Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. To introduce our very special speaker today, we have a very special guest, Professor Ishwe, who, as many of you know, is now the director, recently appointed director of the Sustainability Accelerator at the Door School. Previous to that, among his many other jobs, he was the director of the Precord Institute for Energy, which is our kind of guiding light and benefactor. So we literally work for him on this seminar series, but now he's back in a different capacity to introduce our speaker today. He, of course, is a world-class researcher in electrochemistry, nanoscience, and sustainability, actually doing innovations across many different domains, from energy, batteries, solar cells, water purification, air purification, a few other ones I probably forgot. Just to end the introduction of E, he's been awarded 28 prestigious awards and honors, including the Global Energy Award in 2021, and five startups have sprung out from his laboratory. So he's a very busy guy, and we're glad he is able to join us today to introduce our special speaker for today, E. Well, thank you very much, John. Finally, I know how many awards I have won. Thank you for counting that for me. I never know. You said that you probably put it here. OK, I'm glad to know about his number. And thank you. It's my actual pleasure to introduce Cynthia Zhen. Let me tell you a little bit about Cynthia. About two years ago, I met Cynthia for the first time. He is currently still a PhD student at MIT, an operational research center. And she was telling me about the exciting research she has been doing. She entered in BlackRock, SoftBank, on her way in making a lot of money. Then instead of telling her about financing, because I know nothing about, I started to tell her about climate change, sustainability. And presenting to her some of the problems we are thinking about. Cynthia said, well, that's very urgent. That's important. She went back to MIT talking to her PhD advisor, saying she wanted to switch the research topic into climate, climate adaptation, and so on. So in the past two years, she generated very, very interesting results. I said, why don't you come to Stanford to tell us about what you have been doing, what you have learned. Here we go. I think Cynthia now is back, ready to tell us about the results. But let me tell you, she picked a date of today to give the energy seminar. I think she used her AI model to know this extreme weather. In the past few days happening right here, this gives the best background introduction about her research. It's never been even more important time compared to now to work on the climate adaptation. We start short introduction. Cynthia, take it from here. Thank you very much for the introduction. And I am today here to talk to you about weather forecasting and disclaimer. I promise I did not bring the storm. It was not a part of the, it was definitely a coincidence. So as Professor Yi mentioned, I am Cynthia. I am a fifth year PhD candidate from MIT. And since I am very honored here to talk in front of brilliant and aspiring students at Stanford, I thought I might share a little bit about how I got here. So my academic journey has not been so linear. I did my undergrad in mathematics in London. And then I actually worked in financial industry for about two years. The work in finance was very exciting and very interesting. But I felt a drive to do something more impactful and meaningful with my work. So this drive led me back to pursue a PhD. Now at MIT, working with very amazing advisor and aspiring peers on some interesting problems for climate change. So without, so I'm very honored and excited to share with you some of the work that we have been doing so far. Climate change undoubtedly is one of the most pressing problem of our generation. Over the past century, we're seeing tremendous surge in the number of natural disasters worldwide. They're not only deadly, costing a lot of lives. They're also extremely expensive. So in the past 20 years here in the United States, the total loss amounted to more than $2.1 trillion US. Is it better now? OK. It's good? Great. So basically kind of the goal that guided basically my PhD work is that in light of climate change, is there something we can do utilizing our knowledge in machine learning and optimization to facilitate climate change adaptation, to build resilience, and to aid sustainable development. So before I talk about how to do weather forecasting, let's first take a quick tour of history of how we got here today. The art of weather forecasting actually originated, began with early civilization back in 340 BC. Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote Meteorologica, in which he documented his theories about the formation of rain and storm, et cetera. Also around the same time, Chinese astronomers developed this festival calendar in which they divided the whole year into 24 festivals, each of which contains a certain weather pattern. So over the next few centuries, as scientific methods developed and also measuring capabilities improved, that led to our understanding of the physical laws underlying the atmospheric dynamics. So interestingly though, back in early 1900s, when the first dynamical model was introduced, it took Richardson, him working alone by hand back then everything was calculated by hand, it took him several months to produce a wildly inaccurate six hour forecast for the town of Munich. So obviously that was not very helpful if you have to wait for several months to do so. So really, weather forecasting became kind of a more operational field when we started to use modern computers. So it was Professor von Neumann and also Charney, they started to do so and then 50 years later, we finally had the first operational forecast. So kind of since then up until now, weather forecasting has been predominantly made by these dynamical models using a very physics-based approach until AI started to change the game. So we are right now seeing exciting interests growing both in academia and in industry in how to use machine learning and AI to do weather forecasting. And DeepMind is really leading the way in producing operational deployment. They have been working with the UK Meteorology Department and actually just a few weeks ago, well more than a few weeks ago, but last year, end of last year, they released a graphcast. So it is the first time in history where machine learning model outperformed the best dynamical model. So in my lab, we started to work on this topic since the beginning of my PhD. And I'm here today to tell you more about how we take a similar approach to do forecasting of tropical cyclones or hurricanes. So why is AI really taking off now, why not earlier? Like in many other sectors and fields, it is the increase in computing power, data availability, particularly driven by satellite image observations and also processing techniques. And in particular, because of the growth of computer vision, natural language processing and time series techniques, we are able now to do what is called multimodal machine learning, which is really at the frontier of machine learning where you're trying to synthesize data from different modalities and sources. So my PhD work centers around the development of this multimodal machine learning framework. And as mentioned earlier, I have worked on it, so my group at MIT actually focuses primarily on healthcare applications. So I have been working extensively for healthcare applications to develop the kind of the technology to do multimodal machine learning. But my interest is really in weather forecasting and also climate forecasting. So I have adapted kind of leveraged the experience there to predict weather events such as hurricanes and floods. So the technology itself is very cool and exciting, but really what excites me personally is the vast and profound implications this technology enable us to do. Imagine that you can now forecast flooding events for your house say three to five years, then you might do something different to protect your family. And as a society, we might do urban planning, infrastructure planning and insurance very differently if we are able to forecast risks in a very different way. So I have been working on applying it for insurance pricing and also sustainable manufacturing. But the focus of the talk today is kind of how to do weather forecasting using machine learning. So to introduce the concept of multimodal machine learning, I would start with kind of a folk story from India. So this is a group of blind men trying to touch an elephant. So depends on where you touch the component of the elephant, you might infer very, very different outcome. So you would only be able to know it's an elephant if you kind of go around the elephant and take data samples from multiple sources and places. And this is kind of the idea behind multimodal machine learning. So how we started to work in this field is really from healthcare. And it is really a natural way of thinking and inferring. When you go to the doctor, when you have a lung problem, for example, the doctor would prescribe a chest x-ray and the doctor would think about your chief complaints and the doctor would also think about your age, your gender, your past medical history and take all of this into account to make a final decision. But when you look at