witness up in here? But retailers do not listen to the church. We all know that that should be the fact and whether you like it or not, people are already starting to think about Christmas. In fact, on the Christian calendar in a couple of weeks, we begin a season of Advent. Advent historically was a time where the church would look back and remember the first coming of the Lord and also utilizing that as a springboard to remind our hearts that just as Jesus came the first time, he's also going to return and when he comes the second time, it's gonna be distinctly different from the first time. The first time, we all know the story when Jesus came, he came without any fanfare, he came without trumpets blowing, announcing the coming of the King, he came subtly, he came under the radar as an infant born to a young Middle Eastern couple living in occupied Israel, laid in a manger, which was a feeding trough, in a basically the garage of a hotel six because there was no room for them in the inn and the only people that the angels announced it to was to the shepherds out in the field and Jesus came under the radar as an infant and the Bible says he grew in wisdom and favor and stature with God and man, he grew up and it wasn't until he was 30 years old or so that he emerged on the scene and when he did though, he went all the way to the cross where he wrought the victory that won our salvation. The cross of Jesus Christ was a decisive victory for humanity, whether humanity understood it or not. The principalities and the powers that we've been talking about, the spiritual hosts of wickedness, the demonic powers that ruled this world illegally occupying this territory that ultimately belonged to God did not know that Jesus was here to die. They thought he was here to reign. They did not understand that the process by which he would reign began with him humbling himself and going to the cross because it was there that he who knew no sin became sin so that you and I who only knew sin could become the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ and it was on the third day that that victory became clear because what the devil thought was a permanent residence became a temporary shelter and the stone was rolled away and the Son of God was resurrected in power and glory defeating death, hell and the grave and winning the ultimate victory. So Jesus when he came the first time came as a lowly child and when he ascended, you know he's resurrected in Acts chapter one and when he ascends to take his rightful place at the right hand of God the Father, the disciples are standing there watching Jesus lift off. Imagine being there watching Jesus like caught up into the clouds and they're gazing at him and then the angels that are standing there tell the disciples, why are you staring at Jesus? Why are you looking at him like this? This same Jesus whom you've seen depart will in like manner return. Jesus said talk to his disciples about the fact that I'm leaving but I'm coming back and I'm going to depart and go to the right hand of God the Father but I'm going to return and here's the signs of what it's gonna look like when I return. What's interesting to me though is when we look at the story of Jesus' first coming which is what Christmas is really all about, it's what Advent is really all about, what I think is incredibly interesting about that is that God prophesied so much about how the Messiah would come in the Old Testament because in the first century they didn't have the New Testament, all they had was the Old Testament, Genesis through Malachi, 44 books in the Old Testament filled with prophecies about how the Messiah would come that he would be born of the line of David, that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would sit on his father David's throne, that a virgin would conceive, that he would be a king but he would also come quietly and there were all of these scriptures that everybody knew all the scholars and the theologians and the teachers and all the people of Israel had it all at their disposal but when Jesus did come, people missed him. I mean to me one of the most mind-boggling parts of the story of Jesus is after he's born, I mean the virgin birth is amazing, I mean by itself, that's an incredible miracle but when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple to dedicate him much like the parents today dedicated their children to the Lord, they're in a long line of faith all the way back to Hannah who dedicates Samuel but then Mary and Joseph dedicate Jesus, they brought him into the temple holding their child who is both at the same time 100% God, the second member of the Trinity but yet also fully human, two natures and as they carry him into the house to dedicate him it was filled with hundreds and thousands possibly of other people who were there to worship God who walked right by God, may have even bumped into God and did not know it. The only reason Mary and Joseph knew it is because Gabriel came and bailed Mary out and there was an angelic visitation so they knew it but as they're walking into the course of the temple there's two individuals that recognized Jesus, Anna and Simeon. Anna is a widow who's spent 40 plus years praying and fasting and interceding in the temple and Simeon is a prophet that God had given a word and said you're not gonna die until the Messiah comes on the scene, I'll tell you when you see him and so here's Mary and Joseph carrying a child and all of a sudden everybody's busy doing their stuff distracted by religion and yet Simeon goes, that's him, that's shocking to me. That's his first coming but what I want you to know is that the Bible has just as much information in it about his second coming as it does his first coming and my fear is that most of the church is not thinking about it and not ready for his second coming, that we may find ourselves guilty of missing the signs that predicate his second coming and we're not living lives that are ready for when he does come because make no mistake about it when Jesus comes the second time, he's not coming quietly. He came the first time as a child, lowly and meek and mild, laid in a manger. When he comes back the second time, he's coming back as the king of kings and the Lord of lords, not for a manger but for a throne in Jerusalem to rule all the nations of the world. He may have come the first time church and the angels only announced it to the shepherds but the second time it's gonna be the voice of an archangel, there may not have been trumpets that announced his birth but when he comes back there's gonna be a trumpet blast and every eye will see him as the one who has written on his leg true and faithful and just riding on a white stallion with the armies of angels and all of his saints with him burst from the eastern sky, emerges into the atmosphere to reclaim the world and the nations that he rightfully purchased. Man, when he comes back, it's gonna be a show. It's gonna be a showcase and nobody's gonna miss him in that moment but I wonder if in that moment there's gonna be some people who are like I should have been ready, I should have been looking. That's what Paul is saying to the believers at Thessalonica. They are enduring incredible persecution for their faith and when Jesus had left he said I'm coming back. Do you know that most of the people during the time of Paul that he's writing the epistles in the New Testament they thought that Jesus was going to come back in their lifetime. Paul thought Jesus was coming back in his lifetime and so when pressure was getting hard when they were persecuted for their faith when there was difficulty in following Jesus in the middle of a pagan culture because make no mistake about it, the early believers, many of them lost their lives for their faith, many of them lost their businesses and their homes, a lot of them lost family members and divisions over this kind of thing because they were living in a culture that it was unacceptable to say that there was only one God that was unrealistic to think you were gonna live a pure life in the middle of so many options and opportunities, in other words, listen, this is the Roman Empire, live it up. And these were people that said no, we're not gonna live it up because we know our king is coming and when he comes the kingdom that we belong to is gonna be established. But Paul's writing in the middle of that saying come on, come on, don't give up, encourage one another because even though he hasn't come yet he's still going to come. And yes, it's been 2000 years. There was no way in the world they could have anticipated. In fact, when I talk to some people they'll actually try to bring that up as evidence for why the gospel is not valid. They'll say, well, first century believers thought Jesus was coming back in their lifetime and he didn't come back and it's been 2000 years and he still hasn't come back and that totally invalidates your faith. And I say, no, actually it validates my faith. Unbelievers or skeptics will say how in the world can it validate your faith? And I say, because in the middle of a first century Christian community that thought Jesus was coming back in their lifetime the Holy Spirit actually prophesied through Peter that there would come a point right before the coming of the Lord and what he calls the last days when scoffers would rise up and say he's been gone so long, where is his coming you Christians? And so what I tell the skeptic as I say you're just fulfilling biblical prophecy which validates my faith and makes me know he's still coming back. The Bible says that, look, before he comes back people will say he's never coming back boy it's gonna be a shock when he does. And we're supposed to encourage one another with these words, with the reality that Jesus is going to come back and it's supposed to change the way that we live our lives as Jesus followers. You know, the return of the Lord is not talked about enough in the church because the Bible calls it our blessed hope that's what we're looking for. Do you know that in the first century Christians greeted one another with a welcome and a greeting? They would say, Maranatha, Maranatha