Good afternoon, everyone. This afternoon I'm going to talk about farm performance and introduce some new statistics we've released today that provide greater insights than what's been easily available in the past. Then I'm going to say a bit about investment in farms and where the capital used to fund that investment's been sourced. And similar to Karen Schneider this morning, I'll make a few comments about differences in performance between family and corporate farms and some of the likely explanations for that. And to finish, I'll look at variability in farm returns and what this means for the risk involved in owning and operating farms in Australia. So you can see incomes for broad acre farms have been high in recent years. The projection of an average $179,000 of farm for 2015-16 is 75% higher than the 10-year average and would be the best result in more than 20 years in real terms. Now that's been driven by high livestock prices, especially for beef and good winter grain production in most regions. Now of course there are differences across regions and industries which I'll come back to. Incomes have been more variable in the dairy industry. In 2015-16 farm cash income at a national level is projected to average $113,000 of farm. That's around 5% below the 10-year average and dairy incomes are projected to fall in all states except Western Australia and Queensland as a result of lower farm gate milk prices, higher cash costs and slightly lower milk production. And broad acre performance has varied within and across states. Now beef cattle productions by far the most common and widely dispersed agricultural activity in Australia and higher beef cattle prices result in increased farm cash incomes for a large proportion of Australian farms. In addition to higher beef receipts, winter grain productions increased in all states except Victoria and Tasmania and higher prices for lambs and wool have also helped. Now there are detailed descriptions by state and industry in the paper but some of the highlights include highest farm cash incomes in 20 years in New South Wales and the Northern Territory, the best results since 2000-2001 in Queensland and well above average results in Western Australia and South Australia. Victoria and Tasmania are the two states where incomes are projected to fall in 2015-16. So in Victoria increased beef cattle receipts aren't expected to offset reductions from lower grain production and in Tasmania dry seasonal conditions are projected to reduce livestock and crop receipts. Now while incomes in Tasmania are expected to be much lower than in 2014, this projection is still around 36% above the 10-year average. Now there have been concerns about the large increase in farm debt that occurred through the 2000s and this chart shows the proportion of broad acre farms with relatively high debt servicing commitments. So an interest to receipts ratio of greater than 15%. And you can see that at a national level it's fallen steadily since that peak of 25% in 2006-07 to around 9% last year which is very low in historical terms. Now that's been achieved through a relatively small reduction in debt combined with improved farm receipts and lower interest rates. Now that's a national picture and debt servicing's still difficult for many farms especially in regions where seasonal conditions have been poor for an extended period. And while at a national level debt didn't change much last year, debt did increase on 24% of broad acre and dairy farms. Now importantly, much of that increase has been used to fund expansion and increase intensity both of which would be expected to have productivity and profitability payoffs in the long term. And here we can see that borrowing to fund new on-farm investment especially the purchase of land, machinery and vehicles make up the largest proportion of farm debt. Debt to fund land purchase accounted for around 44% of broad acre farm debt last year. Now that's a fairly quick overview of farm financial performance. There's much more detail in the paper but if we were looking at one indicator to summarise economic performance it would be rate of return to capital which we can see here for the last 20 years for all farms in the broad acre sector. Now this series includes capital appreciation so it's important to remember there are two components. Operating returns with capital assets which is mainly land. And you can see the contribution of each when we add rate of return excluding capital appreciation to the slide. Now there's no systematic trend farm returns go up and down over time largely driven by random changes in weather conditions and commodity markets and also changes in land prices. And this applies across the different industries. Returns are better in some industries than others but rate of return moves around a lot reflecting unpredictable variables like the weather and commodity prices which have a big effect on farm returns and sentiment in rural property markets which has a big effect on farm capital values. Now this huge variation in rates of return between individual farms and industry level averages like these ones don't necessarily represent the performance of those farms which are run primarily with the intention of making profit and produce most of our agricultural output. In particular we know that a relatively small number of the largest farms produce the vast majority of output and that these farms earn much higher rates of return than their smaller counterparts. And as such there's growing interest from corporate agriculture businesses and investors in data that describes the performance of large farms. On the other hand the majority of Australian farms are relatively small and it's important we've got a good understanding of what's happening on these farms as well. So as a result we've regularly produced performance statistics for small, medium and large farms. And to help illustrate these differences more clearly starting from this edition of agricultural commodities we're publishing annual data for selected variables in 10 farm size categories for a number of industries and regions where farm size is measured as the value of receipts generated. Now it's a rich data set that you can download as a set of Excel tables so I'd encourage those of you who are interested to have a play with it. As an example some of the key insights we can pull out just using the Broadacre statistics include things like 48% of Broadacre output was produced by the largest 10% of farms while the smallest 50% accounted for 11% of output or you can see that the average rate of return increases consistently from smaller to larger farms and that 80% of investment was made by the largest 20% of Broadacre farms. Now we hope that these statistics will help people get a better understanding of the factors driving farm performance across the sector and we're looking to further disaggregate the largest 10% to provide more information on that important cohort. Now the theme of the conference is investment and there are many opportunities to make profitable investments in Australian agriculture and a good deal of investment has been happening and we can see from the slide here that it's large farms that account for the majority of investment as you'd expect given their focus on improving productivity and profitability and with this longer time series you can see that investment has increased but it's not clear that the rate of investment has been constrained by lack of access to capital or other impediments. Rates of return in the sector aren't systematically rising and comparison with other developed countries such as the US and Canada suggests that Australian farmers already use a relatively large amount of capital in production and perhaps most importantly it's relatively large Australian farms that undertake the vast bulk of investment and these farms generally have ready access to capital in the form of their own equity and debt and so while we expect to see ongoing investment in the farm sector we shouldn't be too worried that anticipated growth in demand in Asia necessarily means that farmers should start investing in land and equipment at a substantially greater rate than they have in the past. Now as Karen Schneider mentioned this morning it's also worth pointing out that investments mostly funded by family farm operators either in the form of equity such as retained earnings or debt and that this isn't likely to change quickly. The other equity capital category in this slide represents all equity capital provided to the business by people in their spouse and what it shows is that families remain the main source of capital used on Australian farms and that's true despite the significant consolidation of farm numbers and the growth in the average size of farms that's occurred over the last 20 years and despite significant purchases of farms by corporate and foreign entities. So it indicates that many of the transactions have been transfers of farms between corporate entities from families to corporates. The ongoing dominance of family farms in Australia and in other countries reflects the fact that family farms or more precisely owner operators are quite an effective business structure in agriculture. The effectiveness of the family farm models reflected in these results you saw this morning which show that among large farms families tend to outperform corporates in terms of operating returns. Now the most likely explanation for the superior performance of family farms is that they're operated by the people who own them and who have very strong incentives to maximise returns while managing exposure to risk and to do this with a relatively long term view. The challenge for corporates is designing incentives for managers and workers that encourage them to work hard, cut costs and take advantage of opportunities in the same way that owner operators do. Even though these workers have a limited if any equity stake in the business this is especially hard to do in farming because random changes in things like the weather, commodity prices and pest and disease pressures have big effects on profits but they can be hard to distinguish from those effects caused by variation in management skill and work commitment. Now there's a long history of trying to come to groups like this on corporate farms both in Australia and internationally some of the other speakers will tell us more about it. Now I want to finish up with some comments about risk and some of the work we've done to measure it. We've recently calculated distributions of returns generated by large farms in the cropping beef and dairy industries over the past 10 years. Now although performance on any individual farm will undoubtedly differ from the aggregate figures I'm about to show you, there's a good way to understand how farms perform as investments. Now the first thing you learn when you look at the distributions is that because returns in agriculture are so variable there isn't that much information in averages because the average doesn't occur very often. One way to understand risk is to calculate the probability of earning a rate of return less than the opportunity cost of capital. So this was 30% rates of return are lower than this 39% of the time for cropping farms 43% of the time for beef farms and 49% of the time for dairy farms. This means that in any 10 year period rates of return will be less than the opportunity cost of capital somewhere between 4 and 5 years on average. Now of course these years are compensated for by years with returns much higher than 5% from the table. But investors need to be aware that all 4 of these bad years might occur in a row and that this might just be bad luck and completely beyond the control of the manager. A lot of risk in farming is driven by variation in commodity prices and the climate and there are tools to help manage these risks but farming is highly exposed to uncontrollable variables and investors need to be aware that this will apply to them too. Buying a farm with a big farm with the latest technology might reduce your exposure to risk but considerable variability will remain and it's important to realise that this applies even though investments in farming usually involve a substantial real estate component. Now the estimates in this table include a period where there were some substantial increases in land values. When you exclude capital appreciation you can see the returns from the operation on business and the impact changes in the price of land have had in the ten year period that we're looking at. Now the most striking difference is for beef where the chances of making more than 10% become very low and the chances of making less than 5% balloon when we exclude the changes in the value of capital which is mainly changes in the price of land. It's obvious from this simple set of tables that there's wide variation in returns and that the operating and capital components of agricultural investments can have quite different characteristics. Understanding and managing this variability in returns is an important component of investing in agriculture. So to sum up farm cash incomes high in most regions supported by good livestock prices especially for cattle but also good crop receipts in most areas. Agriculture is receiving more attention in terms of potential investment but it seems unlikely the source of investment funding will change substantially. It will remain largely owner equity and debt held by banks and the owner operator models likely to dominate for some time to come but given the opportunities that exist there will be continued interest from new sources of capital and it's important they understand the risk profile of the various sectors within agriculture. Thank you.