this, this is across multiple sources and modalities of data, ranging from images to language data to tabular data. So if we can make an algorithm that is able to make decisions and inference by synthesizing data, then it should be better than thinking about each individual modalities. And this is exactly the idea behind multimodal machine learning. And really kind of the framework is very general and the application is also very vast, ranging from self-driving cars to weather forecasting, healthcare, recommender system, et cetera. So when you think about data fusion and synthesizing data, there are generally three strategies to do so. That is early fusion and pipeline. There is the late fusion on the other end, which is basically consensus model. So you would have inch individual models and take an average consensus. Then there is the mid fusion approach, which is basically kind of something in between the two extremes. Based on our experience, we have found mid fusion strategy to be the most performing and also the most versatile. For reasons, I will explain next. So here is kind of an illustration of the overall multimodal framework, taking the mid fusion approach. So we have different sources and types of data. We process them individually and then we concatenate the features from different data sources in the feature space. Then we make the downstream prediction. One of the advantages of this approach is that in the first step, we can leverage some state of the art processing techniques. For example, right now, everyone is talking about the large language models, so we can use them to process language data. And as the models themselves evolve, we are able to update and upgrade our processing techniques as well. And this approach allow us to add data and take away data very easily, making experiments extremely easy to do. And in addition, in the downstream case, we can once again leverage different prediction models based on different needs. So for example, in the healthcare domain, interpretability is very important and figuring out which features contribute to the model is also an important task. So we might take a regression model to do so. And when thinking about kind of the overall performance plus computational cost, maybe tree-based approach are more faster and cheaper. So the first example that I'm showing today is on hurricane forecasting. So the science of hurricane is that they are rapidly rotating storms that originates from the tropical warm ocean waters. So they draw energy from the ocean, from the water, and they release energy through rainfall, especially when they make a landing. So in order to protect our communities, we need to know basically where it's going and also what is the magnitude of this hurricane. And these are track and intensity forecasting tasks separately. When there is the hurricane, typically this is what you see on the news, which is in the field, they call it a spaghetti model because each line represents one model forecast. And overall, we would take an average consensus of each individual model. And broadly speaking, in the field of hurricane forecasting, there are three categories of models to do so. Obviously, the most performing ones are dynamical models. As highlighted here, GFSO and HWRF are kind of the leading two dynamical models. One is run by the North American NOAA, the North American Weather Forecasting Agency. And the second one is run by the European Weather Forecasting Agency, which is typically what we discuss in the news, the North American model and the European model. In addition, there are statistical models and also ensemble models. And typically, if there is an official guidance, it's made of an ensemble model, which is kind of taking a weighted average of each individual operational models, either dynamical or statistical. Statistical models are typically a very simple regression-based model. So it's kind of the precursor of machine learning approach by looking at patent recognition. So in this task, we set ourselves to forecast hurricanes by taking a multimodal machine learning approach. And specifically, we take two modalities of data. The first one is historical storm data, which is typically the data used for statistical models that consist of certain basic features, such as the basin of the hurricane, the time right now, latitude, longitude, et cetera. In addition, we coupled that with reanalysis maps. So reanalysis maps are kind of, they come in a picture format. So basically, they look like a satellite imagery picture with each pixel representing kind of the numeric value of a certain atmospheric character. In this case, we have taken the wind speed of the U, V, and Z direction at three atmospheric levels. So basically, that is kind of nine pictures at each time step. So here I'm presenting the results for hurricane forecasting. Here, this is for intensity task. And I'm showing the mean absolute error and also standard deviation for standalone machine learning. And we are comparing ourselves to operational models. So the first two lines you see here are all of the machine learning models that we have trained. And the last three lines are the most advanced operational models from statistical approach and the last two are more dynamical approach. We compare results in two different basins because the behavior of hurricane is very different in the two basins in Eastern Pacific and North Atlantic. And these are the out-of-sample experiments we have conducted using the last three years of the data set that we had. So that kind of accounts for 2016 and 2019. So here we see that the most, so in Eastern Pacific basin, the most advanced machine learning model shows very competitive results with the most advanced weather forecasting dynamical models. In North Atlantic basin, on the other hand, dynamical models outperform slightly to the machine learning models. However, it is noteworthy that although these machine learning models, most of the training and cost of training and the time of training comes before. So we pre-train the model and the deployment time is basically seconds. And we can run trained model on a personal laptop to make predictions. Whereas those dynamical models, they're typically run at supercomputers in national labs and the runtime is usually four to six hours. So machine learning models are able to actually make real-time forecast using the latest data available. So that's kind of comparing a long machine learning model versus operational model. But what is actually more exciting is that we thought, okay, since official forecasts are typically a consensus model, why don't we try to add a machine learning model to the consensus model and see how they work with other models? And what we have found is that when you add machine learning model into a consensus model, we actually outperform the official forecast in two basins by a little bit. So this is extremely encouraging for the kind of the future of adding machine learning into one of the operational models. This is all great. Obviously, it comes with, it cannot be a fairytale that everything is so great. You might ask, okay, so then why don't we just deploy it already? So there are certain limitations and one of which is that I mentioned that we use reanalysis maps. So reanalysis maps are available retrospectively. So they are obviously unfortunately not available in real time, but it is the best quality of data that we can access to for academic purposes. And the second problem or the second extension is that we started this work at the beginning of my PhD about four years ago. And in between a lot of things have happened. For example, there is the large foundational model, the emergence of large foundational model and also the emergence of kind of natural language processing as a technique. So basically we need to leverage these models and also we need to add additional modalities of data because adding more rich data into a multimodal approach is always going to lead to better results. Kind of these two thinking led to the second project that we did for flood prediction. So basically kind of how I started this flood prediction was at the time I was really brainstorming with my advisor, which natural disaster to pick.  