Our sermon title this morning is Light to the Blind. Light to the Blind, and we're in part three, looking at the Gospel according to John, chapter one, and working through the prologue. And in our passage, as we work through verses six through nine, we'll finish this up this morning by getting through verses eight and nine. The guy's sorry I remember that. In our passage, we're looking at the testimony of John. And through the testimony of John, at what it means, what it looks like to be a witness for Christ. And as we've seen, very witness that light, and this is the light that all men are born blind to. We are born with a sin nature, and born with our sin nature, we act in accord with our sin nature, and we choose the sin. And in choosing the sin and being born with that sin nature, we are blind to Christ, blind to the light of the world, which brings light to all men. And it takes God to open our blind eyes. But through the Gospel of John in the chapter one here, we're not to miss the good news of the incarnation of Christ. We're not to miss the good news of Jesus Christ coming into a dark world and shining the light of the Gospel of God on the world to save blind men. It is a blessing of God. God does not leave us without a witness of himself. We're also not to miss, in John chapter one, the tragedy of the human rejection of God, all men in their sin turn a blind eye to the light, and they choose rather than live in their darkness. And they'll say in effect, I'll not have this man for rule over me. They live for themselves. We're also not to miss the grace and mercy of God and many who will appear and believe. That's the purpose for John's writing as we've seen, that believing that Jesus Christ is the son of God that many would have light through his name, would believe and have light. Now as we look at this passage beginning in verse six, we're to see first in verse six that we're to go to the blind. And if we look at that, we saw that John was sent with the purpose of going to the blind to give witness of the light, and so are we. Secondly, we saw that we were to go to the blind and then speak of the light and being sent. John was given the role of the witness, the responsibility to witness about Christ, with the desired result that blind men might be saved. And thirdly, today we'll look at standing for the truth. We're to go to the blind, we're to speak of the light, and we're to take a stand for the truth, for the sake of the gospel, for the sake that souls would be saved, and we as Christians are to take a stand for all that is true, all that is real, all that is genuine, we're to take that stand against all that is false. There is saving light in no one else, but the true light, Jesus Christ. Again, nor is there salvation in any other. There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. So point three, let's take a look at standing for the truth. Point three on your notes beginning in verse eight, where the Bible says, he was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light, which gives light to every man coming into the world. In verses eight and nine, we're gonna see both our position and our purpose. We're also gonna see Christ's position and Christ's purpose in light of these verses. Let's take first our position, if you see that in verse eight. John the Baptist was not that light. It's interesting that this reflects our position. If you didn't understand that's true of us, you and I are not that light. John the Baptist was not that light. Let there be any false exaltation of John the Baptist. John the Baptist was not the light. He was the greatest man who never lived up to this point in history. And according to Christ, among those born of women, there had risen not one greater than John the Baptist. And yet, John was not the light. Seems like a simple statement to make, very clear, very true statement. Very easy for us to understand, we're not the light, but we tend to forget that sometimes, the way that we preach and teach. It bears remembering. Drogos came out to hear John preach. The Bible says all of Jerusalem, all of Judea, all those in the region around the Jordan, came out to be baptized by John. John said in Luke chapter three, in him decreasing while Christ was increasing, he says, one mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with a Holy spirit and fire. It was of him that John said in chapter three, verse 30, he must increase, but I must decrease. And that is true of the Christian today. I must decrease while Christ must increase. John was a mere man. Christ was the word. John came into being. Christ is eternal. John is sent by God. Christ is God. John came that many would believe in Christ through his witness. Christ is the object of belief, the object of faith. And John came to bear witness of that light and Christ is the true light. So as great as John was, as great as his purpose was in God's redemptive history, he was not the light. Jesus Christ is the object of faith, the object of our belief. And even so, John at that time, because of his popularity, because he just attracted a crowd, John had many followers, many that came out to look to John, many that followed John as a founder, a leader of a new sect that they were joining. Now Paul ran into a group of these folks in Acts 19, a group of 12 of them in Ephesus that said they were baptized into John's baptism. Many at that time had exaggerated opinions, exaggerated ideas about John. And some followed him as a great prophet. He was the last and greatest of the Old Testament prophets when Israel had been without a prophet for 400 years. So many followed John and others appeared to have believed that John was actually the Messiah. The whole purpose of John's appearance in God's redemptive history and God's redemptive plan is to point to the light and bear witness to the light. Listen to what Jesus says of him in John chapter five. Turn there with me, just a few pages to the right. John chapter five. And this is a summary that Jesus gives for John's ministry. John chapter five, look down at verse 35. Where Jesus says of John that he was the burning and shining lamp. And you were all willing for a time to rejoice in his light. Now Jesus is the light. What does he say of John here? John's a lamp, right? There are two different words being used. Jesus is the foes, the source, the essence of light. John is a luke-noss. He is a portable lamp. He's a light carrier. He's a light bearer. What's the purpose of a lamp? So shine the light and let the light shine, right? That's the purpose of a lamp. That's Jesus's summary here of John's ministry. John is a lamp, right? Does a lamp shine on its own? No, it needs a source of light. Needs a source of power. Look back at Matthew chapter five. Matthew chapter five. Let's see the same thing said of Christians, of believers, followers of Christ. A lamp doesn't shine on its own. It needs a source of light, a source of power. And Matthew chapter five, then in verse 14, here the Bible says you, Christian, are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lamp stand. And it gives the light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Ephesians chapter five, verse eight says it this way. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. Before Christ, we're full of darkness.  We need a supply of light, need a supply of power. The lamps don't shine on their own. So what does a lamp need? Needs oil, it needs power. No oil and the lamp burns out. And even the greatest man born among women is entirely dark apart from the light of Christ. In Christ, you and I have a derived light. We derive our light from the source of light, the essence of all light. We derive any light that we have from Jesus Christ himself. And we then are light bearers. Our ministry being sent by God can be summed up in the fact that we are lamps just like John is. You and I are lamps. Christ is the sun, S-O-N, but also in this analogy, S-U-N. We are like the moon that reflects the sun. He shines in us and through us and through us brings light into the darkness. He is like the sun, S-U-N, and we are like candles, so to speak. We're just lamps. And John's mission in this was always pointing away from himself and pointing to Christ. A lamp doesn't shine for itself and to itself. We're simply light bearers. John was always pointing away from himself to Christ. In that, in the light of John's ministry, Jesus Christ, the true light, blazed in John, blazed forth in John's ministry. The moment that John would have pointed to himself would have been the moment he would have been ineffective as a witness for Christ. And don't we see that today? You and I point to ourselves. If you point to yourself, yourself, yourself, you become ineffective as a witness for Christ. When your Christian life becomes all about you, all about your wants, your needs, your desires, you become ineffective for Christ. When you become self-centered, self-willed, self-indulgent, you become ineffective in God's plan to use you in the Christian life to bless others. It's not about John. It's not about you or I.   Right?  And how much is the light shining through you now? How much light shines through you? You can't do it on your own. You need oil in your lamp. Where do you get that oil from? Is that a mystical thing? Where do you get oil from to bear light for Christ? It's interesting in the scripture that oil is often used as a reference to the Holy Spirit.  It's the spirit of God. And how do you get that? Is it mystical? Do you just hope for it? No, the Lord gives us means of grace. And if we will avail ourselves of the means of grace, then by the spirit, strength, by the spirit's power, we'll be able to serve the Lord. You pray. You pray fervently. You study the word of God. And you learn the word of God. And then you obey Christ in faith. And praying and studying the word of God and just obeying Christ by faith, the Holy Spirit works in you and through you to do and to will according to his good pleasure.  That's our position.  And now useful to the Lord. So here's the point. John was not that light. You and I are not that light. And understanding that, you gotta take as point three says. You gotta take a stand for the truth. Don't allow first, don't allow a man to be your light. All men are men at best. John, the greatest born of women after that point in time was not a man that you should allow to be your light. All the greatest of men can do is point you to the light. Don't allow that man to be your light. A favorite preacher that you have is a man at best and he is not the light. All that he should be doing is pointing you to the light. And all that you should allow him to do is to point you to the light. Paul said, imitate me as I imitate Christ, the light, right? Far as Paul is imitating Christ, we're to imitate him. If a so-called teacher isn't pointing you to the light, what do you do? You don't follow that so-called teacher any longer. If your wife is following men and not following the light, what do you do? You follow the light.  