meant the Lord has come and the Lord is coming again. It was how they greeted one another. They were constantly living in this reality that God came and he's also coming again. So we should live our lives in a certain way in light of those realities. If Jesus is first coming and what he accomplished at the cross and his promise of his second coming to bring his kingdom and to make everything that is wrong in this world right once again. If those two parts of that promise Maranatha do not impact the way you and I live as followers of Jesus we have a dysfunctional gospel. Because if we're living as if he's never coming again then we'll become too comfortable here as our home. We'll accommodate and blend into culture because this is all that there is. But if we live with that expectation and we get too caught up in it we become discouraged if and when he doesn't in our lifetime. Now I've been practicing for the coming of the Lord. I mean, I'm practicing my rapture jump. I don't know how that whole thing's gonna work but I'm like, let's go. I think when he comes I'm ready to go. And people argue about when he's gonna come. Is he coming before the tribulation? Is he coming in the middle of the tribulation? Is he coming at the end of the tribulation? Is it a millennial, pre-millennial, post-millennial? Is it mid-trib, pre-trib, post-trib? I'm whatever-trib first. I'm going on the first load. When he comes I'm out. And I'm not arguing with Jesus. I'm not pulling out Bible prophecy charts saying no, no, no, you're not supposed to come yet because this guy said I got like two years left Jesus. Now when he comes baby I'm out. I'm getting caught up with him and nobody's gonna argue theology at that point but our hearts need to be prepared as if he will come because we're called to be people that are waiting for him. It needs to change our lives. Timothy or Titus in chapter two verse 13 describes both of his comings. It says, for the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people. That's his first coming. Training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled lives in this present age. That's how we should live. Waiting for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ. So that's his second coming. So we live our lives in the tension that we are people that are living in waiting between what he has done and what he is coming back to finish. We live in that tension as people of the now and the not yet. You know in 1944, it was the end, nearing the end of World War II. There was a period of time, a year or so before that where it was almost an assumed reality that the Allied powers were going to lose to the German forces in World War II. In fact, tomorrow is Veterans Day. And so on this day, we just wanna thank those of you and honor those of you who have served in our armed forces and we thank you. We appreciate you so much. And you know, every Veterans Day and Memorial Day, I think about that group of young men that were on those amphibian carriers in June 6, 1944, part of a last ditch effort, an operation, top secret operation called Operation Overlord. That the Allied forces had put together under the cover of darkness, it had moved these 18, 19 year old kids wearing the uniform off the shore of Normandy in Northern France. And in just a few moments, the gates were about to drop and they were going to step out into the water facing enemy fire to take territory, lay down their lives 150,000 of them, to get a foothold into German occupied Europe. Germany had spent the entirety of the war basically picking off nation after nation, annexing Austria, taking over Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, all the way up into Scandinavia and then invading very deep into the Soviet Union, Northern Africa. I mean, they had taken over so much territory. They had an agreement with Mussolini in Italy, they had an agreement with Spain and so here they are controlling most of Europe under their totally demonic forces. And the Allied forces on June 6th invaded France and over the course of the next couple of weeks and actually the battle went on for up to two months. They won a decisive victory that turned the tide of World War II. It's called D-Day. But do you know from D-Day, which most historians acknowledge turned the tide of the war, it was the beginning of the downfall of German forces. It pushed them back from D-Day on June 6th until V-E-Day on May 8th, 1945, almost 11 months later, which was the victory in Europe day. There were several months in which the troops were still fighting battles. And that's almost a perfect description of what has taken place between Jesus' first coming and his second coming. His first coming was the decisive invasion of occupied territory to win a decisive victory. C.S. Lewis, who's one of the great British writers, says it like this, enemy occupied territory, that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise and is calling all of his followers to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. We are those who are in waiting. We are like the troops in Europe between D-Day and V-Day. Jesus' first coming was D-Day, an invasion behind occupied enemy lines. In V-Day will be the day when Jesus returns and every eye sees him and he vanquishes all of his enemies and he makes his enemies his footstools and he makes everything that's wrong right again. He reclaims the earth that he won at the cross. But you and I are still fighting battles in the midst of the waiting and we've been called by Jesus to be people of the victory of his future who are living in the tension and creating sabotage to the kingdom of the enemy by the way that we love our lives. See, every time that we love our enemy we're sabotaging darkness. Every time that we bless those who persecute us we're sabotaging the enemy. Every time we live generous in a very selfish life we're sabotaging the work of the enemy. You see, I think the church is supposed to be a picture of what the kingdom is one day going to be like. We should not be a thermometer that shows the temperature of the culture around us. We need to be a thermostat set to the temperature of the kingdom of God in the midst of a lost and dying world. When the world comes into the church and they see people of different political parties loving each other because our allegiance to Jesus is stronger than our allegiance to a political party that will stand out as distinct and different. When they walk into the church and see that the lines that divide everybody else out in the culture don't divide us because the blood of Jesus has washed us clean and we are brothers and sisters in the Lord regardless of the color of our skin regardless of our ideological differences but our allegiance to Jesus, our King is greater than any of the other things that divide us. We begin to set the temperature of the kingdom of God in our culture and we begin to be part of the solution and not just registering the problems. Because let me tell you something when Jesus comes back, he's not running for office. Psalm two says I've established my King on Mount Zion. Jesus is King. He's not running for president or state rep. And when Jesus comes back, he's not getting caught up in the quagmires of all of our arguments and let me just say this, within our arguments and our discourse and our dialogue there is right and there is wrong and there are hills that we need to battle on but we don't do it against one another. We do it through the spirit. We do it as righteous people that are being graciously and sneaky sabotaging. That's how we're supposed to live our lives as people in waiting. And it should literally change the way that we live our lives. Second Peter, listen to these words. Second Peter chapter three says but the day of the Lord it will come like a thief. In other words, it's gonna be sudden. You're not gonna expect it. And then the heavens will pass away with a roar. The heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all of these things are to be dissolved here's the question. What sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness? Waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved and the heavenly bodies will melt away as they burn. God's gonna make all things new again but according to his promise that we are waiting for what is it? New heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. In which righteousness dwells. He asked the question, what sort of lives should we be living? What sort of people should we be living in light of the fact that our king is going to return? I think Christians need to live three distinct qualities in our lives in light of Jesus' return. Number one is we need to live soberly. Soberly. Now I know nobody in here has ever experienced being intoxicated or under the influence of anything at any point in your life because you've, I can just tell by looking that every one of us in this room have lived righteous lives from birth. No mistakes have ever been made. I got that. But you may not believe this but there are people outside of this building that at times have come under the influences of substances that alter their personality and their behavior. I know it's hard to believe. It's shocking to me. Like for example, there are people that will wake up the next morning after imbibing on certain substances and their friends will tell them, wow, you were pretty crazy last night. Oh, what was I doing? You were doing Japanese karaoke on the Denny's dining table.  