And the reason that we picked flooding was at the time Pakistan was hit terribly by flooding and there were lots of Pakistan students, basically fundraising outside MIT and Harvard. And I personally had friends who are from Pakistan and the economy was just destroyed because the whole country was submerged, a third of the country was submerged underwater for several months. And this is devastating for a developing country. So then we decided, okay, maybe we want to do flood prediction. And kind of the nice thing is that when we use satellite images, we actually don't depend on developing countries such as Pakistan to have high level quality of data because satellite images are available globally and therefore we're able to leverage this available data to do forecasting on a global scale. So kind of a quick overview of what is the existing approach to flood risk mapping. So there are short-term forecasts and long-term forecasts. The short-term forecasts typically depend on the hydrodynamical models, which are once again physics-based modeling. They're rather local scale. And also, when you want to stretch the forecasting horizon, then arrow propagates because you're always kind of feeding the prediction into the model. For longer-term risk maps, for example, if I wanted to know what is the risk of flooding in five years, there are typically kind of historical flood risk maps. And one of the issues is that they're kind of historical looking and therefore unable to deal with the changing climate. So for this work, we decided to take three modalities of data. In addition to the statistical data and also satellite images, we decided to leverage language data. So language is, you know, it's a data that is extremely vast and available on a lot of topics, but the problem is that it's very unstructured. So thanks to, you know, right now the growth of natural language processing and everyone is kind of becoming more and more dependent on large models, such as chat GPT, we're able to better utilize language data. And in this case, we thought about using Wikipedia's geography section to take in consideration of the geography features of a certain place. Because basically at the time I was reading a lot of those hydrodynamical model papers and I realized that a lot of the times you need to know what is the river location and kind of the topological features and if there are mountains and oceans to be able to understand the geography of a certain place. If you search Wikipedia, it actually has a lot of information. For example, there is a lake nearby, there is ocean nearby. So this is the approach that we took. So I have to present kind of not semi-available, semi-ready results because this is still kind of ongoing work that we're trying to do. But those preliminary results show us very promising numbers that basically show us that if we take a machine learning approach, we're able to forecast extreme events such as flooding up to years in advance. And obviously we're still trying to refine and improve the results. This is already extremely promising and that shows the potential of using such an approach and especially taking a multimodal approach can have for tailgate events such as flooding. So kind of combining the two examples, I'm sharing certain lessons that I have learned during this experience. So the first lesson that I have learned is that multimodal approach typically outperforms single-modal approach. And the second lesson that I have learned is that machine learning models are able to produce very competitive results to dynamical models, but in a fraction of simulation time. And the last lesson is that scalable machine learning models can have the potential to produce long-term risk models that would have basically profound implications to many, many fields, infrastructure planning and insurance. So because I honestly think that this is super exciting and that's why I'm trying to pursue an academic career to continue the work and to refine the technology and to broaden the impact. So I have worked on hurricanes and flood, but obviously a similar technology can be applied for droughts, wildfires and earthquakes, etc. And that would really change how the society works in many, many aspects such as agriculture or renewable energy planning, for example, as we shift into more renewable energy supply than if there is, say, no sun, then we cannot afford to have a blackout. So basically the capability to know and to forecast whether in advance will help us make decisions to make our society not only more efficient, but also more safe. So this is all I have prepared for the talk and I'm very happy to take any questions. Thanks, Cynthia. That was a terrific, very exciting research, very exciting research directions. I especially appreciate letting us know a little bit about what's underneath all those storm track, hurricane storm tracks that you see on K-Ball News constantly at certain times of the year, also commented by some political leaders and others. So we do have about 15 minutes for questions in the room. We usually start with student questions. Hi, Cynthia. Thank you so much for the great talk. So the non-linear dynamical systems that govern a lot of these systems, they are known to be chaotic, which means you have to write the simulation for four hours to know exactly what the system is going to be doing. And normally, given a system, you can actually derive mathematically your time horizon beyond which you cannot predict anymore. So I'm wondering how does the machine learning approach address this problem? Yeah, thank you so much for the question. So basically, you're absolutely right. Kind of we picked hurricanes to forecast. And at the time, people thought we were crazy because it's known to be very chaotic and it's one of the most notorious tasks. But basically, what we observe is that the results that I show here are for 24-hour advance forecasts. And basically, both dynamical models and machine learning models are able to make reasonable forecasts, although not very accurate. As you see, standard deviation is pretty large compared to the MAE. But when we actually stretch the testing horizon to 48 hours, we observe that actually both dynamical models and machine learning models stop producing reasonable results. So basically, it is most likely due to the chaotic nature that things evolve drastically as you stretch the forecasting horizon. Other questions? So Fintia, for that, how can you expand the learning? Expand the learning, so you have what, so far as 2016 to 2019, you said that that learning. Expand the learning, would you be able to, based on the past data, increase your, based on the machine learning approach, the accuracy will increase, the error bar will be reduced. So what's your... Yeah, thank you for the question. So actually the testing period is 2016 to 19, so it's three years, but we actually use data from 1980 as the training data up until 2016. However, the issue is that we didn't have access to earlier data because read-in-access maps were not available before then. But generally speaking, as you increase the data set and the availability of data machine learning models tend to increase the performance. Yeah, can I ask one more? No matter it's hurricane or the flooding, I'm also wondering what about people's response to a debt. Let's see if you can predict and say, hey, the flooding is likely coming, it's time window. Then what would otherwise people do? Building infrastructure, of course, is very expensive and you must be thinking about how people can respond. I remember when California having this power consumption this last year, right, John? It's looking, it's going to exist, certain threshold. Then we all get text messages and say, go home and reduce your air-conditioning need or something like that. And suddenly just several gigawatt or power is reduced. I'm interested in the response part based on machine learning and this outcome, because to see what you think. Yeah, I think definitely this is a great point. I think that one of the key advantages that I believe machine learning model has is the capability to use real-time data to make forecasts at the spot. So I think in terms of response and emergency response, especially being able to update forecast models using the latest data at a shorter frequency is able to kind of be very helpful to save many, many lives. So because dynamical model typically take a few hours to run results and at the time things might have evolved drastically. So I think definitely this is a very interesting angle. Thank you. Yeah, actually, if I could intercede, there is a lot of research now on dynamical multi-sector models. And I think your general conclusion regarding the synthesis of the structural physics models and the machine learning models holds over. So I think an exciting thing would be to work with people who do that kind for someone like you to work with those people and they do both the physical and although it's harder, human response, human adaptation options and meld everything together. I think that would probably lead to much better operational results than we now have. We've actually looked pretty carefully at the flood map approach and it's actually frankly not very useful at all for people who are actually trying to make decisions on the ground. I think we have one over here and two back over here. Yeah, thanks for your talk. I wanted to ask about the multimodal ML. I can understand in general why it's useful, but particularly on disasters, where do you think the textual information will help? Like in the example you showed, it didn't seem to be helping that much, but maybe there's things you have in mind where there's information capturing text that actually help pinpoint where things might happen. Yeah, so actually I didn't add the slide, but for example, so for example.  Yeah, so here is kind of, thank you for the question. So basically here's the backup slide that I didn't include. So basically for hurricanes specifically, there's a lot of experts who describe the behavior of the hurricane in a text style. For example, I give an example here, so there's a lot of kind of the characteristics of a hurricane specifically, and being able to leverage that from a language format probably has some additional insights into different other types of more structured data. So this is one example. Can I read the results for the example that the text didn't add much to what you already have with the statistical? So for the flooding one, the actually adding text helped a little bit, but the overall results are not so great. The ROCA we had the highest was around 0.75, which is why we're still continuing to kind of improve this by adding more satellite imagery data from topological features as well as climate features, but we're still doing experiments, so I unfortunately cannot share more, encouraging results at the moment. Thank you, Cynthia, for such an amazing presentation.  