Welcome to The Commentaries, a podcast series from Tan in which you'll learn how to read and understand history's greatest Catholic works from today's greatest Catholic scholars. In every series of The Commentaries, your expert host will be your personal guide to not just read the book, but to live the book, shining the light of its eternal truths into our modern darkness. Visit tancommentaries.com to get your copy of the book and to subscribe for access to all the great reading plans, new episodes, bonus content and exclusive deals for listeners of The Commentaries. Hello, I'm Father Robert Nixon, a Benedictine monk and director of the Institute for Benedictine Studies at the Abbey of the Most Holy Trinity in New Norcia, Western Australia. And this is The Commentaries series on The Imitation of Christ by the great Thomas Akampus. Today is day one of this series and we'll be covering book one, chapters one through five of the Tan edition of the book. But before we get into the actual pages of this amazing work, let's begin with a short prayer followed by a brief look at the historical significance and the influence of The Imitation of Christ. We begin in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Enlighten, Lord, our souls and hearts, and to our minds, thy grace impart. Lead us by thy gentle hand, teaching us to understand the wisdom of thine only Son, the humble, patient, holy One, Helper, as imitate Christ's ways, and live his gospel all our days. Amen. The Imitation of Christ, the book which we'll be discussing in this series, is the second best-selling book of all time, second only to the Bible itself. How did this come to be? A fascinating question. The author of The Imitation of Christ, Thomas the Kempers, lived from about 1380 until 1471. He was born in a small German village known as Kempers, hence his surname. Of fairly humble stock, his father was a blacksmith, his mother was a teacher at a very small local school. From an early age, Thomas showed great holiness, as well as great sharpness of mind and intelligence. In due course, he went and joined a group called the Brotherhood of the Common Life, which was a kind of religious organization, but without any formal vows, and he studied there for several years. After this, he felt called to commit himself more fully, and so he entered the Order of Saint Augustine as a canon regular. He then had a very long career living within his monastic community. Of course, his exceptional intelligence and learning meant that he could very easily have risen to great heights, either in the church or in the civil hierarchy, but instead he chose the path of humility. He served as the chronicler of his own community. He was responsible also for giving arms, and he developed a great reputation as a teacher, as a preacher, and also as a spiritual counselor. It's as a spiritual counselor that he speaks to us through the imitation of Christ. And this book has been tremendously popular since it first appeared. It's appeared in over 2,000 different editions, being translated into virtually every language imaginable. The Tan edition of it is quite wonderful, a very good translation, very clearly laid out, and this is a book which, if I might say, has influenced countless generations of Catholics, including a great many saints, people like Saint Ignatius Loyola, as well as a lot of popes. Pope Pius X, Pius XII, and so forth. It's been favorite reading for so many, and it's the kind of book which you can pick up and just read one paragraph or one chapter a day and find that you've got enough material there to meditate on quite profoundly for the course of the whole day. It's divided into four separate books or large sections. So these four separate sections are then divided into smaller chapters. Many of the chapters are quite short, so we'll be getting through quite a number of them in the course of each of our sessions. Well, in this first session, we're going to talk about the beginning of it. So we're going to be talking about book one, chapters one through five. And this plays an important foundation for the whole work which we'll be pursuing. So our very first chapter is called On the Imitation of Christ and the Contempt of All the Veneties of the World. And this is so important, almost the key point of the entire book.  So Christ, alone of all humanity, is the exemplar, the perfection of the Christian life. Of course, by definition, He is the ultimate Christian. So this conscious imitation of Christ is something which we should all cultivate. But an important prerequisite of imitating Christ, of putting Christ above everything else, is that we can overcome, that we should overcome our attachments to the veneties of this passing world. And this is something which Tempest talks about very many times. That we all find ourselves, whether willingly or unwillingly, ensnared and entangled within the things of this world. And I mean, of course, it's impossible completely to avoid being involved in the world. Even as a monk, I'm involved in many different things. And sometimes these things can become distractions. So He tells us that we need to begin our study by a meditation on the life of Christ. To imagine what He did. To imagine almost to visualize the kind of person that He was. And then to consciously imitate it. It doesn't mean imitating it in like a fake or artificial way. But trying to take on board His characteristics of patience, humility, charity, obedience to God the Father as much as we are able. And He tells us in this first chapter that it is vanity to seek after the riches which must perish and trust in them. It is vanity also to be ambitious of honors and to raise oneself to a high station. It is vanity to follow the lusts of the flesh and to desire that for which thou must afterwards be grievously punished. It is vanity to wish for a long life and to take little care of leading a good life. It is vanity also to mind this present life and not look forward unto those things which are to come. So this is the key point. Vanity in this context needs to be understood as futility, as something pointless, something which is foolish and ill-advised. So we need to recognize that everything in this world is passing to keep our hearts and our minds fixed on that eternal world. And we do this of course by following the example which Jesus offers. So then our next chapter is on having a humble opinion of oneself, on humility. And it is often said that humility is the foundation of all the other virtues. If we think about the very first sin, not the sin of Adam and Eve, but going back even further to the sin of Satan and the wicked angels who followed him, it was one of pride. It was seeking to become more than what they were intended to be. And this is something to which human beings are often very prone, either through insecurity or through a kind of compulsion to achieve, to assert ourselves in some ways. And in trying to become who or more than what God created us to be, we actually end up becoming less than what we could be. So there's a certain wisdom and simplicity in humility which rewards all of those who find it. It's much easier for a person who is humble to be content than it is for a person who's pride. And he talks about this. He says, So this is all keeping in mind one's own fragility and limitedness, not putting oneself down unnecessarily but thinking, you know, who am I? Why should I be giving primacy of place to myself all the time? And instead to give that primacy of place to God, to work for the glory of God rather than the glory of self. Because in finding this glory of God, we find what alone can give us true and lasting happiness. The next chapter is on the doctrine of truth and of course truth is so important. Jesus tells us that he is the truth itself. And this is a truth which cannot be articulated in words or concepts. A truth which comes through a personal encounter with the risen Christ. And from this chapter, Thomas writes it to us. And what need we concern ourselves about the terms of philosophy? He to whom the eternal word speaks is set at liberty from a multitude of opinions. From one word are all things. And this one thing speaks. And this is from the beginning, which also speaks to us. Without this word, no one understands or judges rightly. And what is this word? This word is the word of God, the Logos, who was incarnate in the person of Jesus. Who was expressed perfectly only in the person of Jesus. So to come to know Jesus is, in fact, to come to know truth. And you know, he talks to says, don't be too distracted with philosophy, with art and science. He's not putting down those things in themselves. I mean, after all, he was a scholar and a teacher. He certainly encouraged his students to pursue these things to the best of their ability. But in doing that, it's important to recognize that there are only tools for the journey. They're not the absolute truth in itself. They might help us from time to time in our search for the truth. They might help us do our job or our profession or whatever it is. But in the end, they're not the ultimate truth. And he talks about this. He says that we should recognize how quickly the glory of this world passes away. Would that our lives have been answerable to our learning, that they would have studied and read well. How many perish in the world through vain learning, who care little for the service of God. He is truly great, who is great in charity.  And Holdeth as Nort, the pinnacle of honor. He is truly prudent, who looks upon all earthly things as nothing, that he may gain Christ. And you know, when we hear these words to look upon all earthly things as nothing, we shouldn't think this is kind of negative, having a negative attitude towards God's creation or our fellow human beings, but rather putting them in their proper context. They're nothing, not in themselves, but nothing in comparison to the endless glory of God. And it's in this context that Thomas the campus is calling us carefully to reassess our own preoccupations, our own attachments. Chapter four talks about prudence in our understanding. And he tells us we must not be easy in giving credit to every word and suggestion, but carefully and leisurely weigh the matter according to God. Alas, such is our weakness that we often more readily believe and speak of another that which is evil than that which is good. And how true this is. I mean, human nature is such that we've all got a propensity to enjoy hearing scandals about other people, that we somehow love to enjoy also sharing these scandals. And I think we're told to kind of pull up a little bit to think, what are we actually doing in all of these? We're told that we shouldn't credit everything we hear. And this is a particular danger these days in which we're told such a multitude of things by family and friends, but also by governments and media. We can't believe everything that we're told. We need to sit down with everything in the presence of Christ and think, you know, is this true? Is this not true? Or is it just one of the many things which might be true or might not be? You know, and then to treat it accordingly. And in this lies true prudence, this kind of power of discrimination, of not jumping to wrong conclusions. And Thomas tells us a good life makes a man wise according to God and expert in many things. The more humble a man is in himself, the more subject to God, the more wise will he be in all things and the more at peace. And this obedience to God, this subjection to God, I think the surest and most certain way of attaining peace and happiness in this life for whatever peace and happiness is possible in this life is by strict obedience to the commands of God, to the laws of church and so forth. And we're told in the practical reflections which follow this chapter and their practical reflections and prayers after each of the chapters, which I think make this 10 edition very wonderful, we're told that nothing is more opposite to charity or more fatal to salvation than the evil reports we make of one another, whether they be true or false, because they irritate the mind, disorder the heart, ferment divisions and imbitter hatreds. And because we cannot obtain God's pardon for them, unless we resolve in our confessions to repair the evil which we have done and to reconcile those who we have set at various. So this principle of speaking evil of no one, as far as we can possibly avoid it, is a very wise piece of advice. We finally move to our last chapter of reading the Scriptures and this is a practice which Thomas the Kempers loved himself. He's known to have copied the entire Bible by hand because this is in the days before printing or when printing was just beginning. He copied the entire Bible by hand no less than four times and what a huge job that would be if you can imagine. And he tells us that truth is to be sought for in holy Scripture, not eloquence. All holy Scripture ought to be read with that Spirit with which it was made. So he's telling us that we should read the Scriptures with a view to finding truth in them, not a view just becoming expert in the Scriptures so we can share it with other people or show off or whatever we might want to do. And in doing this we need to treat the Scriptures in their proper context, in the context in which they're written. And it's important to remember that our Catholic attitude towards the Scriptures is quite different of that from Protestants. Of course we accept the validity of Scriptures as the Word of God but they can be interpreted properly only in the context of the tradition of the church. So it's not up to each individual person to take Scripture and make of it what they will. The Scriptures speak to each person individually but in the end their correct interpretation is given to us through the tradition of the church. And we're told to read the sacred Scripture and the books of piety with the same Spirit in which they were written. That is to read them in a quest for truth, for instruction, for edification. So this again is asking us humility. Well I think if we keep our hearts fixed on this imitation of Christ, fixed on the cultivation of humility, prudence, moderation, restraint of speech, of grounding ourselves in the Scriptures, in the Scriptures and in the traditions of the church which ultimately can't be separated, we will advance far in the imitation of Christ. And in imitating Christ we will find this tremendous peace and contentment which He alone can give. And that brings us to the end of day one in our study of the imitation of Christ. Thank you so much for listening and for joining me on your journey to grow deeper in your spiritual life. Next time we'll be discussing Book 1, chapters 6 through 11 in which the author writes of pride, obedience, peace of mind and so much more. Until then, may God bless you all. This has been an episode of The Commentaries, a podcast brought to you by Tan. To follow the show, study more of the greatest Catholic classics and to support The Commentaries and other great free content from Tan. Visit tancommentaries.com to subscribe and use coupon code COM25 to get 25% off your next order including the imitation of Christ and countless more spiritual works to deepen your interior life and guide you to heaven.