You follow the light. You submit to your husband, ladies, in as much as he submits to the Lord and follows the Lord. You obey the authorities until they cause you to sin and you don't obey them anymore. You follow the light. If a friend, a coworker, a family member, or a pastor goes another way, what do you do? You follow the light. What happens when you have your own agenda? When you want to go your own way, when you become self-willed, you're not the light either. Stop following the dictates of your own heart. Search the scriptures, be humble, and obey the Lord. You follow the light. Now where are you going to find the true light? Christ came in human form 2,000 years ago, died on Calvary's cross and is now risen, sitting at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for his own. And until he comes again, where do we see the light? We see the light in God's word. We have God's word and we can see the testimony, given in God's word, bearing witness to the light. We're to follow the light through God's word. We're to obey the Lord through his word. It's in the word of God. You can see the light, right, can't you? In the lives of those that bear witness to the light, you can see it in their lives. You can see the transforming work of the spirit of God in the life of a genuine Christian. You can see the fruits of the spirit and you can see how the Lord works through a genuine Christian, again, to do into will according to his good pleasure. But you're to humble yourself to the word of God. You're to be taught the word of God. You're to learn the word of God. You're to study the word of God, read the word of God, meditate on the word of God, and follow the light from the word of God. You're to be able to be persuaded from the scriptures, but you are to be Berean. You're to search the scriptures to see if what is taught there is true. And so one, don't allow men to be your light. Only follow them as they follow Christ. But two, stop following the dictates of your own heart. You're not the light either. We're simply to obey the word of God. And in that, we're obeying Christ, the true light, which brings life to every man. Submit yourself to the word of God in everything. Simply trust him in all things and obey. You know, time and time again, we see this regularly, don't we? Person after person after person, making their own self-will decisions. The scripture is sufficient in all things. In other words, that when we have a question, when we need to understand what we are to do, when we're to understand how we are to live, or how to follow the Lord, or how to seek the light, we're to go to the word of God to do that. Instead of making our own self-willed decisions, person after person, it becomes wise in their own eyes. And as the proverb says, there's more hope for a fool than for them. They run off into sin, they run off into disobedience and into folly, thinking that they do God's service. Yeah, they're just following off after the dictates of their own heart. And there are consequences to those self-will decisions. There's consequences to not following after the true light. You follow the dictates of your own heart, you're gonna find yourself in trouble. Simply learn what the Bible says and then obey what the Bible says. We sit down to counsel someone who's found themselves in a difficult spot. Sit down to counsel someone who now has found themselves in sin or found themselves in rebellion or desiring the dictates of their own heart. What is the answer? What is the remedy to that? Is to point you away from you thinking you're your own light and to point you to the light is revealed in God's word, that you will follow the light. If you'll follow the light, you'll not make self-willed decisions after the dictates of your own heart. And there's blessing and there's safety and there's preserving power from God for the Christian life. But when you follow the dictates of your own heart, when you become your own light, you face the consequences for foolish, sinful, disobedient decisions.  So next, what is our position then? That's our position. What's our purpose? In verse eight, we're to bear witness to the light just like John was. In verse eight, back in John chapter one, he, John, was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. And again, this is repeating what John has said here already in chapter one. But where the evangelist repeats himself, we're gonna repeat ourselves and expand on that. It's important. Where there's repetition, it's important. He was not that light, but was sent, John, was to bear witness of that light. So God, in God's great wisdom, has purposed to save men through the foolishness of preaching. Preaching is verbal proclamation. Bearing witness is verbal proclamation. Evangelism is verbal proclamation. And bearing witness, we're to bear witness to the light so that God in his wisdom might save men by the foolishness of preaching. In 1 Corinthians chapter one, verse 21, the Bible says, for since in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God. It pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. It may seem foolish to darken men. It may seem foolish to those in their sin. It may seem foolish to those who are perishing, but the gospel is the power of God and the salvation. And you, Christian, who have been saved by God through this gospel, the mercy and grace of God in this gospel should recognize it as the power of God until salvation and not be ashamed of it. In Romans chapter one, verse 16, Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. And we need to preach it like it's the power of God to everyone who believes. People believe in Christ to eternal life through the faithful witness of genuine believers, all of whom are sent by God like John. That's why Richard Baxter said, I preach as never sure to preach again and as a dying man to dying men. In that statement, Richard Baxter understands that the gospel is the power of God under salvation and he's going to preach that as a dying man to dying men. And all this again requires that we take a stand for the truth. We're to bear witness to the light and in bearing witness to the light, we have to take a stand for the truth. John didn't preach his own mind. John didn't preach his own heart. John didn't preach his own opinions. John didn't think to himself, you know what? I'm gonna survey the people, find out what the people want. I mean, can you imagine? John the Baptist didn't do that. The people, he may have thought to himself, wanna hear about marriage, so I'll preach on marriage. John the Baptist didn't do that. The people wanna hear about sex, about power, about how to be successful on the job. John came to bear witness of Christ and in that John was a faithful forerunner. He was not going to cater his message to what the people wanted to hear. He wasn't gonna cater his message to the cultural demands of the time. Let's get rid of this oppressive Roman government. Oh, John was concerned about people's sin. He might get rid of the oppression of their sin, the judgment that hangs over their head because of their sin. He didn't preach that Christ could heal you, which Christ could. He didn't preach that Christ could take you from your infirmities and give you health and give you wealth. He could make you rich or they could provide a free lunch. Christ could do all of those things. That's not what John preached. John said what he said because he knew he was responsible to God. John preached the message that he preached because he knew he was accountable to God. It didn't matter to him how much was in the offering plate. It didn't matter a snippet to him how much they liked him or didn't like him. How many people came out to hear him or how many people didn't come out to hear him. He didn't mind calling those Pharisees to their face a brood of vipers, a generation of snakes. It didn't matter how many of those people came out against him. John the Baptist was gonna be faithful to preach the message that God had given him to preach. He didn't mind telling Herod that Herod was in sin for having his brother's wife. And he didn't mind it so much that he eventually went to his death because of it.  You can make me headless. Isn't that what you wanna hear from God? Well done, good and faithful slave. We must stand for the truth in our preaching. As a witness to the light, bearing witness to the light, as a lamp for Jesus Christ, you have to stand uncompromisingly for the truth against a darkened world where there are broods of vipers and generations of snakes. And we have to stand for the truth in our practice. Standing for the truth of God's word and standing for the truth, if you will, of the application of God's word to life.  You can't contradict God's word with your own personal testimony.  You have to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. It doesn't matter if one 100 or 1000 come out against the biblical practice of church discipline. What are we going to do? We're gonna obey the Lord, obey the word of God. Are we doing what the Bible says or aren't we? Then does it matter if one 100 or 1000 come out against the practice of church discipline? We're obeying the Lord and what the Lord says for us to do, let the rest of them pound sand. We need to obey the Lord, amen? If another church takes them in and listens to their gossip and listens to their lies, what are we going to do? We're gonna follow the Lord. We're gonna be lampbearers for the light, pointing people to the light. It doesn't matter if one 100 or 1000 come out against the biblical example and the biblical practice of evangelism. Are we going to obey the Lord or aren't we? People can whine and they complain and they can leave. But what are we going to do? We're gonna follow the Lord. If it gets down to three or four and the Lord says no more, then shut the door. We're gonna have church. We're gonna obey the Lord and simply do what the Lord says to do. We're gonna obey his word. We bear witness to the light and being witnesses of the light, we can't compromise with the truth of God's word. We compromise with the truth of God's word. Then we compromise the light. We corrupt the light. We pollute the light. You have to take a stand for the truth. When we looked at our position in verse seven, we noted that man was not the light and that you're not that light. The same warning applies here. The same warning applies here in our purpose. We must take a stand for the truth and maintain our focus on Christ as the light as we bear witness to him. Most preaching in churches today has become grotesquely man-centered. It comes, God comes, right? Hat in hand. Wooing and pleading for men to accept him as if man is the center of the universe. Trying to get him to choose him. It's just absurdly unbiblical. God is sovereign over everything, sovereign over creation, sovereign over you, sovereign over the hearts of men, sovereign over those who will be saved. In most churches today, man is the light. We've got to maintain a focus on Christ as the light in our preaching. And you're preaching of the gospel going door to door. Who's the light? Christ is the light. This is not self-help. You're not preaching morality. You're not preaching conformity. You're preaching Christ. If you preach Christ, men will believe God will take care of the morality.  