You would never do that. I didn't even know I knew Japanese, neither do we, but there you go. Or people have been known to swerve off the road when they're under the influence thinking that they're driving a straight line. Or they're fallen all over because their equilibrium has been affected by a substance. When Paul writes to us in First Thessalonians, he says, live soberly. He's not just talking about physical sobriety. That may be a part of it, but what he's really aiming at is that in the middle of a world where there are so many things of this world that we can get intoxicated with, be careful that it's not throwing the way that you live off your judgment off. Be careful that you're not living in a way that if Jesus were to return, you would be embarrassed of. Now I'm not talking about legalism. I grew up in a very legalistic environment, church environment, and I was told, if you go to movies, that that was a sin, and also playing cards unless it was Rook, but cards were a sin, movies were a sin, secular music was sin, and I actually think some Christian music is more sinful than some secular music, and but that's just me, but in the environment I grew up in, it was like those things were sin. I remember seeing the third installment, Return to the Jedi, sitting in the theater scared that if Jesus came, I would not go. Now I'm not talking about legalism. I'm talking about living our lives in such a way that if Jesus would show up, our behavior, the way that we're living our lives, in light of us also being followers of Jesus and knowing who he is, that we would not be embarrassed of it. Living our lives, knowing, listen, that we will all stand before the Lord and give an account for his life. Yes, God is love, but can I tell you that love is not God's root primary attribute. His primary attribute is he's holy, which means he's distinct, he's different, he's other than us. You see, if we only say what God's love, what we have a tendency to do is project our view of love onto God, shape a God who looks like how we think love ought to be, and then we worship that God and we feel good about that God because he never challenges us in any of the way that we live our lives. But when we recognize that God is holy, which means he's different than us, he's separate, he's distinct, we are the creation, he is the creator. And out of his holiness, he loves us with a love that is so distinct and different from the way that we love, that is based on truth, and it is based on wisdom, and it is based on his character. If we're not careful, we miss out on the holy fear of God.  I'm talking about the fear of the Lord that Proverbs says is the beginning of knowledge. And we need to return to a little bit of the fear of the Lord, the respect of knowing, as Paul did, that someday every single one of us will stand before the Lord and give an account for our lives. Believers, hear me. It's not just the unbelievers who will stand at the judgment seat of God. Yes, when Jesus returns, he's gonna set up a great white throne and he's gonna judge the nations. And that judgment, when he resurrects both the living and the dead and all stand before him, that judgment seat is going to be about what did you do with Jesus Christ, the son of the living God, the only way truth in life. And in that moment, those who say, well, I rejected him. I wanted to live for myself. I didn't want to bow the knee. In that moment, God literally with sadness is going to say, depart for me, for I never knew you. Depart from me into outer darkness, away from my presence. That ought to sober us up a little bit. But there is a throne, a seat of judgment in which Christ will sit on that believers will stand before and give an account for our lives. And this judgment seat is not about salvation. It's about reward. Listen to these scriptures, 2 Corinthians 5, verse 10 says, we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil. 1 Corinthians 3 verse 13 says, each one's work will become manifest for the day will disclose it because it will be revealed by fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. Look at that. But if anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss though he himself will be saved, but even as through fire. So yes, there's going to be a judgment seat for the nations that'll be about who enters into the kingdom and who doesn't. But there's going to be a judgment seat for believers. That's you and me. Where it's about reward. You see, can I tell you something about heaven? Heaven's not general admission. It's not, oh, I said a prayer when I was eight years old and now I can just kind of do whatever I want. And when I stand before Jesus, it's like, he just lets me in and I'll get a front row seat and I'm going to have my mansion because the Bible says there's mansions in heaven and I'm going to live that kind of, just whatever and it's just going to be the way that it is. Heaven is more than just about you dying and living in a nice place with big clouds, playing a harp and eating Philadelphia cream cheese. That is a very shallow view of heaven. Heaven is a kingdom, heaven and earth coming together. And it says some will rule, some will reign, some will get in even as through fire because everything you invested your life in has been burned up by the fire, like an reentry into the atmosphere between history and eternity. There's a fire of the presence of God in which if we've lived our lives only for temporal things, we'll get burned up. Even though we enter into the kingdom, it will be as if we pass through fire. But when we stand before his throne, here's what he's going to say to us, what did you do with your life? I gave you this talent, these resources, this amount of time, these relationships.  How did you live? In a reward level in the kingdom, I mean heaven is still heaven, but the reward level is going to be based on what we did in our bodies. We're going to give an account for every word that we've ever spoken. That would change the way that we use social media. And we're going to give an account for every action, every thing, every stewardship that we've been given. I firmly believe when we get to heaven, those who are going to be in the front row are going to be people we never heard of. They're going to be people that, as Jesus said, on this earth were last, but in the kingdom have become first. And those who everybody thinks are first are going to be last. I think, I mean, trust me, I can't wait for heaven. I can't wait for the kingdom come. Who's that sitting in the front row?  It's going to be those kind of people. That ought to make us sober, not to compete with others, but to compete against the alternative version of ourself that would get wrapped up in all the things in this world. We got to live with eternity in mind, Christian. We're not destined for this world. This is not all that there is. This world is training for reigning in that day. I want you to think of yourself 10,000 years from now, looking back from the kingdom perspective with your glorified body. That's going to be awesome, right? How many are looking forward to getting your six pack back?  You will have judged angels, the Bible says.  What are the things that you will look back on and wish you had lived differently in light of the new perspective? Second way that we need to live our lives is expectantly. We got to live like he's coming. We got to live like he's coming. Well, how do you know when he's coming? You don't. That's why it's going to be like a thief in the night. There's some signs that Jesus shares and teaches us that we can pay attention to.  Any parents in this room? You know what I'm talking about? Jane and I love to do that. Yeah, we'll be home at six. Uh-uh. We're gonna surprise you at one. Because I know if you think I'm coming back at six, you're gonna wait till 4.30 to clean up the house and get everything in order. I don't wanna see it after you prepped it. I wanna see it the way you lived in it. If your teen knew that you could come back at any moment, they would live differently. If we live our lives knowing that Jesus could come back at any moment, and when he comes back, will he find faith? That's how we ought to live. And we ought to live expectantly. This world is not my home. This world is not my home. I am an exile. I am a missionary from heaven sent to earth. And I got 80 years to enjoy the goodness of the thing that God has built and given to us. I've got 70 or 80 years to develop and all that God has called me to do, to love like Jesus, to live for eternity, to prepare to be a ruler and a reiner with him for eternity in the kingdom. I can't get caught up in the trappings of this world because he could come. Number three, we need to live joyfully. Joyfully, knowing that when Jesus comes back, his victory is our victory. His victory is our victory. And when he comes back, let me tell you, he's gonna vanquish all of the enemy. He's gonna take the devil. He's gonna bind him and do away with him. Demons aren't gonna be the illegal rulers of this occupied territory anymore. He's gonna take this broken world with all of the mess that we created in the fall. Everything that's divided us. Death, rebellion, spiritual death, poverty, sickness and disease, and he's going to eradicate it. And he's gonna make a new heavens and a new earth. Listen to the words that John writes in Revelation chapter 21 about when he returns. Says this, he, Jesus will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said this, behold, I am making all things new. On Cable, every once in a while, you'll see one of these Nat Geo shows, talks about the apocalypse, the end of the world. And they'll say, Christians believe in the end of the world. Jesus' return is not the end of the world. It's the beginning of the new. We're not people that are waiting for Jesus to come and end this thing. We are people that are waiting for Jesus to come and finish this thing so we can get back to the new heavens and the new earth. Where there isn't any more death, no more saying goodbye to our loved ones. Where the tears of suffering and of injustice in this present age are wiped away by the finger of the one who took nails in his hands to redeem us and restore us back to the Father.  I don't know if you've ever lost a loved one, a close friend, but I have. And I can't wait for that day because on that day, on that resurrection morning when all the dead in Christ shall rise, we're gonna be reunited on that great getting up morning. We're gonna see our family members with no more sickness in their body. There's not gonna be any more separation. The saints of all ages are gonna come together. There's not gonna be anything to grieve anymore. There's not gonna be any wars to fight anymore. There's not gonna be any more pain to make us cry anymore. There's not gonna be any more enemy to tempt us anymore.  