Hello and welcome to the presentation about Quarkus, its APIs, and the way they client and break, and how to handle that. My name is Lukas Karici, I'm a senior software engineer at Red Hat, and this presentation is pre-recorded, so I should be somewhere in the chat round, and you should be able to ask the questions. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's just jump right in. So, imagine, you're like me, you're working on a large software project with lots of dependencies. That, you know, are very complex graph that is interdependent and making upgrades there, usually breaks something, at least. And, you know, fixing that is a lot of frustration to go through. Frankly, most of the time stuff works, and it's wonderful. So, I'm talking here about library APIs, obviously, not about the REST APIs, but just the application programming interfaces in the polished sense of the word. So, this presentation should be about Quarkus. And, from a very high level, Quarkus is just a tool or runtime that you can build your application with, and it provides you using its extensions with a set of libraries that you can use in your application. And the extensions of Quarkus do the magic of build time, you know, initialization, augmentation of your code bootstrapping, such that the resulting code is faster and provides, or consumes less memory than it would if you just used libraries with common Java runtime, like some EE server or spring. So, where are the APIs here? Obviously, the Quarkus core needs to provide some API to the extensions so that they can instruct it how to do the build time initialization and code augmentation bootstrapping. And there are also APIs between your application and the libraries that the extensions provide to your library. So, yeah, the extensions, as I said, provide the APIs to you and consume the API of Quarkus core, and there is a lot of them. I counted 187, but I'm sure there's more. And the thing is that every upgrade of the third party library that the extension provides to your application can, in theory, break the API because of the third library breaking the API. So, you as extension author need to be very careful about what and when you upgrade, and you need to make sure that you don't break your use of Quarkus users with that. Quarkus core, as I said, provides the build time augmentation and bootstrapping and is used by extensions to do this magic. So, there are many moving parts in the API of Quarkus mainly because of the extensions and the third party libraries that they bring into the picture. So, you know, releasing a new version of Quarkus is usually quite a complex juggling act between providing new features and fixes and not breaking the API. So, it would be nice if there was a set of automated checks that would prevent, you know, accidental changes and human error in this complicated process. So, there happens to be a tool called RevAPI or RevAPI, however, we want to pronounce it that I've been developing for the past seven years. And it provides the API checks to the users. It's got a Maven plugin, third party provided cradle plugin, and it's mainly geared towards library authors. So that, you know, during your daily work when you're developing new features and fixes, you remind it during the build that your changes are breaking the API so that you can make them an informed decision. About whether to do that or not. For that, it's got, as I said, integration with build tools and it's got reporting capabilities so that you can then, you know, provide some summary of the changes that your new version of your library is making. And it's not just about Java code, it's going beyond that currently into YAML and JSON. And with that, let's see a demo of how RevAPI works within Quarkus and what it provides to it. So let's put ourselves in the shoes of an extension developer and have taken Flyway extension of Quarkus as an example. And let's see how our, you know, daily work would look like with API checks in place. In Quarkus, there is a profile that you need to activate for the API checks to kick in and that's what we are going to use here. So I know that the Flyway extension has upgraded the Flyway library since 1.10 release of Quarkus. So let's now, let's imagine I just upgraded to 7.3 as a developer of the Flyway extension. And I want to make sure that everything is still OK API-wise. So I'm going to run Maven with Verify. I'm going to activate the API check profile. I'm not interested in tests in this case. And here I'm saying that I want to check dependencies. That's something that the Quarkus configuration for RevAPI switches off by default, because when Quarkus uses many of its modules interdependently, it produces basically false positives. But in case of extension, I actually do want to check my dependencies, my Flyway library that I'm exposing. So let's switch that on to true. And because RevAPI integration in Quarkus is still working in progress, I need to manually specify the base version I want to compare against, in this case 1.10.0 final. Otherwise, the default behavior of RevAPI is to use the latest released version, the latest non-snapshot. So let's run this and see what we get. Hi, Lukas from Future here. I'm speeding up time so that we make it to the presentation time limit. Thank you. And we see that stuff failed. We see that there are some methods removed in Flyway API configuration. Another one of those. Another one of those. I'm not sure, for example, if this is... I don't know Flyway, so maybe this is okay. But again, this is not the point that I want to make. I want to make the point that there's a tool that makes you aware of these changes. There is a method signature change, but it's somewhere in internal packages, so this is possibly okay. And another one in internal. Okay, so what are we going to do? We upgrade it to 7.3 Flyway library and we really do want that. So we take a look at this list of API packages reported by RevAPI and decide what to do with them. For example, here I would say changes in classes that are considered internal by Flyway, I guess we should just ignore those. So to do that, we need to tell RevAPI to just not even bother with these. And in the RevAPI parlance, this is called filtering. So we are going to filter out anything in an internal package of Flyway. So let's go to our IDE and now we're going to tell RevAPI to just ignore everything in internal packages. I think this should happen for any version of Flyway extension. So we are just going to put this in right in the POM file of the Flyway extension so that it is applied always. So I've prepared what we need to put here. So let me just paste that in and I'm going to explain what this all means. So we are configuring the RevAPI-Mable in plugin and we are modifying the analysis configuration. So we want to filter out certain types from the analysis. So analysis configuration is basically configuration for all the RevAPI extensions that are going to be running. So one of them is RevAPI filter and we are going to filter elements meaning, you know, classes, methods or fields. And we are going to exclude and this is a new thing that has been just added to RevAPI after like two or three years of me working on that. And this is very, I think quite advanced filtering for Java. This is specifically for Java and we are saying that we want to exclude any type i.e. class interface annotation enum that of which the full qualified name matches this globe pattern. So org, Flyway, whatever and there needs to be an internal package and any type after that. So with this in place, let's see what we get if we rerun the analysis. Oh, of course, it's not Flyway, it's FlywayDB, sorry. Okay, so these internal, the changes from the internal packages of Flyway are gone, but we need still to, you know, justify these changes. And the way I want to do this is that I want our users, the users of Flyway extension to be aware of these changes, you know, because we're upgrading, we're providing the Flyway library to the user application. And so the user when upgrading the Parkways extension should be aware that that brings along some consequences in Flyway as well. So the way to do that is not to filter out these elements, but to basically make them reported or documented, but not breaking the build. So the way we want to do that is in Parkways, there is a setup to provide like external files that can provide changes that have been deemed necessary per version of the extension or the module in question. And that file should be located in the root of the module that is exposing those API changes and the file should be called APIChangesXML. The way it's set up in a Parkways configuration, this file should have versions as its root element and then each child element should have the version that those changes are relevant for. Now, the development version is always 999 snapshot in Parkways. So this is the way we, it's currently set up that we need to reference that version. It's not ideal and we will probably work on that, but that's the way it is right now. And we want to say that we need to change the classification or change the way certain differences found by Revapi are reported. So there is an extension of Revapi called Revapi differences. So we will need to configure that here to basically take these changes into account but not break our build. And so the way we are going to do that is to consider all of them as documented, which the configuration is set up such that documented changes are not breaking the build. And it would be good to give a justification for these changes. So let me just place that in from my notes. So we are just going to say, you know, we think these API breaking changes in Flyway are okay and we want to move forward with them. Even though they're potentially breaking your code because we don't think that's going to either happen or that it's really necessary. So and then we are going to list the differences. If you look here at the build results, Revapi during when it found the problems, it output some suggestions what to do with them. You know, for example here, it suggests that we should ignore certain the change of removal of this method from Flyway API. Now we don't want to ignore it because that would make it disappear from reports and from the build also. We want to document it so we are not going to exactly use this. But we can we can just copy paste this here and copy the item as well. And we can ignore this. So this is saying that now we're going to document this change instead of us breaking on it. You know, the method, the removed method, this concrete method is going to get documented and we're fine with the change and we give justification for it. We gave it here so we don't need to repeat it here. And the same thing for the rest of the changes. So let me just paste that in from my notes. And if we save this file and rerun our analysis or build, we should get no errors and our build should be green. Yes. So the build succeeded. So everything that we