I'm wondering could you elaborate a little bit more on how you have envisioned this result to what are the indications for long-term climate adaptation, especially in the exciting field about renewable energy penetration and infrastructure planning, because those designing take a long time. I'm wondering how this model can help us have a better and smarter design in those areas. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the question. So I kind of come back to this page of results. So basically kind of when I started to do this work, basically I tried one-year flooding prediction two years and five years, and it usually when you think about it, my first instinct would be five years would be harder than one year, at least in the healthcare sector, it's harder to predict the outcome five years than one year. So Mike, I'm kind of hardwired to think that, okay, longer is worse, but actually in this one, results show that we don't see a decline in accuracy over the kind of the horizon, and in some certain cases, it is even easier to forecast the probability of a place having a flooding event in the next 10 years versus one year, because if this place is more prone to flooding, then 10 years is kind of a longer window for it to happen. And in this lens, I think that it's kind of the opposite of normally how predictions work, and this kind of longer time horizon is able to allow decision makers and policy makers to make, have enough time, say to do infrastructure planning, to prepare, for example, better drainage system in certain areas or build better dams, et cetera. Thank you for your question. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. As a future thing, you have suggested renewable energy economy. How would you take it to account geo-political height and height of this, in the model like this? If I'm right. Most people have subsidy policies, right? Are they predictable? How would you, any perspective? I guess you're asking a machine learning engineer from MIT to comment on the geo-political implications. I think I'm right, the idea here would be to do better predictions of wind as it is input to wind machines, so how to configure them. There's lots of research on how to configure them, how they space them out, what locations to put them in, is that correct? So it's more of what you could do with a wind farm, where's the best place to put a wind farm and get the maximum output from it. And then the politicians can, however they do it, they can use that information as some of the input to their decision-making process. So whenever you have an opportunity. So it's so hard to cite these things whenever you get a chance to do one. It's very good to optimize the maximum output, effective output you get at the right time. Yeah, I suppose that kind of, at least personally, I personally haven't thought about this, the geo-political implications. And obviously when you think about energy these days, especially with the war, et cetera, it is an unavoidable topic. But frankly speaking, I am kind of taking a more of a utilitarian approach, thinking that how can I make the overall energy system perhaps on the local scale more efficient and more resilient against climate events, for example. Yes, thanks for your great speech here. And I'm just very curious, because I think there was a tiny hurricane happened in Stanford yesterday. So I was wondering what is the minimum level of the hurricane this model could forecast? Yeah, so, well, I think that, so basically when you think about a hurricane, so a storm, so basically a storm, when it passes a certain threshold, it is categorized as hurricane. So basically at least from our work, we only work predominantly with storms that are already big enough to be categorized as hurricanes. But I think that it really, in terms of what is the minimum threshold of a storm that can be used, can machine learning apply to predict, it really depends on the training of the model. So in our experience, we made the conscious decision of only predicting hurricanes, but if one were to develop a different model by taking data sets from all storms, then the threshold doesn't necessarily need to be there. It's more of a modeler's choice. Does that answer your question? Okay, great. Other questions? I have one last one. I've always been puzzled by a set of results that came out of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Colorado Office about 10, 15 years ago. So see if you can help me understand why this might be. That was in many of the climate predictions people have done. This is mostly historical comparisons. The big climate runs, it do take a lot of time to run. If you just take a combination of the existing forecast, you do better, retrospective forecast, you do better than any of the individual models. Any idea where that might be? Yeah, so basically this is kind of the... I guess you're asking why ensemble models, for example, you have many, many spaghetti models, and then you take an ensemble weighted average, it would tend to be better than each individual one. I think that really, I would say part of the reason is due to the chaotic nature of such hurricane evolution. So basically when things are chaotic, the outcome is extremely different based on the very sensitive input that you put. And every model comes with certain errors and kind of wisdom of the crowd when you take more consensus and kind of averaging, cancelling the errors, the results tend to be better. It's kind of like a lot of large numbers or something like that. Yeah. Any other questions? I have lots of more technical questions. Last one, this is the last one, I'm just doing that. Yeah, actually I just realized this. So have you thought about kind of like augment your real data from simulations to your machine learning model? So what I mean is like you can simulate a hurricane that hasn't happened before. People haven't seen this type of hurricane before. And now you simulate it and then add that data as if it's real data to your machine learning model. Yeah, that's a great point because basically one of the critiques of our approach is that most of the data that we use to train, all of them are historical data. And as climate increase and the sea temperature grows, a lot of the meteorologies are suspecting hurricanes to be more stronger, to have more intensity. And that is a major weakness for us to take a machine learning approach using only historical data. And what you mentioned could be a great idea to complement the data set, to basically train our models to be able to learn from more potentially bigger hurricanes that haven't happened yet. So I think it's a great point. Thank you. Definitely food for thought. So with that said, thank you very much Cynthia for a very good talk that opened our eyes to a lot of new horizons that you're working on. We'll look forward to seeing results in the future and thanks to the audience for excellent questions. Thank you very much.


Yes, welcome back. So we were looking at Paul's letter, Paul's prayer for the Colossian believers verse 9 onwards all the way up to verse 14. So the first prayer request which he is asking from the Lord he says, we continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will so that why is he making this prayer so that they may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way. You know, we were looking at those missionary journeys in the second missionary journey Paul and his companions want to go towards Bytynia but then the Holy Spirit prompts them and says no that they are not meant to go into Bytynia. So they say okay fine and they go towards Troas and then Paul has this vision where you know you have the Macedonian man saying please come and help us. So how did Paul and his companions know that they are not supposed to enter into Bytynia? They were full of the knowledge of the will of God on a daily basis. You know, not just simply knowing the general will of God but being so full of the knowledge of God where you know his will regarding the things regarding the activities that you're doing on a daily basis. Jesus and his disciples were walking through the desert. How did Jesus know that he has to stop at that particular well? You know, you could have maybe walked another one kilometer and stopped somewhere else but why did he sense in his heart that that is the exact place where he should stop and rest? So you see if a person is full of the knowledge of the will of God they will be able to take the right steps at the right time and that will make a huge difference in their ministry and even in their personal walk. Everything that they do they start doing it in the way God wants it done. So that will please him in every way and it will be a life that is worthy of the Lord. So therefore it is good to know the general will of God. It is also vital to be full of the knowledge of his will. How do you gain access to something like this? How do you become full of the knowledge of his will? We