And at the center of it is gonna be Jesus seated high and lifted up upon the throne, worship forever and ever and ever. The king is about to return. Woo, he's about to return, church. And that is our blessed hope. We're not waiting for somebody to give us hope and change. Jesus is the only one who can bring true hope and true change.  It's the presence of the Holy Spirit. He is here to comfort us, to lead us, to guide us and to magnify Jesus. Would you stand with me all over the room?  But if today was your last day and you stepped out of this life into eternity and you stood before God, what would he say to you? Would he say, well done, good and faithful servant? Would he say, I know you.  I saved you, I know you. Your name's written right here in Lamb's Book of Life. If today were your last day and you stood before God, are you living the way you know you should be living? If Jesus were to suddenly crack the sky and step onto the stage once again of human history, would you be expecting to see him? Would you rejoice in his coming or would fear and dread fill your heart? Today, you need to be ready. Today, you need to answer that question. The good news is every single one of us can be ready. It's not about you being good enough, it's not about you living good enough. It's about you simply bowing the knee to the King now, saying, Jesus, you indeed are Lord. I believe that God so loved the world that he sent his son the first time who came to pay my sin's debt on the cross. God raised him from the dead and he seated at the right hand of the Father, waiting for the moment when he's gonna return in Jesus. I bow the knee and I say, you are Lord. Come into my heart, save me, give me a new heart, cleanse me, and I will live for you. That's how we can be ready. I wanna invite you to buy your heads with me all over the room if you would. If you're here today and you say, I am not ready, I am not sure, I am not sure that I'm right with God. Today, the most important thing that you could do is to get right with God today. And there's only one way to do that. Jesus said, I am the way. We believe, we repent, we confess. We believe in Jesus. We repent of living for ourselves, getting caught up in the trappings of the world, and we confess him and we say, Jesus, you are Lord, come into my life. Today, if you're here and you say, I know that I need to get right with God, or I'm not sure that I'm right with God, but today I wanna know that I'm right with God.  You've gotta take the step, though, and I want you to acknowledge it today. Today, if you say, I know I need to get right with God, pastor Lee, include me in this prayer before we go.   Today, hold it up all over the room. There's hands all over the room. You're not alone. Today is your moment. Bow the knee to Jesus. If you know you need to get right with God, raise your hand and hold it up. Do not wait for another day. Today is the day of salvation. His hand's all over the room. Raise it if you've not yet. You know you need to get right with God. There's some prodigals in here. You know you're on the line, you've walked away, and you just, right now you're thinking, I can just do better tomorrow. No, you need a breaking point, a moment of redefinition and saying, today I repent God, forgive me, cleanse me.  You can all put your hands down. Thank you so much for your courage, your faith. I want all of us to say this prayer out loud together. When we say this, we're not saying a formula, we're praying to the King. And he's gonna hear you say this with me, say, Heavenly Father, I come in Jesus' name. I confess, you are the King. You are Lord. I believe Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for my sin. And God raised him from the dead on the third day to sit on the throne. Today I repent from all of my sin. I'm so sorry, God, forgive me, cleanse me. Give me a new heart and a new spirit. From this day forward, I wanna live righteously for you. I wanna follow you, and I wanna expect you and receive you when you come. Thank you for loving me, saving me, and rescuing me. In Jesus' name, amen, and amen. Come on, let's celebrate.


This presentation is by Chono Abeledo talking about CrabTech and this is a very exciting example of the kind of work we're doing. Another really good news story about AI solutions that have moved from the research phase to the practical phase and really helping people on the water. Hello everyone, I am Chono Camil Vincicruz Abeledo, the project leader of the CrabTech team from the De La Salle University from the Philippines and I'm here to talk about some of the technologies we've created to help improve Philippine aquaculture. Our work often starts with a problem with some of them rooted in the difficulties in identifying an organism. Sometimes we are led to work on strange new characteristics or in figuring out the connectedness of things. Most of our work involves the extraction of DNA or RNA from target organisms that we work with. And we use the unique sequences found in these molecules to find a match in existing databases. We also make use of the sizes of these unique sequences to find organisms with similar traits. Using these techniques and with funding from the Department of Science and Technologies, Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development, we have helped various fishing communities. We have helped monitor and confirm the biodiversity of seaweeds in the Verde Island Passage, which is the center of the center of marine biodiversity. We've also found previously unseen connections across the different mangrove crab populations in the Philippines that is now being used to improve management practices of traded crablets. We are also trying to find possible genetic roots for delayed maturation in female crabs that make them appear like an intermediate female type. And with a combination of image analysis, DNA bar coding, and machine learning programming, we have created the free mobile application called Crabbyfire that helps identify to species juvenile mangrove crabs. Crabbyfire started out as a problem rooted in biodiversity and species identification. Because you see, in the Philippines, we have three of the four species of mangrove crabs under the genus Cila. Of the three, one species is preferred because of its faster growth rate and larger sizes upon maturity. This species is Cila serata, which is locally known as bullic or the king mangrove crab. Differentiating the species at adult stages is straightforward, but at least three sets of morphological markers that are very obvious. But in the case of juveniles, there is no obvious physical feature that has been tested and has proven reliable in differentiating the species. This is a problem because the local mangrove crab industry that is now producing more than 18,000 metric tons per year and is second only to China in terms of production, still uses captured juveniles to stop grow-out ponds. And since the ecological ranges of the three species overlap in the Philippines, any captured batch is a mix of the three species. To develop Crabbyfire, we first made use of morphometrics and image analysis to look for physical features that would cluster individuals of the same species. We then confirmed if the patterns we were seeing were equivalent to species groups using DNA barcoding technology. From the data gathered using this technique, the Crabbyfire app was developed using a convolutional neural network that feeds off additional crab images that we have correctly identified. The application, which uses the carapace shape, specifically the frontal lobe spines, can now identify the species of a single crablet in less than a second using an entry-level camera mobile phone. Its current accuracy is at 92.4%, but we are still hoping to increase this by adding more images to our database. Since its deployment last August 2019, we have helped fishermen ensure that they are capturing or purchasing the preferred species. The pipeline that we have created for Crabbyfire can be applied to a huge variety of organisms, and soon enough we can see applications like Crabbyfire used from the pond to the farm, from the forest to the ocean. At the moment, Crabbyfire is identifying juveniles one individual at a time, but we are also hoping to create a sorting device to help improve the efficiency of our mangrove crab ponds. Currently, our fishery-sort crab lets to size manually, but with this device, we are hoping to cut the processing time to a third, increase its accuracy, put in the option of sorting to species, and lower mortality in the process. Currently, we are also developing the Aline-Mango algorithm. It's like a dating app for crablets and potential grow-out ponds. We are looking at information from existing databases for temperature, salinity, and pH of Philippine coasts. And we will match this with these conditions in fish ponds all over the Philippines to help our fishers determine the best geographic source of crablets are for their fish ponds. And that's what we do as practical geneticists in the Crab Tech team. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us in the contact information that we will show on screen. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share our technologies, and we are looking forward to collaborating with you. Thank you very much, Johnna. Wow, what a complex story, beautifully told.  