configured to ignore or document has been accepted. And you know what? There's been quite a few changes in the API and this extension is supposed to be stable. And I'm personally not too comfortable with the amount of API changes that are happening in Flyway, even though they may be, you know, well intentioned and everything. But, you know, I want to give certain API stability guarantees and those changes don't allow me to do that. So let's just demote this from a stable extension to a preview and run the build. And what I want to show you here is that Revapi is not limited to just Java API checks. It's slowly moving, you know, in other directions as well. And one of those is the ability to check, you know, JSON and YAML files and stuff like that. And when we are talking about the integration of Revapi checks into Quarkus, we realize that, you know, there's a good potential for writing custom extensions just for Quarkus. And we've just started experimenting with that. And one of the results is that we have a dedicated Quarkus extension for Revapi. And what it does currently is kind of simple. It just looks at this Quarkus extension YAML file and reports the changes there. And so here you can see that, you know, it breaks the build because you've changed the status of the extension and that has consequences. And therefore it should be documented. So again, we want to document this change. Now we've done that before. So let's just continue doing the same thing. In API changes, we want to document that we are changing, we are documenting that we've changed the status. So again, with this in, the build should succeed. Yay, it succeeded. So that's all too good. You know, for me as a developer during my day-to-day work, I can upgrade what I need and I'm kind of pushed or forced to document the changes that I'm making as a Revapi configuration now. But you know, that would be kind of bad if stuff ended there. We want to have a way of reporting all those changes and reporting our justification for letting some of the API changes through. So again, the configuration of Revapi in Quarkus has been set up to produce reports. And those are put into target of the module that is being built. And one of those reports is a JSON report that just will list everything about the found differences that Revapi knows about. So if we look at this file, we can see all the differences that we've seen before and maybe even more of them that were not deemed breaking the build before. Like for example, here there has been some method added in Flyway API, but adding a method to a class is not a breaking change. So this didn't break our build, but it's documented. And because it's not breaking change, it doesn't have any justification because we didn't provide any. But the changes that were breaking the build and that we needed to put into our Revapi configuration have the justification here in the report that we entered in the configuration. And this is saying that removing the method from a class is a breaking change, both as a source incompatible change, as a binary incompatible change. But still we thought that this should go in our release. So this is no longer a breaking change, but a documented change because we said so. As you know, authors of the extensions, we have full power to do that. And these are the details that Revapi provides about the change. And so with this JSON file, basically the intention that we have in Quarkus is to use this JSON file and basically work with it further, produce different kinds of reports, which is easy to do. If you have a JSON file that you can then programmatically massage in a whatever way necessary. Another report that is being produced is basically just for human review. It's an ASCII doc file that gets built. And this is the same thing only as an ASCII doc document. So if you want to take a quick look at the rendered output. So this has a lot of work to be done on this. But yeah, so you see that the reports are not just limited to JSON or whatever, but they can also be nice graphical human readable things. Yeah, so basically that's that's all I wanted to show you. We have API checks. We can leave out certain stuff from analysis altogether. We can document certain API changes such that they are still known or documented, but they don't break the build. We are not limited to just Java checks, but we can also check other types of files, like for example, certain descriptors in YAML or JSON. There's a plan to check the configuration options that Quarkus exposes for any changes. You know, that's going to be based on the annotations that you put on the configuration classes in your extensions code. There could be other things that could be something like a Pico CLI extension for Revapi that would look at the annotations that Pico CLI is using for, you know, command line arguments. And then you would have API checks on your command line arguments. There are many things that we can do and then we can then more importantly report on. So, yeah, that's it. And so, and we've seen all that in running in Quarkus, but this is still a work in progress. We have many great plans with it to make it really nice and, you know, smooth experience. So, yeah, looking forward to the future, maybe you will want to help us out. And so, as a final note, let's write a window of change in the APIs smoothly, because that's what you want. You don't want surprises. Here are the links. Quarkus is obviously on its homepage and is a great project. If you want to take a look at Revapi, I would be thrilled. My name is Lukas Grici and thank you.


Nothing makes the narcissist crazier than this, nothing makes them more mad and insane. There are a lot of things that make the narcissist crazy. There are a lot of things that get under their skin and affect them with madness and insanity. But there is one thing that trumps everything else. There is one thing that really frustrates the narcissist and that is a person who they cannot manipulate, a person who can see through them, especially if it is a person that they want. When that happens, the narcissist will feel a sense of loss, especially if this is a person they highly admire and respect or someone that they are physically attracted to. It causes them to feel powerless and helpless. It reminds them that they are not the all-powerful, all-knowing character that they think they are. It humbles them, it brings them back to reality and while they may obsess over this person, they won't try to pursue them because they know they haven't got a chance. They know there's nothing they can do to win them over, especially if they have strong boundaries because they're not easy to influence and overcome, they're not easy to fool, they're not willing to accept standards that are lower than they desire and sometimes this may cause a narcissistic injury because narcissists are very arrogant and entitled. They believe that they are deserving of whatever they want just because they want it so they will feel like they're being limited and restricted, they will feel denied and rejected and they don't like how that feels. Man hurts a narcissist more than rejection but a person who is not susceptible to the narcissist manipulation is likely to not be afraid of them because they see through them.  They may try to win them over but it's not going to work because they're going to see through what the narcissist is trying to do and they're not going to buy into it, they're not going to fall for the false image which will make the narcissist feel irrelevant and unimportant because they are removed from consideration, they're denied access because this person wants nothing to do with them, they can sense that something is wrong but this person may often have what the narcissist wants, they may be very successful, they may be physically attractive to the narcissist and the narcissist wants to partake in that, they want to be a part of it so they will become very envious and jealous of this person, they may try to downplay their success, they may try to criticise them but this person is not going to care, they're not going to be concerned about what the narcissist thinks of them so the narcissist will be unable to influence their emotions, they will be unable to control them and the narcissist cannot coexist with those who they cannot affect or control especially people who are genuinely happy and people who find fulfilment of little things because that is a threat to the narcissist's delusions of grandiosity, it makes them irrelevant because they like to brag and boast about their accomplishments, they like to argue and complain, they like to create drama and chaos but they can't do that around someone who is optimistic and focuses on the solution rather than the problem, nothing makes the narcissist crazier than this, nothing makes the narcissist crazier than someone who is not susceptible to their manipulation, the narcissist is fake and they have to pull other people into their false reality, into their alternate world which is why people who are authentic are a threat to the narcissist, they're like sunlight to a vampire, they're like kryptonite, the narcissist hates authentic people, they want everyone to be fake because authenticity has the power to expose them which is why they hate truth tellers and free thinkers so the narcissist will try to avoid them because they hate the truth, the truth is a threat to them, they may try to turn people against this person, they may try to find people who also envy them so that they can team up and try to destroy them because they see them as a threat to the illusion, to the fake world that they have created, to the fantasy bubble that they are living in, thank you for watching, I hope this video wears in it with you, please like, comment, share and subscribe, if you would like to donate, my paypal link is in the video description, coaching inquiries, you can email me at coachingatnarksurvivor.uk, thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


From experience and from doing it before, you will get a real stuff. We'll get all the containers out here so I can get the heads out here and then we'll work on this side. And then I think what you're going to have to do is say, hey, so like for the drivers, right, we drive off these. You a driver? I don't want to be in the camera stuff. I'm like, oh god.


Here we see NGC4490 and NGC4485, together they form the system ARP269. 24,000 light years currently separates the two. Over millions of years their mutual gravitational attraction has dragged the two galaxies into each other. In this image the two galaxies have moved through each other and are speeding apart again. 4490 was once a barred spiral galaxy, like the Milky Way. The outlying regions have been stretched out, resulting in its nickname the Cocoon Galaxy. The extreme tidal forces of these interactions have determined the shapes and properties of the two galaxies, but now virtually no trace of its past spiral structure can be seen from our perspective.