You just rub the genie and get what you want. And as it is in many churches today, everything from the music to the cafe, to the sermon, to the coffee that served is all about man, all centered and focused on man, not designed to bring glory to God. There's a song. I just every time I hear it, it just drives me crazy. Like a rose trampled on the ground, right? He took the fall and thought of me above all. Yet no, he didn't. Jesus Christ, the son, was thinking of the father's glory. God the father, thinking of the son's glory. You are a love gift from the father to the son, a love gift that the son will give back to the father one day, all for the father's glory, the glory of the son, the glory of Christ, the glory of the light, the true light. You are not that light. His own were definitely on his mind. Christ was bearing their sin all the ways that they had offended him. But above all, you know, the glory of God is supreme. If man is the light, then you'll start preaching moral reformation. You'll start preaching self-help. If man is the light, we'll preach health, wealth, and prosperity. If man is the light, you'll preach easy believism. He's got to give man an excuse for his sin. So you'll say, it doesn't matter how you live your life. As long as you pray to receive Christ, accept Jesus Christ as your savior and then do your best, but live however you wanna live. If you have man as the light, you get Arminianism. Charismatic experiences that appeal to man's senses. You'll preach theology to their intellect rather than preaching Christ to their heart. It was interesting, brother and I were talking to today, talking about a quote by Kierkegaard, where Kierkegaard said that there are those, and this is true, and examine yourselves to see if this is true of you, that study theology and study and study, and their study of theology, they're so enrapt by acquiring knowledge. And a study of theology, good? Amen, it's very good. But in their study of theology, they lose the importance of applying that theology to their heart and mind so that they might live for Christ more faithfully. Theology is not a means or an ends in and of itself. It's a means to an end, where to study the word of God that we might live him, obey him, serve him, glorify him, worship him, pray to him, but people can study theology, and it's the way that Kierkegaard said, he said that it was like putting napkins in your britches before you get a spanking. The kid goes in for a spanking and he just pads his britches with more and more napkins, more and more filler, so that when a spanking comes, he doesn't feel it. You can study theology and study theology and pad your britches so that when a spanking of God's word comes, you don't feel it. When conviction should come from the word of God, you don't feel it.  You put distance between you and the searching word of God. We do that in many ways. Man is not the light. Everything we preach should be bearing witness to the light. Thirdly, we see in beginning in verse nine, Christ's position and his purpose in his incarnation. We saw in verse eight, our position, our purpose, Christ's position, Christ's purpose and his incarnation in verse nine. John chapter one, verse nine says, that was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world. Now coming into the world here refers to the true light and not every man. If you're reading your New King James, that was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world. It appears as though there, coming into the world, refers to every man. More appropriately, coming into the world refers to the true light, which is Christ, speaking of his incarnation. As we get into verse nine, again, we're looking at the incarnation of Christ and we see that carried over into verse 10 where it says he, Christ, was in the world and the world was made through him and the world did not know him. Again, we're talking about the incarnation of Christ. So coming into the world there refers to the true light and not to every man. That makes sense? The way the New King James or the King James translates it, it's a case for general revelation and we can see general revelation in it, but the Bible nowhere supports an inner illumination for every man. This is not prevenient grace. It's not providing for an illumination within every single man. This is a reference to the incarnation. Coming into the world and throughout the gospel refers to Christ. If we look at chapter six, verse 14, after the feeding of the 5,000, Bible says this, then those men, when they had seen the sign that Jesus did, said, this is truly the prophet, Jesus Christ, who has come into the world. That phrase is often used of Christ. In chapter 11, verse 27, Martha said to Jesus, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is come into the world. In 18, verse 37, Pilate says to Christ, are you a king then?  For this cause I was born and for this cause I have come into the world that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth, here's my voice. It's very common throughout John to describe the incarnation in that way that Jesus has come into the world. It's never used in the gospel of John for a man that has been born. So what we're speaking of here is the incarnation. This was the true light coming into the world which gives light to every man. Would be a better way to translate verse nine there. And again, we see in verse 10, again this is a smooth transition to Christ in the world in the incarnation. Just makes sense. So, coming into the light is a reference to true light. This is speaking of Christ's incarnation. Christ's incarnation is Jesus Christ, God coming into the world in human flesh, in a human body. So the true light came into the world. Now, the fact that John the Baptist and witnesses after him, half the point to the one true light demonstrates how blind the world is. Again, it gives testimony to the blindness and darkness of this world and why is that? Turn with me to 2 Corinthians chapter four and let's look at one example. 2 Corinthians chapter four. How is it? Why is it that men are so blind to the light? And here's one reason. 2 Corinthians chapter four and look there beginning at verse one where Paul says here to the church at Corinth, therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart. Now, like John, Paul had been sent to bear witness to the light. John had been sent or Paul had been sent by God. This call to gospel ministry, Paul says there in verse one is a mercy from God. Therefore, since we have this ministry, since we've been sent by God with his purpose to bear witness, to bear testimony to the light, he says this is a mercy as we have received mercy. This call to gospel ministry is a mercy from God. Rather than give us what we deserve, Christ gives us a ministry. Rather than give us what we deserve, Christ puts us into service. Didn't Paul say that in first Timothy that God was merciful to him, putting him into the ministry? Well, he's been merciful to you and I, putting us into the ministry. He's been merciful here to Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter four, verse one. This is a mercy from God. And because we know that the work is the Lord's and because we know that the Lord is in control, that the Lord is in control of results, we don't lose heart. If you had to face that ministry in your own strength, face that calling in your own power, thinking that it all hangs on how I say this or that or how I do this or that. Can you imagine the pressure? Who would ever go into full-time Christian ministry thinking that it all rested on them for results?  Here we know the work is the Lord's. The Lord is in control and as difficult as things get or as sometimes seemingly it is the results. You don't see results. You don't see results you don't receive it. The Lord knows and the Lord does. The Lord is one in charge of results. We don't often see what those results are. We don't often see the fruit that the Lord produces as a result of your faithful witness. But we're not to lose heart. The Lord is in control. We're not to lose heart. If you ever feel weary, look to the Lord for strength and don't lose heart. If you ever feel weary, sit back and just rest on the sovereignty of God and don't lose heart. Here Paul faced great persecution, great difficulty and yet he says it's a mercy. One and two, we don't lose heart. Verse two, in 2 Corinthians chapter four, Paul goes on to say, but we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. Paul simply preached the truth. Now there's a couple of ways of looking at that first phrase there. We have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness or handling the word of God deceitfully. One is that Paul has left his sin. He's repented of his sin, turned from sin. In that sense, he's renounced the hidden things. Those things that were once in darkness are renounced. Paul has renounced them, now stepped into the light, serving the light, bearing witness to the light and those things he's repented of. There are some who believe that that is also speaking of the thing that was once shameful to them, which was the gospel. These hidden mysteries that were shameful to even think of or speak of to the Jews is renounced that idea of shame and now recognizes the gospel of God as the power of God unto salvation. And in that manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves, he says, to every man's conscience. This is just a direct, clear, unvarnished truth on the part of Paul. He's preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified and pointing spiritually blind men to the light. In verse three, he goes on, but even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. Why? Because in 1 Corinthians chapter two, verse 14, the natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned, as the Bible says. Those who are perishing are spiritually blind to the light. In one sense, because they love darkness rather than light. They just love their sin. But in addition to their own sin, look at verse four. Whose minds, these who are perishing, whose minds the God of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. You see the dual responsibility in that verse. One, the minds, the God of this age has blinded their minds. Satan's world system. You know, it's not necessary for Satan to possess every person. Or that his demons should possess a lot of people. Satan has a world system designed to deceive you. Designed to keep your mind in darkness.  So the God of this age has blinded the minds of those that are perishing. But look at what it says in second half of verse four there. Who do not believe? Listen, that's the sinner's responsibility. They don't believe the light. They would rather have their darkness. And they don't believe because they don't want the light of the gospel or the glory of Christ, who is the image of God to shine on them. And why? Because they love darkness rather than the light.  