Hi, hello everyone. Thanks for joining us for today's session. This is our first keynote session for the Unraveling the Cycling City course. And today we are happy to have George Leo with us to give us keynote talk. I will be assisted by Facundo along with me here today. I just wanted to give you a brief agenda for the today's session. First, I will be introducing George that will be followed by the keynote talk by George himself, which would be about 30 minutes. And after that, there will be a Q&A session for about 25 minutes. Of course, George doesn't need much introduction, but it's a little something that I wanted to let you know about George. George is a PhD researcher studying on how ideas from urban design can guide the creation of attractive environments that encourages cycling as a practical and desirable mode of transport. He also studies the emerging concepts of cycle highways, which is conceptualized by practitioners, academics and people cycling in the northern European countries. George is currently cross appointed at Einhofer University of Technology and University of Amsterdam as a part of the smart cycling futures project. I just wanted to give a little bit of a note for the Q&A session. During the George's talk, you can put your questions on the chat screen, which would be compiled by Facundo and he will be moderating and queuing the questions which we will ask on your behalf after the Q&A session is over. So, George, how are you? Hey, I'm doing excellent, yourself. Very good. And I hope everyone else is doing excellent too. We're all trying to do the best we can. Okay, thanks for taking the time to join us today. And without much ado, please do start and give us your keynote talk on beyond stated preferences. Excellent. First, I wanted to thank the MOOC team for, you know, you're all volunteers. So it's great to see the initiative to have these things happen and to have these talks being organized. I want to keep the MOOC fresh, but the course content itself isn't always easily updated without interrupting the progress of current students. So this is these live sessions are a great way to add on and to keep things current. I was going to talk about bicycle highways today, but then I realized there's a whole lecture in there about bicycle highways. So I wanted to talk about my research on cycling experience instead. And the two are not unrelated. They're actually quite closely related in terms of, I try to use bicycle highways as a way to apply the research on cycling experience. By the end of this talk, you can ask me questions either on the paper presented in the course or the presentation that I'm putting forward today. So today I'll be presenting some findings based on a paper that I wrote before the bicycle highway paper. I'm putting out a link to that paper in the chat box below. And it'll be about cycling experience. And right now I'm taking the idea of cycling experience and trying to figure out how it relates to the current body of research on stated preferences and revealed preferences, which is kind of like quite an academic way to talk about what people say versus what people do. So stated preferences generally is a way that we try to find out what people want or what people desire in a laboratory setting. So to do research using stated preferences, an example would be you're taking a few different infrastructure types, you know, protected infrastructure or or sharers or bike lanes or no infrastructure. So, and using that type of categories to ask people hey, it given this road type what would you prefer so it's very hypothetical. On the other hand, stated preferences, sorry reveal preferences is generally done using GPS study. So now, most of those reveal preference study is done by GPS, which means you track people on what they do what kind of roots they choose. For example, if people choose the shortest route, then you can ascertain from that data that people like the shortest route or people choose a route with separated bicycle infrastructure at the expense of perhaps longer detours that we can make the conjecture people would take prefer protected infrastructure or a separate bike path, even though they have to give up times for it. So in the era of big data and easy access to GPS right because all of us has GPS in our phones. It's the research had seems to be heading more that way. Now what my talk is about is how do we take these two categories and how do we move forward and learn more about people's motivation and meaning right because having GPS data from your phone tells us nothing or next to nothing about what our motivations are or why we choose what we choose. And, you know, unraveling the cycling city kind of gets into that, especially, you know, these articles on rule breaking for those of you week four. And I'd like to look more into the why you know why do people choose what they choose. So let's talk about experiments because they're, they're quite important, you know, as a, as a scientist, right what is an experiment and better yet what's the difference between an observation and an intervention. So, first of all, the experiment involves number one, specific instruments and specific people. Right, so usually when we think of an experiment, we think of someone in the lab coat, right administering doses of medicine, perhaps in a very controlled environment, which is number two, aims for a controlled inducement of changes in the laboratory. And that number three measurement of these changes before jerry and after. And this is our traditional concept of what an experiment is. But the problem with bicycle research is that the world isn't very neat like that, and it's kind of hard to put cycling into a laboratory where we can control everything. But we mostly rely on observations for what we do. So we, we try and observe the way that people choose their roots, or observe the type of environments that people cycle through, and we try and make some conclusions. Another way is to ask people what they prefer. Right. And this is also not an experiment in the true sense because we, we don't have a before and after we're just trying to obtain data. So it's it's also an observation like type of way of getting data. Now where does meaning come in and where does the why matter. The why matters is because they're right now there's revealed preference and stated preference right. The why matters because neither of these categories kind of tell us exactly what the reasons for these preferences. Right. And I think even the word preference is is a bit constraining, because we want to know not just about preferences, but about the reasons behind people's choices. And the reasons may be motivation, right. Why, why, why does cycling matter. And that's also some of the things that we covered in the course. So the, the difference between stated and revealed preferences also seem to matter less. It seems that GPS has really supplanted the this research most revealed preference research can be done using by just tracking people to see where they go. So there's not many things are very interesting there, aside from more and more data. And on this stated preferences, if you're just asking people know what type of roots do you like. It seems a bit shadow, shallow, given our huge access to GPS data which tells us exactly what kind of roots people prefer. So what's the alternative to this type of research. I think the alternative is to look into research that looks more at at motivations specifically. Right. Some of the research I do is is right along research, which is doing interviews on the go and trying to ascertain notes, a meaning that's more than just transport, because if we think about cycling as just traffic determinism, right, as just traffic determinism, then we don't see a reason to obtain people's motivations for travel. But if we see transport as cycling as a meaningful way of being right so you know you can observe people standing outside of a cafe. You don't ask, you know, is that an efficient thing to be doing. They're not moving anywhere. If you think of many of our stationary activities we assume that there's meaning behind it. Right. If we're at the office we're working. It's a very clear why for at home we're doing home stuff. But for some reason when we're on the move. We immediately switch to this scientific mindset like where's this person trying to go. And that's the, that's not very helpful for getting motivations, and I think there's, there's a lot more that can be explored here. So, with that in mind, I, my research is on cycling experience and that's kind of the why for the aspect of the why that want to touch in today. And so I'm going to go briefly to a 2018 paper I wrote to this diagram, which, which outlines three different ways. Let me just go find that it was up here briefly. Here it is. So, which outlines three different types of cycling experiences of social sensory and spatial. Right and this kind of gives you an inside out view of what, what matters for people that that ride a bike. On the social side, you know, we tend to forget that interaction is important that, you know, the sense of normality that the social context is important for people who bike. For example, if you're in a context where no one cycles and it's kind of weird, then obviously that's going to affect, you know, the way that that you travel as well. You know, the way that we feel on a bike, it's very sensory way of movement. It's very different from automobile traffic. If you're in a box, right. Shielded from the environment, which insert interestingly, if, if you're in a car, it's actually much easier to do these laboratory experiments, because you simulate know the windshield you can simulate the visual effects of being in a car. It's a lot like a video game, but it's very much more difficult to simulate the feeling of being on a bike. Right. It's not a chair you kind of have to balance. You feel the pavement. So it's, it's very difficult to do laboratory experiments for cycling versus a car where you can simulate know what's coming up on the windshield. You can get people to play driving games, for example. And you can do experiments that way. So that's, that's kind of the reason also why it's so little is understood about cycling. And then spatial, right. How do people create a sense of the environment. How do people make sense or develop preferences for for certain environments around them, because cycling is more about than just environments. More than just infrastructure. What kind, why do prefer people prefer greenery, why do people prefer certain types of architecture. And maybe these are the kind of questions that we'll never know in the particular. But we do know in general, you know, what kind of environments people prefer riding a bike, and they seem to be approximately the same types of environments as people prefer walking. And that's why it's important, I think, to look at urban design is because we have a history of knowledge. Though not entirely scientific, we do have an history of knowledge from architects and as people who have made cities, you know, according to certain design principles that have been developed through the year. And it's, it'll be interesting to make that body of knowledge, much more scientific, do experiments on it, do more observation to obtain why and how what type of environments people prefer exactly. So let's, I want to just go through a few quotes here that some of the you in the course might find interesting this paper wasn't in the course. You know, here. So, So what were the things that you notice on a bike. Right. Not McCarthy 2011 finds that not only do cyclists list of hosts of risks attributed to this driver behavior and attitudes, but they have also formed through the process of sense making a common framework that explains the origins of risks posed by drivers. And that's a piece of research on cycling, on cycling experience that was done using interview and direct transcriptions, right, which is very different from the type of research that we typically do, which is based on data and surveys. This, this is an example of the sense making that we need to do as researchers that cycling is not just about going from a to b but it's also about kind of figure out what kind of questions are valuable to be asking. Especially when it comes to risk, especially when it comes to danger. You know, these fields of research have much more in common with researchers who study pedestrian environments than they do with people who are in the safety of an automobile. Let's go to an example of a sensory experience. Right. So, let's go to this one