Today we're in 1st Timothy. We're gonna look at chapter four verses one through five as we continue our series in the book of 1st Timothy. And so what I'll do is I'll read to you verses one through five. We're gonna be looking at the subject of latter times and we'll see it especially in light of what Paul has to write here in chapter four of 1st Timothy. So let's begin reading 1st Timothy chapter four at verse one, we'll read to verse five and we'll get into our study. Paul writes, now the spirit expressly says that in latter times, some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer. Now as we've been going through 1st Timothy, we know that Paul has been writing to a young pastor by the name of Timothy who was dealing with some very pressing issues. One of the worst issues was the presence of false doctrine that had been introduced to the church by bad leaders. And so as we began reading and studying 1st Timothy, from the beginning of the letter, Paul had been addressing this concern. And as I've been pointing out, he already has stated certain things related to what these false teachers were presenting to the church. In chapter one, verse three, he had pointed out that they were introducing bad doctrine. In chapter one, verse six, he said that they were spouting worthless words instead of the truth of the gospel. And then again, in chapter one, verses seven through 11, he said that they have misunderstood the law of Moses as well as misunderstanding the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is such a severe concern for him that he actually names them. He actually mentions names. In chapter one, verse 20, he mentioned two of them, a man by the name of Hymenaeus, as well as another one by the name of Alexander, undoubtedly church leaders there in the church in Ephesus. It is necessary sometimes to mention names, he does it more than once. In 2nd Timothy, chapter two, verse 17, he mentions a man by the name of Phyletus. And in 2nd Timothy, chapter three, verse eight, he mentions the names of Janus and Jambres, two of the men who opposed Moses. He was very open to mentioning the names of those who were bringing bad doctrine or in history had done so in opposition to God. You see, he needed to name them because the church should know which teachings to avoid. And that's what teachers are supposed to do, not only teach the things that are especially true in terms of laying the foundations of truth, but also to expose error. And sometimes teachers even have the responsibility of mentioning by name those who are bringing error into the church. So the church should know who to avoid in order that they might not be corrupted by bad teaching. In 2nd Thessalonians, in chapter three, verses 14 and 15, Paul said, if anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take special note of him. Do not associate with him in order that he may feel ashamed. Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother. So if you have a brother or sister in the Lord who's giving you bad doctrine and all, he said you're not to have association with him, not because he's a bad person in and of himself, but because his influence is bad and therefore you need to warn him concerning the things that he is saying. You don't treat him as an enemy, you warn him as a brother. But in Romans chapter 16, verses 17 and 18, Paul said, I urge you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the minds of naive people. So there is a rejection of false teaching that is necessary if you're gonna grow. So to deal with their ungodly influence, Paul actually began to outline, as we already saw, leadership qualifications. He said, remember in chapter three, verse two, when he was pointing out the pastor teacher, the elder, he said that the elder is to be able to teach. In other words, he's to divide the word correctly and he's to be able to communicate it clearly. Paul is making it clear that their error is not to be allowed to continue because it infects the church. And if they ignore the error, it ultimately will spread. It'll corrupt the purity of the body of Christ. It's been said, a lie repeated often enough eventually becomes the truth. And that's what happens when you're in a church service and the man is there opening up the word and you believe and you trust that he's teaching you the truth and sometimes error finds its way in and it can corrupt the purity of the church. And so Paul is concerned about this because false teachers are influencing and corrupting faith. And so as we've been going through first Timothy up to this point in chapter three, he concluded chapter three with what is called a creedal statement. A creedal statement is a system, a doctrine or a formula that outlines religious belief. A creedal statement is what is also called confessions or statements of faith. And so in verse 16, he had said in chapter three, without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness and then he gave a creedal statement. God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory. And so he's giving a statement of faith. Now in the early history of the church, the church was under pressure by the unbelieving by the pagan world. Pagan intellectuals and pagan philosophers began to develop arguments against the gospel. And so the response to these arguments was the production of creeds. And the creeds were intended to establish what would be called biblical foundations. And so let me give you an example of two of the early creeds. And remember with me that the creeds or a creedal statement was supposed to encapsulate the essentials of the beliefs of Christians. So you have what is called the apostles creed. The apostles creed was first developed somewhere around 180 AD. The apostles creed is a very famous creed. As a matter of fact, I as an eight year old memorized this. So I've had this in my mind for a long time. And many of you also memorized this particular creed. The apostles creed. I believe in God, the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty, from once he shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy spirit, the holy Catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen. I was taught that as an eight year old. I believe in the holy Catholic church. The word Catholic in its original meaning is the universal church or the church worldwide. It wasn't speaking of a specific denomination. It was speaking of the universal church throughout the world. The apostles creed. And these are essentials. Later on in AD 325, there was another creed that became very famous. It's called the Nicene Creed. It was basically developed because there were those who were rising up in opposition to the Trinity. There was an individual who was saying that Jesus Christ was the first creation of God. And so the Nicene Creed was developed to speak concerning especially the essential reality of Jesus Christ being the second person of the Trinity, God in human flesh. And so the Nicene Creed around AD 325 says this, we believe in one God, the Father, the almighty maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. For our sake, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried. On the third day, he rose again in accordance with the scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life who proceeds from the Father with the Father and the Son. He is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen. These are called creeds. And Paul had just finished chapter three by giving what was called a creed. And Paul was writing that these were elements central to the Christian faith. And these are the kinds of things that the false teachers were denying then and to this day continue to deny. So when we get to chapter four, chapter four begins with Paul returning to the exhortation concerning false teachers. Their existence in infiltration was recognized as a primary sign of the last days. That's what he says in verse one, when he says the spirit expressly says that in latter times, some will depart from the faith. Now remember with me that when we were in Matthew's gospel, I pointed out that when Jesus was asked concerning the sign related to his coming, you find it again, Matthew 24. He had said, take heed that no one deceives you. So deception was from the lips of Christ and through the pen of the apostle is something that the church has been warned about as a primary sign that we're in the last days. And the fact is, is even during the time of the writing of 1 Timothy, there were those infiltrating, bringing in bad teaching. And so Paul is dealing with that. He says in verse one, the spirit expressly says that in latter times, some will depart from the faith. So he clearly states that God's spirit has revealed people will fall away. The spirit expressly says. So that gives us insight into the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit. One other thing I want to point out, I want you to notice in verse one, how he says the spirit expressly says. You see, there are those today who teach that the Holy Spirit is simply power, kind of like electricity or wind. But the fact that people speak gives us evidence of there being a person. The Holy Spirit is a person and thus the Holy Spirit here is pointed to as one who says, he spoke. And so you see his personality revealed in the scriptures. In various times in the book of Acts, it's recorded that the spirit speaks. Remember with me Acts chapter eight verse 29, how in that passage it says, the spirit said to Philip, go near and overtake this chariot. Or in Acts chapter 10 verse 19, while Peter thought about the vision, the spirit said to him, behold three men are seeking you. Or in Acts 13 verse two, as they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, now separate to me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. The Holy Spirit directed, he spoke. It's the Holy Spirit who inspires the writers of scripture. In second Peter one, 20 and 21, it says this, above all, you must understand that no prophecy as scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so he is the one who inspires. He's the one who directs. And in this instance, the spirit is inspiring a prophetic word about the end times. And notice what he's saying. He's saying, some will depart from the faith. Some people will voluntarily depart from the truth of the gospel. And he's saying that is inevitable. There will always be those who have what we call a temporary change of heart. They're there in a Bible study or a church service or a crusade or whatever. And they hear a message and they act as if there's something about that that causes them to say that they want to be born again. But it's a temporary change of heart that happens quite often. People who come forward at an invitation and you'll ask them for some basic information. You'll say, we want to follow up. We want to minister to you. And here's a sheet of paper that has a couple of questions so that if you don't mind we'll contact you and follow up. Oh yes, that's fine. And then they fill it out and they'll put in a wrong phone number or they put in the wrong address because they don't want people calling them. They don't want people writing to them. They don't trust people. And very often these are the same ones who later on just walk away. There's always been people who make a temporary change, a temporary change of heart that's not permanent. Jesus illustrated that. He did so in his parable of the soil and the seed. In Matthew 13 as well as Luke chapter eight Jesus gave a particular message. It was a parable called the parable of the soil and the seed. And in that parable it speaks of a sower who sows seed on four different kinds of soil. And