And so what is the remedy here? What is Paul to do? Look at verse five. For we, Paul says, do not preach ourselves. Paul is not the light. But we preach Jesus Christ the Lord. Jesus Christ is the true light. And he says, ourselves your bondservants, your lamps for Jesus Christ's sake to bear witness of the light. We do not preach ourselves, Paul is not the light. But Jesus Christ the Lord, because Jesus Christ is the true light and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus' sake, because he is sent by God to bear witness of the light. For it is verse six, the God, it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And Paul points spiritually blind people to the light of Jesus Christ. It was Paul's ministry too, just like John's. With Satan over this world, with this God of this age, as Paul says, over this world, there are also false lights. There are deceiving lights, pretending lights. Second Corinthians chapter 11, in verse 14, Paul says in no wonder, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness whose end will be according to their works. In John chapter 18, we see false accusers, falsely giving testimony of the light against Jesus Christ, leading to his crucifixion. But Jesus Christ is the true light. The word true there, there's two words that you could use for true. In the Bible, two Greek words that are often used. One is a lay face, it means true as opposed to false. True as said opposed to false. For example, a statement that you make in a court of law thinking of legal terms that is either right or wrong, true or false, you would use that word. The word that's used here is a lay finas, it means real, it means genuine. True, through and through, right? True in total. One true when everything else is imperfect. One true when everything else is corrupted or polluted. All other lights will be partial. All other lights will be misleading, will be corrupted, will be polluted. Christ alone is the true light that enlightens the darkness and opens spiritually blind eyes. And this word true, this is true of Christ in four different ways. One, it is true as true opposed to false. Christ is true as opposed to all those who are false. All those so-called lights that are false. Many believe that happiness is light or that love is the light of the world. Love makes the world go round. Or they believe that money takes that position or power or fame or whatever it else it is. Some of you may live for leisure, live for fun, live for pleasure, for comfort. But it's also true, meaning real. This is no longer ceremonial type or shadow, but Christ is the reality. Christ is the truth. Ceremonies have all been fulfilled in Christ because Christ is the true Passover lamb. Christ is the true sacrifice, the one sacrifice that has taken away the sins of the world. There are no longer types and shadows we now in Christ have the reality. So he is the true light. It's also the true light, meaning an undirived light. Christ is the source of light. He's not a borrowed light or a reflected light. Christ is the one true light. He's not participating in light with another. And it's also true, meaning highest or preeminent. Christ is supreme as the one true light. He's not ordinary or common or in any way like you or I in that sense. He is the one unique true light. So we're to take a stand for this light.  Tend to your own faith. Tend to your life and your doctrine as Paul said to Timothy that you might save both yourself and those who hear you, right? No other light will forgive or cleanse. No other light will change your life. No other light will impute righteousness, righteousness that is not your own. No other light is gonna get you to heaven. Lastly, Christ's purpose is to bring light into the darkness to every man. Verse nine, that was the true light coming into the world which gives light to every man. J.C. Ryle said this. Christ is to the souls of men what the sun, S-U-N, is to the world. He is the center and source of all spiritual light. Warp, life, health, growth, beauty and fertility. Like the sun, he shines for the common benefit of all mankind, for high and for low, for rich and for poor, for Jew and for Greek. Like the sun, he is free to all. All may look at him and drink health out of his light. If millions of mankind were mad enough to dwell in caves underground or to bandage their eyes, their darkness would be their own fault and not the fault of the sun. So likewise, if millions of men and women love spiritual darkness rather than light, the blame must be laid upon their blind hearts and not on Christ. Whether men see or not, whether they leave their dark caves or not, there is no other light for sinners except the Lord Jesus Christ. Luther said there's only one light. No man coming into the world can possibly be illumined by any other light. Jesus Christ is the only man who ever gives light to anyone. Any enlightened man is enlightened by him alone. And this blindness is without excuse. Again, because the light of Jesus Christ shines on every man. In verse four, back in John chapter one, we saw that in him was life and the life was the light of men. In Romans chapter one, men are without excuse. We don't have time to go there, but I invite you to take a look at that passage in verses 18 through 23. Man is accountable and guilty before God for the light that is revealed in creation and in man's conscience. Man is accountable before God, guilty before God, and he is without excuse. Although he shines on every man, as the passage says here, we know that not every man is spiritually enlightened. Verse five in John chapter one says that the darkness did not comprehend it. Down in verse 10, he was in the world, but the world did not know him and people refused to come to the light because they loved their sin. They don't wanna leave it. They don't wanna be exposed. They are willfully blind. John chapter three, we'll get to this passage, beginning in verse 19, John says, and this is the condemnation that the light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light lest his deeds should be exposed. And so Jesus, the light of men comes into the world. True light shines for every man to see. He gives off light and many reject. And so if you think about it then, Jesus Christ shines on some that they might believe and having believed in his name, they might have eternal life. But on others, he shines for the purpose of judgment. There are those that will not believe. He has to grant sight to some and there are others that he passes over and men are responsible for their damnation. Christ came to safe centers and eventually he will judge. God in Jesus Christ must open blind eyes, must cause spiritually dead men to be made alive in Christ to see in the light of Christ their wicked condition before him. They might repent, turn from their sin and put their faith in Jesus Christ. There are others that when the light shines they simply reject the light. They hoard themselves in their darkness, in their dark corner, in their dark cave. They reject the light lest their deeds should be exposed because they love their sin and God simply passes over. Men are responsible for their sin. Men are responsible for their guilt before God and Christ eventually comes to judge. John the Baptist went to the blind, spoke of the light and then he took a stand for the truth. We're to do the same. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation. You know in John chapter 10, John's ministry is summarized, or John the Baptist's ministry is summarized here where in verse 40 the Bible says, and he went away again beyond the Jordan to the place where John was baptizing at first and there he stayed. Then many came to him and said, John performed no sign, but all the things that John spoke about this man were true and many believed in them there. So John spoke and what he spoke was true and he spoke of the true light and pointed men to the light and many believe. Will you believe at the testimony of John? If you're here today and you've never bound the need of Christ, you've never turned from your sin, you've never come out of the dark corner of your own cave to give your life to the light, to put your faith and trust in him alone. You can do that now and be cleansed if you'll believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and believing means trusting, trusting in him alone, not trusting in any of your works, trusting in Christ alone. Believing means committing yourself to him to follow him for the rest of your life. It's saying I want light, I don't want my darkness anymore.  It's a trusting in Christ alone to save you that bears the fruit of a hatred for sin. Bears the fruit of obedience to Christ. Bears the fruit of a love for his word. Bears the fruit of a love of his purpose to come into the world of safe centers. Bears the fruit of your following God's sending of you to bear witness to the light. Will you follow him? Will you turn from your sin and put your faith in Christ? Let's pray. Father in heaven, Lord, God, we thank you for this time. Thank you for the gospel that it is, the power of God and the salvation. Thank you, God, that you've sent witness after witness after witness to bear witness to the light. I want to thank you that you triumph over our darkened hearts, our darkened minds, our blind eyes, our deaf ears, our dead lives, God, that you bring us in Christ to life and we might be saved. Thank you, Lord, that it's not by the will of our flesh or the will of man, not by what family or what heritage or what ethnicity we're born into, but it's by your will. We praise you and thank you for that. And thank you, Lord, for the testimony here that we've seen of John the Baptist. This is a faithful example of a witness for Christ and Lord, may we live in light of that witness and be faithful witnesses ourselves. Our desire, Lord, is to please you, to please you and to one day hear you say, well done, good and faithful slave for your glory, God. And for the good of those that will turn from their sin and believe on you, they might worship you for all eternity. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.