Zelda! Yeah folks! We're talking Zelda! I got my Zelda shirt! Oh, get that track force going! I literally can't do that hand thing. Oh my gosh, guys. I'm so excited to have another Zelda video for you all.  I'm too excited. I'm too hyped, and the camera focus is a little better. So here's the thing. In this video, I'm gonna be recapping all of the Zelda rumors that I have heard and talked about over the past week, because there's been a lot of stuff happening potentially for the 35th anniversary of Zelda. So before I get into it, we are giving away a copy of Monster Hunter Rise and $2.20 Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, or Xbox digital gift cards. So three total winners this month head on to the description of the pinned comment to enter. Now, here's the deal. I love me some Zelda, and I'm super excited to kind of recap all of the rumors and stuff for you guys, because I know it can be hard to kind of follow along when there's so many different videos. So let's just throw this all together into one. For starters, what do we know for Zelda's 35th anniversary? Well, we know. Skyward Sword HD is coming. July 16th. We're getting theme joy con, has amiibo support. We're not sure what that amiibo support is. We're not sure if there's new content in the game. But we do know that we are getting that game. Fact done story, okay? We also know that we're gonna get some news. Probably a trailer, but definitely news on Breath of Wild 2 before the end of this year. Because Aegeanoma told us when he announced Skyward Sword HD that we could expect Breath of the Wild 2 news later this year, so good stuff. Next is all kind of rumors at this point. These are things that have been floating out there on the internet that I've previously reported on and I will link to all the videos I've talked about this before, but a lot of it centers around Grezzo, although not everything. As an example, a themed Zelda Switch is supposedly in the works. Not sure if it's a Switch Pro, regular Switch, or a Lite, but supposedly a themed Switch is in the works. Not surprising. They did do it for Mario's 35th anniversary. Hello, that red themed Switch.   I mean, what if one of the Zelda merch was a Zelda LEGO set? Can you imagine a Zelda LEGO set officially? You know, we have Mario. Why not Zelda? Makes a lot of sense to me. But beyond all of that, we have been told in various rumors that we need to be looking towards Grezzo. Grezzo is a company that has traditionally always had at least two Zelda projects in the works at once and the last one they had that released was Link's Awakening back in 2019. Now, we know that Grezzo is also the company that has ported in HD Metopia that's releasing this summer. So that game's probably already done and proves that Grezzo has the ability to port games from the 3DS into HD on Switch. And the thing is, Grezzo worked on two previous remakes in Zelda series, known as Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask 3D. And when they made those games, they actually created HD assets and then down-sampled them to 240p for the 3DS. So we actually can maybe even expect Ocarina of Time HD and Majora's Mask HD to come over.  Grezzo is also factually hiring right now for a new Zelda game. So because they're hiring, that leads to speculation of what they could be doing next, what they could be porting next, bringing next, etc. Rumors are out there as well, because they created that Link's Awakening engine, supposedly an Unreal Engine 4, that they are going to apply that engine to the Oracle series. So Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons in HD on Switch. Now, I personally am not really so sure I've sold on that. Grezzo's not doing four Zelda games at once. I just don't foresee that being possible. So if we could only pick two out of these four games they've already worked on and already have the assets for, seem like a lot more sense to me and seem like really easy for Nintendo to tell Grezzo to just bring them on over, whether in a dual pack or a Zelda collection pack, or whatever the case might be. Speaking of Zelda collection packs, the Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD are supposedly coming over as well. So we need to consider that those sources for that are publicly known. They come from Tom Phillips and another major guy out there. I forget his name. I don't know if it was Chris Kohler. It was someone, another major media person, basically said, look, we're getting the Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HD this year, probably coming after Skyward Sword HD this summer. I think they're going to let Skyward Sword HD have a runway. So here's the thing. I think that we could really expect a lot of this information to probably come true. Zelda's 35th anniversary is going to be really stretched out by Nintendo. We're talking, yeah, they're going to celebrate it this year, but expect half of 2022 dedicated to it as well. In the past, we've had Zelda concerts and other things happen that extended for years and years and years. So Nintendo is going to melt the hell out of Zelda's anniversary to get a lot of money. Somewhere in there is probably Breath of the Wild 2. I don't know if it's this year. I don't know if it's next year. There's rumors the Switch Pro is attached to Breath of the Wild 2. So whenever Breath of the Wild 2 lands, there's one Switch Pro is also landing. So there's just been a lot of rumors circulating about this anniversary. I think a lot of us at this point just want to know what's going to happen, but I'm here to tell you we're not going to find out until after Skyward Sword HD comes out. So on June, July 16th, it gets here, expect Zelda to do a Nintendo to do a Zelda Direct sometime in August. Doing it then allows a full month runway for Skyward Sword HD to maximize its launch sales and then potentially gain a second tier of sales if we get something with Breath of the Wild 2 that teases aspects from Skyward Sword. As an example, there's been a tease in Breath of the Wild about Fee, Phi, whatever her name is, returning from Skyward Sword already.  How does this connection work? We need to go buy Skyward Sword HD to find out. So I want to preface this all by saying we're not going to hear anything about the anniversary for a while. We're just not. Beyond that, I think here's what you should expect. You should expect a Zelda themed Switch. We're getting Skyward Sword themed Joycons, but a full-on Zelda themed Switch probably based around Breath of the Wild 2. Expect it, it's probably going to happen. Whether or not it's gold, trimming, just a complete color swap palette, I don't know because that's what they did for Mario, but expect that. All right, expect the Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD in addition to Skyward Sword HD. Likely as individual releases, although we can always hope they're packed together, maybe even as limited releases. Nintendo likes this limited release thing, it worked, quote unquote worked for Mario, so I don't know, I don't want to see them do it, but whatever they probably will. So expect those three games and Breath of the Wild 2 shown off at some point and then releasing probably 2022, maybe recapping everything or capping off the 35th anniversary or something. I don't know. All right, beyond that, Ocarina of Time HD, Majora's Mask HD, I think it's reasonable to expect those games coming. In fact, what would be really really cool is if Nintendo decided to do a four pack collectors edition, including the Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HD, Ocarina of Time HD, and Majora's Mask HD, and if they sold it for like 80 bucks, they're not going to sell something that for 60, right? It's going to be 80, it's going to be 100. Whatever, anywhere from 100 on down, limited release, I think is going to end up seeing a shitload of sales. Literally, they could get away with that $99 price point with those four games included. Those are four massive Zelda games, all in HD. Two of them obviously ported probably just almost straight ports, but yeah, some UI changes over from the Wii U. So I honestly think that that is something we could realistically expect to occur. I don't think Oracle games, I know I really love the Oracle games. Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons are amazing games. Just like I would love to see Zelda 2 remade and Zelda 1 and only through the past comeback, they can even use like the Olympian Worlds engine, but put it in HD, like there's a lot of things I would like to see them do, and Nintendo might have crazy other things like a Zelda 35 in the works, or a Zelda dungeon maker in the works. Like technically, even though Mario's 35th anniversary ends this month with the removal of games, kind of a sour ending, we're getting Mario Golf in a couple months. So like, it doesn't really feel like Mario is ending. Then again, Mario always comes out and Zelda, we had Hyrule Warriors last year, Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity, we had Link's Awakening the year before, or those anniversary years. So Nintendo always has Zelda stuff coming every year anyways, they've almost Mario-esque the Zelda series, not quite as many spin-offs, of course, Hyrule Warriors being one, not quite as many spin-offs per se, but still, they're trying to get something Zelda out every year, dropping a bunch of Zelda games, say anywhere from four to six Zelda games over the next 18 months. I don't think that's too crazy, certainly a lot of them are games like The Winemaker HD and Discover Sword HD that already exist, and Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask can be straight up 3DS HD ports like Metopia. So a lot? Yes. Exciting for some? Absolutely. Am I about to spend a shitload of money on Zelda? Yeah. Am I probably going to end up buying a Zelda-themed Switch only for a Switch Pro to come out two months later? Probably. And then I'll buy that too. Anyway, maybe there'll be similar enough design that I could swap some of the plates, like take off some of the Zelda plates and put them on the Switch Pro? You know, Zelda Eyes the Switch Pro? That maybe that's what I should do. Zelda-themed my Switch Pro. Anyways, thank you guys so much for tuning in. I understand that's a lot of Zelda stuff. What do you think's happening? I want to know. This is all just rumors and speculation and hope. A lot of hope. Alright, I'll catch you in the next video.