about shoes, which I think, again illustrates the, the similarities between, you know, cycling and walking shoes, I quote can be understood as part of a hybrid unit of analysis. Right. So, human socks shoes pavement, we rarely do we break it down that that far, where shoes intervene and disrupt the flow between the body and the pavement. You know, and, and that we can think of that in a similar way to cycling where the type of equipment you use disrupts or intervenes with the way that you actually experience the city. Let's say that's, that's also something that we could look forward to researching more is, you know, in some contexts, the traditional Dutch bicycle, right, is is is almost universal in other contexts such as North America it's much more mountain bikes. So, what does a machine have to do with human. How does that interaction happen, and what kind of implications are there for for cycling. Now, perhaps to close off this talk, I want to also talk a bit about e bikes. So, e bikes are kind of taken over the market, they're more than in the Netherlands it's more than 50% of all sales I believe so it's that they're more expensive so maybe not the number of bikes but definitely the sales the value of bikes, more than 50% of new bikes being sold and I suspect it's, it's been way past that mark in places like China already where these much cheaper e bikes are are on the market for quite some time. And I think e bikes are an interesting case where we focus on a lot of the transportation aspects of it, right, goes faster enables people to pet pedal further. But there's, there's something underlying that, and that is, I think e bikes change the way that cycling is experienced right it's becomes much more of a motorized vehicle and. The extent to which e bikes norm bikes share characteristics and defer, and that would be a very interesting avenue of research, and also know if, if you're able to throttle it completely or if you need to pedal assist. So there are a lot of questions about how people get around but there are also questions about the meaning and the experience of cycling that changes as a result of putting a motor on a bicycle. So let's go back to the original question. You know, which we started with was these research with large sample sizes may reliably capture preferences, but what about motivation. And I think that's a place that we can improve on understand more of the why, and only by understanding more of the why, can we then in the future, you know, understand exactly what is what research needs to be conducted. And also the blind spots that we have on cycling research. So that's my, that's my two cents in this talk, and that is also why I think, you know, we need to go beyond stated preferences, and why we should be exploring motivation and meaning more as we look at how cyclists interact with the world around them. So, hey, thanks for tuning in. Look forward to the questions. Thanks, George, because I need a very informative talk. We're waiting for the questions to stream in. And I think Facundo will help me out with this. Facundo. Yes. For the moment, we have two questions. So the first one would be, George, how does the sort of spatial data from apps like C dot sends right insights fit in. Okay, so I'm just looking at the, the webpage here briefly. So, I think that's, let's, let's think about the underlying problem here. And that is that the perhaps the responsibility of safety and and who bears it. And whether, whether, or and whether, you know, we should be requiring people to have technology in order to be safe. I think that's, that's a question here. So, but this question is also about data, like apps. So, I'm trying to get to the data page. Let's look at this together actually. Let me put this up. Perhaps we could unmute Kim and Kim could further inform us about what data she's talking about. Here, here's a webpage. I don't know, Kim, if you have a particular information about the app. I was going to ask about, it gives a look, there's more to it than just what's there, you can collect data on how people are reacting to the road. So how they turn sharply or if they experience a lot of vibration and things like that. It can always be brought into people's experience and you can see the hotspots and maybe survey the hotspots or something like that. It's, it's all rather new. So I don't know how you'd use that. Okay, so that, good. I, I note here that there's, there's a qualitative service that delivered via the app, which I find that quite interesting. You, you're, we're now able to, you know, time quite precisely what the quantitative measurements for for cycling are, and put that together with the qualitative data. So, for example, if you experience a near miss, and you're able to give a reaction to that immediately, that would be combining an outside in perspective which is probably accelerometers on the device and GPS data, and also matching with that some reaction from the cyclist. So, I, without understanding this more, I think I can talk to that concept. And that is quite useful. It's, it's, because what has been difficult is trying to measure people's reactions while on the move.  But that's, by the time that that happens by the time the researcher gets to the person they're trying to research, the instant may have happened, you know, a few days ago, a week ago, a year ago. And the memory clouds, what the sense was in the moment. So by being able to sync up exactly what the instant was, in terms of the accelerometer so however the near miss or the incident is calculated with a feedback by the person who was involved in that instance, and be able to have those two data sets together. I think that's, that could be really useful to understanding how people interpret, you know, these events in the environment. So thanks for that question. I look forward to following up on this. Is this, is this a, yeah, I wonder if this is this would be good for for data collection for the research community. I think on the consumer side it's much more targeted at these lights and things. So the question, I'll look into this product a bit more and see what I see what's there. Thanks. Okay, so we have another question from Anthony, and they're asking, do you have knowledge about preferences depending on the type of bike, for example, an e-bike or a cargo bike, and the type of use, for example going to work going to the grocery traveling with your kids, etc. I just published a paper about cargo bike preferences. A few, a few months ago. See if I can look that up. And, and the results, it's, it's, it's hard to actually categorize these different types of bicycles. Even that's one comment I'll make while doing research. Even cargo bikes have their subcategorizations, right? You have three-wheeled cargo bikes, which actually feel quite a bit different than two-wheeled cargo bikes. And then you have these cargo bikes with the load on the back, you have cargo bikes with load in the front. Electric cargo bikes feel very different from non-electric cargo bikes because of the weight, especially if you're in a hilly environment. So just trying to narrow down the selection and the choices to make of what type of bikes we're studying and what types of bikes we're not studying was, was difficult. And as to the motivation, you know, so why people ride, where they're going as a leisure ride, as a day utilitarian ride. And that was, it was also difficult to determine in conjunction with the, the quantity of data we're collecting. So, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to determine on the one hand, if you're doing a traffic count or GPS study, exactly what type of trip it is. Right? Like, there's some figuring out and puzzle pieces to be done, figuring out, okay, if this person is going from here to here, you know, they're clearly going from home to work. But it's, it's not, it's not cut and dry in terms of being able to figure that out for, you know, thousands of people. And if you're doing a traffic count, it's even more difficult. Well, well, you can get the type of bicycle from a traffic count. Right. So you're standing there and trying to figure out who's riding what, and you can figure out the gender. It's, it's much more difficult to then get the purpose because you're not going to stop everyone to ask them. Whereas with GPS studies, generally, if you're doing research, you're getting a big data set from someone else because they're expensive to conduct now with cell phones, but privacy issues are important. So you can't then track down the people who are in the data set to ask them, you know, exactly what type of bikes you were riding. And to confirm the data, are you going to home or work. So there's quite a bit of methodological issues with connecting all these different elements that we want to know about. And then perhaps more difficult and the same question is what kind of socioeconomic group are they in, etc, etc, and having a survey that determines that with the GPS data and trying to get to know what type of bike exactly that they're riding. And maybe one day we'll be able to get all that information together and make a useful determination. But for now, I think that having having that's a challenge and also determining what type of bike to include or exclude. What is a cargo bike, for example, is also a challenge and perhaps something that we won't really ever figure out, given the wide variety of bikes out there. So the next question is from, I believe it's pronounced Rohit, I apologize in advance if the names are different. They say Arafa Long reads articles stated that using GPS for navigation might potentially make our memory weaker. In comparison cyclists should have a better memory and visual cue and hints on local markets. So this is a question in comparison do cyclists have a better memory and visual cues and also will that then help local economies. Wow. Intuitively, I have no doubt. That's the case. In terms of research, I think that can be backed up by quite a few studies for drivers. The whole talk about how cyclists and drivers are different, but I suspect, you know, if people driving cars are interpreting, have better memories of their roots, which is a field that research has been done on, then perhaps it's even applied more so to people cycling who have a better sense of their environment. So I suspect that's true the link to economics. And, sorry, can you repeat the last question I can't find out the chat here. The just the last part. Yes, they were asking if this difference would help the local economies. I don't know how to answer that one. That's, that's, that's a bit of a stretch to go from memories to local economies. But I think there might be an argument to be made that cyclists, well, we do know that bike lanes promote businesses from a few recent studies. So maybe part of that effect is a more intimate interaction between people on bike and their local environment. So, especially if it's main street businesses, which was a particular study, then if you're driving at the speed of a car, you know, those types of environments aren't designed for being passed at 60 kilometers an hour. But if you're on a bike, then the, the, the number of buildings is you're going slow enough that you can actually, you know, find what you're looking for. And it's possible, et cetera. Whereas, if you're driving really quickly, you're looking more for like a highway rest stop where there was giant signs that lured you in, you know why you're going really fast so I think the speed of mobility, not so much the memory of the environment would determine whether you're able to locate what you're finding in that environment. And also being to pull over and park your bike. Maybe that's a factor, but this is no all personal conjecture on that point. Then we have Jain, who says, on choosing routes, avoiding traffic lights is a factor. Has there been good studies to quantify how much energy or time is lost in stopped start journeys? How much energy is lost? I think this is interesting because it's more of a mechanical question, right? This more speaks to the cycling as a human machine, something that we can figure out using physics, really, about power loss and how much energy it takes to get started and stopped versus the wind resistance we're going at full speed. But I don't think that's the really relevant factor here because we do know that it takes quite a bit of energy to get something that stopped into motion. I think this question though, what's more relevant is how people interpret this energy being put in, right? How do people experience it? And whether they're adverse to