are told that it comes through the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives. So this should become a prayer point, you know, where we pray during our quiet time and say Lord I need this wisdom and understanding which you alone can give me. I want to walk in this kind of a wisdom and understanding so that Lord, if you I know because it says very plainly the Holy Spirit will give this to us. If we ask for it, you know, he will give us this wisdom and understanding. Paul was asking it for those people. We can ask it for ourselves and say Lord give me this wisdom and understanding that comes from the Spirit so that hour by hour I am filled with the knowledge of your will and I get all my decisions right so that I will do what I am meant to do and it will be so pleasing to you. You know, so it's something that we can ask. So the second prayer point that Paul asks for these collusion believers is that, you know, they would be strengthened with all power. This would be verse 11. They would be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might. Why? Why does he want them to be strengthened with all power so that you may have great endurance and patience? When you become full of the knowledge of the of God's will, you know, there are so many things that God is going to be asking us to do. We will not be able to do it in our own strength. When you're, you know, ignorant and blind to what God wants, you can sail through the whole day not even realizing that God had actually wanted to so many things from you.  God wants me to send and spend half an hour in prayer interceding for someone.  And it's not something that you can do on your own. So he says, you know, you would need great endurance and patience to live in this way. And so Paul is saying that God would asking Paul is praying and asking the Lord to strengthen them with all power so that they will be able to exercise great endurance and patience and live in a way which is worthy of God. So we need to know God's will, but we need the strengthening and enabling of God himself to be able to actually do that will. The third prayer point that we see over here, he says, and giving joyful thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of His holy people. So Paul says, my third prayer point is actually a praise point. I give joyful thanks to the Father, because you guys have been qualified to share in the inheritance of His holy people. So they will begin to share in this inheritance, begin to enjoy this inheritance even as they are full of the will of God, full of the knowledge of the will of God. And they start acting out this will, obeying this will through the strengthening and enabling of the Holy Spirit himself. He will give them the patience and endurance they need to be able to do his will. So that's basically a small prayer that he prays for them. And then he goes on to talk about this thing which is on his heart, because there are wrong teachings which have been coming into the church. And he wants to stress that it is Jesus who should be the center of our focus. It is Jesus who is supreme over all things, including the spirits. So somewhere around the end of chapter two is where he actually clearly says, please don't go away into angel worship. Okay, so that's basically what he's trying to focus on. He's trying to tell them, do not go into angel worship, do not go into all this Gnostic teachings which have started rising where you want spirits to come to you and reveal things to you so that you can boast about how great you are. He says, please don't get into all of these things. Jesus is the one who is supreme. He's supreme over everything, even over the spirits. So let your faith and your walk be focused on Jesus. So that is what he is focusing on right here. So if we can have someone read out for us, verses 15, maybe all the way up to verse 20, yeah, 15 to 20, if we could have someone read out, Colossians chapter one, verses 15 to 20. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him, all things we are created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether through thrones or dominions or presparities or power, all things we are created through him and for him, excuse me. And he is before all things and in him, all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father. Amen. I don't know. Please go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. For it pleased the Father that in him, all the fullness should drill and by him to reconcile all things to himself by him, whether things on earth, all things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of his cross. Amen. Thank you. So in these verses, Paul talks about the supreme status, the highest status that can be is given to Jesus. So he talks about that. So he says the son is the image of the invisible God is literally the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn over all creation. Not sure whether we've touched upon this in other classes, we most probably have the word firstborn over here. It's not talking about Jesus being, you know, being created by God as the first born in the creation process. No, because this is how the Jehovah Witnesses would use this particular verse. They say, in the beginning, God created the created creation. And one of the first acts of creation which he created was Jesus. No, that is not what this verse is saying. This verse is not saying that Jesus is first born in that sense. It is saying he's first born over all creation. It's talking about a technical term. It's a legal term which refers to the inheritance, the authority which comes to the first born. So that word first born is not talking about someone being born biologically or not. It's talking about the legal status that they have, where they hold all the inheritance, where they exercise all of the authority. So very difficult to remember what I have touched upon in which class, but in case I have not, maybe we should, you know, when go look at this, in biblical times, if a Jewish person, let us say he has two sons, one of course was born to him biologically first, and then the second son was born second. So as long as the first born son, the biologically first born son is alive, he's probably the one who would be inheriting the property. He's the one who would be given an awful authority in that household. So yes, he is literally the first born when it comes to biological birth and when it comes to the legal sense of the term first born. Also, he is the first born in the sense he's the one who holds the inheritance. He is the one who exercises the authority. But let us say he has an accident and he dies. He's now dead. Now the second born becomes the first born. Does it mean he somehow miraculously was biologically born first? No, it's not talking about his biological birth at all. The second born is now the first born in the legal sense. The second son is now holding the inheritance. He is now holding the authority and legally in all the paperwork, he would be termed as the first born, not because he was born biologically first, but because legally he is holding on to the inheritance and the authority. In that sense, it's talking about Jesus' legal status. This is what Jesus' legal status is. He is the image of the invisible God and legally he is the one who is holding all of creation as a inherited inheritance. And he's the one exercising authority over all of creation. That is who he is. Verse 16 goes on to elaborate on this. It says, for in him, all things were created. Everything that was created, it was created in him. It was through him that it was created. So obviously he is the one who has legal inheritance authority over all of creation because of who he is. It was in him that all things were created things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. So the things which you can see visibly on this earth, the trees and the mountains and the natural resources and the human beings. Yes, he is he has ultimate authority over all of these things which we can see. But he also has ultimate authority over all the invisible things which you cannot see, such as these thrones and powers and rulers and authorities. It's talking about these spiritual forces in the unseen realm. You know, the spirit beings that we cannot see, which are boasting against God and placing themselves as though they are gods, you know, in defiance of God. Even Jesus, Jesus is Lord even over such creatures. So he very specifically, you know, talks about these four categories of spirit beings, the thrones and the powers and the rulers and the authorities. Now this reminds us of our efficient passage, because in the efficient passage just before talking about the you know, armor of God, Paul's he writes over there and he says, you know, you guys are fighting against these four levels of spiritual authority. So you better wear your armor. If you're not fully clothed in your armor, you know, you may fall prey to these four levels of demonic powers. So those powers are mentioned over here, even in the Colossian passage. And three of them are identical with the ones which he mentions over there in the efficient passage. In the efficient passage, he is the first category that we had talked about worthy, our cars, you know, in the Greek. So these are the ancient ones, the most supreme ones. So here, again, those the same archive are mentioned over here