The first session we're going to talk about this morning is one heart, one heart, and the title of the conference, the two shall become one. And so we're going to look today at different aspects of that oneness in marriage. So you've got one heart, one mind, one flesh. We're going to look at those different aspects of oneness in marriage. And so we wanted to begin this morning with an introduction of sorts to what will be the rest of the conference and discuss what it means to be one heart. The two became one, here specifically one heart. We'll look at various texts for that, but I'm sure you as I, as we look at the way that the world views marriage today, views the marriage relationship, it is a scandal. And it's a shame how marriage is being completely trivialized and completely marginalized in our society. We see it even more rapidly becoming trivialized, rapidly being made a mockery of in society today. It's happened quickly. But people change marriage, change their views of marriage, their understandings of marriage as if it were their own to do whatever with it that suits them best, that marriage is somehow a conception or a convention that they adopt as they see fit, and they can view it and do with it as they please. They don't realize that marriage isn't theirs, that it doesn't belong to them. It is an institution that has been established, it was established at creation, and it is not theirs to fiddle with. And it's interesting, the prayer we just talked about, that the Bible begins and ends with a marriage. Now the Lord doesn't do anything by accident. That's an interesting fact to me. The Bible begins with a marriage between our first parents, Adam and Eve, and ends with a marriage between Christ and his bride. We've got Ephesians 5 in the New Testament that talks about how the marriage or the relationship between a husband and wife in marriage is to picture the relationship between Christ and the church. And so there's something more here than just a man and a woman getting together, right? Something more here than just sort of establishing formal bounds for a relationship. This is God's doing. Marriage is God's doing. And like the Bible says, whatever God has joined together, let not man separate. So we have to take a stand for marriage, for Christ, and go against the push of the culture. Go against the flow of the culture. And with every, it seems like passing week now, the culture is getting farther and farther and farther downstream from what we would consider to be a godly marriage. So the more that time goes by, the more glaring, the more obvious the lines are between what is a godly marriage and what is an ungodly marriage or a worldly conception of marriage. And so today I want you to see this first beginning in three different ways. Speaking of one heart, we want to look at this in three different, from three different perspectives. One is one heart in covenant, and that one heart in covenant is undivided in its devotion to Christ and to one another. As we talk through these, this is going to lay a foundation for you. It's going to set the table, so to speak, for what comes after. You've got to have some pretty foundational ideas in your mind, some foundational, if you will, slabs, granite stones upon which you build your marriage. And it's amazing to me, and talking to people today, that oftentimes those aren't granite slabs, those are shifting sands. But you've got to establish some thought processes about the foundations for marriage that you're not going to tinker with either, that they're going to be non-negotiable to you, that you're going to build your marriage on, that you're not going to mess with. This is just how the Bible teaches it. That's what we believe, that settles it, and I'm not going to entertain any thoughts to the contrary. And so some of this idea of first covenant, you need to be an undivided, settled devotion to Christ and to one another in your marriage, first and foremost. And you need to verbalize those things, just settle it, be done with it, and then you can build your marriage on that foundation. We'll talk about that. The next is one heart in grace, one heart in grace, and then lastly, one heart in submission, one heart in covenant, one heart in grace, and then one heart in submission. So let's begin with point one and look at one heart in covenant, one heart in covenant. It is a joy, a joyful occasion, a cause for rejoicing to perform a wedding in our church. I can't get through one without crying. It's like, it's just a joyful occasion. You see two people that you love, and they love one another, and they're getting together, and it's just awesome. Love to do weddings. Young man who at best comes in, and he has no idea what's going on. The whole thing is a complete blur to him. When it's over, it's like, what just happened? Just get me to the honeymoon. He has no idea. The lady, the young lady comes in, and she's got every detail planned out for like the last six months. Every detail usually starts two or three hours late because some bridesmaid forgot a matching earring. Those kinds of, can you relate? These things are, this is a very solemn event, a very important event. However, it is a very serious event. As joyful as it is, as much as we rejoice over a marriage, it's a very serious, very solemn event, and that is lost on the world. I don't want it to be lost on us. All right? If you're already married, you're in a very serious, a very solemn before God relationship. If you're thinking about marriage, you are thinking about a very serious, a very solemn undertaking. This is serious business. And when we come to a wedding, here's how it begins. We are gathered here together in the site of Almighty God. Now think about the words that are spoken, what is said during the ceremony in the site of Almighty God, and these assembled witnesses to unite these two in the holy estate, the holy estate of matrimony. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, He who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, listen to this, what God has joined together. Let not man separate this from Matthew chapter 19. He goes on to say the Bible, God's holy word teaches that marriage is to be a sacred and permanent relationship between one man and one woman for one lifetime, fully, freely, and sacrificially committed to one another, and signifying the wonderful spiritual union between Christ and his bride, the church. Now that is rich with theology, laden down with import, and we've got to take that to heart. This is not some passing in the night kind of a relationship. This is not some, you know, spitting on your hand and shaking kind of a covenant you make with your buddy in the backyard. This is a very serious, very solemn thing. He goes on to say, therefore, marriage must not be entered into lightly, but with a sober mind upon wise counsel, with reverence for God, and careful consideration of the purpose for which it is established by God. This sounds extremely serious, doesn't it? This is extremely serious. Can you see, looking even at that first paragraph, how sex outside of marriage makes marriage a mockery, how dating as the world conceives of it today makes marriage a mockery. The world's conceptions of marriage are completely antithetical to this, even in the first, and these are words that often pastors or so-called pastors in many marriages will make. They'll read the same set of words, and in most cases it's just, you know, the bride and groom are standing there looking at each other's eyes, just googly eyes, they have no idea what's going on. The pastor has no idea what he's saying, and the marriage is just sort of, get churned out. But listen to this, many marriages, it goes on to say then, if, therefore, anyone can show any just cause why these two may not be lawfully joined together in marriage, let him speak now or else hereafter, let him forever hold his peace. That's involving you.  Not only does it involve the married couple, it involves their parents. It's done in the sight of Almighty God, but now they're including you in that, and then you turn to the couple. I now charge you both, if either of you know any reason why you may not be lawfully joined together in marriage, you do now declare it or else hereafter forever hold your peace. That sounds pretty final, doesn't it? Pretty permanent. You are etching something in stone here, very, very important, very solemn. Sounds like a covenant, doesn't it? This is a promise it's being made. You have the couple there entering into a solemn covenant. Your pastor is there entering into that covenant. You have two witnesses that will sign the marriage certificate who are entering in witnessing that covenant. You have bridesmaids and groomsmen there witnessing and validating that covenant. You have the church there to witness and approve and all this is done in the sight of Almighty God. And so what do people expect today? Most today, if they marry at all, they just blow by all this and want to get to the reception. I want to get to the honeymoon. Half of all marriageable couples today choose to cohabitate rather than marry. The cohabitation rate is way up. The marriage rate is way down, and you still have the divorce statistic that over half of all marriages end in divorce. They don't want some old fashioned ceremony to get between them and their love, right? If they marry, they feel completely free to change the ceremony. A lot of ways that you see that today are people writing their own vows. They don't want none of that till death do us part stuff. I'm going to write my own vows. So the young man having spent a great deal of time agonizing over what he's going to say in his vows, his covenant to his new bride begins to write, Lady, I'm your knight in shining armor and I love you. You have made me what I am and I am yours. My love, there's so many ways I want to say I love you. Let me hold you in my arms forever more. That constitutes the man's vows. Oh, and I like your hair. This isn't a sappy love song, right? These are covenants. These are vows to one another, vows in the presence of God, vows in presence of your church witnesses, the pastor, your physical family, your spiritual family. Here are the vows. Do you take this woman to be your wife and will you pledge yourself to her in all love and in all honor, in all duty and in all service, in all faith and tenderness to live with her and to cherish her? I don't even know that most people that they can define what cherish really means. Give a biblical definition of what it looks like to cherish your wife, cherish your husband. According to the ordinance of God, it goes on, the holy bond of marriage. So long as you both shall live, so long as you both shall live or until death parts us. If so, please say I do. So let me ask you, in light of these, does it reflect poorly on our society that so many marriages end in divorce? Yes, it does. Of course it does. So then, what does it say about our Christian community? What does it say about our church, our testimony as Christians? What do you think it says about Christianity, about Christ, when Christians divorce? Ultimately, what does it say about God, about Christ and his church? That's why we're all there to witness the covenant and to uphold it. Getting married is not simply about you. It certainly is, to some degree, about you and what you're going to do. But it's not simply and only about you. If you make a pig's ear of marriage, it affects all of us. It affects Christianity. It taints the name of Christ, brings reproach on the name of Christ. It reflects poorly on Christianity, reflects poorly on the church because you are tied to the body of Christ. You don't live to yourself.  Marriage is not simply an outlet for your self-indulgence. Marriage is a display of God. Marriage is a display of his covenant keeping love. Ephesians 5 explains, marriage is to display the covenant keeping love between Christ and his bride, the church. Hebrews chapter 13, verse 4, marriage should be held in honor. And that word honor there means precious, held as precious among all. So this is extremely serious, extremely serious and it's been made a complete mockery of by the world, to the point now where last week another state falls and Kentucky adopts gay marriage. Just one after the other. We've seen, we've been on that slippery slope for a long time and now have completely, we're just, we're at the bottom of the slope and we're still sliding, right?  