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Hello, everyone. Welcome to 2021 Qubocon. Here is the signal intro and the deep dive talk. My name is Don Chen, and I am the software engineer from Google and currently working on GKE and Answers. I'm one of the funding engineers for the Kubernetes and initiate the signal community back in 2016. Hi everyone, I'm Derek Carr. I'm an engineer at Red Hat. I work on upstream Kubernetes as well as our distribution and OpenShift. With Don, I've been working on Kubernetes since the pre-Kubernetes 1.0 days, and I'm happy to hear and talk with everybody. Hi everyone, I'm Alana Hashman. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat, where I work on the OpenShift node team. I've been contributing to Kubernetes since about 2018, and I work upstream on the node team as well as in SIG instrumentation and the production readiness review team. Hello, I'm Sergei Congelif, and I work for Google. I work on GKE specifically, and I was involved into Kubernetes for over a year now, and I'm super excited to be part of SIG node. So Don, can you tell us about SIG node? Okay. Before getting into today's agenda, I want to briefly mention the previous SIG node update made by Alana and Sergei back in May at Kupacon, Euro. And click each of those links you will see the watch of the record video and also slides. Next. Here's today's agenda. We are going to first introduce SIG node's responsibility. Then we are going to talk about the current activities, the roadmap for 1.22 and 1.23. Then we are going to talk about some interesting projects and efforts currently driving by SIG node community. For example, 1.22 power life cycle refactory, CI sub project to continue from last updates. Then finally, we are going to talk about the bug challenges. At the end, we are going to talk about how to get involved and how to get help. Next. What is the SIG node and its responsibility? Let's briefly talk about the node responsibility in Kubernetes first. Kubernetes is a cluster or transportation solution for container-less applications and services. Those containers include of the Kubernetes control plans are running on the nodes. On each node, there is an agent called KubeNet. KubeNet registers the node to Kubernetes master. KubeNet together with container runtime managing pod and the containers life cycles on the node. Set up, run, tear down and clean up. KubeNet also does the node-level resource management such as ensure applications get the request resource, detect the node-level resource starvation issues and takes action to prevent other resource situations. KubeNet also sends the status back to the control plan. Next. In summary, SIG node owns all controllers running on the nodes, which ensures node itself and the applications running on it, running happily. SIG node is very large and owns many projects. And you can click all those following off the links. You can find so many interesting projects and also the tools and the demons to ensure all the healthiness. Next. So thank you, Don. Let's talk about SIG node roadmap. As we mentioned, Don, we already did a talk in the past in May about roadmap and what we planned for 1.22 release. I wanted to refresh and tell what we actually delivered in 1.22 in terms of caps. By the way, cap is our way in Kubernetes to track features and improvements. It's a short for Kubernetes enhancement process. And we track all the caps through different stages and this list shows caps that we've been working on in 1.22 and actually merged it. I try to split caps into themes and it's really hard to split anything in the teams. A team is not an attribute of a cap, it's just our way to attempt to group and to demonstrate what we've been working on. I think it's important for Kubernetes to stay on the edge of which workload we support, be it in high performance applications or some databases. I mean, we try to support as many workloads as possible and we constantly improve how we support these workloads, how we make it possible to run applications with high availability and high performance. Another thing is reliable operations. It's critically important to stay reliable and secure by default. And we also constantly working on cleaning up a code base and no permanent beta is a topic that is always on top of our mind to clean up code base and make sure that we have a way for new features to come in and deliver a lot of value for users. I don't want to go into details of every single cap we've been working on for 1.22 and you can go to previous talk to listen what you've been playing to work on and get some details. I just wanted to highlight again, these caps are by no means ordered in any priority order. For everybody, priority is different. Some people care about some features, other people care about other features. So I just ordered that by cap number. You can see it in the end of every link. And it's also hard to structure and categorize caps into themes. For instance, node swap support that Elana and you worked on, it can be attributed to both to support more workloads like some AI workloads that loads of huge data models or it can be attributed to reliable operations. Which one do you believe it applies the most? I mean, to some extent, it's a bit of both. Honestly, for the alpha, to some extent I think we're targeting reliable operations maybe more so than workload support because swap is currently only tunable at node level rather than for each individual workload. However, you are currently allowed to with the alpha, let workloads use up to unlimited swap on the node or no snop within the constraints of C groups. So it's giving folks some options and I'm also excited to continue working on that in the 123 cycle. And Derek, I know that another highlight of this list is memory cost support. It's a seemingly easy feature that allows to set up requests and limits for memory and make it more reliable. How long did it take to get to the alpha stage of memory cost? Yeah, it's a great question, Sergey. So I think C group suite two has been a journey in the Linux community and then as well in the broader Kubernetes community. It's important that as the underlying operating systems the keyboard is orchestrating to run containers on that we keep up with emerging changes at the actual host itself at the Kubernetes tier and take advantage of them. A lot of folks might not realize today that the memory requests on a pod when running on a C group suite one host isn't actually used to provide any quality of service guarantee to that container beyond just the minimal scheduling guarantee. So we're excited about some of the new features in C group suite two that we can exercise now to provide differentiated memory quads so that better and more minimal guarantees can be provided via the memory dot, the different options in the V2 version of that controller. I think this is an effort Don, you and I have talked back on since probably the last five years. And so it's been a slow emerging process but an important one we see for the sake going forward. Yeah, I still remember though, the first out of memory and the discussing and the memory quality of the services and there's the long list of the problem released to there. Yeah, thanks. And Don, since you've been here a long time and you initiated dynamic couplet configs that currently on the list for duplication. Do you have any hard feelings about it? Actually, I'm really glad that we finally decided to duplicate this one. So this, I first started at the beginning about the Kubernetes at early adoption states and we don't have like the clear of the node spec. We also don't have that clear of the standardize of the system configurations. So many user at earlier time want to customize the node configurations and specs. At the same time, we don't have, we only have tons of the logs, flags to need to use that to customize our offer. So which is unstructured and is not manageable. So through this, we founded this project and back in 2017. And so while to support this one, actually we are defying off the Kubernetes components, component configurations project, which is not just for Kubernetes, actually it's applied to all the control plan. And so we draw those things successfully or a while back. So make all our control plan can be managed. And another thing it is, we also deprecated tons of unused of the flags and convert them to the Kubernetes config fields. And over those times, and we also realize how to do the more dynamically Kubernetes configurations at a node level, but no need to have this intrusive and much harder to manage the dynamic Kubernetes configuration. So I think this is serve the purpose, original purpose. And now is the good time to deprecate this. Yeah, thank you, Don. And I want to say from myself that how much I enjoy working with you Derek and every member of a community, so much history and hard work was put into these features. And the history of it is quite exciting and thrilling for me. So in Kubernetes, we also committed to improve our processes all the time. And as part of the signal, we also committed to do the same and we run some retrospective for 122 release. I think it was the topic of 122 release was reaching new heights or new peaks. Yeah, reaching new peaks. And I think we reached another peak in signal. We tracked record number of 24 caps for this release. We merged 13 of them. It's a very good number considering everything. Two of them was exception. So very last moment and four was almost ready. So we could have done 17, but the exception was denied by different reasons. And from things that went well, again, record number of people working on the record number of caps, which is great. We now looking more at the reliability and requiring end-to-end test on early stages, it allowed us to catch some issues on caps that wasn't merged, which is great because we don't want to shift something that is not working and create a better impression about alpha feature. Also, we realized that all small caps were very smoothly merged into release and no issues on the road. So it's all great. Some things we plan to improve is we will define a soft early deadline for PR draft. This will allow us to first confirm that the cap is actually on track for release. And it also will allow us to request early API review. This release, we realized that API review is a bottleneck for us. Too many caps were trying to merge at the same time. And API reviewers just don't have enough bandwidth to satisfy and review everything. And then we don't have time to react on these reviews. Plus PR process can find a lot of issues. We just started using PR and we realized that PR may early discussions in PR. PR stands for production ratings review, by the way, can find a lot of issues that will enable smoother implementation of a feature. Anyway, great release. And now we work on 123 release. In 123, I put the same things for caps and I had the same workload support. We want more workloads, same secure by default. But also new topics is easy to troubleshoot, which is something that helped us to improve their instability and observability of workloads and infrastructure. It's partly handled by SIG instrumentation and mostly handled by SIG instrumentation. I would say that Elana is a chair of, but at the same time we in SIGNOT also need to make some core investments and core features to enable advanced scenarios that are outside of SIG instrumentation scope. Yeah, and just to jump into that, SIG instrumentation for the most part does not actually own any of the code in the various components that provide observability. SIG instrumentation owns the core library, like the metrics library and framework in component base, but not necessarily specific metrics on each component. So it's the responsibility of each SIG, such as SIG node to actually make investments in those areas to meet the guidelines set forth by SIG instrumentation. Yeah, thank you. And in other things that I'm very excited about is intelligent operations. We want to make sure that we minimize workload interruptions and apply some intelligence to do how we do that and how we optimize resource use, for instance. Intelligence is replacing manual labor. So this is great for operators and it's great for workloads. With that, I mean, I can go into details of some of this caps. I think content-intensive fire is something that we'll long awaited for. It will enable some SIG storage related features and it will improve some, enable some workloads. Another long-awaited feature is JVC probe support. And from intelligent operations, I'm really excited about in-place pod update. This is something that was discussed for a long time. You can see by the number of a cap, it's like 1,000 less than everything else. It was long discussed and finally we reached a milestone when we understand the API