in this verse. He also mentions the exucia, the authorities who were that were mentioned in the efficient letter, the ones who exercise, you know, delegated authority. So those exucia are mentioned even over here, the same Greek words are being used, the archive, the exucia. The third term seems to be a little different. You know, in the efficient letter, it talks about the powers. They are called the Cosmo Kratos, the rulers of the cosmos, the, you know, the world rulers. Here, the word Kurio is used, you know, they are called lords or masters. So two different words in the efficient, you have the term Cosmo Kratos. Here you have the word Kurio. Both of them basically mean lords and masters. The fourth one seems to be different. There in the efficient letter, it talks about the evil spirits of this world. Whereas here, it talks about Tronoi, the thrones. So you know, that's just one different category that is mentioned over here. So, you know, in all of his interactions with the, with the Lord, these are things which the Lord has revealed to him that these are the kind of demonic powers that are there in existence and our fight, the fight of the church is against these forces. So here, Paul is saying all these, you know, very big, powerful, mighty spiritual powers, even they are under Christ. Christ is ultimately the superior authority. He is the first born over all creation. So these, these things which you people are you know, kind of looking up to and beginning to admire, okay, not the church, the church was not doing that. But you know, other people were doing that and the church was getting kind of attracted in that direction. So he's warning them, he's saying the way the people of this world, you know, they, they, they worship these creatures like as if they are something very big and great. And for them, it's like a great honor if one of those creatures comes and you know, visits them and gives them a vision, please don't go after such things, he says, you know, hold on to Christ because Christ is an authority or even over these, the over these creatures. He says all things have been created through him and for him. So originally, even these spiritual powers, these, you know, the spirit beings, they too were created through Christ for Christ to honor him, to worship him, to do his bidding. And then they chose to rebel against him. But actually, in reality, even these creatures were also created through him and for him. We in fact see that right about that about about Satan in Ezekiel. If someone could just go to Ezekiel and read out Ezekiel chapter 28. Look at the way it talks about Satan over there. What is he created for? You know, what has he been made for Ezekiel 28 versus 14 and 15? If someone could read out Ezekiel 28 14 and 15? We you were the Anointed cherub who covers I established you were on the holy mountain of God. You walked back and forth in the Mid East of fair stones. You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created until iniquity was found in you. Amen. Amen. Yeah. You know, all of you, a lot of you are reading out the verses without even me having to like urge and also thank you so much, you know, for the very quick responses today. Yeah. So here in Ezekiel 28, it says so plainly in verse 20, yeah, 28 verse 15. From the day you were created, Satan was just a created being and he was created with a purpose. What was he created for? Verse 14, it says he was ordained and anointed to be a guardian. He was supposed to be this guardian, cheer up, you know, this guardian angel who would be guarding the holy Mount of God. That was what he was created for. So even Satan, you know, was created through Jesus, for Jesus to serve Jesus to to guard this holy Mount of God. And so the irony is that someone who was supposed to, you know, be guarding the holy Mount of God chooses to rebel against God due to the pride in his heart. He does that. So all these creatures are under the supreme authority of the first born overall creation. So our focus should be on him, not on these lesser beings. We should long maybe for a visitation from him, you know, through his Holy Spirit, rather than wanting visitations from all these evil spirits which which which claim to be giving us mystical superior knowledge. So in verse 17, he says, Jesus is before all things and in him all things hold together. Everything is being held together by this Jesus, not by the spirit beings. It's Jesus who's holding everything together. If you look at the visible world, you know, the planets that we can see, the natural forces on earth, you know, the oceans, the winds, everything, it's all being held together by Jesus. If Jesus were to stop sustaining these things, you know, there would be complete chaos in a matter of minutes, maybe the entire universe would just crash. It would not be held in place in its proper positions, you know, without Jesus holding on and sustaining it. So it is that important. He is in the center and everything is being held together by him through his authority. And so even these spiritual beings, they wouldn't last a moment without him. He has given temporary permission to them to, you know, wreak their havoc, which is what they are doing right now. But it's a temporary permission that is being given to them. We see that so clearly in John 1231, where it says, now is the time for judgment on this world. Now the prince of this world will be driven out.  The prince of the world thinks that he's being very, very clever by putting Jesus on the cross. But actually it was Jesus who was turning the tables on him. So when the time comes, Jesus, you know, without any effort, he's just able to drive the prince out or prince of this world out of his position of power so that he can no longer hold humanity in slavery. The same thing Jesus says even in John 1430, he says, I will not say much more to you for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, Jesus says. So the spirit beings which are, you know, which are described as cronoi, the thrones, the dominions, all the big words which are used for them, they have no hold over Jesus. Jesus is supreme. He holds them in place and gives them temporary permission to do what they want because God is going to even use this evil and he's going to turn it into good to accomplish his ways. So, God has his own purposes for allowing this but these spirit beings have no hold over Jesus. So, our focus should be on this Jesus rather than on the spirit beings, you know, is what Paul is saying over here to his Colossian audience. And then he goes on to talk about how the church has this special privilege of being so personally connected to this very, very supreme, you know, all sovereign Jesus. You know, we have such a personal connection to this highest of highest kings and lords. What is our very personal connection to him that is talked about in verse 18 onwards. If we could have someone read out for us, 181920 please versus 181920 of chapter 1. And he is the head of the body, the church who is the beginning, the first one from the dead, that in all things he may have the preeminence for it leads the father that in him all the fullness should dwell and by him to reconcile all things to himself, by him whether things are earth or things in heaven having made peace through the blood of his cross. I mean, just now in the previous verses we talked about how sovereign and supreme this Jesus is. In fact, all of the universe would just crash if Jesus was not holding it all together. And this Jesus who is so supreme and sovereign gets so personal and gets so involved with such insignificant beings like humans. This God of God who is completely supreme, he chooses to become the first born from among the dead.  Where's the need for him to even do that? But that's because of the love that this that God has. So, you know, it says in verses 19 and 20, it's so beautiful. Verses 19 and 20 it says, God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in this Jesus so that through this Jesus, you know, both of them together can reconcile mankind to themselves, the love that God has for us. Such a supreme sovereign God, such a high status.   This is what it says in Hebrews 2 9. If someone could read out for us, Hebrews chapter 2 verse 9. But we see Jesus who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor that he by the grace of God might taste death for everyone. So, for a little while, Jesus chose to become lower than the angels so that, you know, he can identify with humans like us, you know, because we are anyway lower than the angels. I mean, at least we were earlier, that was our earlier status. So, as slaves of sin, we were lower than the angels. So, Jesus also chose to become lower than the angels, come and become one of us, represent us and taste death for everyone on our behalf. He humbled himself in that manner and then of course after having won the victory on our behalf, he once again rose above the angels. He now has got the glory which he had with the Father which he originally had. He has got it back. So, now in that position of supremacy, he is acting on behalf of the church. So, that is why in verse 18, Paul says he became the firstborn from among the dead. He did that so that in everything, he might have the supremacy. So, remember who he is. He is supreme and now he has chosen to be supreme for us on our behalf by tasting death for us. So, regard him as supreme in your personal lives is what, you know, Paul is reminding them and telling them and he goes on to talk about what Jesus has done for them in verses 21 to 23. This is, you know, just him urging, giving them encouragement, telling them, see, this is what Jesus has done for you. So, therefore, let him be supreme, you know, in your lives. So, verses 21 to 23, if you could read out, we will look at what Jesus has, you know, done for us 21 to 23.  