Jesus speaks concerning the kinds of soil that the seed falls on. He speaks of the wayside. That's the hardened footpath that immediately rejects the seed. He speaks of the rocky soil which is the seed landing and immediately springing up but it withers because of no root and no water. He speaks about the seed that fell amongst the thorns. So the seed springs up but it's choked out. Jesus said by the cares, riches and pleasures of life. Then it falls on the good ground. And Jesus said it produces a wonderful crop. So there are always those who appear to embrace the gospel but do not remain. They don't abide in the things of the Lord. So if they walk away it's because they never committed themselves completely to the Lord. They've made a temporary change perhaps of mind but never a change of life because if they had been born again they'd have remained with him. Hebrews 314 says we've become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end. So there are people who have temporary changes but they're not real changes at all. So he's speaking concerning the latter times. Again in verse one where people will depart he says from the faith. The latter times. The latter times refers to God's program with the church. The latter times began with Jesus's earthly ministry continues until his return. In Hebrews one verses one and two the writer said God who had various times and in various ways spoken time past to the fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken to us by his son. So from the beginning of the church age to its end people will fall away. And this falling away will escalate in the days just preceding the return of Jesus Christ. He speaks in verse one in this way. Again notice he said some will depart from the faith. The word depart. There will be a deliberate rejection of biblical truth. There will be a deliberate rejection of Christian doctrine. He's saying people will follow deception that is propagated by demonic spirits who are the originators of all lies. In second Peter two one it says there were also false prophets among the people even as there will be false teachers among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies even denying the Lord who bought them and bring on themselves swift destruction. This is a deliberate rejection of the truth. As mentioned when Jesus was asked what is the sign Jesus said deception. There's another word that is going to give us a clear glimpse of what the conditions will be in the last days. And that word will be denial. There'll be a denial.  Now that started very early in the history of the church but it continues to this day. There are those who will knock on your door. Call themselves Christians who deny that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Christodelfians, Oneness Pentecostals, the Unification Church, the Unity School of Christianity, groups like Dianetics, Islam all denied that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. All of them deny that. When you read first John chapter four verse three John said every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ is coming in the flesh is not of God. This is the spirit of the antichrist which you have heard was coming and is now already in the world. So one, there'll be a denial of Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. Second, there's a denial of the value of a morally pure life. There will be those who will give you permission to continue in sin so that grace may abound. And Paul had been dealt, he had to deal with that in the Romans. What should we say? That we should continue in sin, that grace may abound and his answer was immediate. God forbid, God forbid how can we who have been set apart by Christ continue in sin? How can we continue in sin seeing that we've been set free by the grace of God would be his response. And there are people today who will stand up and say, you know what, all that matters is if you prayed this certain prayer and this and that. But problem is, is there basically teaching people that there is no need for you to walk in the spirit and obey the things of the Lord and they have made grace a blanket to continue in sin. There's a movement as I speak that you're all familiar with. There's a movement within quote unquote the church world to ordain homosexuals, to perform same sex marriages. There's a denial of a need to live a pure life. In Jude 17 and 18, it says it like this, beloved, remember the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time who would walk after their own ungodly lust. And we have that today. There's a third denial and that's the need to study the word of God. There are many people today who think that Bible studies are boring and that we need something much more entertaining than just church as it is. We need something that is gonna appeal to us in a different level and all of that. But in 2 Timothy 4, 3, and 4, the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But after their own lust shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears. They shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned to fables. A denial from the need of the word of God. And then forth the denial that Jesus is returning which is interesting in that Jesus promised and the word of God promises that his return no less than 300 times. 300 times it's mentioned he's returning and yet people will deny that he's ever going to. In 2 Peter 3, verses 3 and 4, knowing this first that there shall come in the last day scoffers walking after their own lust and saying, where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. So the spirit of the age encourages unbelief as demons entice people to reject the truth. In verse one again, some will depart giving heed. The spirit of the age is so powerful that people voluntarily yield to its influence. And that's true. First time I ever went to Europe, it was 1975. I spent three months in Europe. And one of the places I visited was England, 1975. And England at that time was already moving downward in terms of its religious fervor. I've gone back since then more than once, teaching in churches and teaching in pastors conference. And I can tell you that England is post-Christian. I mean, we went on one occasion, we were in a building that was a, you know, well, as you went into the building, I didn't really notice it. And it had, you know, just plywood floors and all. And we sat down and we're having a cup of coffee with a pastor. And he says, you realize right now that you're in a sanctuary. And I said, what? He says, you're in a sanctuary. He said, this doesn't appear to be anymore, but this is once consecrated to the glory of God. This was a church. It's been turned into a coffee house. And I said, really? And he said, yes. He said, and he walks up to this panel, small, you know, three by three panel of plywood. And he lifts it up. And he says, look down here. And he lifted it up and I looked down and it was the pews. They had actually put the paneling over the pews of this church. So we were seated over the pews, drinking coffee in a church that was no longer quote unquote consecrated because it had been turned into a coffee shop. Then he began to point things out. We went by a dance, a place where they hold dances on Fridays and Saturdays. He said, you see that? Yeah, at that time it was disco. He said, that disco hall there? I said, yeah, that was a church. We went by other churches that had been turned into mosques and bookstores and you name it. So at one time England, and think about this for a moment with me, that England was the mission sending nation of the world. It was known for the missionaries that had been sent out. Some of the greatest men and women who ever served the Lord came out of England and then we go throughout the world. People like David Livingston, who went from England into the continent of Africa and lived his entire life. They're preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. I was mentioning just this last Wednesday how that he died there in Africa. And when he died, the Africans sent his body back to England but they removed his heart and buried it under a tree. And they told the British, you can have his body but his heart belongs to Africa. He was a great missionary who gave up his life to preach the gospel. He came out of England. And there were many who did that who went and they took very hazardous trips and they went throughout the world to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ. But now the nation of England, if you go is no longer anywhere near in any way, shape or form the nation that at one time was even 50 years ago. Because it's very quickly spiraled down, it's rejected its Christian roots and it's now basically given itself over to the spirit of this age. I don't know if you know this or not but the United States is the recipient of tremendous amounts of missionaries. That missionaries are coming from Korea and other foreign lands to the United States because they see the United States as a mission field, a lost nation. Did you know that? As many churches as we have in the United States, people from the foreign lands that we at one time were sending missionaries to evangelize are sending missionaries back to the United States to try and tell us once again about the glorious gospel that we've been ignoring as a nation. We are living in latter times. We are living in a time when people are departing voluntarily from the faith and they're giving heed. And that's what he says here, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. When he says giving heed, that simply means paying attention to or devoting oneself to or clinging to something. These are people who may understand some of the things of the gospel. They may even outwardly agree. I mean, if you tell somebody we need more love, they'll outwardly agree, yes we do. If you say we need more faith in this nation, we need to come back to faith. People will say, oh, you're right about that. But if you say we need to have faith in Christ, you're gonna have a problem. Because Americans today, when they're taking their various surveys and all, many will continue to mention that they have religion but they don't refer to themselves with a term like a Christian. What they say is they say we're spiritual. So they're open to spiritual things but they've rejected the gospel. They like certain things about the gospel. You can see that on talk shows amongst many people who will speak to you about those kinds of things and they'll say, oh, we need faith and we need love and we need, you know, kind. We need these things but we don't need the gospel. Well, he's saying the error originates with deceiving spirits, inspiring demonic doctrines. So the deceiving spirits are alluring, they're seducing people to wander away from truth and into error. The deception doesn't originate with liberal pastors, by the way, it doesn't originate with jaded university professors who like to argue about faith. The doctrines, he says, are demonic in origin but they are preached and embraced by men. And as he speaks concerning this, he goes on into verse two by saying, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron. Having the conscience is seared. But notice how he says this. It's not a result of a mistake. These are things that are knowingly taught and the people are bringing this, who are bringing this, he's saying, are hypocritical liars. He says, they appear righteous outwardly. They show a piety and outward holiness and that by the way is what is attractive to people. As they see these people who seem to live a life in another world in a different way of thinking. So they may walk by them in an airport with a