So before you run off and condemn the culture though, you seriously have to ask yourself, in what way have I made a mockery of the covenant that I made to my spouse and how I have acted in my marriage, how I conduct myself in my marriage? When God made his covenant with Abraham, do you remember that story in scripture? When God made the covenant with Abraham, you have Abraham being put into a sleep, okay? And then God takes two, or takes the animals, splits them into, lays half of the animals on one side, half of the animals on the other side, and then you have the flaming torch, right? The flaming furnace that's God. And the flaming torch passes through the animals, God passes through by himself. And basically what that is saying is that if I break this covenant, let this happen to me, that I would be cut in half. That's where we get the term cutting a covenant out of ancient covenant making. This was a common form of making a covenant. Basically let this happen to me. If I break the covenant that I'm making between us, you can cut me in two. And that is important, shows you the importance of covenant making and the importance of keeping your covenant. Look, I don't want to talk about this issue of covenant a little bit more. Turn to Malachi chapter two, Malachi chapter two. And this is important as we get into the day because you have to recognize, if you're married, you're in covenant. If you're considering marriage, you're considering making this lifetime till death do us part covenant. And you need to settle that in your mind. It is amazing to me, amazing to me, that a Christian who from the word of God understands the importance of covenants to God, a Christian that very clearly understands what God has said about divorce would even consider or entertain the idea of divorce. Like that's not yours to consider. You can't consider it because the Lord says you're going to keep this covenant until death do you part. You need to put divorce completely out of your mind, put separating completely out of your mind, unless there's a strong compelling biblical reason because God hates divorce. But how do we talk? You know, I think I'm just not going to work out. You know, I just said we shouldn't have gotten together. It was wrong to listen. You are together. And unless you deny the sovereignty of God, you believe that God put you together. And God has a reason for you being together. So put the idea of separation completely out of your mind. It's not even, it shouldn't even be on the table. This is a covenant relationship and you are in covenant with one another and let it happen to me that you slice me in two before we break this, this covenant together. And we see that again in Malachi chapter two and look down at the beginning in verse 10. Here I'm going to read this and then we'll go through it a little bit. Verse 10 says, have we not all one father has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously with one another by profanning the covenant of the fathers? Judah has dealt treacherously and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem for Judah has profaned the Lord's holy institution, which he loves. He has married the daughter of a foreign God. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob, the man who does this, being awakened aware, yet who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts. And this is the second thing you do. You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying. So he does not regard the offering anymore, nor receive it with good will from your hands. Yet you say for what reason? It's amazing they have to ask, right? For what reason? Because the Lord has been witnessed between you and the wife of your youth with whom you have dealt treacherously. Yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant. But he did not make them one having a remnant of the spirit. And why one? He seeks godly offspring therefore take heed to your spirit and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth. For the Lord God of Israel says that he hates divorce for it covers one's garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. Therefore take heed to your spirit that you do not deal treacherously. All right, the prophet here begins at the beginning of chapter two with a scathing rebuke of the priests. Now tell me if you don't think this is a correlation here. A scathing rebuke of the priests from verse one down to verse 10 here for how they handle the word of God, how they handle the law of God. Now I would say that correlation exists today because of the way so-called pastors, so-called priests, the way that the by and large the professing church today represents the law of God, represents this covenant of marriage, leads to a corruption of marriage. If you're going to handle the word of God wrong, if you're not going to take the word of God seriously with respect to these commands in this covenant, then marriage suffers as a result. And so just like there was a correlation at this time for Israel, there's a correlation today. You need to be in a Bible teaching, Bible preaching church that upholds the covenant of marriage as something that is critical, something that is important.  It's like, yeah, no, you've got a covenant, you can't divorce your husband, but she was calling around getting counsel and looking for counsel that would go along with what she wanted, counsel shopping. Here, this is the same thing going on with these priests in one through ten, not upholding God's law, not upholding God's word. You, Christian, need to uphold God's word in your life. Don't think about marriage outside of Scripture. Run your marriage through the filter of God's word and uphold what God says about it. You've got to have that settled. It has to be resolved ahead of time. Now, the prophet beginning in verse 10 addresses two ways in which this covenant is broken. First, the Israelites were coming under judgment because of who they married. That takes place in verses 10 through 12. They had married foreign women under other gods. If you remember the story, you remember how much hot water that got Solomon in, right? There was an admonition, a command against marrying foreign wives. Next, they were coming under judgment for unwarranted divorces. That takes place in verses 13 through 16. Basically, they had divorced the wives of their youth. They divorced their Israelite, their Jewish wives, and had married foreign wives of other gods, right? And God prohibited that because in marrying foreign wives of other gods, it's going to pull away Israel into idolatry, and we see that happen time and time again, right? So, how does the Lord treat this? Look at verse 10. It says in verse 10, have we not all one father and has not one God created us? And so, why do we deal treacherously? That word treacherously there means faithlessly. Why do we deal faithlessly with one another by profaning the covenant of our fathers? Now, he makes the point with respect to marriage here that they're acting like they have no God. Have we not all one father? Has not God created us? You can apply that to us today. Are we not Christians? Do we not have the Bible? Has God not caused us by a spirit to be born again and dwelt with a spirit? How can we deal faithlessly with our wives? How can we deal faithlessly in our lives when we have one father? We have the spirit of God. We have the word of God. Sounds like most people today. They don't ask what about God. They don't ask what does the Bible say about this. They don't think they have any accountability to him or to the word of God. They would rather just ignore it so they can get away with what they want to do. Your marriage again needs to be run through the filter of God's word.  So in living for Christ by faith, you're going to live for Christ in your marriage by faith. You're going to make decisions in your marriage by faith in Christ. Right? This is all to be done by faith in Christ. You're to obey the Lord Jesus Christ when it comes to your marriage. In other words, you keep your covenant with the Lord. And in keeping that covenant, you keep his commands regarding marriage. All right? Verse 10, verse 11, here the reason for the rebuke is given. In verse 11, it says that Judah has dealt treacherously. They've been faithless and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profanied the Lord's holy institution which he loves. He's married the daughter of a foreign God. Again, treacherously, faithlessly. They've not been faithful and they've not been faithful in this area of marriage. And now notice here how this responsibility is laid on the whole nation. You individually have responsibility in your marriage, but you reflect on Christ. You reflect on the church, our covenant community together. You reflect on Christianity in your own marriage. So not only are to you, you are to keep your covenant marriage, but you're to do that to the glory of God and not to the reproach of God, reproach of Christ. They profaned the Lord's holy institution here. How you conduct yourself as a Christian reflects on all of us and it gives gentiles an opportunity to blaspheme. All right? And then the Bible describes that what is taking place here, their faithlessness is described as an abomination. That place is sin here. That word abomination places sin here on the level with blasphemy, with idolatry, with witchcraft. So when you deal faithlessly with your covenant spouse, that sin of dealing faithlessly is on par with idolatry, on par with witchcraft, with rebellion. It is an abomination to God. It's blasphemy. And blasphemy because you are picturing, displaying Christ in his church. All right? It's interesting here too. And in verse 11, God uses the name Israel. Israel is the name for the people, was the name for God's holy separated people. This was their holy name, if you will. There's an intentional contrast being set up here between what they are called holy and what they are doing, which is living or treating their marriages faithlessly, their conduct, which is unholy. Verse 11 goes on to say they've profaned the Lord's holy. And then it's got institution there. If you've got a New King James, institution is in italics means it's not there in the original language. It's literally the Lord's holy. You've profaned the Lord's holy. You've profaned the Lord's set apart. This isn't referring to the institution of marriage here. It's referring to God, or this is not referring to God or the temple. This is referring to God's people. It profaning the holy uses the covenant name for Israel, meaning holy set apart. And then you've profaned verse 11, the Lord's holy profaned the people. Our sin no more taints or corrupts God. And I've heard the phrase before that a sunbeam is tainted or corrupted by the garbage that it shines on. God's not tainted by our sin, but you can bring reproach on the name of Christ. You can bring reproach on Christianity. You can make a poor testimony of yourself in the way that you handle your marriage. And here, this abomination has been committed and it profanes the nation that God loves. In our context today by application, we profane the name of Christ. We profane Christianity, the church that God loves. Again, if you're not dealing faithfully in your marriage, it brings reproach on the name of Christ in the eyes of the wicked, causing the Gentiles to blaspheme. It goes on in verse 12. He says, May the Lord then, here's the judgment, cut off from the tense of Jacob the man who does this, being awakened aware. In other words, being awakened aware there, he knows they are dealing faithlessly. He knows it. And even though he knows it, he brings an offering to the Lord of hosts. That brings an offering. A guy knows that wickedness has taken place. He knows that they've dealt treacherously. And yet he brings a sacrifice to expiator, to remove the guilt of that person anyway. Romans one would say that those are those that are deserving of righteous judgment of God who not only do these things, but they approve of someone who does them. And so he's bringing a sacrifice, approving of their faithless dealing in their marriage. So do you approve of this kind of wickedness? This is serious business. So listen to what the prophet is saying in verse 12.  