Not only are you bringing genetics, you're bringing AI together with the end user all the way to a fantastic story. I wonder if you could share with us a little bit about some of the stories you have about making sure the products that you're developing were accepted by the young farmers and people. How did you, for example, when you were trying to build the user windows and so on, how did you be able to understand what was suitable and what wasn't? Some of the story of how you managed to deliver this all the way to the endpoint of the people you get on the ground. Thank you for that question, Kim. I feel a huge responsibility for carrying this story because it's not just my story. It's not just my team's story, but also the story of all the fishermen who were able to help us with this project. I think part of our story is very similar to what Alberto mentioned earlier. When it comes to developing technologies, it has to start with the people. And in the case of crabby fire, it started out with the fishermen who were helping me finish my dissertation in college. I was trying to do population genetics, which is something so abstract compared to what crabby fire is. And a lot of the fishermen were asking me, Ma'am, why are you looking at that problem when we actually have a bigger problem at hand? So they started showing me the crablets that they were purchasing and capturing and their problem for species identification. So crabby fire actually started out as a promise to these people. How can I help them after all the effort that they did in helping me, a young student at that time, complete my degree? So it started out with me asking questions from these people, finding out their needs, finding out their traditional knowledge, which we are continuing to this day. And once we created a functional prototype, we knew that the first thing that we had to do was to go out there outside of the lab to the fish ponds to the ocean and start talking about what it needs. So currently we're trying to figure out a way to change the language of the application so that the names of the species can change from scientific names to all the different local names in the communities that we are helping. And apart from that, even the Sorter, the classifying device that we want to make is something that our fishermen are asking us to do. So a lot of the things that we're doing really is shaped by what is on the field rather than just a random idea or interest that we have. So thank you. Thank you, Shona. I'm going to pass you over to Matt. I've got another 50 questions, but we're trying to get through. So Matt, can you go ahead, please? Thanks so much, Shona. Thanks so much, Shona. Salam at the presentation. One of the, I could also just talk for hours about this. One of the other, I think you've highlighted the key risks are real incentive for a reason to use technology, aren't they? Of course, one of the big problems for people in the crab industry in the Philippines seems to be happening increasingly more frequently over the past 20 years is super typhoons. And I'm just wondering, you know, we saw some terrible damage this year to the crab ponds. We're not integrating any kind of sort of Python alert and offering guidance to stakeholders to protect their stock, because the damage this year has been appalling, actually. And I've seen very little done so far to address this actually. It's disappointing. But it's a very important high quality value sector. I just wondered if you thought about integrating anything to do with that. And that is a very, very good idea, which we might actually start incorporating to our new program called Alin Mango. So Alin Mango is actually a fusion of two Tagalog or Filipino words, Alin, which stands for which, which type, and Mango, the last portion of the Filipino word for mangrove crab, which is Alin Mango. At this point, I would also like to shout out to one of my students, Kenneth Solis, because this is his master's thesis. And he's part of the audience who's watching right now. But anyway, in Alin Mango, what we're trying to do is match the environmental conditions of the crablets to be fish ponds that are going to grow them. And at this point, what our primary motivation was the fact that climate change is also changing the adaptation of our crabs in the different locations of the Philippines. And it would be best if crabs from a particular environment will be grown to the most similar environment that they could possibly be in in order for us to maximize their growth. And since you mentioned the possibility of typhoons in the Philippines, sadly, is part of the typhoon belt. We could incorporate an early warning system to this. So at least we can forward our mangrove crab fishers and growers to either start harvesting early, or maybe even delay the grow out of their crabs if a new typhoon is coming in. I guess at its core, this is also part of our eventual dream to make a system where we connect our fishers to the marketplace, where in, for example, they can use the same application to find the best source of crablets for using their ponds, project how many crablets they need to buy in order to reach a particular quota or profit margin that they're aiming for. And then at the same time use the same application to sell the crablets to restaurants, markets and supermarkets in the Philippines, or maybe even beyond. So that's that's the dream that we have for the crabby fire system, the crabbeck system. And I'm pretty confident that the same thing has been done or can be done in other fishing, fisheries commodity in the Philippines. So thank you. Just one more, Shana, sorry, we're going to ask you one more question. Anton's going to come with this question. Thank you, Anton. Go ahead, Anton. Sorry, my, my zoom disappeared. I could not find the new button. No, no, great work. Very, very well done. But so how can other countries team up with you and learn from you and how much would this would be replicated in another country with a similar value chain, how much time would it require for students and researchers to collaborate to build a similar project. Wow. That that's a very intimidating question right there. It took us about, I think close to four years to make the first prototype of crabby fire and we are now at our seventh year building our database. Lucky enough, our springboard is population genetics. So we are sort of familiar about the connectivity, how the different populations of mangrove crabs interact, not in the Philippines, but across the Indo Pacific, because it's based on gene sequences that are freely available in an online database. So we know that there are interactions across the different populations, and yet at the same time, we also know that different populations with different environments gain different kinds of adaptations. It would be nice if we can collaborate with locations in Australia in China, and in Southeast Asia that have wild populations of mangrove crabs, because we would like to know how different your juveniles look like from ours. And this can open a portal for international trade, not just at the adult stage, but perhaps even at younger developmental stages to help us improve selective breeding practices. It can also open the pathway for a network, a system of managing this organism because at the end of it, the crabs growing here in the Philippines are not necessarily just Filipinos. The larval stage of the organism is traveling all over the world because they are buoyed by the different flows and ebbs of the water all over the world. So it is a shared responsibility, not just the Philippines, but of other countries. Now in terms of timeframe, I think because we already have the pipeline available, this would be much, much, we can do it much at a much faster rate. And if any are interested in doing this in other organisms, we actually have, we have workshops on the ready. So all you need to do is contact us, and we can set up a virtual workshop for the meantime about how we do the things that we do. But hopefully someday once we're all vaccinated and safe, we can travel over because we do love traveling, and so that we can teach you firsthand about how we create a crabifier and how you can do the same with another organism. Thank you very much, John. And to Kenneth, good luck with your masters and well done for getting such an inspiring supervisor. And just as we kind of hope we're getting questions on your talk from one of the previous presenters who's working in India and as we can see, you know, the efforts and the imagination is, is worldwide. We have people in this presentation from Hawaii, from Africa, from Japan, Holland, and now from the Philippines and if we can start to link these groups to share their knowledge that that would be the successful outcome for this type of event.


You talked about health being the major concern when it came to Vance McDonald's, but when you think of Tyler Eifert, literally the first word that comes to mind is health. Can his back hold up over a 16 game season? I don't know if it can, and I don't think anybody could answer that question honestly, because no one knows. But what we do know is that when he's healthy, he is a primary target, a primary passcatcher for Andy Dalton. He is very much involved. And while we have seen the emergence of Tyler Boyd, it's been Tyler Eifert that's been there for a much longer period of time. He's healthy now, which means fantasy owners need to pounce. Yeah, that's exactly it. I think you want to target and use Tyler Eifert while he's healthy now, especially once again in this matchup against the Atlanta Falcons. You're going to hear us talk about it a lot this week. They're missing all those defensive pieces, and specifically for them, Greg, two safeties gone and a linebacker. Those are the positions that normally guard tight ends. So Tyler Eifert is going to have an opportunity to feast this week, especially with the possibility of AJ Green missing this performance. AJ Green dealing with a groin injury. We don't know what his status is as of right now, but Tyler Eifert we saw last week targeted eight times. That was the same number as AJ Green. He was actually targeted more than Tyler Boyd, which I think was interesting. This was the first time this season that that has actually happened where Tyler Eifert really saw a big share of the targets. So he's trending in the right direction. As you mentioned, you want to use him while he's healthy. That's obviously right now and especially with AJ Green banged up and in this matchup against the Atlanta Falcons. You might not use Tyler Eifert five weeks from now, but you want to use him in week four against the Atlanta Falcons, Greg. You're right, Frank. He may not be in my lineup five weeks from now, but I don't know if I care. This week against Atlanta, I think he's a must start and that's not just in season long. I think he's a very sneaky DFS play as well.