saffron robe and we look at that robe and we say, boy, that's a symbol of somebody who's very holy or they may wear a certain kind of garb or wear their hair in a certain way. And we say they are definitely set apart because these are people who have religious outward appearances. They're in the time of Christ. There were people that were so outwardly religious that when Jesus said, unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, well you basically have no chance. The men he was speaking to, the people he was speaking to at that time, they said, then who can be saved? Because when you looked at the outward religiosity of the people of his day, they were amazingly outward religious. Amazingly, they would stand on street corners and pray. They would give their gifts in an ostentatious way. They would fast and Jesus said they are seated in Moses' seat. They had this authority. Their scribes were intellectuals and scholars. The kind of people that were so well versed in what they believed that when Jesus came along, they couldn't listen to him. How does this man know letters and having never learned is one of the things they said about him? How does he know theology? See that he never went to one of our universities. He never attended one of our seminaries. He never was mentored by one of our rabbis. How does he know these things? How does he speak with such authority? Because when Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, it was closed by them being amazed because he spoke with authority and not like one of the scribes. So Jesus had this amazing authority about him. He spoke things that caused people to wonder when the Pharisees on one occasion sent some of the officers to arrest him, the officers came back without him and they said, where is he? And their only response was no man has ever spoken like this man. There's no way that we can take this man. This man has got authority from God himself. Are you deceived too, has any of us believed in him? Was there only response? So Jesus Christ would speak during the day of his, as he was hearing and then the people would, they would see these religious people walking by and see that's the whole thing. I mean, even today, if somebody approaches you and they have a gravity about them, if they speak with eloquence, if they have an intellectuality, it can cause us to feel very intimidated. They must be sold out.  Well, look how hard they work and look at the things that they do and they must be real. They must be spiritual and that's basically what he's saying. They appear righteous outwardly. They show a piety. They have an outward holiness, but in reality, they're hypocrites. They're trying to gain the hearts of multitudes. In Matthew 23, verses 27 and 28, Jesus said it like this. He said, woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.   So he speaks concerning this, speaking lies in hypocrisy, but notice having their own conscience seared with a hot iron. What an interesting phrase that is. Do you understand what that? Neither do I, let's just keep going. Having their own conscience seared with a hot iron. This refers to the practice of branding criminals and slaves on the forehead. They actually would brand them and you would know that this person was either a slave or a criminal. So the point he's making is they are unfeeling in what they are doing and they are literally slaves to their sin. He's saying their consciences are closed to conviction and they don't feel guilty for what they do. Their consciences are closed to conviction. Somebody knocks on your door or you encounter them at the store or somewhere. They approach you and they wanna hand you their literature and you begin to speak to them. You're well versed in scripture and you don't mind talking to them about their beliefs and they begin to present to you what they believe. And then you say, but wait a minute, what you just said doesn't line up with what Jesus said and you quote the scripture. And what do they do? They don't answer your question. What they do is they ask you another question, right? Have you ever had that? They will ask you another question. They don't answer your question. Well, the Bible says that Jesus is the first creation of God. And you say, no, wait a minute. No, in the beginning was the word. The word was with God, the word was God. The word became flesh dwelt amongst men. We beheld this glory. The glory of the only begotten Son of God. No, the scripture teaches that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. Oh, well, what does it mean in John one verse one?  I've had that happen many times and many of you have too. How do I respond to that? Well, I will say this. I will say, they will ask a question. I'll say interesting question, but please, you need to answer the question I asked you first. What does this mean? Well, did you know, wait a minute. Let's not move from here until you answer my question. I will answer yours, but you need to answer mine. And they don't want to do that. And that's why I've had them many times close their book and walk out. They don't want to answer it. Why? Because they're trained to answer questions with questions. They are not trained to see what that scripture says. They have willingly closed their minds to the truth, willingly closed their minds to the truth. And so I will share with them as much as I can. I'm not going to argue with, I certainly don't want to fight with them. I will present what I believe is the truth is scripture and encourage them to go on to see that for yourself. But he's speaking concerning the fact that they are slaves to sin. Their consciences have been seared as a slave to sin. And what is it that they do? Well, notice verse three, forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. So what he does here is he gives two of their doctrine forbidding to marry, when he speaks of forbidding to marry, it would be physical pleasure as sin. And it's identified by marriage as well as by eating. So they teach that holiness is defined by what you do not do. So that's holiness. I don't drink and I don't chew and I don't date girls who do. That's outward holiness. That's what they're talking about. It's a legalistic effort to make yourself holy by your own strength. I am going to be holy. I am going to walk with a very humble face. I'm going to speak softly when I'm addressed. I'm going to have a nice heavenly smile and you forced yourself into this, even though on the inside, you're not feeling what you're showing on the outside. You're trying to force yourself into holiness and you're going to be holy based on not being married and not eating certain things. In Colossians chapter two, verses 20 through 22, Paul said, since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belong to it, do you submit to its rules? Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. These are all destined to perish with use because they are based on human commands and teachings. Now, looking at this in a basic way, again in verse three, forbidding to marry, well in some ways, practical ways, remaining unmarried does have its benefits. There's nobody who's married who would argue against that. Paul addressed that. You see, Paul was an unmarried man. He said, I would bet that you would remain even as I am. He was unmarried and thus he had the ability to go throughout the world proclaiming the gospel and he didn't have the responsibilities that a married man would have. So in 1 Corinthians chapter seven, verses 32 and 33, he said, I want you to be without care. He was unmarried, cares for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord, but he who is married cares about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, which is true. You have concerns in marriage that you just don't have when you're unmarried, but Christians are not commanded to remain unmarried. Singleness can be used by God, but we need to remember that God is the one who established marriage. And so it doesn't make you better if you're unmarried. It just means you have less cares that married people have. He also speaks about abstaining from certain foods. Okay, who's to argue against having a healthy diet? You know, I on occasion eat healthy once in a blue moon.  See, that's the cares of marriage. She makes me eat stuff. She makes me drink stuff too. So gross, but it doesn't make me closer to God. There are many people who give you dietary laws. I've had conversations with those who believe that you are supposed to keep the mosaic a law as it pertains to not eating pork and this and that. You know, and they believe that it makes you holy if you refrain from doing those kinds of things. I was raised as a Roman Catholic. I don't know what your religious background was, but I was raised Roman Catholic and two of the things within the Catholic religion that stand out to me even as I read this passage is one, is that the priests were to remain unmarried and that too, that you abstain from certain foods. And so for me in my religious background, Friday would be a day that you only ate fish. We didn't eat meat on Friday. Actually, we did because it seems odd that our memories always kind of became faulty and we forgot it was Friday as we're eating that bologna sandwich, you know, and I was taught that the Lord will overlook that if you forget. So we were taught that some of you were too. Well, in 1 Corinthians chapter eight verse eight, food does not bring us near to God. We are no worse if we do not eat and no better if we do. So your diet isn't gonna make you closer to God. Now, if you have a bad diet and you're eating all kinds of fatty foods, you're gonna go see them quicker, but it isn't a way to make us holy. He said in verse four, every creature of God is good and nothing is to be refused if it's received with thanksgiving. So God has declared all things to be clean for us. In Mark seven, 18 through 20, we read, are you so dull? Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean? For it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach and then out of his body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. He went on. What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. And so if you eat pork or whatever, it doesn't make you unholy before God. And so these people who are bringing doctrine in to the church of Ephesus are saying, you shouldn't marry because that makes you more holy and you should abstain from certain foods that makes you more holy. And Paul's response to that is, that's not from the Lord, that's demonic. He says, every creature of God is good, nothing to be refused if it's received with thanksgiving. It is sanctified by the word of God and prayer. I still remember my pastor Chuck sharing with us one time how that he went with some guys after a Bible study. They went to a place that sold pastries and they were about to eat. And they had these very rich desserts in front of them and one of the pastors turned to Chuck and said to him, well, should we pray over this? And Chuck looked at him and said, you know it's bad for you, let's just eat. It doesn't make you holy. It doesn't. You see, these teachers are rejecting the word of God. So the only thing they can give is their opinions. And the result is people will search for truth outside of the Lord Jesus Christ and in doing so, they leave themselves open to lies. See, later Paul would command Timothy to preach the word. He says in second Timothy chapter four, verse two, following, he said, preach the word, convict, rebuke, exhort, with all long suffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will no longer embrace, they will no longer hold fast to the truth.  