changes that we want to implement. So hopefully in this release, we can make it happen. So caps is very important. It allows us to deliver new features but also as important the reliability, refactoring and optimization work. And Ilana will talk, tell us about one of the refactorings that we've made in 122 release. Yeah, thanks, Sergei. So it's really important for SIGNO to be able to pay down technical debt as we accumulate it over time. And so to give you a little bit of context, in the 122 release cycle, we went and did some pretty substantial refactoring of the pod life cycle. So to understand that refactoring, I first want to give a very quick overview of the kubelet as part of our SIGNO introduction. So the kubelet is just a controller that turns a machine into a Kubernetes node. And the code for the kubelet lives at mostly in package kubelet with entry points and command kubelet. And I've listed the files under the package kubelet director here if you want to go take a look at what logic lives where. But essentially, like any other controller, the kubelet manages a certain kind of Kubernetes object. In the kubelet's case, it is the pod and it has a main sync loop and you can find that main sync loop in kubelet.go. And the sync loop uses pod workers to track operations on pods and you can find that logic in podworker.go. Each pod describes a collection of one or more containers and those containers have a life cycle that's defined in the kubelet starting in a waiting state, moving to running and eventually being terminated. And you can find more on that logic in kubelet pods.go. So on the next slide to illustrate with a picture here, this is sort of an idea of the core workflow that this comes from a design proposal. If you click on this slide, you will actually get a link to that design proposal all the way back from the 1.2 Kubernetes release cycle and planning. So the core design has remained the same over time and you can see here in the middle, the various pod workers that the kubelet spawns in order to manage various pods and pod changes. So pod life cycle refactor, why did we need to do this? Well, so initially we found a bug wherein pods can set on the pod specification their termination grace period seconds to zero. That is when you tell the pod to terminate, this is the grace period seconds that it will use by default before it tries to force kill the pod. When you set that to zero, we found a bug wherein that was accidentally causing forced deletion, which was never intended by design. So we went to submit a patch to fix that and we found that when this was fixed, we started finding a number of flakes in the end-to-end tasks as well as some failures because those were relying on this undefined behavior. And so in order for everything to coordinate without this forced deletion, it was no longer lining up as far as the timing in our end-to-end task go. So we found this new problem, which was that over time the signode code had evolved and we needed to use a single source of truth in the cubelet during pod shutdowns in order to avoid various things like storage, racing with one another. So the solution was to go back to the original design of the cubelet, clean up some of these drifts that happened over time and unify all of the pod termination logic inside of that pod worker. So while fixing this, we have a pretty substantial test suite in Kubernetes and we started uncovering some occasional flakes as well, which led us to find more rare bugs. So for example, we might encounter a rare race condition on pod startup where there's a cached container status and the cubelet thinks, oh, there are zero running containers, which is not correct in some cases. In other cases, we found that code that had been added was only checking running containers, but not necessarily new types of containers such as ephemeral containers, which would also be required as part of the pod spec. So sometimes that could cause rare correctness issues. As well, some loops had confused whether a pod was terminating or already terminated. And as a result, if one, for example, assumed that a pod was terminated, while it was in the process of terminating, then these components could race with each other because the pod wasn't completely torn down. So by working through this, we were able to clean up a bunch of these sort of subtle, rare issues that we could occasionally encounter as these flakes in our test suite and thus significantly improve the code as part of the pod lifecycle in the cubelet. So what did we learn about this? What went well? We fixed a lot of these subtle, really difficult to reproduce, difficult to debug bugs by going back and fixing this code. And as well, we found that the test suite worked out really well. It caught a bunch of bugs before we went to release. And so we were able to fix a number of issues that might have been sent out in release before we cut the release. But because the majority of our tests we tends to be leaning towards periodic jobs and much of our most detailed tests because they can be very involved to run, they require a lot of infrastructure. We still found ourselves catching some regressions after the release was cut. So as a result, we found a couple of regressions very early in this 123 life cycle. And so since this merge so late, we are going to be working on getting those fixed as soon as possible and then back porting those back to 122. So they'll be available in a patch release. So what are we doing next here? Well, we still need to actually fix the issue with the termination grace period seconds, like causing pause to be forced deleted when that's set to zero and any other bugs that we've managed to uncover here. And hopefully as such, we will then end up improving the reliability. And speaking of reliability, I think it's time for me to hand over to Sergei to talk about our CI subproject. Thank you, Alana. Yes, so a subgroup was originally formed as a reaction on one release where many release blocking tests were failing and nobody were around to fix this release blocking test. So the reaction was that we formed a subgroup but now it's way more than just reactionary subgroup to fix some release blocking issues. We actually converted them to reliability group. We work on improving stability, watching couplet regressions, including performance regression from this version. And ultimately we ensure smooth releases and confidence that Kubernetes is stable and reliable platform. CI subgroup is also a great place to start learning Kubernetes and get started contributing because we have very friendly people and there is always work to do. There is always work that easy to get started with. Last half year, we switched a lot from being reactionary to issues that emerging and ongoing issues that just uncovered by our CI with the new check-in. So like with infrastructure change and we moved more proactive mode where we proactively cleaning up test structures, we add in tests, we requiring tests from new caps and doing all those great activities. We also start looking into reliability more and realize that to be even more proactive, we need to start looking into incoming bugs and for that we want to get into backtrash. So Elana, can you talk about backtrash a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. Let me talk about bug triage. So next slide, please. Oh, I missed the one before this. Yes, here we go. So SIGNode, SIGNode has one of the largest workloads in the entire Kubernetes project. I believe we're around the third largest SIG by absolute workload. And so that means in a given week, we have over 200 average open PRs. We tend to merge in a given week anywhere between 20 to 80 PRs, both merged and closed. And over the past year, we've seen contributors from nearly 50 companies and many countries, probably more than that, making contributions to SIGNode. So your help is needed, we've got a lot of work to do.  Well, we focus on ensuring that we have efficient processes that will allow anybody to be able to jump in and work through a bunch of the stuff on our backlog. So in 121 and 122, we focused on pull requests where we added GitHub project boards for tracking the life cycle of PRs, both for the wider SIG and also focused on CI signal and testing. We improved our documentation by adding a triage guide and contributing file for SIGNode. And we also worked to mentor new contributors via a Contrabex mentoring program in order to help train more reviewers for the SIGNode. So that's focused on pull requests. Well, in the 122 release, we wanted to start doing a better job at tracking bugs because we had, when we started a particular bug scrub event, over 450 bugs on our backlog. So I organized a very large scale global event where we tracked three different regions, all working together for 48 hours. We had over 90 attendees in our Slack channel where we all met virtually. We had 13 region captains and mentors. And during this event, we closed 136 issues. We updated over 200 and we ensured that the vast majority, 96% of SIGNode issues had received an update in the past 90 days. Now, here are some of our stats that you can see from this event. So we really drove down the backlog on the left. You can see the total number of bugs and issues and on the right, how many have received a frequent update. So I mentioned that we previously had tracking on our GitHub boards for the sort of steady state of pull requests to ensure that we're tracking them throughout their life cycle, but we didn't have such a thing for bugs. So for this upcoming release, we have added a bug tracking board that we are going through every week in our CI sub project and ensuring that we can be very responsive when bugs are filed against SIGNode that we're answering folks, we're ensuring that if there's information needed that we request that very quickly and thus we can drive down our meantime to resolution. So how can you get involved in those things? Derek is gonna tell you a little more. Yeah, so I know we're at almost that time here but hopefully everyone saw the themes of presentation today where that, if you're looking to contribute to the SIG, we love prioritization of contributions that focus on helping us improve overall stability posture. So if you're looking to open up issues or provide bug fixes, we deeply appreciate those fixes that come with end-to-end tests demonstrating the problem and the resolution. For folks who wanna help improve Kubernetes to run more optimally to make better use of resources on their computers, we welcome all contributions looking to make the Kubelet more resource optimal. So better usage of CPU, better management of memory, disk, et cetera. And then finally, new features are always welcome but they are less pertinent to us than those first two principles we just talked about earlier. But we do welcome contributors coming forward and coming forward with their new ideas and new use cases so that we can ensure that the project is successful going forward. Great ways to get started beyond where Alana and Sergei have talked about today is just helping improve code documentation, enhancing the actual logging and metrics reported by our components and helping us to really keep up with the workload within the SIG. So we go to the next slide. How to join. So the first step was participating in this presentation. Hopefully you saw we're happy, fun people to talk to. And so we welcome you to join one of our regular SIG meetings. So we have a primary meeting where we cover ongoing features, caps, maybe broader design topics as well as the CI triage meetings that Alana and Sergei talked about earlier. And critically, as the SIG is constructing new features and evolving the platform, please give early feedback for your own real-world environments so we can inform our future directions. Finally, if you go to the next slide, you can reach out to us by joining the SIG meetings linked here as well as join our Slack channel, reach out and ask questions, send a note to our mailing list and reach out to both the SIG chairs and any of the sub-project leads and we'd be happy to assist. So thanks again for everyone taking the time to learn about SIGNib.


Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming back to another show. The non-profit shows here every Friday with our friends at Fundraising Academy to answer your questions.  It's a really interesting thing and so we are so excited to have you on today. We get a different voice and a different perspective from Fundraising Academy each Friday and LaShonda Williams comes to us from the great state of Texas and so are you ready my friend? We're gonna thank our sponsors. More importantly I want you to be able to reach out to LaShonda and her team at fundraising-academy.org where you can learn more about all of their projects and at the end of the show we're gonna talk about a really interesting conference that they have coming up which I heard there's only like about 20 tickets left. You are right spot on. We have like right at 20 so Cultivate is definitely catching storm and things are moving very swiftly so if anyone is out there interested in coming do not delay because you may possibly miss the opportunity that you've been waiting for. I can't believe it. I was on a meeting with your team leaders earlier in the week and they they said wow you know it's going we're gonna sell out and I'm like oh yeah you'll sell out and they're like no like in the next week or two. Exactly and we're like six eight weeks away so yes exactly. Very exciting. Well the non-profit show will be there and we'll talk about that a little bit more. We are here today and every day thanks to our amazing partners and sponsors and they include Bloomerang, American Non-Profit Academy, Non-Profit Thought Leader, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Non-Profit Nerd and Non-Profit Tech Talk. Okay you can get to us in many ways through our app, through our streaming, through our podcast and through our live shows but what's really interesting about this is that the archives for all these questions go back from the very beginning and so there's a lot there that you can find with us and we're going to jump right in because you know Lashonda, I get all excited when I have a name withheld, city withheld. It's always a little juicy. Okay this is a really interesting thing. This person writes in, I'm writing a book that shares my insights into what it looks like to be a fundraiser in the non-profit space. I'm doing this to point out the negative aspects of being in cause selling or mission sales. As the way I see it the customer is always right, mindset is being used in non-profit development. Do you think this is true? Very interesting question. It's like a pull. Right you know I see fireworks but in a different kind of way so I will say first you know I'm curious to know why you would like to share the negative aspects of fundraising because when I think about fundraising the first three letters are FUN and so fundraising most people enter that space because they want to make a difference and although sometimes we may have less than favorable experiences, the outcome, the impact are the things that are what really kind of drives most of us but not necessarily all of us. So that's the first part of my response. The second part is there are mechanisms in place that do actually provide support for fundraisers. So for example I'm certainly you know everyone in the non-profit space is aware of the donor bill of rights and they're like well what about the fundraisers? Well you know I can recall specifically there was a chapter that was either St. Louis or Chicago I can't remember which but they came up with a draft of something comparable to the donor bill of rights which would address fundraisers rights and so AFP had been working on some things to create opportunity space and some leveling of the playing field so that everyone feels as though they are equally valued and I would also say that from a being a professional in the industry I've had the pleasure and benefit of working with individuals in leadership who also think about the employees and we reemphasize the importance of ethical behavior and a part of that is making sure that in the event that your non-profit professional is feeling like they are being infringed upon or as something unethical or if they are being harassed you know the same attributes of sexual harassment in the workplace are applicable in the non-profit space when you're engaging with a donor so I would say that there are mechanisms available and your mindset is thinking about some of the best business practices are also applicable in the non-profit space especially when you're thinking about HR related concerns as it relates to rights and so my experience I can only go off of my experience has been one that's been favorable and supportive and I feel really really sad that unfortunately this individual may have had a bad experience or had bad experiences but when you're thinking about human resource concerns they are applicable to those in the non-profit space as well you know Lushanda I love I always love your mindset because I think you're so empowered through and towards positivity I mean for the number of years we've worked with you I really admire that and I think it's incredibly powerful and I agree it seems like this person might have really had some negative things that has changed their point of view about the whole process and and everything and that that's that's real and that's not shameful but I've got to ask this question have you ever been in an in an environment where the the I almost want to use the word toxic that the relationship with the donor became so toxic that you and your team or your organization in essence refunded their money and and closed that door and said we're not the right fit for you I kind of quoted Terry Axelrod twice this week that the the woman who started raising raising more money and and then ultimately became Benavon and she has this phrase called bless in release meaning thank you and go forward and do great things they're just not going to be with us have you ever been in that environment so I have been very fortunate that it's not escalated to that particular point and so a part of a part of the donor cycle you know is beginning to think about you know in the first part of the cost-selling cycle as well you're thinking about the pre-qualification and you're doing all of this background research on your prospective donor and so we've been fortunate to be able to be preventive and to identify early on if there were some questions about whether or not this relationship was a good relationship and so an example that I will bring out about a decade ago with another institution they had accepted some funds from a particular donor who later had been accused and prosecuted of a crime and they refunded those dollars so I mean that does happen however I've not been in a situation like that because we've you know been pre-emptive and done due diligence on the front end to ensure that you know if someone's going to make a sizable gift that that person those funds are made legally and that they're not in conflict with the organization's mission goal objectives and also ensuring that it will continue to create opportunities for subsequent gifts you know that it's it's supported that linkage ability and interest is very important and making sure that there are no ethical implications of receiving that gift yeah and that acceptance policy comes into play as well looking at that you know when you're thinking about those attributes yeah exactly well I I know that at AFP coming up in Toronto which you will be there with the fundraising academy team Jack Alotto and Angela Barnes are going to be doing a seminar on you know kind of touching on the topics of of how fundraisers are existing and and what they what are I don't want to say the negatives but what some of the challenges are I am assuming some of these conversations will come up because I think you're right about this we don't really talk about it and we don't really always have a strategy and I think there are a lot of nonprofits that don't even have a gift acceptance policy like we won't take money from companies that sell alcohol or exactly or tobacco or firearms or I mean no matter what whatever it is you do it's a it's not across the board but you know what I mean right so it's just kind of an interesting thing that we need to kind of take a breath and and look at these things so thank you definitely yeah thank you for for bringing that up okay here's another name withheld and I'm gonna man up and say or woman up that I took the name off because Sacramento is kind of a small I didn't I didn't want to out somebody so the question is this Lashonda I'm leaving the for-profit space for a job in nonprofit fundraising I'm used to earning commissions I just learned that the nonprofit organization I am joining does not do this is this a normal thing in the nonprofit sector that is another great question Julia and I'm so glad that you withheld the name yeah for that particular individual so I will go back to the why so many individuals not everyone I know this is a very generic statement enter the nonprofit space because you want to make the world a better place there are some opportunities to secure and and live well in specific positions in specific areas however most people enter just in the spirit of I want to make the world a better place and I will be able to secure funding beyond what my capacity would be I could make a donation to an organization and so I'll just go from my vantage point and so with that you know there's a big difference in nonprofits and depending on the type of nonprofit but specifically as it relates to bonuses to answer your question more directly AFP provides specific guidelines about the bonus process and so with the bonus process it is strictly based on you know what your salary is and it's based on your performance not based on the amount of revenue that you've raised you're not able to get commissions based off of referrals nonprofit is a business but the model is a little bit different as it relates to the ethical implications and the reason why I think it all exists is to ensure that our prospective donors know that we are vested in the organization and we're not looking at them as potential capital but we're building a relationship with the individual to help amplify the mission of our organization