Hey everyone, welcome to figure fantasy. So we have here apocalypse war trying to clear out normal So let's check out the equipment first before we proceed to the match up for this one. Okay So first I brought a Zerola Her equipment is ultimate then you have defensive set then you have here and time ultimate badge Next up is going to be Zephyr, which will be all the way HP sets then you have here Eternal Eden badge for helpers next would be Take a look at this lineup. Ayane Okada. I got her Lifesteal set plus defensive set and I got her eternal midsummer badge for week more frequent You know triggers of her frost then she has the her adornment by the way additional bonus for HP attack and Boost ultimate power reduced damage taken during Ayane's ultimate. So next on This lineup is going to be Rin. Rin here is sporting a She's sporting a skill set then ultimate set then her badge would be eternal defensive badge the next one is going to be Zuki Liang which which going which is actually using an attack set Then you have your crit set then for his badge is going to be end time Inferno badge. Okay. So for Harriet. I got her attack set Then you have HP set then she has an eternal prophecy badge To help her out. So let's go to the match itself and the lineup Configuration for this team. Okay, as far as the lineup configuration of this team This is it. This is the same as the last video Special zones would be occupied by Rin and by Ayane Unfortunately for Harriet. She won't be occupying this because she's a specialist So let's check this out guys and see how this lineup does Okay, once we clear normal will be going too hard. So heart is more of just increasing the damage There's no clearing of that one So normal is the last one that should clear to get more rewards for hard. So the aim of Apocalypse war Picru and all the apocalypse series events is actually to get too hard So that you can earn more rewards. So we're at time six right now and We are kind of okay So just the hoping to clear this out in a while So I'm actually happy that Harriet is here to give as Give blind to the boss and also have a couple of minions to help us out Okay, so we're we're done with Zerola I'm hoping that we could still clear this out with the remaining manpower that we have So so far So good So we still have Rin on top dealing tons of damage. So Zuki Liang's keeping us till Alive then we're down to time zero. This is going to be close guys So there you go, even though we lost Zerola, we still cleared it Perfect clear and that is your lineup. So you may have other variations for this lineup But these components do good in this game mode, especially for normal So thank you very much guys for staying this far. So please consider subscribing if you are still here and Take care. Stay safe. This is the warden and I'm out of here


So first, what is observability and why are we talking about it? Let's start with a little bit of level setting. So systems have functional requirements, you know, cars, software applications. Functional requirement is specifying what a system is supposed to do, right? So a car, for example, transports people from one location to another. Systems also have non-functional requirements that specify how that system is supposed to be or defining it, in other words, defining its qualities. So comfort or safety specifically for this example. Protecting the options from harm during transport is one of the qualities that you want from a car. And these are just one of the many illities of the modern software and engineering applications these days. There's usability, scalability, testability, you know, readability, maintainability. Availability, all of these illities. And observability is just now one of these illities, right? And applications, different applications have different scales for how much of that quality needs to be present in that application. For example, maybe the Blue app needs to have a scalability twice as much of a greenout on this example. Verne Vogels, the CTO of AWS actually explained observability really well in one of his keynotes for re-invent in late 2020. So I'll play his video and kind of let him describe observability. When you talk about the history of dependability, I mean some systems theory. The related field of that is systems control theory. It has been crucial in building many dependable industrial and other systems. The most important pioneer in this field was Professor Rudolf Kalman. In 1960 he defined concepts such as whether a system was controllable and observable or actually inobservable. To be observable is something we know as software engineers all too well. How can you infer the internal state of a system from its outputs? This can be functional outputs like voltage and amperage of the turbines or non-functional output like the turbine temperature sensors or rotation speed measurements. And this is what we try to achieve with the observability property of a dependable system. How can we infer the internal state of our digital systems from its outputs? This can include both functional, requires from your vehicles for example, or request to other parts of the system from non-functional information that we collect for other needs. So inferring the operational state of a system based on its outputs. You've got your inputs in your system which is opaque and then you have outputs which you can see, measure and analyze. And observability has a quality scale itself, right? So just like scalability or maintainability, there's on one end it can be, you know, your outputs leave the system still completely opaque and you can't see into it. Or on the other hand you have excellent observability and your outputs render the system completely transparent. You can see everything that's going on within your application in your system. So to illustrate this, we're going to time travel back to the early 2000s with a very, very simple PHP app. Maybe this PHP app just took an image, extracted URLs or metadata from the image, and outputted a simple page that allowed you to see those metadata and attributes of that image. Well, if you have, if you had, you know, things like just server monitoring your CPU and memory of your application, of the host of where your application was running and then maybe you added a little bit of the Apache server application logs to see the amount of traffic or the request per second and the amount of errors, you're actually maybe doing pretty well for this simple, simple PHP app. You know, your observability quality scale might be toward the high-end for something this simple. Why is because while this is a very simple application and early on, you know, 15, 10 years ago, there was mostly identical years of experience through the entire application stack. So all of your visitors essentially could be thought of, you know, the same, the same kind of experience. You know, there's no individual in application experience that was different from one visitor to another. And if you threw in a little bit of testing above and beyond this simple server and maybe Apache log monitoring, you're actually doing pretty well and you're seeing, you know, a very well or very high coverage of your stack. That's because there were limited pathways to kind of interact with your application. Traditional monitoring is very low dimensional. We treated all of these experiences as the same. You know, we could measure and it lacked the contextual differences that separate the one app experience from another. And now let's talk about why monitoring is not observability, again with the murder vocals of the CTO of AWS. Classical monitoring deals with two questions. What is broken and why is it broken? Monitoring uses a predefined set of metrics and logs in determine all values. In general, with monitoring and alarming, you can't predict when things will fail. You can only take action when they do. It is why we used to call people who molested these systems operators and not engineers. The generators here at Sugar City are extremely complex. It is very likely that the operator of the dashboard knew how to repair it when something went wrong. But they did know with the Saudi alarm and gauges moved to where they were supposed to go. As systems continue to increase in complexity, it is impossible to put every important metric for that system. We'll say, oh, that's what they've been used towards us. Think about everything that goes into a modern application. There are metrics for the service, containers, and functions that you're managing. Your application has counters and logs for all the work it's doing. You may have anywhere from thousands to millions of customers. All which have data about what they're doing and how they interact with your application. It is impossible to put all of this on a dashboard that a human watches to define alerts for each of these metrics to tell you we're not going on spec. And Amazon, we've been on a 25-year journey to improve the processes of managing our systems. And we've long left a notion that just monitoring was sufficient to manage our systems. We've embarked on a holistic approach to operations, from collecting massive amounts of data and logs, to how we analyze them, to how we solve and talk about problems when we do have them. And this is what observability is all about. How can you make sure we have the data, the tools, and mechanisms to quickly resolve problems in a fundamental way? How can we, rather than reaching into the system in the first internal state for the data that we have? And Amazon, our most important drivers, have always been customer-centric. Find any solved problems before they impact customers. Understanding impact on your customers we couldn't prevent it. And fix the problem so that it never happens again. So he made a really important point here, is, you know, monitoring is not observability and with the most complex apps these days or with the applications these days growing more and more complex, more services, interoperability, more individual user unique interactions with an application. You can no longer fit your monitoring and the amount of data that you need for observability on dashboards. Systems evolve from simple to complex. This is true for applications today. It's also true for, you know, a telephone. Think about the 1900s candlestick telephone, right? It had different requirements and different complexities than, say, the modern smartphone of the 2020s, right? Different usability, scalability. All of theilities were different through these generations of telephone evolution. It's true for automobiles and for software. You know, you can't imagine these software Facebook or Google calendar or Twitter existing today as they were, you know, 15, 10, even less years ago, you know, with the amount of features and interactivity and infinite stroke scrolling, AI applied to feeds, all of these different things that make these applications just more and more complex. And complexly like entropy just increases, right? It's true for phones, true for applications.  