The sign of the last days is they depart from the truth and embrace lies. That's why he'll tell Timothy in the second letter to Timothy in chapter four, preach the word. Because it's the word of God that convicts the heart of the listener for them to come to faith in God so that their lives can be transformed through his redemption, through his forgiveness, for the blood that cleanses them from all sin. It's a word of God that promises us that we might receive the power of the Holy Spirit, the one who will reside within us. It's a word of God that teaches us that our names are written in the Lamb's book of life.  It's a word of God that will hold fast because forever his word is settled in heaven. It's his word that we have embraced because wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way by taking heed there to according to thy word. Thy word hath I hidden my heart that I might not sin against thee. It's God's word that we need to preach and embrace. It's God's word that transforms our life, being born again by the word of God which is living and it abides forever. You see, it's the word of God that we need to preach and embrace and that's the word of God that we are to receive in church whenever we show up. And I'm aware of the fact that we're living in a time when people want entertainment much more than God's word because people will no longer endure healthy teaching. I'm aware of that. I'm aware that people are caught up so much into the moment and the emotion that they're unwilling to grow through the things that will make them into the people of God that they claim that they so desire to be. I'm aware of the fact that there are churches that preach a lot of emotion and not enough word. I'm aware of that. That people will stand in line to get in to be lied to because we're living in a day when they will no longer endure healthy teaching. They will line up to hear the false teachers lie to them. I'm aware of the fact that if you wanna be cool, you get some skinny jeans and a swoopy hair and you will be listened to. I'm aware of that. You would hate to see me like that, I promise you. So I made a promise to God in 1973 that every time I come before anybody, I will give them the word of God because it's the word of God that sets you free and that's what we need today, the word of God. We teach the word of God because it's through the word of God that we mature, it's the word of God that we learn discernment. In Ephesians 414, Paul had said that God gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry. He said in Ephesians 414 that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness by which they lie and wait to deceive. He said, we need to know God's word. And he told the church of Ephesus that Timothy was the pastor of the church that received Ephesians, the largely Ephesians and he said it to them again and again and again. And finally you see the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2 where Jesus says, oh, you have a great reputation for so many things, but this I have against you, you have left your first love. Remember therefore where you have fallen, repent and return because they began to move away from the truth. And Paul was warning Timothy in chapter four and letting him know the spirit expressly says in latter times, some will depart from the faith. That's why when Paul had his final conversation with the Ephesian elders, he said, men will arise from amongst yourselves and will draw people to themselves. It's not just the wolves he said that will enter in, it's men from among you that will rise up. So he warned them from the beginning and Jesus said, unless you repent, I will take your candlestick and guess what? You can go to Turkey today, you can go to where this church of Ephesus existed and it no longer is there because they didn't listen. May God help us to hear what the spirit says to the church today.


Patriot Prime Reviews is a channel for adult collectors and may not be suitable for children under 13 years of age. Viewer discretion is advised. So earlier last week, I posted a review of Generation 1 Galvatron. And when I got to the articulation, I said he had no articulation in his legs. I was wrong. And in normal YouTube fashion, I was called out on it multiple times. So I picked up Galvatron and I took a look at him and I'll be damned. He does have leg articulation. The legs can go up and back and there is a knee bend. I mean, this absolutely floored me. That mind's a little tight. I have had three different Galvatrons. An original one, back in the day in 86, I had the all purple e-hobby release. And then I recently bought this one a few years ago and I had no idea his legs moved. I guess I always had either really tight joint ones or whatever. So I guess you can teach an old G1er new tricks. So Galvatron for a G1 figure has tons of articulation. I mean, the arms can do a complete 360. There is an elbow bend. The forearms can go in and out. The arms can go in and out. There is a waist rotation and leg rotation. So there you have it. Galvatron, tons of articulation. So I guess now we'll get back on to our normally scheduled review program. And guys, if you enjoyed the video, don't forget to like, don't forget to subscribe and don't forget to click that bell icon to get notified when I upload new reviews. This is Patriot Prime, signing out. Hula!


What's good YouTube? This is your boy Chi world today I will be telling you guys how you can make the best cartoon inside Adobe draw The first thing you want to do anytime you're working on a picture inside this program You want to make sure you're paying attention to detail so as you can see I'm going through the whole picture And I'm making sure I add every strand of hair the more time you put into doing your line work The more better your picture will be once you start adding your color I'm just I'm just going through right now adding every little piece of hair Not leaving it where it looked flat giving it a Nice realistic feel paying attention to the smaller details.


Felly, yn 2011, 2012, rydyn ni'n rwy'n cymaint gwirioneddol gyda cyfnodol ac mae'n ddweud yn ymddi'r drŵn. Rwy'n dweud yn ymddangos i'r company sy'n dweud ymddangos i'r ysgolwyr cyfnod ac mae'n dweud yn ymddangos i'r ysgolwyr. Mae'r cyfnod yn gyfnod i gweithio'r ticots yn ymddangos i'r ysgolwyr, mae'r cyfeirio'r ticots yn ymddangos i'r ffordd, o'r ffordd o'r ysgolwyr, ac rwyfod o'n dweud i'r dweud i'r ffordd ac mae'r dweud yn ymddangos i'r ysgolwyr a ymddangos i'r ddweud i'r dweud i'r dijoeniaeth i'r paru gweithgarwyr, i'r ddweud i ysgolwyr ac mae hyn yn dweud i'r dweud i'r ysgolwyr, oherwydd rydyn ni'n gweld fel yr oed yn ymddangos i'r company a byddai'n gweld eich gweld i'r byd ymddangos i'r cyffredinaniaeth. Mae'r dyma i'r ddiweddol Felly, yn y cwrin o'r company, yn y gweithio cyfnod, a yn y ddechrau, rydyn ni wedi'i gweithio'r peth. Rydyn ni'n gweithio, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r code, rydyn ni'n gweithio, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r code. A rydyn ni'n gweithio'r button. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r button, a rydyn ni'n gweithio'r producció ar y ddechrau. Felly, mae'n gweithio'r button. Mae'n gweithio'r cwrs. Nes du, rydyn ni'n gweithio o'r tychau, halu cyfoeddion nawr o'r cyfn умilul Certai Llywodraeth Hadwyr Cymru, dwi'n colladdi, nidio'ch fod o'r cyfrwm felly leso'r ddechuillっと ac gennymill yn synthau supply ac b- dato'r troi. Mae'n fwy wedi am Alice, mae'r bod�w dynny'n d Kommentig. Mae yn credits i gael ymgyngoeู่, mae sy'n gweithio'r fowalog boards chi'n gweithio, ac mae'n ddechuwn o tomahag i hed� contain ar-he挑 Llyd. A contacts gallu�r wneudot rhywithodol I wanted to try and introduce it to a company myself, to try and take these ideas I'd been using successfully at other companies that other people had taught me, and try and take these ideas of continuous delivery to another company. So I thought, well, why not try the UK Government? That could be a good starting place to try and introduce continuous delivery from myself. So I worked on a project in the UK Government related to business property taxes and, to be fair, in our team we were doing continuous delivery. We were deploying to production about, on average, three or four times a week, so I thought that was quite good, that was quite a good start. But then the nightmare kicked in when I realised that making significant changes was a very painful and complex process because we had so many dependencies on other teams. We had customers complaining about a bug once, about the address field. It was only three lines long, but their address was five lines long. And so our mission was to add a text box to a web page and make that field longer. Like, how hard can it be to add a text box to a web page? Two weeks later I'm sitting in a meeting with five project managers to put a text box on a web page. Wow, this is what I've let myself in for. How hard can it be to add a text box to a web page? About a month later I'm sitting in a meeting with five project managers to put that text box on that web page and we're not making any progress because we have an architecture and an organisational structure that looks like this. To make one change on the website we need to coordinate a change across all of these services and all of the teams that own them. And this is a problem I've seen many times. We talk about companies wanting to adopt continuous delivery and there's a big effort to make this happen. And we can achieve continuous delivery in one team, but very often we still have an organisational structure and a software architecture which causes so many dependencies to exist that making real changes takes a long time. So when I read Accelerate last year I'm like oh wow, guess what they discovered? A loosely coupled software architecture and an organisational structure to match that's actually quite important for continuous delivery. And then ThoughtWorks in their studies they found that when a piece of work leaves the team when multiple teams must collaborate on a piece of work it takes an order of magnitude longer to complete that piece of work. And I thought well I had five teams and it took about five orders of magnitude longer to not be able to do the work so I can agree with this. And then we see other studies from the likes of McKinsey and what they're finding is even at the big enterprise level trying to achieve digital goals and digital transformation the structure of the organisation which is affected by the structure of the software architecture. That's one of the biggest hurdles at that level too. So the question I would like to look at today is what can we do to design these socio-technical systems to maximise the benefits of continuous delivery not just in one small team but removing those dependencies so teams can make most of their changes without being slowed down. So here's an idea from Alan Holub. What if instead of aligning our software architecture and our teams with activities like front end or back end or technologies like databases what if we try aligning our architecture with the software domain we're working in? The idea here is if we want to make changes in our domain in the business on the products and our software architecture and our organisational structure matches the domain I'm not going to say it will be easy but it will be no more difficult than it needs to be to implement those changes because the only dependencies that will exist in software and between teams are dependencies that truly need to exist in the domain. But how hard can it be to do that? How hard can it be? We see stories like this where companies just oh let's go to microservices let's have