If indeed you continue in the faith grounded and fast and steadfast and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you had, which was preached to every creature under heaven of which I, Paul, became a minister. Amen. Amen. So, here again he's referring to the gospel, the true gospel which was proclaimed to every creature. So, what does this true gospel tell us? This true gospel tells us that we used to be enemies of God once upon a time.  So, now if we are reconciled to God through this Jesus, then, you know, one day we will be presented before the Father without blemish free from accusation. So, the exact wording is this, he says, now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation if, this is an if, if over there mentioned, if you continue in your faith established and firm and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. There are two things that you Christians need to continue doing. He's saying to the people, he's saying God will one day definitely present you without blemish, you know, you will be presented before God. God will present you to himself without blemish, free from accusation, fully accepted, no longer enemies, considered as friends, considered as loved ones as part of God's family. This is how God will present you to himself. If you do two things, you need to continue in your faith established and firm and you should not move from the hope that is held out by the gospel. So, any true proclamation of the gospel will involve this message of faith and this message of hope. If any true preaching of the gospel should talk about the heavenly hope, the reward which is awaiting us and it should talk about the way we should live on this earth staying steadfast and firm in our faith. No matter what suffering comes along, no matter what doubts and questions Satan throws at us, we hold on, we continue to obey in faith. We do this because we have that eternal hope and reward to look forward to. So, he's saying that this is the gospel which has been proclaimed. Therefore, stay firm in the Lord, let your eyes stay focused on Jesus. So, then in verse 24 onwards, he talks about this commission which has been given to him, this mission which has been given to him by God. He talks a little bit about that. That would be verses 24 to 28 if we could have someone read out for us. Verses 24, all the way up to verse 28. I now rejoice in my suffering for you and fill up in my spirit what is lacking in the affliction of Christ for the sake of his body which is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God which was given to me for you to fulfill the word of God. The mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations but now has been revealed to his sense to then God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. Amen. Amen. So here he says, I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in the afflictions of Christ. Christ when he was crucified on the cross and he declared it is finished. He indeed finished everything that is required for our salvation for our redemption and deliverance. Everything that is required Christ finished on the cross. So what is still lacking in the afflictions of Christ? Somebody has to now take what you know somebody has to now go and tell people what Christ has done otherwise it stays incomplete right? So he says, now my job is to tell everyone to present to you the word of God in its fullness this mystery you know which is hidden in the past but now Jesus has come. He has done his work on the cross. He has finished what is required for us and now I am the messenger who's going and telling everyone that Jesus has done this so that they can realize that they have hope of glory in this Jesus. How will they ever enjoy the glory and the praise and the honor which God wants to release upon them if nobody ever goes and tells them what Jesus has done for them? So someone has to do that. So in that sense we all all of us the church we are supposed to fill up in our flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. So Christ was afflicted Christ finished whatever is required for humanity. He has completed the work of redemption but now we need to go and tell people about this because only then they will discover this great mystery that people like us who were enemies and rejects we now have hope of glory through Jesus in Jesus. So we need to go and share this good news with people that they there is a future glory awaiting them a great reward that is awaiting them and that good news has to be shared by us and by doing that we will complete this work which Christ began. So Christ finished his work on the cross but we need to do our part in telling people about this and the wording that Paul uses to to talk about this you know this work of going and sharing the good news he says he's filling up this work in his flesh literally he this ministry that he has this work which has been given to him he literally feels the impact of it the sacrifice of it every day in his physical body you know it's something which strains him it's something which affects him are we um fulfilling the work of Christ in that way where we can literally feel the impact of it in our flesh you know is something that we need to think about because when this man you know when he went from city to city sharing the gospel getting persecuted getting beaten sometimes not having enough food and starving sometimes having to go through shipwrecks sometimes getting arrested and being thrown in the jail in all of these things that he was going through he literally could feel it in his flesh you know he was filling up in his flesh this commission that was given to him by God and we need to be that totally involved in ministry I mean if we are not facing persecution today excellent I mean that's good it means that I know the the environment is good and open and we can go and do the gospel work without any kind of obstacles so it's really good if there is no persecution but in other ways in the amount of effort that we put in the amount of sacrifices that we are willing to make to be able to go and minister to people are we literally filling up in our flesh this commission that God has given us where we can feel the impact of it in our in literally in our physical bodies you know is something that we would have to consider so Paul was that enthusiastic in doing his part he was filling up in his flesh on a daily basis whatever he needs to do for the for the sake of the church and so he says you know I'm presenting to the word of God to everyone and letting them know this mystery that even they can now have hope of glory through Jesus and he says this Jesus is the one we proclaim admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ so Paul's ultimate goal is that everyone should know Jesus to such an extent where they will become fully mature in him so there he wants the believers to be growing in in their in their knowledge of what is the will of God he wants them to be growing in the faith which they which they exercise and obeying him he wants them to be growing in the love which they are showing sacrificially towards one another he wants them to be growing in all of these aspects so that one day each believer will be will be fully mature in Christ so that is his goal and so that should be the goal of every person who's you know operating in some kind of leadership in the church our ultimate goal will be to present every person in our congregation fully mature in Christ we got to urge them open their eyes and help them to see the exciting realities of heaven so that they will all exercise their hope and practice their love in such a way that Christ is pleased and so that in the process each of them will become fully mature in Christ that should be the goal of every leader who is ministering to the church so from there we kind of move on into chapter two of course you know we will be looking at chapter two in greater detail in the next class okay Enoch says that they're having a blackout in Nigeria due to a lack of power supply so yes yeah we will maybe know pray when we are having a concluding prayer yes we will definitely put that as a prayer point yeah so in the little time that we have left we let's get into chapter two if we could have someone read out for us the first five versus yeah chapter two versus one to five please for I want you to know what a great conflict I have for you those in Laudicea and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh that their heart their hearts may be encouraged being in it together in love and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding to the knowledge of the mystery of God both the Father and of Christ in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge now this I say least anyone should deceive you with possessive words for though I'm absent in the flesh yet I am with you in spirit rejoicing to see your good order