In that modern or in that early candlestick telephone with your traditional, say, basic monitoring of that system, you might actually have been doing pretty well with your, you know, observability. As we talked about it today, what it encompasses to make sure that you can observe all of the performance qualities of that system. But that's just not true today, not true of the smartphones and not true for applications with traditional monitoring. Again, using the example of the THP app from the early 2000s, you know, with our server, CPU, memory, and then Apache logs, it might have been pretty excellent back then. Those limited amount of metrics and throughput metrics and server metrics don't cover your observability needs for a modern application today. So everybody visiting your PHP app, you know, 15, 10 years ago, never really was the same user experience, but it was often a reasonable approximation. Now it's just not reasonable at all. Modern apps are just much richer, offer a wider variety of user experiences. It's different for essentially everybody using applications these days. Once you log in or start interacting on a personal account on these modern applications, there are so many different ways that the application can behave or respond or execute different things and call various APIs or external services that are just totally unique for each individual's situation within these modern applications. And so monitoring really is the tip of the observability iceberg, right? Traditional monitoring is low dimensional and low carnality. Things like aggregated metrics or summary statistics are the things that we used for monitoring up until recently. And that sits just on a huge iceberg of contextual data, high dimensional, high carnality data that you need in order to achieve true observability. For example, here's a request latency histogram showing two peaks, one around the one second mark and then another around the, say, seven or eight second mark. So two peaks along this and you kind of get that distribution of this aggregated metric for the request latency histogram. Well, if you add some contextual data to that and you attach these tags for this metrics that we can break it out and get extra dimensions based on whether it's a desktop or mobile or whether the location is in a certain city. If you attach that geographical and platform information, now you can break this out and start to see what the composition of that overall chart was. And we can see that if we actually go down through the desktop and then down lower to the bottom charts of those metrics, we can see that that second peak actually matches the New York City and Boston and D.C. area for desktop users. So we know that that's likely the problem area for this latency histogram on the higher end. The good thing is, you know, with modern monitoring, we are starting to bubble these up, right? We're starting to bubble a little bit of this contextual data up so it can be a bit more, give you a bit more automatic insight into kind of what those metrics may be needing. And that's just a few dimensions. So, you know, people have been kind of taking the approach of, well, we can handle that, we can just add this contextual data to our metrics and we'll just make more dashboards, put those more on more dashboards and let's just add more monitoring for these dimensions, right? And that's just more monitoring. That's just more dashboards, right? You're going to have a problem of, you're going to have just more and more dashboards growing as you add more context. And it's just, as Werner said, it's impossible to observe your systems using the monitoring metrics and dashboards that we've used up to this point. So how do we achieve the excellent side of observability, making our systems and applications as transparent as possible? When you read about observability or the traditional pillars of monitoring, you'll read about metrics, traces and logs. We'd like to think of them as these four different constituent elements of observability, which we define as logs, metrics, spans and events. Logs are your traditional logs that they include the attributes and context identifiers attached to those logs as well so you can correlate the logs, these highly specific debugging tools in your logs to the metrics, spans and events that happen elsewhere. Metrics are your aggregated summary statistics that we're used to in traditional monitoring, but including the attributes and context identifiers, again, these are the things that are going to sow and thread the logs and metrics and spans and events altogether to kind of compose your observability system. Spans are time span tag locations within services or code or your stack to allow you to know at what point in time you were or the request was when that specific period of time happened. And then events are the discrete individual events at a point in time that were encountered within a time span, again, with just as many attributes and context identifiers as we can attach to these. The kind of analogy here is these constituent elements of logs, metrics, spans and events aren't necessarily super interesting by themselves or useful by themselves, but together they compose the elements and molecules and eventually the planets and universe that exist. So these are the constituent elements of observability. And the context and attributes are the key to observability. So an extremely simplified example of what observability may be with in the context of application performance tracing. So let's say a user triggers an action on the front end of your application. You'll start a trace or a span here that's automatically generated from your observability and instrumentation. And you can attach these identifiers, this contextual information to this trace so that we can identify maybe the front end version or the page route that this user took. Even the user metadata like their ID or the product plan that they're on, which device they're using, the location, are they in Chicago? Are they in Boston? Are they in D.C.? Where are they located? And that front end call then makes the back end call on your server is hosted on your infrastructure and you can attach back end metadata to that. So which end point was hit, which post it was, which container ID, which Kubernetes cluster, things like that. And that back end API call makes the database call, right? And then we can create a metrics off of that. We can maybe say, okay, we want to count how many times this database call was actually made and service that as a summary statistic later on. And then that database query is eventually executed on the database, over the database connection and we can tell when the connection was actually established and make that a point in time event. If that database query returns, we can then log that as with specific database call information. We could log different information about that database call depending on the time of the token, things like this. So now we've made a metric, a counter metric, an event in the log. And maybe we make an external service call. This could be a API call between your microservices within your individual infrastructure, or it could be, you know, a third party hosted API call from anything increasingly sass or third party vendor hosted service that makes the API end points exposed for services that are critical for your application to execute. So that external service execution returns, we can log that as well. We've made a response and we send that back to the back end and that goes back to the front end. But maybe the front end action is not completely done yet and it needs to make another back end call, right? So we've still got that top level front end action with the identifier, the action identifier that is actually attached to all of these other calls, the first back end API call, the next database call, the database query, the external services. And in addition, now we're making a second back end call page maybe to load a paginated list of data on your application. And again, we make a database query. We record the connection established there and that returns the amount of items and we make a count metric out of that as well. And then maybe it loads, preloads maybe the second page of paginated results and we can thread all of this through and connect all of these different events back to that single triggered front end action. So very highly contextual and correlated, now distributed tracing in this instance. And then we can log the action outcome metadata on that as well. So you can see that context connects everything. And maybe the more context and the more data we can attach to these events and these traces, these logs and these metrics allows us to correlate all of this information together and allows us to search and surface insights about all of these related events. And until recently, you could do this to an extent, you could buy it from a vendor, a large vendor, typically, and or you could try to build it yourself and a lot of it from scratch and it was expensive either way. So there's two, there's two key trends changing unit. The first one is cost effective and performing disk storage and compute resources for high cardinality, big data. The second one is open source, observability APIs and SDKs and tooling implemented collectively, collectively with broad support from the community and vendors. So we'll talk about the second one first. Open telemetry is a fairly new project that's been getting a ton of vendor support and community support and is emerging as a new lingua franca of observability. Open telemetry defines a cross language specification for how APIs and SDKs responsible for collecting and configuring the telemetry and instrumentation of languages and frameworks and libraries should be done. It allows the standards to be applied in a standard fashion across all of the major languages that then have their own libraries written to adhere to these specs. The API and SDK libraries are written in the native language of these programming languages that implement this specification the same way. So that we have cross functional, cross language APIs and SDKs that all handle the data in a standard way. And then there's the open telemetry collection and agnostic export formats that allow these languages and the APIs and SDKs to send that data to a collector and further send that data on to multiple back ends, whether it be your own destination, your open source tools, Zipkin or Yeager, and additionally to third parties like Scout. So Scout application performance observability as we're evolving into is built on open telemetry. And some facts about open telemetry, the top active cloud, it's now the top active cloud native computing Federation project behind only Kubernetes. It's backed by over 130 companies, including the big ones like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Splunk and Scout. It's integrated directly into open source projects and cloud native stacks instead of injected into them. And it's simple to use with extensive ability to customize instrumentation specific to your environment. And so that's great, right? So now that there's this vendor agnostic and kind of standard way to apply this telemetry and using these APIs that are that are defined through the open flow machine specification and available for open source libraries and packages and framework maintainers, there used to be this wall in between the observability instrumentation like Scout would write itself and apply as an outside in patch to these libraries and frameworks in order to gather telemetry data. And so we're kind of breaking down that wall and the package maintainers, they would have never, we could have never approached a package maintainer like rails and say, hey rails we want to put Scout APM's observability instrumentation into the rails framework and committed to upstream to the rails project. There's no way that they would apply that vendor specific telemetry into the rails project. So now, breaking down this kind of wall in between those with the vendor agnostic APIs and specifications, it's now more acceptable and more libraries and packages