it or whether they appreciate this input of energy. Perhaps there's a distinction there to be made between people who are out for a recreation ride and people who are out for a ride to work. Maybe more importantly, maybe in the future, this distinction will become less relevant as more people ride e-bikes. Because what I do know with e-bike riders is that when I was doing my personal research that they mentioned quite frequently the eradication of wind. So it takes the unpredictability out of the route that if you have a lot of headwind, for example, it affects how long it takes to get to your destination. So when speaking to some Dutch people, as they were growing up, getting to school the largest variable was not the traffic light, but actually the amount of headwind they get. If you're going 10 kilometers on the countryside, flat environment, and one of them mentioned that with an e-bike you would completely eradicate that variable, making your journeys more predictable and therefore making cycling more of a better transportation alternative and you're not exhausted by the time you arrive at work. So perhaps the question to the traffic light, the answer to the traffic light question is to what extent does it make you exhausted and tired by the time you get to work? Maybe that's the biggest variable. And maybe in the future, this variable will become less important. If more people are on e-bikes and the waiting time at traffic lights, maybe that becomes a much more important variable. I'm also gonna put, yeah, sorry, I'm gonna post the cargo bike paper in the chat here. Maybe we'll add that to the course at some point, but that's for you to read. Oh, sorry, to a public group. Yeah, go ahead, next question. Yeah, the next question's from Sean and the question is, do you have any suggestions on how cities with lower bike commute rates can normalize bicycling and also reinforce that the biking is generally safe? And also, what about cities that face potentially dangerous weather? For example, here that's over 115 degrees Fahrenheit for a specific period of time, but are otherwise photographically ideal for biking? Hmm, no. The weather one's tough. The weather one, maybe there are just places that are too extreme for cycling. For example, if we take an example from the streetscape from pedestrians, there's cities being built on deserts and in these places, these climates, most of the architecture is built in a way that everyone is in an air condition environment, for example. So either above ground walkways or underground walkways, and apart from that, mostly just automotive travel. So I'm thinking of these places like Dubai, Houston, et cetera. So that was, I think that's the architectural solution on the pedestrian side. Is there a similar way to protect people from the elements on the cycling side? There doesn't seem to be a good way to do that, because if you get too much enclosure, it's a lot more weight at what point is it no longer a bicycle? And then if you're trying to get people inside, then spatial efficiency becomes much more of an issue. So then you get into walkways, escalators, et cetera, in which case, does everyone really need a bike in that environment? So that's a tough one. Maybe there are environments where cycling won't be as popular due to the, you know, the temperature variations or weather. And interesting about hills is I go back to the e-bike, is that maybe that's a solution that can be solved by technology, right? Hilly environments may become much less of an issue compared to places that are too hot or too cold. And that perhaps in the long term will be a much more difficult issue. Sorry, can you say again the first part of the question? Yes. They asked, do you have any suggestions on how cities with lower bike communities can normalize bicycling and also reinforce that biking is generally safe? Yeah, that's a tough one, I think. How do you make a normal, it's a vicious cycle. I don't think we really have figured it out yet. You know, it's more people makes the activity more normal. There are perhaps one area of very, lots of contention. There might be even a lot of contention in this room is helmet lost, right? Not wearing a helmet does make the activity more convenient. So maybe there's something to be said. If you look at Denmark, you know, Copenhagen where there's more people wearing helmets compared to the Netherlands, where almost no one wears a helmet. Maybe there's a study that can be done to kind of figure out the impact of helmet use on the normality of cycling. But then again, there's also cultures where the helmet is the normal thing to do, still with some degree of cycling. So maybe that's a key issue. I don't have a good answer. I don't think really anyone has a good answer for that. It's a tough question that we'll keep working at. You talked a bit ago about e-bikes and the next question is about e-bikes. So Cyril asks, what are your thoughts on where e-bikes belong within urban mobility spaces? How governance should impose or suggest policies? And what impact may be in terms of equity? For example, decreasing the size of some groups to cycle where e-bikes allow others. Perhaps more privileged groups to cycle for again, some different purposes, leisure versus utility. E-bikes are interesting. There's a few issues there. There's the equity issue. Like what does it mean for everyone to spend $1,000 to be included in this activity? Maybe the economic issue will be solved in the future. I think what's more interesting for me in that question is the safety issue. I think I was reading somewhere while I was doing automotive safety research that the safest car is a car with a spike point directly at the driver. The safest car is the car that is most dangerous for the occupant. So if we think about that logic, that perhaps the safest e-bike is the e-bike that's most dangerous for the rider. So what does that mean? That means that as e-bikes become heavier, there certainly looks like there's e-bikes on that very heavy side of the spectrum, e-bikes that look more like mopeds, they become safer for the rider. The more mass there is in the vehicle, the more force that vehicle is gonna take on impact versus a vehicle or a person that's much wider. All right, that makes sense, so basic physics. So the heavier we make e-bikes, the more dangerous, I believe, people are going to be inclined to act. I think it's not common sense, but that's just the way that risk would be distributed. If you're completely rational and you're cared for at your own safety, the heavier the bike, the more aggressively perhaps you would be riding it. So perhaps one solution that's not overly onerous or complicated on the legal side is to make sure that e-bikes are below a certain weight, that they are not excessively heavy. In terms of the top speed, there's a lot of talks about make sure people don't go too fast. Perhaps it's informative to look at racing cyclists. People can go really fast under their own power. If you have a professional cyclist out for a sport ride, they're going 40, 50 kilometers an hour on a flat ground. So we know that people going this fast are using the infrastructure. So it's not so easy to say if we limit the top speed of e-bikes, then we limit all fast cyclists. So I'd say that the weight more than the top speed would be more important. And obviously there needs to be some limit to the top speed, but going too fast isn't necessarily the danger. The danger is people making the choice to go too fast. But making it artificially feel too safe for people to be going too fast on especially like pedestrian environments with dense urban environments where that kind of speed is completely uncalled for. And I think at some point we have to rely on people's common sense. If an environment is clearly designed with a lot of cross traffic and a lot of people sharing the space, that's where social norms kick in more than we can regulate top speed. And you know what top speed sometimes that's one of the advantages of e-bikes, right? If you're out in the countryside and there's wide open path, maybe going relatively faster than you would in an urban space is a completely rational thing to do. So that's my two cents. Weight limits over speed limits, if I had a choice. Okay. Sarah from the UK says that cycling infrastructure is really patchy and means you're cycling with cars, et cetera, which feels unsafe and a bit hostile. Whilst GPS data shows where people cycle at the moment, it doesn't show where this unmet need. For example, protected cycle routes. Is there a potential to capture or survey the unmet potential? Yeah, this is where the models come in, right? When we try and predict future bicycle traffic and actually the reason behind stated and revealed preferences, kind of like why they exist, in a sense is to calibrate these models, right? We take these revealed preferences so we track people via GPS and we have a pretty good sense of what kind of routes after they're built, what kind of routes they prefer. And if we're lucky, we have some natural experiments where a new route does get built and we see how many people shift over to the new route, right? And using that shift, we can determine the propensity of people to use that particular route. And then we can take a look at that new route to see if it's high quality, low quality, et cetera. And we kind of make a model out of it using all that data. And the input for that model could also be stated preferences. So we also have research on which people prefer separated bike paths, when is it appropriate to merge traffic, take all that data into a model and traffic engineers is using these models, urban planners to try and predict where a new segment of bicycle route could belong. Right? That's kind of the conventional way of thinking about it. But the problem is the models that we have currently and especially when I was doing research in bicycle highways, it turns out that they're completely useless. So these models are being used to justify funding for one or a rationale for building new bike infrastructure, but they're really not any, they're no good at the moment. And the numbers that they predict are quite far away from the numbers that actually are realized. Right? So that means there's, despite all the GPS data that we have, despite all the calibrations and the input that we're modeling these bike paths with, it's saying that there's something that we can't account for quantitatively. There's something in there that's, that even though it works for most car traffic models, this typical gravity model or agent based modeling, even though these techniques work for automotive traffic, it seems that there's something about cycling in which these models don't work. And that's kind of the residual leftover from the correct predictions versus, you know, how much is unaccounted for. And maybe, and if, if my hunch is correct, and there's so many micro elements and context dependent elements to cycling and things are unmeasurable, such as, you know, the type of building environment that the vault, the micro volumes of traffic day by day, maybe these models will never be 100% correct. And they might continue to be quite a far off just because it's difficult to predict how people respond to their immediate micro environment versus how they respond on a network traffic scale. Okay, so next we have a question from Chris and it says, how do you see this information being used in a practical sense? It's fine for most of us consumers, for example, bike riders to consider this, but how can we use this information to get our city engineers and administrators to provide what we need to feel safer and better about riding? So that on the one hand, and then they go on and ask, more relevant, perhaps, how can this be used to make cycling more accepted generally as a transport mode? So, let's talk about the city administration. It asks about how do we get this accepted. The local system and the system that runs transportation and traffic, right? The people that we must influence to change the environment. And the reason I talked extensively, just before about modeling, is that the people that control roads and public space in general around the world, it's actually quite surprising that that's the case because almost everywhere are increasingly traffic engineers. And there's a certain or an urban planners who are just finding their decisions using quantitative modes. So actually the research that I'm doing into these experiences don't translate well into models, right? And the challenge there is to figure out whether there is an independent or competing