So is the Lord serious about dealing faithfully with your covenant? It's extremely serious, extremely serious. Keeping covenant with the Lord by honoring your covenant in marriage is a solemn responsibility. So again, begs the question, how are you dealing faithlessly with your spouse? Have you traipsed off after the digital idolatrous harlot? You know what I'm talking about? How are you dealing faithlessly with the wife of your youth, with your covenant spouse? Maybe you're single and you've entertained the idea of marrying a lost woman. It's dealing faithlessly according to God's covenant. There's a second way here in Malachi, the second way in which the Israelites were breaking their covenant with the Lord and in marriage, they had frivolously divorced their Israelite wives. And he says, he goes on to say, and this is the second thing you do, verse 13, you cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying, so he does not regard the offering anymore nor receive it with good will from your hands. Now the effects of the sin here are described before the sin. They've caused their wives to weep before God in the temple, covering the altar with their tears, right? And God will no longer accept their worship of him because of what they've done. They're so oblivious to their own sin that they have to ask why. God, for what reason? Well, comment of people today, even ourselves, we don't see the seriousness of our own sin. And so we walk in ignorance, but ignorance is no excuse. One reason you need to be informed from the word of God. Ignorance is no excuse of these things. Your marriage and your faithfulness to or your faithlessness to your covenant is lived out before God. And as such, he says in verse 14, the Lord has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt faithlessly. And again, that wife of your youth is another way of saying this is a lifetime covenant, a lifetime covenant, never to be broken. So he goes on to say, but did he not make them one, having a remnant of the spirit? And why one? Because God seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, let none deal faithlessly with the wife of his youth. The Lord God of Israel says that he hates divorce. It covers one's garment with violence. That word means sin there, covers one's garment with sin. The wickedness adheres to him. He like sticks to his clothes and clothes. They're just being a picture on the outside of what it is inside his heart on the inside. All right? The sin just sticks to him. It's a picture of the inside of the man, says the Lord of hosts. Therefore he says, take heed to your spirit that you do not deal faithlessly, time and time again, dealing faithlessly, dealing faith, faithlessly, comes up all the time. God says, beware of faithlessness to your covenant. So you've made a covenant in the sight of God to be faithful. When you sin in marriage, you're being faithless. And this is daily living in light of your covenant. When you get angry with your spouse, remember your covenant and deal faithfully. When you are tempted, remember your covenant. You have a covenant with God and you have a covenant with your spouse and deal faithfully. When you disagree, remember your covenant. You, Christian, be faithful. If you are married to an unbeliever, remember your covenant. When you believe that your spouse is in sin, remember your covenant. When he just won't listen, he just doesn't listen to me. Remember your covenant.  Don't spend time with a digital whore, a digital harlot. Remember your covenant. Don't spend too much time apart. Remember your covenant. Keep Christ as the center and focus of your relationship in remembering your covenant and be a good steward of your home, a good steward of your relationship, your kids, your finances, your service. Remember your covenant. So are you, let me ask you, are you planning or have you ever thought about running out on what basis? If it's not for a biblical reason, you have no basis whatsoever to abandon your covenant. It doesn't matter how you feel about it. It doesn't matter how you feel. Remember your covenant. You cannot count on feelings. The marriage wasn't based on feelings, right? You did something there. You made a covenant. What did you do? You made a covenant. You made promises. Now all this is only possible because we are one heart, point two, one heart and grace. It's only possible in grace, grace from God. Keeping this covenant, you have to do that by grace, by faith in Christ. Because it is biblical to say that marriage is a picture of Christ in his church, then it is biblical to say that marriage is a picture of grace. As Christ restrains, upholds, sanctifies, loves and matures his bride by grace, Christ restrains, upholds, sanctifies, loves and matures your bride, your relationship, your covenant by grace. And grace here is first. I'm going to give you several ways that grace is pictured in a marriage. Grace is pictured by sacrificial love, silent killers of a marriage relationship, silent killers that go against sacrificial love are unbiblical expectations of your spouse, unbiblical expectations. When two people can't live up to each other's expectations, they will look for alternatives that they expect to satisfy them. Remember your covenant and sacrificially love your spouse. You have expectations, you need to put down your expectations often in order to honor your covenant. Unbiblical expectations are silent killers of a marriage. They will look for alternatives like the next relationship, the next digital encounter, the next experience and unfulfilled expectations grow increasingly in discontentment, discontentment with their spouse and with their marriage. So repent of your unbiblical expectations. You're not going to change your spouse like that. The Lord God, Jesus Christ will change your spouse as they mature in Christ as they're sanctified, but don't allow frustration with your unbiblical expectations be a cause of strife and contention in your marriage. You need to drop your unbiblical expectations. Concentrate on who your spouse really is and not on some conception that you are trying to achieve in your mind and you are trying to achieve that in manipulating often your spouse, nagging your spouse, nitpicking at your spouse, but what they do or say or don't do or don't say, you need to put down your unbiblical expectations, but repent of that.  Your spouse as wonderful and as perfect as they seemed at the altar is not all going to be all the time all that wonderful and all that perfect. You are not going to be all that wonderful and all that perfect.   It's very important to get clear. Give up the idea of a perfect spouse. Give up the idea of trying to make him be that way, make her be that way and begin learning to understand and sacrificially love the spouse that you have. That's what Peter meant in 1 Peter chapter 3, when he says, live with your wife in an understanding manner, in an understanding way. You're understanding who your spouse is and then you live with them in an understanding way. You're not nagging and picking and putting unbiblical expectations before them to make them what you want them to be. Concentrate on sacrificially loving your spouse and not on your compatibility. You are married and no matter who your spouse is, you can learn to love each other. So don't concentrate on what you perceive as being incompatibility. Love is not merely feeling. It is resolve. It is determination. It is choice. In contrast to the prevailing idea in the world that love is merely something that happens, Paul commands husbands to love their wives and he commands wives to love and submit to their husbands. The Bible never even hints at the idea of what is compatible or incompatible after marriage. Certainly believers are compatible. Believer with unbeliever incompatible. Once you're married, that's not an issue. You are married, right? So put that unbiblical idea of compatibility out of your mind. The Bible simply commands that we love each other according to a biblical definition of love. Next, you must sacrificially love by getting past the way that you look to each other. Proverbs 31.30 says, charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord she shall be praised. So what's the focus or the emphasis on there? It's not a woman who fears the Lord, loves the Lord. That is beautiful. That quiet spirit that Peter speaks of, right, is beauty. Peter says, 1 Peter chapter 3, your adornment must not be merely external, braiding of the hair, wearing gold jewelry, putting on dresses. Guys, don't do that. Not about the external stuff. But let it be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God, right? All that can be obviously applied to husbands too. Much more could be said, by God's grace and in accord with God's grace, you are to sacrificially love one another. Grace in the marriage is pictured by forgiveness, pictured by forbearance. Grace in the marriage is pictured by treating one another better than what you deserve. Let's summarize those three with one passage. Colossians 3 verses 12 through 19. And listen to the grace of God toward us. And this is the grace with which you are to treat and interact with your wife, your spouse. Therefore, it says in verse 12, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering, bearing with one another, and forgiving one another. If anyone has a complaint against another, even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. Oftentimes in marriage, when you're talking to someone, counseling someone, gotten themselves so high strung over some offense that they've taken and they have never sat it down. They've never forgiven. They've never talked it out. And they're just harboring some, well, that's what my wife did. That's what my husband did. And they carry around that anger for years. You've got to forgive as Christ forgave you. You must forgive. You must be long suffering. Allow sin or love to cover a multitude of sins before bearing patient. And just as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. Verse 14, but above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfection. Let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body, and be thankful. Are you continuously thankful for your spouse? Thankfulness for your spouse eradicates discontentment. And listen, you, like right now, if you don't feel thankful for your spouse, well again, it doesn't matter how you feel. Think about all the ways that your spouse, that God has benefited you through your spouse, by your spouse, for your spouse. Cultivate in yourself a thankfulness to God for your spouse, and discontentment will begin to flee away, will begin to disappear. Be thankful for your spouse. It says in verse 16, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom. You need to, if you have an unbiblical idea of marriage or you're having difficulty in your marriage, you need to get yourself in the word of God. Practically apply the scriptures. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly with all wisdom, with all teaching, admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to God, to the Lord. Whatever you do in word or indeed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Wives submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands love, your wives do not be bitter toward them. I would say grace also, wives in understanding that as a part of the curse, your desire is for authority over your husband. Realize that is sin. Realize where you sin in that way. You are to submit to your husband. Husbands, you're to be sacrificially loving towards your wives. It's not an open-ended free reign to be authoritarian over your wife. You are to sacrificially love your wife, treating her better than yourself, is steaming her above all others, is to be sacrificial. It's a part and parcel with denying yourself as a Christian. So deny yourself for your wife or the benefit of your wife. Then there's grace in the power to stop sinning. Grace in the power to stop sinning. As a bloodbought disciple of Christ, you're no longer a slave to sin. Depend on the power and the spirit of God within you and stop sinning against your spouse. Stop sinning against God. The marriage relationship is going to, more than any of the relationship, is going to reveal and expose your sin to you. So in that, it's going to reveal selfishness, hypocrisy, anger that you must repent now. Part, we'll talk about a little bit later, don't allow those sins to remain hidden. Confess those sins to your spouse so that genuine repentance can come.  Next, there's grace in the gospel-centered way that you confront sin. You confront sin in your spouse lovingly, in a spirit of gentleness. Unless you are married to an unbeliever, you cannot nag him into becoming a Christian. As Peter says, 1 Peter 3, you seek to win him without a word by your conduct. And then lastly, it's grace that is pictured by a bond that is unbreakable.  