these small, loosely coupled software services. How hard can it be? In this case they built their service twice. They had to rebuild it twice because they got their boundaries wrong and they went back to a monolith. We see stories like this too where we move to microservices and we introduce more dependencies between the teams that make the problems worse. So it's very easy for me to stand here and say align your software architecture and align your teams with the domain but it's quite irresponsible if I don't show you why this is difficult and give you some tips on how to do this. I noticed Jezz had some shapes in his PowerPoint this morning in his slide deck. I didn't copy him, I already had these. But here's a game. If this is our domain and we have these concepts in our domain how do we group these in a way that has the minimum number of dependencies? We could organise by shape the triangles, the circles and the squares or we could organise by colours the yellows, the greens and the blues or we could organise things into unique combinations that must be used together at certain stages of our business process. There are always multiple ways to model a domain. But how hard can it be? Well, let's take a simple example. Is tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Very simple question to get started today. Who says it's a fruit? And who says it's a vegetable? Oh, well that's interesting because science says you're wrong. A tomato matches the botanical definition of a fruit. Scientifically a tomato is a fruit. A very simple example and most of you got it wrong. That's why it's hard to design software systems. But actually in the 1800s there was a tax in the United States on vegetables. So people started importing lots of tomatoes because they could use those as vegetables in savory dishes. And so the US government said no, no, no, right. Tomatoes, they are now vegetables. Forget about what science says. Tomatoes are now vegetables and we're going to charge you tax on them. So what this teaches us is that domains are quite fuzzy and contextual. In the context of science a tomato is a fruit. But in the context of cooking because it's used in savory dishes and has a savory flavour it's actually a vegetable even though science says well actually it's not. So from these small activities we can draw some general fundamentals about modelling software domains. So firstly there are many ways to model a domain. Often when we're designing software systems it feels like there's a very obvious choice. A tomato is scientifically a fruit. How hard can it be? But it's not. It can actually be wrong. And it's the context we're working in which defines how useful is a given model. And the way to start understanding domains to find the different context is to look at language. How do people talk about tomatoes over here? And how do people talk about tomatoes over here? What's the language they use to describe these concepts? And that's where we get to which strategic domain driven design. What we're looking for are these concepts called bounded context in our domain. Parts of our domain where certain concepts have a very specific meaning. Where the same word can mean different things in different contexts. So let's take an example from the domain of sports equipment e-commerce. We're working for one of the world's biggest sports equipment companies we've got an e-commerce website we've got a warehouse and we have to be very good at what we do to compete with the likes of Amazon who want to take over everything. And in the company everyone talks about this concept of a product. Oh, a product has a price. A product has a rating. A product has a description. And in the inventory we have a stock. In a very naive team we think oh we talk about this concept of a product and it has all of these properties therefore there must be one class that has all of those properties on it. But that class quickly grows into a God object in the software which all of these contexts become coupled to. And that means the teams are now coupled by this coupling in the software. But we can see in this very simple example that if you're working in pricing you probably don't really care about how much of this product you have in stock or maybe you do in a sense but it's not the key part of your system. You might change the price actually based on stock, that example. Likewise in the catalogue you care about the description of this product but maybe the price doesn't affect you so much here. So the idea with bounded context is we look for these separate models where the different where the same concept can mean different things and we isolate those. Separate bounded context with no shared code no shared database we try to avoid having this enterprise canonical data model which all parts of the system are conformed to and each bounded context is owned by a single team. But this is a very simple example and a very naive example and I still haven't really explained how can you use this information to design systems better. So for this we have a part of strategic domain driven design called domain discovery and this is where we go out and we properly try to understand the domain we're working in and we use a technique called event storming. Has anyone heard of event storming or tried event storming before? Okay, that's cool. So the idea with event storming is we try and get everyone together or as many people as possible who understand something about the domain we're working in. It can be developers, it can be testers, domain experts, product managers. We try and get all of these people together and we ask them let's model the domain we're working in together. Let's combine everyone's knowledge and try and understand this domain. But we have a problem. All of these different people in the business they all talk in very different languages. Developers might use UML business people probably don't know UML too much. So event storming has this simple idea of let's create a very simple language that anyone can use so that we can all model the domain together. So what we do is we model our domain as a timeline of events using orange post-it notes. So if we were modelling the software for a conference submission process we might start with. The call for papers opened event followed by the talk proposal submitted event. After this event the call for papers might be closed and then a talk may be accepted. So far it seems very simple and the idea is to keep very simple because anyone can do this. Everyone is included in your domain discovery and we can have everyone's ideas on the walls. Time and time again when doing event storming you realise that we're not just combining people's ideas of the domain we're uncovering people's assumptions about how they thought the domain worked and it didn't. I was recently doing event storming with one company and the developers were talking about this calculation they create and the marketing person said no, no, that's not how that value is created and the developers were like yes it is because I wrote the code for it and she went oh she was shocked because she was using that figure and it didn't realise what she thought it meant and she kind of shocked and walked out and had to make some changes but orange post-it notes are very simple and as people get familiar with event storming we can start to add more notation we can add small yellow post-its to represent the different kinds of users who are operating in the domain we can add purple post-its to represent business policies and rules and we can use big pink post-its to represent external systems that we must communicate with in order for our business process to work and in fact when you start doing event storming you can start improvising adding all kinds of information that you think is useful once people are up to speed with event storming and they see the value of it people will just start adding what they think is useful so I'm not here to talk about event storming today here are some great resources you can use the one thing I want to share from event storming is once we started modelling our domains with event storming and we have mapped out all of the different parts in our domain these post-it notes turn into those shapes we saw earlier the small squares and circles and triangles and yellows and green and blues and now we're in a position where we can start exploring how do we group those concepts into different bounded contexts so the first thing we do is we use our toolbox heuristics heuristics ask us questions and give us ways of thinking about how could we group these different concepts so let's take an example from a financial products domain so we're working for this company who has a marketplace of financial products credit card deals mortgage years and loans like a comparison website and so the first heuristic might be let's align our software with the domain language as we talked about earlier how hard can it be we have credit card deals mortgage deals and loan deals well the bounded contexts are quite clear here they speak for themselves it's so obvious people are always talking about credit cards, mortgages and loans but then we notice that actually people start talking about something else another orthogonal concept we have tier 1 products and tier 2 products and tier 3 products tier 1 credit card deals tier 2 credit card deals tier 1 mortgage products and tier 1 loan products so now we have 2 ways of slicing the domain and if we listen for the language all of these concepts are used regularly by the business so how do we make a choice in this case well this is where we need to understand the business model we can create many models of the system we're working in but to actually choose the right one we need to understand the business model so we can use activities here like the business model canvas I'm not going to talk about this today but this is an example of an activity you can use which I do use so what we're looking for when we're choosing a model is which are the core parts of the business where the business generates the most value or there's the most potential for value if we can isolate those parts of the system we can make those parts of the code to iterate and add new features on and we want to apply continuous delivery here more than anywhere else so we have this concept in domains of a design of core domains we call them core domains where those parts of the business where the payback is greatest so in this case maybe it was the tier 3 products maybe this business model is about maybe this company generates most of their revenue and we also have core domain customers who want great products with a low interest rate but we also have supportive domains such as in this example the company gives away free financial advice which brings people to the company and helps them to optimise their core domain but there's limited benefits there and we also have a concept of generic domains these are concepts you'll see in many different domains like the ability to make payments for example make payments from customers the idea here is we don't want to gold plate these parts of the system continuous delivery on these parts may not be as important as on our core domains and in fact we may even want to buy those things off the shelf but not always now here's an interesting one finding bounded contexts is also about understanding how will these boundaries in our software affect the people who are building them so how can we design our software systems so that a team's building them have purpose, autonomy and mastery one example of social heuristics is about social complexity if we create lots of very small