logic that our administrators would accept to justify a decision, right? Just because the models are wrong doesn't mean that the particular infrastructure is not worth being built. There are people who, practitioners who build bicycle infrastructures who know that the model is wrong. And given the model is wrong, they still have to make these decisions, right? And increasingly I think these decisions should be, maybe the engineering way of looking at these decisions can be replaced by a completely different paradigm, right? That if we don't think of traffic flow and carrying people as the primary objective of building bicycle infrastructure, it's a neighborhood beautification project. Some people have argued that bicycle infrastructure is a traffic calming project. It could be parks, it could be turned into a linear park, for example, enhancement of public space. These are all projects and logics are not related to carrying traffic. So perhaps one way to bring this research into some kind of practical use is to say that we're thinking about the problem the wrong way, that the primary purpose of bicycle infrastructure is indeed not as infrastructure at all. The fact that people use this environment or the bike path is a side effect, but the primary purpose perhaps of some bike paths is to create a better and more appealing public space. And that's kind of as far as I've gotten on the other side of the logic, because the alternative would be try to incorporate this into traffic modeling. And so far, efforts have been really unsuccessful. And perhaps, as I said, the reason it's unsuccessful is because it's not capable of being incorporated into a traffic model. Okay, so we're at the one hour mark. Do you have time for one more question? Yeah, sure. Let's do one more. Okay. So the question is, has there been any work done on accidents on e-bikes compared to normal bikes? Okay. Yes, plenty actually. Plenty of research have been done on e-bikes, accident rates versus normal bikes. I don't know the studies personally, but I do know that that's a huge field of study. And perhaps the related question there is, are e-bikes more dangerous? And maybe that's something that research, the numbers can tell us. Perhaps what's interesting for me on top of the, are e-bikes more dangerous question is, is how they enable, how the behavior of people in e-bikes can be interpreted by others. So how do we solve that problem of danger rather than just heavy regulation? For example, one of the ways that I think from personal experience, one of the ways, the visual cues of a cyclist stopping or going really fast is how fast their feet are moving. And if you're looking at a cyclist, you can tell that they're riding an e-bike because their legs aren't quite moving at the same rate as a speed that they're going. Their body motions don't quite make sense, given the way, how fast they're traveling. And perhaps one of the areas of research that we can do better is to determine what kind of visual cues both drivers and cyclists use to kind of estimate speed and then improving the design of e-bikes to make sure that our visual cues of estimating speed match up with what people expect. And further on that, maybe as more e-bikes are out on the road, perhaps we get better at interacting with e-bikes and maybe they'll lead to a safety gain. Or maybe not. Maybe e-bikes like motorcycles are just inherently dangerous. We do know that motorcycles are about 100 times more dangerous than driving, right? And so far, no one has been able to do anything about it. It's just the inherent design of the vehicle. Maybe it's true that e-bikes are just more inherently and inherently more dangerous, in which case it becomes a very tough question for policymakers. And people who are thinking about inclusivity and these cities have hills, what kind of trade-off are we willing to make, right? Between e-bikes and accessibility, if there is one. Okay, thank you very much. That is it from me. I'll hand the mic back to Sune. Hey, thank you very much for joining us today. And George, thank you very much. That was indeed a very informative session. I can get a last word in. I've given some perhaps controversial answers here. So it's good. I think we should be on the edge of controversy for anything to be, you know, to be useful, I guess. I'm trying to take us to the edge of that controversy. So, you know, let me know your thoughts for you. If I said anything factually incorrect, or if you have any perspectives on things. Yes, sorry, go ahead. No, no, sure. I actually wanted to ask you that if people want to follow up and ask you questions, what's the best way they can get in touch with you? Twitter or should they send us your questions and we can forward them to you? I think the best way to get in touch would be I've been trying to stay off social media. But if you, if you message me on LinkedIn, I'll leave the LinkedIn at Urban Cycling Institute or LinkedIn, if you just find me at George Liu. That's the place I'm at most. And if you want to get in touch with Mark, the promised route is also in the course, he's much more on the Twitter side as well. Thanks, George. Again, thanks everyone for joining in. And I hope this was an informative session for you. And of course, we look forward to having you for the next session, two weeks from now with Trey. And please let us know your feedback on how you found the session and how we could make them more informative for you. Before we sign off, I just want to also introduce the rest of the team who's been working behind the scenes to make these sessions possible. So two new mentors have joined us for this cohort. Yasmeen and Anna. And besides that, it's me, Sunay, Artem and Facundo, who have really been putting a lot of their personal time to make these sessions possible. And we will look forward to organizing more sessions for you guys. Thank you very much.


So hi, I'm Ash and today I'll be discussing the barriers of going green. So urbanization has resulted in many negative impacts and green walls are gaining in popularity globally. As they not only address these concerns, but they are spatially efficient and provide a range of additional benefits. All green walls have been implemented across the world as we can see in Europe and Singapore and America. Research has shown that less than 1% of Australia's major city centres are vertically greened. So clearly there are barriers and obstacles preventing green wall uptake in Australia. In order to overcome these barriers, a greater understanding is required. Thus, this study decided to investigate the general public's understanding of green walls, their willingness to pay and their barriers to implementation. This was achieved by distributing a nationwide survey to relevant local governments and voluntary councils. 161 individuals submitted responses and the distribution of those respondents closely reflected the population density of the country. To ensure participants were not influenced by the survey, no additional information was provided about green walls or green infrastructure in general. Incomplete surveys were removed from the analysis and survey responses were grouped by demographic characteristics. Pearson's KiD Square tests for independence with Monte Carlo simulations were used to examine the differences across the five demographic groups for each survey question. While most participants had heard of green walls prior to the survey, only about one third had a moderate awareness with females having a greater level of awareness than males. Although most did not live or work near a green wall, many reported to at least like one feature of green walls. Though this varied with residential remoteness, as more individuals living in urban areas tended to like green wall features more so than those living in non-urban areas. This could be driven by the lack of nature in the urban environment, resulting in green space and green infrastructure being viewed more favorably. However, probably the most important finding of the study was that 81% of respondents believe that having a green wall at your place of residence would improve their quality of life. This alone highlights the impact of greenery on the emotional, physical and mental well-being of individuals and is also clearly acknowledged as actually one of our previous champions that we just got to listen to said health is wealth. Participants were asked to rank green wall benefits on a scale from low to high importance. The benefits seem to be the most important centered around air quality, beauty and the urban heat island effect. Females tended to identify beauty as a more important benefit of green walls, while low to median income earners considered increased biodiversity is important. Green walls clearly had an impact on the emotional and mental well-being of participants as 95% reported feeling different in the presence of green walls with the most frequently identified response feeling was feeling more at peace. A greater proportion of females reported a stronger sense of community pride, which could be driven by the fact that females also perceived beauty and aesthetics as an important benefit. The outcome of young participants feeling more at peace in the presence of green walls could be driven by the impact of ego anxiety, as younger generations have a greater concern for the environment and the environmental impacts of our current actions. Residents from non-urban areas reported feeling a stronger sense of community belonging. This could be in response to the isolation felt by individuals living in those areas. Willingness to pay was also investigated with the majority of individuals reporting that they'd be willing to pay for a green wall construction. Interestingly, the only demographic to influence this was income, though the outcomes were not as expected. High income earners were most likely willing to invest $600 or more, followed closely by median and low income earners. The highest earners were actually the least likely to invest in this bracket. Interestingly, this contradicts the widespread notion of willingness to pay, which could actually indicate income and financial capacities may not be the primary driver of green wall investments. Despite the majority of individuals wanting to be green, there was a clear barrier of uncertainty. As majority respondents stated that information was actually their most desired form of assistance, with particular preference for resources such as advice, guidance, workshop, technical support and consultations. The secondary form of assistance that was desired was fiscal, identifying that financial barriers actually weren't the primary obstacle to green wall implementation. When queried on what was considered to be a important consideration prior to construction, responses varied substantially across all demographics except education. The most frequently identified consideration for green wall development related to operation, structural soundness, weather resistance and maintenance. This could be significantly influential on the considerations of green wall development with females having the greatest number of considerations prior to construction than any other demographic. This could be driven by the fact that females are generally more environmentally conscientious and males and tend to commit and maintain to environmentally friendly habits, more so than their male counterparts. To create new environmental practices, they tend to evaluate and consider the implications of going green to a greater degree. While the consensus among the Australian community was found to be positive with respect to green walls, there was a clear demand for greater educational, technical and fiscal support to provide necessary resources for green wall development. The concerns are often seen as barriers, but when they overcome, there's a market increase in green wall implementation. This can be seen across Europe and America and Singapore, but also slowly in Australia. In 2017, Urga et al demonstrated the impact of education and informational support. As the Australian local government areas that provided this kind of support tended to have a greater number of green wall and green roof installations. This current study is identified which demographic groups are more likely to be receptive to green initiatives. And this information could be a value to governments and other organizations alike when developing their educational materials. Ultimately, if these barriers were addressed and the assistance was provided, then we'd be on the right path to becoming a vertically green Australia. Thank you.