and frameworks should be more willing to incorporate this open telemetry into their libraries and frameworks. So that's built natively into these libraries and frameworks instead of injected by vendors after the fact. So let's talk a little bit about the components of open telemetry. There's the specification which defines kind of how things should be laid out. It makes the standards of what we're talking about and naming and operations. And then there's the API, which is the application program interface that library maintainers and framework maintainers will use. And then there's SDKs which are meant to be used by the end user or within your application in order to configure and use open telemetry within your application. And then there's also the collector, which is a means of collecting this data sent from these SDKs to the collector as kind of a proxy of either further aggregation or processing of this open telemetry data and sending it to the back ends. The collector, though, is optional. So the specification. The specification actually defines how the API should behave. It defines the standard naming, disability guarantees, the separations of concern, the communication protocols and the data formats and the compatibility, the backwards compatibility guarantees that it makes for the API and the SDK, et cetera. Symantec conventions are just the way that we name things. This could be things like container ID or cloud region. Like what could we call the key value pieces of these where we can find that contextual information in a standard way that we can connect all of the logs, metrics, traces and or logs, metrics, spans and events together to kind of leave them into an observability picture. Fliced and diced through any possible combination that we want to investigate. And then OTLP is a transport. It's called the open telemetry line protocol. It's a transport protocol that defines how the communication between the SDK and the collector should behave. The API component of the open telemetry project is the purpose is to develop an API library in every major language to be used by library and framework developers in order to add instrumentation natively into the library or framework. The library authors won't care if any users are using open telemetry or not. They can implement the API and put the hooks in to collect the telemetry information using the API. And if an end user is not actually collecting the open telemetry data from this library or framework, it will not have any overhead. And they won't need to distribute an instrumented version of their library or framework in a non-instrumented version of the library or framework. This is completely transparent whether you're using or not using or not collecting the open telemetry data from this library or framework. It's zero overhead if the user does not enable open telemetry in their application. And it provides very strict stability guarantees. So the library authors and framework authors, they won't need to be concerned about, well, is this API going to be changing? Is it going to break things? It provides a very, very stable and strict guarantee to these library and framework authors to kind of ease their concerns about affecting their library or framework. The SDK piece was intentionally decoupled from the API piece. So there are separate packages on every single language. And the purpose is to make sure that the API is super stable and the SDK can evolve and change in quicker fashion as needed where it's user-facing interfaces. So every major language, this is intended to be used by the end users in your applications that then serve your users. And you can enable the open telemetry data collection using the SDK and start consuming the open telemetry data emitted from any of the libraries that you use. You use the SDK to set configuration options for what gets collected, what processing is applied after the collection, and where the metrics are sent. And I just discussed that it's intentionally decoupled from the API for stability guarantees and dependency flexibility. And all languages with an open telemetry SDK can send data via OTLP natively. So that's an important part. If you're using open telemetry within your application and you set the SDK up to gather this open telemetry data, you don't need the collector piece, the separate collector binary piece of open telemetry in order to send this data somewhere. So that makes this collector portion of open telemetry optional. But the open telemetry collector is an application written in Go that receives open telemetry data from end user applications. And it can use pluggable modules to further process the payloads, such as making metric generation, doing aggregations, applying transforms, or rate limiting, and etc. And it sends the data, again, it can send it upstream to another collector, or it can send the data for further processing or to data stores to SaaS providers like Scout. So where does that leave Scout with the observability piece in mind and what's our roadmap for 2022? So the Scout product roadmap for 2022 is transforming from application performance monitoring to application performance observability and eventually into full stack observability. In Q4 of 2021, we released the external services feature of Scout that allows you to understand and monitor requests to external services through HTTP API calls to third parties or the other microservices that starts to get at that bit of that observability piece as far as the external services go within the existing Scout platform. Last year we actually started building a new platform specifically geared towards being able to do the application performance observability utilizing open telemetry in 2022. So we're expanding from application performance monitoring to application performance observability, being able to ingest high, just gigantic amounts of trace data from applications in order to provide that observability piece with all of that contextual information gathered from open telemetry instrumentation and allow you to steep insights into your application based on that data. And then later this year we're going to move beyond application performance observability into full stack observability. Things like logging and events will be able to hook up and gather this open telemetry data in from further systems and not just applications but systems and infrastructure that emits open telemetry metrics, logs, and even traces outside of the traditionally APM applications that we've so far focused on. And then observability 1.0 by the end of this year, we have a very aggressive timeline of becoming out of beta by the end of this year. So open telemetry, how it's changing data collection in Scout. So right now the open telemetry or the Scout agent fits in your application and it's an in process thread that collects telemetry data from the instrumentation that we've written ourselves. It collects metrics for every single transaction and sends that to Scout. And then in addition to those aggregated metrics, it picks out interesting traces, detailed traces that are selected from an algorithm that give you some insight. The starting is the beginning of some of observability within your application to what may be slow or where the pain points of the users may be. But the difference between the way the Scout agent works now and the shift to open telemetry is now with open telemetry, the open telemetry instrumentation will sit within your application and traces of every single transaction will be sent to Scout. And Scout's value add and what we need to surface for application performance observability lies in what insights and what we can automatically provide to your developers or to your performance engineers about your applications without overloading you or requiring you to build any dashboards to get those insights. So that's going to be the challenge of observability in the face of just enormous amounts of data collection. So just like the Hubble telescope changed the observability of our universe, open telemetry is a very large piece of how we can enable observability within our applications and infrastructure over the next few years. What may be a dark spot, a blind spot in your application performance now will change with the addition of open telemetry. So just like the Hubble telescope zooming into the darkest spot that we could find from our observable galaxy, we can now see that it's not dark, it's not empty, it's actually full of these whole galaxies that are now observable, invisible that we thought and never knew that were there before. And we can observe these with the modern instrumentation. So this is what observability or what open telemetry is bringing to the open, the observability space and monitoring space. So open telemetry is a somewhat new project over the last two years and the tracing portion of open telemetry is actually stable and being released as stable within the major languages now. JavaScript, Ruby, Java, Go, those languages have or are approaching stable releases for the API SDK and the protocol. Open telemetry is a timeline for metrics and the longing follow within this year and early next. They're working on stabilizing actually the protocol and API for metrics is already stable. The SDKs and feature freeze and now you're starting to see development being worked towards and on within these languages for the API and the SDK for metrics. And then after that will come longing so that the whole of the open telemetry project encompasses these three traditional pillars of observability. And our development follows the open telemetry timeline very closely. We're not trying to build a vendor implementation on top of the open telemetry project. We're not trying to put any shims in between us and the open telemetry. We don't want to, we want to be part of the open telemetry ecosystem and the contributors to open telemetry. So that's available for everybody. And it's not, again, going from the walled garden of traditional APM vendors or logging vendors into an open standard and then eventually, you know, five or so years from now. Migrates its way back to being walled, walled garden type thing. We want to, this is this open telemetry project is super, super important. And it is changing the game of monitoring and observability, logging all these larger vendors. So we want to keep it that way. So what does this mean? If you're a current Scout customer, it means the choice is yours. You can remain on the existing Scout APM product and we will continue to support and improve our existing Scout platform in 2022 and beyond. You can choose to go hybrid. You can have your existing applications remain on Scout APM and put any new applications that you hook up to Scout on the observability platform. Or you can mix and match your use cases as desired. The great thing is you can run both the existing Scout agent and the open telemetry instrumentation side by side. So you can run both at the same time and you can time it to happen when you want. It can be incremental to switch over as our new platform becomes more mature and adds features for things that you're already getting in the Scout platform. So in conclusion, kind of the observability is coming soon to the theater near you. If you want to learn more about observability within Scout, sign up for our newsletter. It's scouts.atm.com slash observability. And you can stay informed, opt into the beta of the new platform and just stay up to date with Scout's evolution into application performance observability and eventually full stack observability through this newsletter.