bounded contexts and lots of small two pizza teams that own each bounded context each of those bounded contexts will be a very simple piece of software it should be much simpler however now there are more chance of dependencies between the teams and we know that that's going to take an order of magnitude longer whenever a piece of work spans multiple teams but if we go the other way and we create big bounded contexts to maintain the rate of working parallel we need to have bigger teams and now we risk burning out the teams if you've got a team of 15 to 20 people has anyone experienced that before where your standups are taking like half an hour and 50 to 60% of the information in the standup doesn't apply to you and you're just holding your eyes open to not fall asleep that's boring but the real pain here is because you're in such a big team there's so much work happening so many slack notifications and emails and pull requests and you feel like you have to keep up to date with all of this information and that can lead to burnout you might end up working longer hours just to actually get any work done so the way we shape the software systems that has an impact on the teams as well DDD has often this misconception that it's all about creating beautiful models in your software that's not quite true because there are many technical factors which can also affect the boundaries of your software legacy software different parts of a system having different performance different needs scalability needs, security needs and the way data is stored and accessed all of these things can still affect the boundaries of your bounded context it's not purely about the domain and also one final heuristic when you're modelling systems it's very easy to ignore the user experience we'll create this beautiful software architecture and then we'll bolt the user experience on afterwards the UI there's really no perfect solution here if we have the monolithic front end we now have a handover between the front and back end teams if we move towards vertical slice bounded context where the bounded context contains the UI as well now we have a risk it's not a guarantee but we risk having a user experience which is inconsistent because different pages are built by different teams it doesn't have to be just add the risk there and I'm sure you've all been to a website or clicking around the website you can kind of work out the organisational structure the company has that built that website it's lots of the pages are inconsistent so those are the five key heuristics for modelling boundaries within each of these key heuristics there are many hundreds of sub heuristics and related heuristics so one technique I would like you to use when you're modelling your bounded context is to create a scorecard or a radar or you just question yourself if we model our system this way what are the benefits in terms of value and domain and social and technical and UX, what are we trading off here and what's the most useful in our situation I'd now like to talk to you about a few patterns but first the obligatory don't abuse patterns slide so if we use patterns as a starting point that's a good thing if we take a pattern from one situation and apply it to another without applying any thinking that's a bad thing because no two situations are really the same by thinking in patterns it teaches us to think analytically like considering those five key criteria but if we just get into a mindset of thinking which pattern should I apply here that can be very dangerous so anyway don't use patterns but use them carefully one pattern I recommend is the business process pipeline as a starting point when you're doing event storming and you're modelling a system it can be very difficult to work out where do we even start here where do we start modelling this domain there are so many different ways I don't know where to start so here's an example from a domain smart cities and urban furniture so we're working for this cool new company and we're building what's called a street sofa it's a sofa which is installed on every street corner all around the world like London, New York, everywhere this sofa has an inbuilt entertainment system where you can find local information you can order a taxi you can view what the weather's going to be like and it also has big advertising displays attached to the sofa because that's how the company makes money so if we were to model this system as a business process pipeline we might find that there are three distinct activities in the business process once the street sofa has been manufactured we now have to provision it with software we have to write some software to provision our software onto the device once we've done that the sofa can then be installed on the streets where it has to be activated activated means it's switched on it's connected to the internet it's an identity and it's alive and then it moves into the management phase of its business process where we can remotely monitor the street sofa and we can send updates and etc so one tip when we're looking for these different steps in the business process is to look for what we call pivotal events in the business these are specific activities which people typically talk about more frequently or with more importance in your business so in this example we've got street sofa manufactured the business are always talking about this manufactured event once something is manufactured we can then start provisioning this street sofa they also talk about provision once it's actually provisioned now it can be installed on the streets so these pivotal events represent transitions in the life cycle of some concepts as always don't stop at the first model or the first pattern the business process pipeline is always just a starting point where we can go from here is to start looking for capability slices so if we analyse the street sofa domain more closely we can see that there's a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be done to provision, activate and manage the furniture control system some software that runs on the device making sure all the different components are working and talking to each other and it has internet connection etc we then have the citizen guidance system that's a separate piece of software installed on a separate piece of hardware and it also needs to be provisioned activated and managed same for the advertising system installed on the sofa so we have these capabilities and now we have those two ways of modelling the system again there's no perfect answer about which pattern is most useful in any specific domain it's about playing the scorecard and working out which is the most useful to you and let's look at a different domain which is commercial airline planning so we're building some software which airlines use to plan the journeys that planes will take so we start off by looking for the business process pipeline here so the first step is we have the routing team and it's their responsibility to calculate the journeys so an airline will have these legs that they're allowed to fly on for example one leg might be from London to Bangalore on Monday afternoon at 2pm the journeys context is all about combining those into complete journeys it then gets handed over to the fleet department and their responsibility is to work out which one of our planes will fly on each of those journeys it then gets handed over to the cruise department and their responsibility is to work out which crew members will now be on each of those flights so it seems like we have a very clear and a very simple business process pipeline here but there's a twist in the story because even when the schedules have been calculated the data can change so we may have a journey and a plane allocated and the crew members all lined up to be on this flight in three months from now but the data can change crew members may leave the company planes may be taken out of service we've seen that recently with the Boeing MaxJets and also legs can be cancelled for example for some reason the flights from London to Bangalore on Monday we may not be allowed to fly that anymore then we have to recalculate all of this now the business say their process is whichever department currently has the schedule it's their job to fix it so if I'm working in the crew department and the routing data changes it's still my responsibility to fix the routing data and to allocate a plane and then to recalculate the cruise so the business have said each of these people has their own screen so they need their own bounded context okay these forces us into a different pattern into an anti pattern you see all of those bounded context need access to the same rules we need to reapply the same rules if the crew department has to fix the routing data they need to reapply the routing rules and the fleet allocation rules so this means we need a separate context where all of those rules live it's like a brain context all of the rules and the logic lives here and now all of the other context in the system become coupled to the brain context and it kind of sucks logic out of them and they become anemic so whenever we want to change one of the bounded context there's a very significant chance that we have to change too in fact if one of the rules changes we might have to update all four of those context in the system so coupling in the software league the coupling and politics in the teams but this is not always an anti pattern sometimes we might want to have a smart rules context it's very rare I would say that but I wouldn't rule it out so the lesson we can learn here is that we just made a big mistake we confused our business process with the user journeys the business said it's up to this user to fix the problems but that's not the business process the business process is we have to recalculate the journey and allocate the plane so in this situation we can use the proposal pipeline or the immutable pipeline each of those users can still have their own screen but that screen can talk to multiple bounded context in the back end by doing this we now no longer have the brain context all of the rules live in the context that owns them and we simply send this proposal back to be recalculated and push through the pipeline again so let's take a look at another domain now connected vehicles so we're building a platform where people can remotely manage and monitor and analyse all of their vehicles out in the world those vehicles could be cars motorbikes or boats or anything now each of those vehicles has its own proprietary format of sending data back to the server or to the main system and some translation logic has to happen there one thing we could do here is have each of the bounded context applying the translation logic to each of those protocols but that becomes very brittle and it makes those bounded context complex so what we can use instead is a gateway interchange context so gateway means we have this bounded context which sits at the edge of our system all data coming into our system from outside goes through this gateway the gateway context will then translate each of those custom protocols into a standard domain format and it will then send each piece of data in the payload to a relevant bounded context that owns that piece of data so we've now isolated all of that translation in one place at the edge of the system obviously we now have gone back to this previous pattern where we have one bounded context which contains all of this logic and others depend on it but there's a key difference here we're not playing business rules in a gateway interchange context it's very dumb translation logic so