I really like they have those international community where they organize all kinds of activities for international students or people who works here. This is very international so then this is a very good point when it comes to university level because you actually get to know a lot of international students and this makes a really good global culture so to speak.


First John chapter five, I'll read verses one through five and We'll get into our study first John chapter five beginning at verse one reading to verse five Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God and Everyone who loves him who begot also loves him who has begotten of him By this we know that we love the children of God When we love God and keep his commandments for this is the love of God that we keep his commandments And his commandments are not burdensome for whatever is born of God Overcomes the world and this is the victory That has overcome the world our faith Who is he who? Overcomes the world But he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God now last time we were together obviously we closed in chapter 4 verses 20 and 21 and in those verses John was giving us at least Three reasons when you combine it with verse one at least three reasons for loving people in verse 20 He had said love for God isn't possible if you don't love people How can you love that which is invisible in other words if you don't love that which is visible It's easier to love someone you've seen than to love someone that you haven't seen and so he's saying how can you say you love God who you haven't seen you know face-to-face and and yet you hate you hate your brother or your sister whom you do see And so one he was saying there are reasons to love God and to love people and it's a mark of a believer To love those whom God loves you can't love the invisible if you don't love the visible and in verse 21 He said that God had commanded us to love him as well as loving other people God has commanded us to love him as well as other people verse 21 chapter 4 this commandment We have from him that he who loves God Must love his brother also. It's a commandment Now I want to remind you of something On one occasion it's recorded in the Gospel of Matthew a lawyer An expert in Jewish ritual or religious law a lawyer Had approached Jesus Christ with a question. It's found in Matthew 22 36 through 40 The question was this teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?  Jesus said it like this By this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another Now love I want to develop this because as we've been going through first John I've read so many times that he's spoken about love right and I Made an assumption we all know what love is and I think to some degree of course. That's true We do but I still remember We had a young teenager who was babysitting our children and I was giving her a ride home after she had Had been taking care of the kids and as we're driving home I might have mentioned this recently. I've been thinking about it often Especially in light of the fact that John keeps commanding us a love on another and I asked her a question And we lived about 20 25 minutes away from where she lived in and I gave her all the time She needed I said can you do me a favor and she said yes, and we're driving and he said can you tell me what love is? Can you? She says well, yeah, of course I can I said please do For about 20 25 minutes she said well, it's kind of like it is it's sort of she had no clue She had no clue So I was thinking about that the other day and I thought you know, I I use Christian ease a lot here They use words that I'm assuming we all know we all know the content of we know what it means and all of that So I thought I'm gonna share a little bit about that for a moment as an introduction Because love is more than emotion and love is more than a sentiment Love is something that actually demands an action in Romans 13 verse 10 Paul said love does no harm to a neighbor Therefore he said love is the fulfillment of the law In Galatians 5 13 through 16 brother and you've been called the Liberty Only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another For all the law is fulfilled in one word even in this you shall love your neighbor as yourself But if you bite and devour one another take heed that you are not consumed one of another This I say then walk in the spirit. You shall not fulfill the loss of the flesh Love one another love God love others on this hang all of the law and the prophets Love for God is demonstrated by a concern for other people It's something that requires sacrifice and It's something that requires a heart of a servant Those are the two things that are attributed to Jesus Christ when it's spoken of him as being our example So love one another he said even as I have loved you Love one another in a sacrificial way. He washed their feet He said if I then being your Lord and master of wash your feet you ought to be washing the feet of one another I have done this. He said as an example to you and So in the New Testament there are two basic scriptures that refer to Jesus as an example One is of servanthood and one is of sacrifice So Jesus Christ is God in the flesh God is love Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. He's love incarnated and those who follow him are to love one another And so that's what he's commanded of us and that's what we do And so as we're looking at this he's speaking concerning these things now in verse 1 notice what it says it says Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God and everyone who loves him who begot also loves him Who has begotten of him? now Love for God and love for our brother or our sister in the Lord is Inseparable it is found in the very nature of a family relationship You see the leavers love one another why well obviously we've been commanded to but We love one another because we're the family of God Earlier he had said that believers aren't like Cain a man who murdered his own brother and So one of the ways that we can know that we're saved is the love we have for our faith family You see faith and love working together produces what you call spiritual assurance Yet said in chapter 3 verse 14 of 1st John We know that we have passed from death to life Because we love the brethren he who does not love his brother abides in death So one of the ways I can have an assurance of my salvation is if I care about you if I care about Church of the believers It's easy to love those who are like me. It's easy to love those who get along with me It's easy to love those who agree with me But it's not so easy to love those who may not care for me or agree with me Those people have a tendency of pushing off of bridges. No, I'm just kidding loving each other the mark of a Christian and Again the mark of the movement that I got saved in but it's been the mark of the movement since Jesus Christ initiated Christianity It isn't something that just came to be in in in the Jesus movement It is something that has always been that if you love God, you're gonna love others and so Faith and love work together and as I said that that creates what you call the spiritual assurance to us a confidence Now how did we become family verse 1? By by he says by believing that Jesus is the Christ Now in chapter 4 verse 3 he had written every spirit that doesn't confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God and This is the spirit of the Antichrist which he says you have heard was coming and is now already in the world Now remember as we've been going through first John some of you have been with us through this through this book You'll remember in our introduction I was pointing to a Philosophic group that had become had begun to infiltrate the church of the time of John and they were referred to as the Gnostics I mentioned to you that the word Gnostic is actually a derivative of a Greek word gnosis and Gnosis is a word that speaks of knowledge So they referred to themselves as Gnostics or those with knowledge and the Gnostics had begun to infiltrate the church I mentioned to you that the Gospel of John really was written as an apology Apologetic against the Gnostic influence as well as his epistles especially first John and so the Gnostics were contending that That Jesus Christ could not be God in the flesh They didn't believe that he was God's son and They're not alone in that by the way Even to this day those who belong to the Jewish faith don't believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God We know that But neither do Muslims Muslims don't believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God in their in their religious book the Koran It says in a section called Surah Surah. It's Surah 23 91 It reads from the Koran. No son did Allah beget Nor is there any God along with him in Surah 112 3 he beget it not nor is he begotten So that's a direct Challenge to the Christian faith. So it didn't just occur 2000 years ago with the Gnostics. It's continued to this day So Christians are begotten We're brought into the family of God and the way that happens is we have a shared faith in Jesus Christ When you trust it in Christ as your savior, you were born into his family. There are quite a number of people who mistakenly Believe them sounds to be Christians Because they've gone through religious rituals, you know that and I know that many of you in this room would say yeah, I understand that I Believe that I was a Christian through Christian ritual When when you had asked me what are you I would have said and I did say I'm a Christian I didn't use the word Christian. I used my religious denomination for me. It was Catholic. So I'd say well I'm a Catholic. Are you a Christian? No I'm a Catholic. That's just how I would respond because that's how I was trained You know, I was trained to do that.  