and steadfast fastness of your faith in Christ amen yes so here he says you know I wanted to know how hard I am contending for you so he says I'm going all out you know like I'm giving every bit of myself in fighting for your spiritual growth of you guys in Colossia and the people in Laudicea and all the other places people whom I have not even met personally you know I'm really struggling in prayer interceding for you you know writing to you encouraging you I'm doing all of this because this is my goal my goal is that you may be encouraged in heart you know which is basically one way of saying you know that you may have hope that you may be encouraged in heart second that you may be united in love and the third thing he says is that so that you may have a complete understanding of the full riches which are yours so again we have the trifecta being you know being brought out over here faith hope love all the three are being mentioned over here so he wants them to be encouraged in their heart and be full of hope he wants them to be united in love and he wants them to have a complete understanding of the full riches you know they'll they'll be they'll be fully confident and their faith will be fully bolstered up by the knowledge that you know there are riches which are backing them up heavenly riches which are backing them up so he says he wants them to have these three things you know in their full capacity that is his goal therefore he's literally contending for them fighting for them in prayer he is um you know writing letters to them he's sending messengers to them who will talk to talk to them on his behalf and encourage them so he's doing everything that he can and he's doing all of this while sitting in prison in Rome so we who are not constrained like him you know who have the freedom of movement to be to go around as we please we should be contending even more than him because he was not you know he was not saying okay I'm under arrest there's not much that I can do and he didn't sit back even though he was in prison he still had this burden and this passion to give us very best for them so in the same way whatever God has called us to we should be contending and giving our best in whatever it is that God has laid on our hearts to do so he says in this in this Christ we have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge so because in Christ we have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge don't get deceived by fine sounding arguments is what he says but rather he says you know he wants them to be firm in their faith in Christ so he says in verse five that he's delighted to see how disciplined they are and how firm they are in their faith in Christ so he wants them to continue being like that he says you know in Christ you have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge you don't need some spirit coming to you in the middle of the night and giving you some kind of fake knowledge okay so he says to not be deceived by this fine sounding arguments there are two kinds of fine sounding arguments that were going around in that in that church some of it may have come from the Judaizers of course but some of it was also coming from these beginnings of the Gnostic philosophy you know where people were beginning to focus more on spirit beings and spirit realm and things like that so when when when people stand up and talk about these things oh it sounds so interesting it sounds so fine and people may get drawn away they may think oh gospel message is so boring so dull look at these exciting things which these people are talking about they're talking about visitations from spirits they're talking about hidden knowledge and mysteries oh that sounds so exciting gospel message on the other hand it sounds so simple so simplistic it and it's all about sacrifice on the cross so you see the gospel message didn't doesn't sound very appealing to human years on the other hand these other things sound adventurous and interesting but it is in Christ that we have our hope this is the mystery which Paul wanted to unwrap and you know tell us that our hope of glory is in Jesus so he says to not be deceived by these fine sounding arguments rather hold on to the wisdom and knowledge which God reveals to us which Jesus reveals to us to us is what he says so in the same I know same line a line of thought he says in verse 8 beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit according to the tradition of men according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ so he's saying all this philosophy you know which these people are you know spouting just to cheat you it is empty deceit there's no power in it it may sound very nice to the years but there is no power in it it doesn't give you the power to enter heaven it doesn't give you the power to live a victorious life on this earth it doesn't give you the power to walk into the abundance which Christ has for you so you see these things sound very fine to the years they sound exciting the sound interesting but they're empty they're hollow there's no power in any of these philosophies and teachings rather the knowledge and the wisdom and knowledge the treasures of wisdom and knowledge of Christ that contains true power so hold on to that is what he says there's a term that he uses over here which is you know translated differently in the NKJV and in the NIV in the NKJV it says you know do not be cheated by the basic principles of the world whereas in the NIV it says you know don't be cheated by the elemental spiritual forces of this world so the Greek word that is used over there some people think that it is just that word refers to wrong principles and philosophies but on the other hand that same word can also be used talk about spirit beings which are conveying something wrong so which is why in the NIV and some of the more modern versions they prefer to use this particular term they call it the elemental spiritual forces of this world you know these there are in the spiritual realm there are hidden demonic forces which are releasing wrong thoughts and ideas into people's minds you know because I mean if you actually look at the current world scenario there's so much stuff about new age spirituality you know it's all some kind of combination of white magic black magic and all kinds of witchcraft and all of that it's kind of whitewashed to make it look good and it sounds very interesting and you have a lot of stuff on YouTube you know regarding all of that youngsters are getting attracted and drawn to such things because it all sounds so mysterious and fun you know so there are actually demonic beings in the spiritual realm which are releasing these teachings and thoughts into the world today so that term which is used in NKJV which just simply says basic principles of the world it's not just principles and thoughts and ideas it's the demonic forces which are releasing these thoughts and ideas so he says don't allow yourself to be cheated by these things because these things are all fake and there is no power in them all right so we'll conclude with a word of prayer and next class you know we'll look in greater detail into chapter 2 and then the remaining chapters so yeah let's pray Lord we just thank you so much for today's class we thank you a lot for all the things that we could learn we pray Lord that we would be excited about heavenly things that we would realize the bigness and magnitude of what is waiting for us over there so that we will no longer be very interested in our little careers and our little promotions and our little gadgets and the things of this world and we will realize the bigness of what is awaiting us the glory of that is awaiting us in the heaven oh lord and we pray that as a result of that we will walk in faith no matter what sacrifices we have to make and that we will act in genuine sincere love towards one another even if it means you know putting other people's interests before our own help us a lot to live in that way and we pray that if we are teachers or pastors or ministers we will share this with other people so that they too can become excited about the things of God and so that we can get our eyes off wrong priorities Lord we also pray for Nigeria and the crisis that they are going through currently we do not know the details but we know that people are suffering people are struggling so Lord we just commit them into your hands so Lord Lord make a way for them Lord help them in this time of crisis so Lord give your wisdom to those in leadership over there so that they will know what steps to take what decisions to take so that Lord in in in the background you would work and you would help your people to come through this crisis thank you Lord in Jesus name amen thank you so much we'll meet again next class thank you


Hi, my name is Thomas and I'm here again to show you a very cool trick inside of Superoffice. Did you know that you actually have a posted note inside of Superoffice? Well, I'm probably not allowed to say posted note because that's a trademark, but we call a notepad and it's just as good.  And you can just click the arrow down here and you have the next one. So here you just save this automatically by crossing it out and it will be forever etched into your Superoffice. Only you can see it, your colleagues can't, but use it before your colleagues do. Thank you for watching.