You're to leave your father and mother, cleave to your wife, and the two become one flesh. Christ is one with his church, you're to be one with your wife. Your marriage is to display the covenant keeping relationship between Christ and his bride. And your marriage will either tell the truth about Christ and his bride, or your marriage will tell a lie about Christ and his bride. And what is your marriage saying? Lastly, point three, there's one heart in submission. Wives submitted to their husband, husbands submitted to Christ. These are all foundational things that you need to settle. You need to settle. This is what the Word of God says. These things are the slab on which you will build your marriage. Husbands submitted to Christ, both submitted to the Word of God for their marriage. Quickly, if you're going to be submitted, then there is joy in your God-given roles. Listen to Elizabeth Elliott on the role of women. This is in an article called The Essence of Femininity. She says, unlike Eve, whose response to God was calculating and self-serving, the Virgin Mary's answer holds no hesitation about risks or losses or the interruption of her own plans. It is an utter and unconditional self-giving. She says, I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said. This is what I understand to be the essence of femininity. It means surrender. Think of a bride. She surrenders her independence, her name, her destiny, her will, herself to the bridegroom in marriage. The gentle and quiet spirit of which Peter speaks, calling it of great worth in God's sight is the true femininity which found its epitome in Mary. Paul then takes nine verses in Ephesians 5 to explain the sacrifice required of a husband for his wife in his acts of love toward her. And the Lord's pattern of love for the church is given to him as his pattern. To wrap this up, what does it mean to be one heart in marriage? It's not always easy, but it is very clear and very straightforward in Scripture. Marriage is two clumsy, stumbling, oftentimes self-willed sinners cemented together by God as loving companions in a sacrificial relationship which takes place in the sight of God in the eyes of a lost world and in the face of life's difficulties. Marriage is two clumsy, stumbling, sometimes self-indulgent, self-centered sinners cemented together as loving companions in a sacrificial relationship which takes place in the sight of God in the eyes of a lost world and in the face of life's difficulties. You cannot follow the world's conceptions of what marriage is to be. It is so far from any semblance whatsoever of the truth. This is not a humanly devised option to consider. Marriage was instituted at creation by God. So you think about it. Marriage is not a way to legitimize sleeping together to remove shame or guilt. Marriage is not simply a piece of paper to satisfy your assumed to be mother-in-law. Marriage is not simply a convenience to merge expenses or to explain away, you know, pregnancy into which you are six, seven, eight, nine months. Marriage is not a way to get benefits. Marriage is not a ball and chain. Marriage is a gift to men and a display of God's glory. So now more than ever it is time for Christians to declare and to put on the display of what the Bible declares. God's standard for marriage and the family is the only standard. They can produce meaning, produce joy, produce fulfillment and produce a proper testimony of God, a proper testimony of Christ. So as you go on today, you have that basis. I encourage you to put down commitments with respect to that. And then as we go through the day, think about those foundational aspects as you hear about practical ways in which you will build your marriage on that foundation. Put out of your mind unbiblical notions, unbiblical thoughts, even today, wholly and completely, just submit yourself to the Word of God and then listen how to practically obey the Lord from the Word of God. And I pray you'll take notes, you'll repent where necessary. Be not hears of the Word only, deceiving yourselves, but be doers of the Word and all marriages for the glory of God. Amen. Amen. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for this time. Thank you for your word. Thank you, Lord, for, thank you for my wife, God. Thank you for our marriages. Thank you for these brothers and sisters here and their marriages. God, thank you that this is to be a display of Christ and his bride, the church that we have such a glorious example to live to. And we praise you God for that. Strengthen us by your spirit, Lord, to have a right understanding of marriage, to lay the proper groundwork and then to obey you in our day-to-day lives. Again, because we don't want to bring reproach on the name of Christ, we want to be a proper testimony of your triumphant grace to a lost and dying world in our marriages. And so, strengthen us to do that, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.


So, you might notice that I did change the name of my talk and that was for a couple reasons. So, I'm actually speaking about Big E MDM and the reason I changed that is because MDM and fun are never in the same sentence.  The second reason was actually a more serious note and that's that we don't always tie MDM back to identity, which is really one of its core purposes. We don't always connect those. And actually, a blogger that I follow made a comment saying, do you have a single identity? And it was pointing back to his blog making a case about the importance of MDM. And I kind of, you know, I laughed a little bit and I replied back to him that, no, I don't. I got just to confuse people. And he didn't find that very funny at first, but it really highlights the need for this identity management concept associated with MDM. Okay. So, if David Lotion is here, I absolutely want to give you a huge thank you for this quote because this has been a very key quote that I have taken to my management in supporting our enterprise MDM efforts. And it's really that there is such a cross functional need for enterprise MDM. So, you might be working in these silos of subject areas like vendor or customer. But once you find a need where maybe you need to look and connect the dots maybe from research all the way to sales and marketing, then you'll find out that you have something that's at a higher level, at a party level that you really need to manage. And that has to come up to an enterprise or a biggie MDM side. So, what's the difference between biggie and Little League? Because I heard a lot of conversations around, yes, we have an enterprise MDM solution. And when I would question that, they said, I said, what is that? What are you doing? And they would say customer. And I said, well, who cares outside of sales and marketing? And they would say, well, nobody. And I said, well, what are you doing about the fact that maybe a customer is a potential customer or maybe they're not even a customer. They're someone you're looking at as a thought leader. How do you manage that kind of data? And there were sort of like crickets chirping in the background. And I said, oh, so we've touched on something important here. So when I say biggie MDM, I'm really talking about that high level cross enterprise, the biggie, the entire company kind of data that has to stretch from your very earliest, whether that's your research area, all the way to your sales and marketing areas. It also, one of the things that biggie comes with is it does come with a price. So it's not free. You do have a lot of communication. You do have a lot of politics that come with biggie. But it can be worthwhile if you have to do something like we had to do where we needed to connect collaborators and potential contacts all the way across once somebody was hired or whether it was a vendor relationship. And we really needed to connect the entire stream of data. It can be very valuable. How am I doing? All right. Give me a minute. Well, actually my last slide was just really, if you want to think more or talk more about biggie MDM, there's a blog. There are lots of blogs actually on Dativersity. They're great that do talk about MDM. I do rant on there once in a while. I've got a session coming up and also on Twitter, or you can follow the hash MDM for a lot more information on MDM. Okay. I made it. Thank you. You made it.


Hey you guys, here's my review of the Maui Morster Curl Quench Plus Coconut Oil Conditioner and Styler. Now this complete line is mineral oil free, no silicones, no parabens. It is gluten-free. It is also vegan-friendly and eco-friendly. Now I purchased both products at my local Walmart for $6.97. You cannot beat that price for the ingredients, okay? This is the consistency. It was very, very creamy, a little on a thick side, but I like the conditioners. I love the way it went on. You can see my face there. My curls are popping. It has a very nice, light, fragrant coconut smell, not necessarily overwhelming. As you can see, I went back to recording in my bathroom because it does make a bit different applying these products, especially cleansing products, onto soaking wet hair. Love the way it was going on. It was literally melting into my hair and looking at my curls again. So I ended up using almost the entire jaw. And this conditioner is definitely one that I would be using as a deep conditioner. This is my hair all rinsed out. Love the way it feels. So now I'm going to section off my hair and apply the Styler. Now this rivals, in my opinion, Shea Morse-Dose Curl Enhancing Smoothie, minus a formula change, no shade, but love this all the same as it went on. Now I'm going to come back on cam after a few days. I'll allow my hair to air dry to let you guys know how I really feel about the leave-in conditioner. It also duels as a Styler, which I will be reviewing in a separate video, okay? So I'm going to go ahead and twist my hair. I didn't use a lot of leave-in because, again, I'm going to use it as a Styler in a few more days. But it went on very, very nice, again, only for $6.97, winning, all right? I did not use a lot of leave-in. This is a very creamy product, so I'm thinking that my hair is going to absorb quite a bit overnight, girl, because my hair is still pretty damp, okay? And I used a little bit of oil. And so I have a lot of hair. My density is on another level, so I could use a lot more product than the average curl girl. Yeah, I've used some one-fold of a cup of the product already, so I will see you guys in the morning. Guys, I wanted to come back on Cam because it's now been two days since my wash day, it's as I applied the coconut styling smoothie. I have some residue. You see this? Let me tell you what happened. I immediately applied the leave-in after my, after co-washing my hair, basically, and it went on great. Very great product, very creamy product, okay? Then this morning I took down one, twisted. I noticed even though my hair was extremely soft, it was dry. So I decided to apply the leave-in to my twist, which I do quite often. However, it started to get a little bit of, I don't know if you really see it in here. You see that right there? Just a little bit, so overall, the rinse-out conditioner is one of the best conditioners that I have used, and I've used a lot of products, girl, one of the best ever. This, the creamy coconut smoothie, this styler, I'm still in the fence about. I will still be using it to set my twists in a couple of my days, which will be in a separate video, by the way. However, at this point, I'm not sure if I would use it as a leave-in for me personally. Now, I find that this line is best suited for three category chicks, but absolutely if you are for ABC, D-E-F-G, like me, the co-wash is fabulous. By the way, I did see that they have a hair mask, basically a deep conditioner, and they carry a hair oil. All of their products are less than seven bucks, which you cannot beat that, considering that they're vegan-friendly, no parabens, no sulfates. I think that's pretty good, pretty good price point. So I think I will be reviewing a shampoo, the mask, and the hair oil from another collection, I should say, but that will be coming up in two more weeks, and definitely I will be doing a separate video for the twist out. Overall, like I said, the rinse out conditioner thumbs up. The styler, I'm still on the fence. So that is it, you guys. Let me know if you tried these products. Let me know what you think, how you feel. All right, you guys, take care. Bye.