I was taught that That's a a literal teaching I received Yes, you can go to other churches, but don't believe anything they say So from the very beginning in my religious life I uh I thought myself to be a Christian, but it was only because of religious rituals And many of us understand that many of us went around that and went around believing that same thing Well, the fact is the bible doesn't teach that we're saved through the ritual Trusting in jesus christ is what saves us. We know that i'm giving you basic things You know that and by trusting jesus were brought into his family in john 3 verse 3 jesus replied Truly truly I tell you no one can see the kingdom of god unless he's born again I can still remember people when I was in the military I would share my faith as as new as I was in it. I was taught to share it and I shared what I knew And I can still remember People saying this and it went past my time in the service and continued on after I'd gotten out But I would say well, you know, I'm a christian and I had this happen more than once where they would say Well, you're a born againer and I said, do you know how one becomes a christian? Well, no, not really. I said, do you know that that we didn't invent the term born again? Because a lot of times people say that you you invented that no no this came out of jesus unless you're born again That came from christ. I didn't make that up He said unless you're born again, you will not see neither will you enter into the kingdom of god And so we entered into the body of christ not because my mom baptized me at this little catholic church By alvera street as every mexican kid in california was When I was four months old, I still have my baptismal certificate Now I I wasn't saved because of that I was saved because I received christ as lord and savior I was born again and and because we sincerely believe in him The bible speaks of us as being regenerated and not only are we regenerated given you life, but we are also transformed And so loving one another in christ Is an evidence of salvation Now he says in verse two by this we know that we love the children of god How can I know? Well, we love god and keep his commandments. This is the love of god That we keep his commandments And his commandments are not burdensome And so how can I be sure that that I love people? Well, my love for god and obedience to his commands Reveals that again through service and sacrifice You see the the fruit of loving god and keeping his commands Is going to be love for those whom he loves And so he says in verse three This is the love of god that we keep his commandments. His commandments are not burdensome So a life of obedience to the things of god demonstrates that you love him John 14 verse 15 If you love me Keep my commandments. That's what jesus said Luke 6 46. Why do you call me lord lord and do not the things that I say? How can you say that I'm your lord because at that time the word lord meant that there was a rulership over me The one who was my lord the one that was lording over me or the one who was lord over me Was to be obeyed You didn't have attitudes with those who lord were the lord over you in that that society So how can you say you love me jesus said? If you don't keep my commandments How can you say you have relationship with me when it doesn't matter to you what I say? How can you say that? You know if I was dating a young lady and and I said these things are important to me and she didn't care If I said these things mattered to me But she didn't even bother to figure out why or ask questions or even On occasion to do that what she knew would make me happy I would have to begin to wonder does she really love me Because she doesn't do the things that I ask of her. It's very simple. It's very basic But we can tell the lord. Oh, I love you so much. I'd go anywhere. I'd do anything But the fact is sometimes we just don't do anything. He wants us to do and he says that So one of the ways for us to know that we're in love with him is when we love others So he said the command to love one another is not a burden It's a joy. It isn't a burden It's not a burden for me to love my wife It's not a burden for me to love my children It's not a burden for me to love my grandchildren It's not a burden for me to love my friends. That's not a burden. It's not hard. It's not difficult You see obedience to that command creates a community And a community that god is pleased with Now again, I mentioned this a moment ago. We often speak of love, but sometimes we need to define it What is love? I mentioned that a moment ago that some people really can't give you a definition Now i'm not going to give you a thorough study. I'm just going to touch on a few things And if you take notes as found in 1 Corinthians 13 verse 4 through 8 The first portion he begins to describe Paul does what love is this is what he says. I'm just going to read through this In 1st Corinthians 13 verse 4 to verse 8 He said love Is long suffering In other words love resists becoming impatient even when it's wrong Love is kind that word Kind means thoughtful or considerate it speaks of doing things in the kindest of ways That's what by the way for me. I when I first got saved I was speaking to somebody I was just saved I was speaking to somebody and I said this is something I'm asking god to make me and this is when I was 20 years old He's been working on me for 52 years in this one thing because I asked him for this I said lord, I want to be known as when he was kind Kind I I'm very very attracted to those who are kind It's a thoughtful person a considerate person someone who does something in a very kind way He says love doesn't envy We've been looking at that envy is the sin that That god jesus crucified Envy is harboring evil towards others because of their success Love doesn't parade itself Love doesn't seek to win the applause of others That's one of those things in ministry That you want to as as as believers in christ You ought to you ought to and I don't mean this in the most In the way that it could appear but I I think you ought to Use that as a measuring rod for people like me who are pastors You know, um, do I seek the applause of man? If I do that's wrong If I'm asking for people to pay attention to me or regard me or or applaud for me or There's something wrong with that There's something wrong with that and I have to say this quickly but it's true in our Churches today sometimes a pastor becomes the hero That's not a good thing. There's only one hero. That's jesus christ and the pastor should be submitted to him Heatfully so love doesn't parade itself. It doesn't seek the applause of man Someone once said they seek the applause of heaven He says, uh Love love isn't puffed up Puffed up it speaks of having an inflated estimation of your own importance Don't you know who I am that kind of thing love doesn't have that attitude an inflated estimation Love isn't rude We know what rudeness is love doesn't treat people wrongly Love doesn't seek its own meaning Seeking what it means is we seek to to to care for others because we we refuse to seek to have things done our own way Love isn't provoked. It isn't easily irritated angrily flaring up when pushed today. I was pulling into a parking space to get a cup of coffee this morning Yep, and somebody opened up their door as I pulled in Their windows were tinted so darkly. I couldn't see somebody in the car And I wasn't speeding in I always go in slowly but as I was pulling in She opened her door and creased You know hit my hit the right front end of my of my car And I was talking to me and I was saying, you know, I was just I told her a little while ago.  Um those things happen, right those things happen And and so, you know, I flattened her tires, but Love isn't provoked It isn't easily irritated Love thinks no evil. It's interesting when you read the words thinks no What that means is it doesn't catalog sin It doesn't keep a scorecard It's not somebody who writes things down This guy was telling me how his wife whenever they have an argument She gets historical And I said you mean hysterical and he said no Historical she reminds me of everything I've ever done wrong, you know, so love doesn't keep a scorecard Love doesn't rejoice in iniquity. Love doesn't take pleasure when someone fails Love rejoices in truth Meaning love is blessed by other people's virtues Love bears all things That means that you endure insults and trials difficulties and you don't complain Love believes all things because we trust God's promises And We hope the best in people Love hopes all things Even after others have stopped hoping we rest in hope Love endures all things We remain steadfast even in the midst of suffering Love, he said never fails because love endures forever. It never ends So the command to love Isn't a burden The word burden when he speaks about it being burdensome it it simply means something that's heavy and weight It speaks of something severe Or stern something cruel something unsparing God's commands are not burdensome because Love for God lightens his commands now Why are they not burdensome well one because they've been given to us as a benefit To benefit our lives in Deuteronomy 5 29 Oh that their hearts would be inclined to fear me to keep all my commands always So that it might go well with them and their children forever God's commands were intended to bless to restrict evil behavior But to put us in the position where he could pour out his blessings Oh that they would be inclined to fear me he said In Deuteronomy 10 12 and 13 Israel what does the lord your god require of you? But to fear the lord your god to walk in all his ways and to love him And to serve the lord your god with all your heart with all your soul To keep the commandments of the lord in his statutes, which I command you this day for your good Why are his commands not burdensome guys because they're for our good Every parent in here knows that the majority of the orders you've given to your children Have not been to restrict them from enjoying life But as to protect them from harm that can come by making bad decisions It's not because you're mad at them that you give them orders It's because you love them Because you know that if you put them in a position of doing that which is right Their life will be going well. They'll be blessed And sometimes they don't do what is right and then You have to spank them like when my son David was very young and probably Six or seven he knew he knew what was right and what was wrong and He had done something wrong and I said to him son, you know right now I I really ought to uh to spank you I said because um What you did really deserves me Chastising you, but I'm going to teach you a lesson son He's around seven.   Oh, thank you dad. Thank you. Oh great one. I said, yeah No problem Then he did it again a couple days later And I went in and I said, you know, I told you not to do that You know what he started doing? He started yelling grace Grace dad grace. I said no law. Wow, you know You gave him orders commands So that their life would be blessed and so they're not burdensome god gives us Commands because he wants to bless us secondly It gives us directions on how to please him He tells us what he requires of us in Psalm 119 104 105 I gain understanding from your precepts. Therefore.  