that's the difference here another pattern you might see when you're modelling domains is the octopus context or the homogenous octopus context and what this pattern is it's about having one context that reaches out and touches many other contexts so I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of GDPR so it's basically this new European regulation that came into place and basically if a customer says delete all my data you have to delete all of their data within a very short timeframe of a couple of months or your company can get sued billions of dollars or half of your revenue so it's quite a big thing so anyway one company implementing GDPR how should we do this so they create a GDPR context all requests come into the GDPR context and the GDPR context reaches out to all the other bounded contexts and microservices and says if you have any data for customer XYZ delete all the data you have for customer XYZ very quickly and send me a notification back when you've done that because I need to keep a record of all GDPR transactions so when we're looking at these patterns we can start to analyse them against those five criteria we noticed earlier and work out what are the strengths and weaknesses of each pattern so if we were to analyse this octopus context pattern here are some of the things we might notice in terms of value it's about cost efficiency or risk reduction we're trying to centralise something in one place so we don't have to duplicate it in many other places now this is beneficial in one aspect because it saves those 10 or 50 other teams having to implement GDPR logic on the other hand it takes away their autonomy and we've now introduced a dependency on the social side and when we think about politics of this pattern because we have one team and maybe 10 or 50 other teams who all depend on them that's going to be a very political situation when they need to make a breaking change you have to convince 50 teams who all have their own backlogs and stakeholders whipping them to deliver new features you're going to have to stop what you're doing and implement this new change that's a very difficult political situation I've been in a number of times and technically if we see a pattern like the octopus where we have many dependencies what we can try and do is to centralise lots of the complexity or some of the workflow inside the octopus when we were implementing this pattern there was one idea that a message would be sent to each a queue on each bounded context and each bounded context would process that message and send a response and if there was an error each bounded context would retry that themselves but now we're saying to every team in the company you have to have a message queue and you have to implement the retry logic yourself that's quite a significant cost across 50 teams who weren't all using message queues so we could invert that and we could put that retry logic inside the octopus and we just say 50 teams all having to implement that same logic ok here's another example slightly different kind of pattern now so let's look at digital music streaming we're a company who provides a platform which enables other companies to build their own music streaming service like iTunes they provide everything APIs for searching for music streaming it, downloading it etc but the company has decided we want to have our own websites we don't want to have a platform we want to build our own website to use our own platform too one pattern we could use here is autonomous context and micro front ends so what I mean by autonomous is each bounded context owns the UI so UI, APIs and data and on the front end we combine these UI fragments into a single web page using micro front ends now this sounds like a great idea because we have fully autonomous teams who own end to end slices but it's actually not a good idea and not because of the UX but because of the dog food context pattern so the dog food context pattern is about creating a bounded context to get feedback on your own core platform so in this case the reason the company wanted to create their own website using their own platform was not about making money they wanted to create this website to get feedback on their own platform to understand how do our customers feel using our platform what can they do, what can't they do and by getting that feedback from using our own platform we can improve our core platform which is where we make most of our revenue as a business so we actually want this handover between the dog food context and the platform that helps us to understand the customer's feeling even though it now takes longer to implement a feature in the front end that we're looking for there's now one final category of patterns I'd like to share with you called relationship patterns so I may have given you the idea that when we're doing DDD and looking for bounded context we're looking for completely autonomous loosely coupled services and teams that never even have to know about each other or talk to each other or have any dependencies that's actually not quite true there will always be dependencies between your software services some kind of dependencies and of course there will always be some kind of dependencies between your teams so with DDD we have a collection of relationship patterns that help us to work out in any given situation what's the best mode of integration between the teams and the software to minimise the cost of that dependency so we have the classical patterns for example we have two bounded contexts that work very closely together so we have a piece of code that's common to both of those bounded contexts which both of those teams work on that's quite a classical pattern you don't really see that too much one pattern that we do see quite often is the open host service the benefit of the open host service is that if you're building a bounded context you don't build a specific end point for every other team or bounded context that use your bounded context you create one standard interface and you ask all of your clients to conform to this interface to much less work on your side and hopefully it's not much more work on their side either another pattern is the customer supplier where we actively engage with the team we're working with and design the interface collaboratively in some situations that's not possible we have to integrate with another system or another service and they're not willing to work with us collaboratively so we might want to create antycorruption layer where we isolate our bounded context from their bounded context and we have a translation layer very similar to the interchange context or sometimes the cost of translating from a different system to our system are so high we just have to accept that we have to accept their scheme or their model and that has to influence the code we create so none of these patterns is perfect and they're all choices equally over the past few years we've started to see different kinds of patterns emerging like in a sourcing for example hey if my team is blocked on your team why don't I just create a pull request in your code and unblock myself now that can be difficult if I've never worked in your team and I don't understand your code base that's where rotation sub teams patterns become useful if we have people rotating between different teams but secondly there's more chance that two teams are working together and one team is blocked on another team the first team can actually submit a pull request because someone in the team has worked in that code before we also have like partnership and alliance patterns and I'll give you an example so one kind of sub teams patterns I've seen is the semi fluid sub teams where we typically have multiple small teams who are all working together on a bigger piece of the system and what they'll do is they'll have one person who stays fixed in the team typically some kind of team or technical lead and then once a month one person from each team will rotate and move into another team the benefits are now if sub team one has to make a pull request to sub team three chances are someone in sub team one has a good understanding of that code so the cost of making the pull request aren't so high there are two partnership patterns where two teams are working closely one example is the begrudging partnership where actually we don't want to work together but we're stuck together like two bounded contexts which are joined by some shared database or some shared code library understanding the trade off with these patterns can help us to make the right choices for example if we see this pattern in our domain we might not want to but it might make sense to have a shared backlog until we've decoupled things another example is alliance teams so this domain we're working in now is advertising tech so we're building this cool product which enables businesses to run advertising campaigns on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and one day the business come and say look this snapchat thing is taking off we need to be able to run campaigns on snapchat too how can we implement this quickly because everyone is asking for it and competitors are going to have it soon we might choose to use an alliance team here so we have three existing contexts one's about building campaigns one's about managing them and one's about analysing them and each of those contexts needs to change in order to incorporate snapchat so we might decide we might not but we might decide to form an alliance team where one or two people from each of those teams come together and they work on this snapchat project together until it's finished and then they go back to their original teams now I'm trying to point out I'm not a fan of project teams fan of long lived code managed by teams but this is a very short project team and people go back to their stable teams after and maybe we can do some rotation here too so I'm almost finished now and I would just like to say if you're not familiar with the main driven design and you see all of these concepts it can all seem very confusing and enterprising and scary but that's really not the case and anyone is encouraged to get involved in domain driven design it's not it's not a set of sacred rituals things like core domains and bounded contexts all of these things are ideas in the community but the community is always looking for new ways of working new heuristics new patterns for example event storming was invented I think four or five years ago and the community has adopted this event storming and it's taken off massively and everyone's doing it now so if you like these ideas and you're interested in domain driven design please don't be put off by any of the jargon DGD people are always happy for new ideas and new faces one last thing there are a lot of things I wanted to talk about today and I had to reduce my slide deck from 150 slides to about 80 so here are the things I didn't talk about so evolutionary patterns how do we migrate our architecture from one state to another for example how might we migrate from the brain context to the proposal pipeline there are evolutionary patterns we can use there like slicing scale to make those transitions the way we classify bounded contexts like core domains and supportive so much richer topic there to explore and if you are interested in any of those topics or patterns I've got loads of free content on my website so please take a look and if you like it let me know thank you