They give us direction third He supplies us with the power to perform what he commands God never gives to you a command that he doesn't also supply the power to obey He gives you a command and the power You shall receive power after that. The holy spirit has come upon you He shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, unto the uttermost parts of the earth. You shall receive power So he has given us the power to obey those things he commands In Galatians in chapter three verses three and four, Paul said it like this Are you so foolish? Having begun by the spirit. Are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain if indeed it was in vain? Are you going to fulfill the things God called you to do by the energies of your fleshly nature? Or are you going to walk in the power of the holy spirit? I was Pastor Chuck was my pastor for many years Chuck Smith from Calvary Coast to Mesa I was part of a board with him and remain on similar board to this day And we would meet with pastor Chuck for planning retreats and things and And every time we would meet there would be a number of us from all over the united states I can still remember we'd be seated at a table Several tables actually linked together and we'd be talking amongst ourselves many of us knew each other for a long time We'd be visiting catching up When Chuck would walk in And when pastor Chuck walked in a lot of people I think misunderstand our relationship with them some think that That we worshiped him and there's nothing further than the truth. We loved him. We knew he was a man He made his mistakes and all of that we expected that he would But he also was a man of God that we respected very much and he was our pastor and he was my pastor for a long time But when he would walk in it was also it was really funny because none of us were young men You know, we're all older and all He'd walk in and we'd get real quiet like daddy just walked in the room It was really kind of interesting and funny and he would come in and he would sit down. He always sat in the same place He gets quiet And the very first thing that he would be asked Every meeting when we gathered like this was this pastor chuck. What are you concerned with? What are you concerned with what is on your heart? What are you concerned with pastor? Have we begun in the spirit? And shall we be completed by the flesh? He said that every time he was asked what is your great concern That the churches the calvary ministries Will begin to try and attract people through fleshly means And no longer rely on the power of the spirit and the power of the word of god And that's a lesson I learned from my own pastor, but that's something you find in scripture Have we begun in the spirit only to be made complete by the flesh? No if we began in the spirit We continue in that way and he supplies the power for us to do so now notice verse 4 Whatever is born of god overcomes the world Overcomes speaks of conquering it speaks of carrying off the victory A commentator said this speaks of christians who hold fast to their faith Even unto death against the power of their enemies temptations and persecutions So here's something that we need to be aware of We today I believe really need to take this to heart.  We just went through Ephesians chapter 6 recently We have spiritual war Christians are actually and this may be something people don't Maybe don't feel good about what me saying, but it's true. I think most of you will don't we're warriors. That's what we are We're called by god to be warriors We don't get participation trophies You know Everybody's a winner. We no no you're in you're in battle. Aren't you you're in spiritual warfare every day You can't even get a cup of coffee You but you are You have to put the helmet on you have to have the shield you have to have the sword You have to be ready and prepared and I think the church is asleep at the wheel We really need to understand what's going on is demonic. It is spiritually demonic It's not just a political thing It's a demonic thing when you take a little boy and tell him he can be a little girl if he just wants to be You've got something demonic going on and here we are listening to psycho babble when the fact is god created male and female It's so basic and yet we're in an argument today and it's true So we're in a war and the war is not necessarily though it is but not necessarily for my old soul You're old I'm going after your grandchildren I'm going after the babies I'm going after the kids. I'm going to have a drag queen reading stories at a public library and you can do nothing about it You can't do anything about it because it's a right thing for them to do They need to be without discrimination the word discrimination means the ability to discern or make a judgment No, they have to have discernment. They have to have discrimination. They have to be aware What is right? What is wrong? What is black? What is white? What is sweet? What is sour? They need to know those things. Where are they going to learn that? They learn it at home. They learn it through their parents. They learn it in their churches if they go. They should be You need and I need to know and and I'm I'm aware of this and I hope we all are I hope I'm speaking to myself right now You're in a war You know it and I know it And there is a constant where you see Satan doesn't Go on vacation He is after you 24 7 He wants to destroy you But when he doesn't go after as the back slider because the back slider does him a lot of good Because people say if that's a christian then I don't need it No, he's after the warriors. That's who he goes after the hardest target. That's what he does We learned that in the military go after the hard target Go after the hard one and that's what the enemy does. He goes after us So we're in a battle Not only on behalf of ourselves, but also for others And the christian life is a life that encounters adversity as well as resistance So because of that we remain firm in our faith in god and his word In the book of hebrus chapter 10 verse 23 the writer said this he said let us hold fast The profession of our faith without wavering For he is faithful that promise when he says let us hold fast that word hold fast that those words Speaks of being unyielding Without wavering firmly Someone pointed out that these words could be used in a nautical sense It meant to hold fast Fight through the storm Holding fast to our faith Means that you stand upon your faith And you're unwavering It means that we're not intimidated that we're not convinced that we're not brainwashed by outside forces I hope we're all this way because you know, I I spent a long time in secular college and More than one of my professors was intent On brainwashing us with their political or their psychological or their philosophic beliefs They wanted to convert us to their way of thinking it's worse now than it was when I was in school Much worse because it starts earlier Starts in preschool now Goes all the way up And so we need to stand firm. We need to know what we believe and we need to not be intimidated I remember on one occasion I was asked to speak At a high school graduation when I arrived The person in charge It was a baccalaureate the person in charge said to me now you have to realize that You know, this is a public school. You can't speak about Jesus And I said really? Yeah, you have to keep your words neutral. I said really?  You've completed the courses you've You're you're on the brink of graduating. You've gained a lot of knowledge But the most important knowledge is this the knowledge of jesus christ The knowledge that he died on a cross for you.  We're not to be belligerent and pugnacious We're not to be picking fights with people That's a very that's not a good thing either You just need to be prepared with an answer to give it at any moment that god gives you opportunity That's what you do and you don't hold back I I did that quite often. I did in in different college classes You know, I would speak about jesus christ. I had people mock me. Yeah, of course, of course, they're going to But you know what? if somebody's listening If somebody's gonna hear that matters And and and I I found that a long time ago that that sometimes people are just seated They're waiting for somebody to say what they'd like to be said I remember two ladies in one class and they they pretty much took over the class and I was kind of tired of it And finally, you know, they did it every week and then finally I finally asked the professor a question. I still remember saying to him something about it was a marriage and family class and I said to him Is it is it true that that it is more It's more beneficial to a young child if there's a father and mother in the home Doesn't that help him in the future? Just it's a basic question. I wanted him to speak about that One of the ladies Turned and said to him Well, she said to the professor and then she turned and looked at me, but she said can I answer that question And I said listen if I was wanting your opinion, I'd asked you I want to hear his not yours. She didn't like that and the other one jumped in. There were two of them tag team And so I I talked to her too and afterwards People walked up to me saying thank you Thank you Because you know what? There are many people who want to hear truth And here we are being told be quiet. You can't say that No No, I don't believe and I'm not teaching you to go out and pick fights I'm not what I'm saying is just be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks And when god gives you opportunity take the opportunity Sometimes it's just a short burst Sometimes they may ask questions, but be ready We aren't we aren't concerned. We hold fast and we're not going to be brainwashed by the world He's already spoken concerning the world's influence in chapter two It said love not the world neither the things in the world But we need to understand we have an adversary In first peter chapter five verses eight and nine it says be sober be vigilant Because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour Resist him steadfast in the faith knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world So what do we what do we do? Well, james 121 says lay aside all filthiness Overflow of wickedness receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls There is no promise or guarantee for us to live a trouble free affliction free life We know that on the contrary the battle's real and injuries are suffered But we remain firm In revelation 2 verse 10 jesus speaking to the church of smirna said this He said do not fear what you're about to suffer Behold the devil is about to throw some of you into prison That you may be tested for 10 days you will have tribulation But be faithful into death And i will give you the crown of life In matthew 16 18 jesus simply said the gates of hell will not prevail You see ultimately we desire To say what paul said in 2 Timothy 4 7 he said i have fought the good fight i have finished the race I have kept the faith And that's only possible through christ and his power the power he makes available to you We stand firm and hold fast to what god has said In 1 Corinthians 15 57 paul said thanks be to god He gives us the victory through our lord jesus christ And though we have internal and external pressures, we are still overcomers What is it that gives us the the ability to overcome verse 4? This is the victory that has overcome the world even our faith Victory comes through faith and christ finished work on the cross We're not saved by naive or blind optimism our faith rests on the victory that's been gained by jesus's work Remember one of his final words on the cross was It is finished Verse 5 who is he who overcomes the world? But he who believes that jesus is the son of god The overcomer knows that jesus supplies power to overcome And so romans 8 31 and 32 what shall we then say to these things? If god be for us Who can be against us? He who spared not his own son but delivered him up for us all How shall he not with him?


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