so supportive of tribal who is the one who supports Hindra ji tribal? he is the one behind this he is a leader and that is what Hindra ji wants so the others should have a different opinion two three reasons i asked her this question when i was small she gave me one book of one tribal boy because my favorite book when i was small his name was trindu the tribal boy so i asked her why you are so close to tribal people she did not say I am close to them because they are weak she said that they are the original owners of India and they have traditional wisdom original wisdom of India is with them so her feelings towards the tribal were not because she viewed tribal as weak but because she viewed tribal as wise so I have come here to learn from you so you are my teacher I am coming to your house


South Africa is the economic hub of the Southern Africa region. It boasts diverse industries, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, retail and wide-ranging financial, professional and communications services. And yet, with all these attractions and economic benefits, South Africa also holds the unenviable title of being the most unequal society in the world. It's a conundrum which policymakers and researchers have been grappling with. This question sits at the core of SA Tide, the Southern Africa Towards Inclusive Economic Development Programme, a unique and collaborative research and policymaking initiative. Through macro-thinking, through climate change, through labour markets, through firm behaviour, SA Tide seeks to make sure that our policy coordination or our policy matrix is including South Africans in our development process, growing economically in a way that's leveraging what this country has to offer. The SA Tide program really is about the production of rigorous and evidence-based policy work that can help policymakers inform the decisions that they have to take. The SA Tide program is a unique collaboration between academic institutions or research institutions abroad, academic and research institutions within South Africa and the government of South Africa, particularly the analytical units, the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry, SARS, and the idea is to examine in a rigorous and independent way policies and other changes that would enable South Africa to achieve its growth and development goals. SA Tide is a relatively ambitious programme focused on generating innovative research that we hope will help policymakers in taking evident-based decisions combined with a strong focus on capacity building throughout. The SA Tide program is divided into six thematic areas or work streams. In keeping with the overarching vision of SA Tide combining research with policy, each work stream is jointly led by a researcher and the relevant official within the South African government. So the collaboration almost has a win-win benefit to it in the sense that as practitioners, those who are either in tax administration or in policy making, are able to solve some of our very, very real and very practical questions and the academics and researchers that join us either locally or internationally or they get the opportunity to apply some of their scholarly approaches and to bring about real solutions to real problems. The old model where you find some clever guys to write you a report and you table a policy brief and you have a little seminar and then you leave it with the policy makers is long gone and in any event it's just like de-linked from the policy process and the real pressures of the policy community and the prioritisations as they're emerging. Since the inception of the program in 2018, it set itself some lofty goals in terms of research output and capacity building initiatives. Workstream One focuses on firm performance and how they adapt to incentives and regulation and I suppose in the context of South Africa's poor economic environment, low growth, high levels of unemployment, it looks at how certain policy interventions, whether it be some tax policy, labour market interventions, industrial policy, I suppose how firms respond to those interventions and whether those policies are actually working towards creating employment and growth. I think one of the big findings from the research relates to localisation and the fragmentation of production networks and really what we see in South Africa is it has led to a substitution of intermediate inputs produced onshore with inputs and it's not even that intermediate inputs are off-shored, in fact they're being completely substituted by inputs. So what this has really led to is an early de-industrialisation process and one of the key findings from this kind of body of research is that especially the Chinese import penetration has been found to be highly negatively associated with employment growth, with sales growth, with firm survival rates, any of the metrics that we would be interested in. But on the plus side and the positive side, investing in innovation and building capabilities can offset that negative impact of the Chinese import competition. There is significant what we call misallocation of capital in South Africa. Some parts of the research also showed this and here the policy recommendation is much more clear. We need a stronger focus on reallocating capital towards medium-sized smaller firms and away from dominating firms, for example in mining and utilities. The idea is to say that if countries are able to collect revenue and use that revenue for its own development and use that revenue in a targeted way towards inclusive growth and inclusive development, that would assist in us achieving the objectives and the aims that SA tied programme is working towards. The key to an economic growth is productivity growth and the latest South African system currently handles corporate income taxation doesn't necessarily promote productivity growth. So it gives lower effective tax burden to some of the older industries, if you wish, and not necessarily so many tax incentives for research development and the newer service sectors. So that's one. Then maybe a second one could be that the correct mix of using tax instruments versus social grants for redistribution. So I think it would be more useful to have these direct benefits rather than zero rating in the value added tax system in order to reach the distribution of objectives. When we look at macroeconomic policy, academic economists normally look at the impact upon GDP, the overall economic activity in the economy. We've done something rather different. As well as looking at those broad aggregates, we've also looked at the effect of fiscal policy and monetary policy upon equality in South Africa. Because overriding all economic issues in South Africa is the persistent and extremely high levels of inequality. The main areas of work focused around fiscal and monetary policy and in the fiscal policy space, there was a big focus around fiscal multipliers because it tells you about the relationship between government spending as well as government taxation and economic growth. And so there was quite a lot of work in this area that ultimately influenced and informed how the national treasury crafted its own macro fiscal stance. We need to think about what is going to include South Africans in our economic development. And so some of the main areas of work are just measuring our inequality in very textured ways, understanding it very deeply. And so for example, we've worked extremely hard with the tax data that this policy has made available because it gives you a lens into who benefits and who doesn't benefit from our economic growth. In my study, I look at what is the job-housing mismatch. We are people located and we are the jobs located. Releases also show that the employment search space for lower-income individuals are much smaller than those that for higher income, which means that the opportunities that lower-income individuals can access is much lower than for higher-income individuals. And that forms part of the inequality that we see individuals face on a daily basis within our country. SAE Tide has played a big role in shifting the perceptions in South Africa about what are the cost and benefits of a renewable energy future. So one of the things that we've highlighted and continue to highlight is South Africa has a very advanced water infrastructure. And that water infrastructure is extremely important in the context of climate change for more expecting, more extreme events. The outputs from especially the energy work really shows that trying to constrain the inclusion of renewable energy is not an ideal situation for South Africa and that we really do need to think a bit more about that. What we've seen in the energy plants coming out of South Africa is looking more at the inclusion of renewable energy into its power mix and we hope that they can sort of expand from there. We've also explored, I think in a rather meaningful way, the potential of Southern Africa to develop along lines that are somewhat less traditional than the existing trading relationships. I mean the sort of conventional wisdom is that South Africa exports manufactured goods and primarily benefits from that relationship to the exclusion of industrial development in other countries. We've sponsored some, I think, fairly innovative and pioneering research in terms of looking at, let's say, the relationship between urbanization and growth in the region, the relationship between agricultural exports and the ability of agricultural exporters to actually benefit from the trade relationship with South Africa and the presence of value chains. I think it's been quite an important exercise for us to try to understand the significance of regional value chains in these trading relationships. It's clear that the rich insights gained from SA Tide have already made a mark and will leave a lasting impact. I think the South Africa data sharing, all this data infrastructure has been a role model for many of the other countries on the African continent. And now we are building up data in Uganda as well, starting up similar activities also in Zambia, Tanzania, to some extent also in Rwanda. So that's a spillover effect. When the COVID pandemic started, SA Tide was very quickly able to mobilize intellectual, academic and other resources to help inform South Africa's response to the pandemic from a policy perspective. The capacity building component has been key. And in fact, I think this is the part that potentially will have the biggest impact in the long term. So specifically it involves the construction of the data lab itself. This is a physical space that stores anonymized tax data where researchers can work on it. We also engage with the Young Scholars Program which supported master's thesis. And lots of these papers went on to be published as wider working papers. And in addition, we supported PhD scholarships. So I think that these initiatives will ensure that the impact of the program lasts well beyond the Zide cycle. The anonymous tax data is a phenomenal resource. And one of the great achievements of this program has been to establish that resource as being available for researchers. The best thing from my point of view is the massive presence of South African researchers in the project as well. Coming from Denmark where we have had administrative data since the early 70s. I think Denmark is in a unique position to actually spillover knowledge to the research community in South Africa. So there is no doubt about that there has been mutual benefits from this collaboration. The biggest pride I think is the fact that we have indeed managed to reach the established goals which at the time when the program started were considered extremely ambitious, both in terms of quantity and quality. So I think that those are things that at the end will have an impact.