to amplify the impact of our organization so what I will say if this is a huge challenge for you now you may want to have that conversation and ask perhaps there are mechanisms in place that you've not been made aware of you know should you meet your goal that perhaps you may be eligible for a promotion or perhaps there's merit pay incentives and you know Julie and I we've talked about that before many organizations depending on its structure will offer merit pay based on performance evaluation and that evaluation is not just specific to the fiscal metrics that you are asked to achieve but there are other variables involved and we just want to make sure that we have clean lines and that your motivation is altruistic you know yes we all want to live well however we also want to make sure that our organizations continue to thrive and are able to sustain right you know and thank you for giving that overview because what you everything you said is really the gold standard for our sector and this is not new I mean this is a very tried and true approach that everybody pretty much understands buys into except for those who don't and this was my concern when I read this question is that I felt and I'd love your feedback on this I felt that this person has is has a lot of missing links to the ecosystem of the nonprofit sector and my question are they ready to actually perform in this environment because this is such a basic thing that I gotta believe there are gonna be other wackadoo things that we do in the nonprofit sector that is different from the for-profit sector that will just fritz them out or not allow them to be successful so for me I was just like whoa red flag red flag red flags right you know immediately I thought about what's your why so why did you transition from the for-profit space to the nonprofit space because you know we don't enter the field because we're we're looking to become millionaires and I can remember how I was a volunteer for my alumni association for a good 10 plus years working on the board doing fundraisers with my alumni association for free as a volunteer for many many years before I actually transitioned into a full-time position so much so that my friends and family was like well do you work for them they're like no this is what I love to do you know with my free time and I would constantly say you know if I do things that I enjoy that the financial opportunity perhaps will come later and I've always operated in that space so that I'm happy with the roles that I've accepted and I've accepted them because of my connection to the organization and its mission as opposed to what the compensation might be right well you know it is a it's a it's a profound question and I appreciate that it came in I have fear for this person because I don't know if this is going to pardon me if this is going to work out for them you know I'm I'm not I like to err on the side of optimism but you know if this is something that's causing some challenges on the front end of the employment I'm just afraid like you that perhaps there will be some subsequent challenges along the way adjusting to the nonprofit space because we operate totally different you know with with business the bottom line is the number and and people may not necessarily be as forgiving in the business sector as they are in the nonprofit space yeah I agree and I it's it's fascinating and it'll be interesting to see if they if they respond back to us or come back with with other comments because it's it's pretty intense with that with that's an intense kind of in some ways heartbreaking question okay Matthew from Fort Lauderdale writes in I'm starting to make more donors I'm starting to take excuse me more donors out to lunch and I need a better method for tracking and paying for these lunches I am putting them on my own credit card and then waiting for reimbursement which is costing me money and stress cash flow that's a very great question so apparently they are this individual Matthew I'm so sorry that you've not been given a company card to manage that what I will suggest is having a conversation with I think it's human resources or perhaps procurement office which all kind of falls under that h-line spectrum to discuss you know if the company the organization if that can secure a card that you can use or talk about what is a reasonable time frame for reimbursements because when you're talking about reimbursements on your credit card there are a couple of implications there one depending on what your limit may or may not be it could create some financial hardship for you and your family and your monthly budget depending on the timeline in which the reimbursement happens you may be subject to interest rates yeah and so those interest rates are things that you definitely will incur which is punitive to you when you're acting on behalf of the organization so those are some serious conversations that you need to have with HR and then the other suggestion and it's not the best suggestion okay this is just an a plan C okay plan C plan C is to have a dedicated card that you use specifically for your organization and that way you don't mix up the different accounting issues so that you can you know provide them with the full statement on that particular credit card and that way you know worst case scenario perhaps they will you know pay the credit card company direct if you provide them with that full bill so that way you can have it separate you can maintain great records but I would start with asking them to secure a card if they would not if they're not open to securing a card then let's discuss what the reasonable time frame is for reimbursements and you know in the nonprofit space we talk about best practice when we receive a gift we'd like to get that acknowledgement letter in 72 hours so can I get my reimbursement in 72 hours of submitting my receipt so applying some of the things that we have in place for donors you know bring that to their attention that you know that's a really interesting way to do it but again plan C would be a separate credit card that you keep everything separate from and then you provide them with all the information upfront but do not incur any late fees if you can or the interest on that because that can be very costly to you yeah and it never goes away I mean it just never goes away yeah the rolling credit yeah that that becomes a challenge and today's interest rates are really really high and so you don't want to put your family in a in a financial crunch so have the conversation first and foremost that's important and I would add LaShonda you know you can go to virtually any supermarket and they will have kiosks or you know sections at the end of their aisles what they call the end caps where you can buy pre-loaded visa cards or I'm a hundred percent there you know and and um while it might not have the tracking and everything at least your finance or accounting department can can do that because that's ridiculous I mean it is and it's not you know gosh the very first question we in today's episode was about how you know we are not making a lot of money in this sector so you're already coming to the table with somebody who's probably right fragile economically and you know here's the other part of that whether or not you know the individual is fragile or not I don't think necessarily is the focus the focus is I'm being compensated at this level to do this particular job but I did not sign on for these additional fiscal responsibilities yeah because you know then you then you're infringing on my monthly budget so it's really important but I think your suggestion is spot on you know with those prepaid cards from the different restaurants and or the visa master cards and then you just supply the detailed receipt after it's been used and that helps with the reconciliation process and that is a win-win for everyone right I agree okay well hopefully that's straightened that thing out because that's dreadful that that's just dreadful I think we've been I think we've had that question maybe once before but I think what's happened to LaShonda is you know people are getting out people you know during the pandemic it wasn't that big of a deal because people were just you know trying to get zoom appointments right right maybe having lunch delivered or you know something like that to be a little creative but yeah people were going out okay this is interesting frustrated grant writer from St. Louis Missouri writes in I'm a grant writer and I have a CEO who just told me to apply for as many grants as I can even though the organization not be may not be covering the type of programming called for in the grant application can you help me here I need to explain why this is a mistake and costly at that wow so Julia you have had some very interesting writers this week and do understand frustrated grant writer you are not alone no you know we started off talking about linkage ability interest in doing all of the pre-work and the same thing happens when you're looking for grants you want to make sure that there is an alignment with programs and services that you currently offer because they may ask you questions about you know what have been some of the implications of your work what are the impact what is the impact and if you don't have that content you know you're starting to fill out this application you've gone through all of these processes and then for not and it's it's truly not a good waste a good way to use your resources because not only is it costly from your time it is costly from a financial standpoint and it's also costly from personnel because you can literally be spending time putting together quality proposal for a grant that aligns with your organization so I would say that you would probably need to kind of give an overview to to the individual about grants and how the process works because sometimes you know the the challenge is a lack of knowledge so going through actually one of the applications and kind of talking through the process and how grants work and how we can't just make up a new program today that we don't have people in place to actually facilitate the programming you know if it's an expansion of an existing program I can understand that however to just offspring and say we're going to start this new program just because this particular foundation is offering a grant I don't think would be justice to your organization especially if that particular programming has nothing to do with the current services that you provide if it's it's not an extension or doesn't complement what you're doing then unfortunately it's just not a good fit and so I'd say do your due diligence and provide some background informational grants in the processes right and you know my my my first thought was you know this is more than a number scheme only about 30 percent I mean if you're successful about 30 percent of of all the grant applications you make are going to result in what they call a grant win so you need to understand kind of like what that looks like for the amount of work and the amount of money whether you're paying an outside grant writer or an internal one it still costs money right and so you have to be more strategic it's it's ridiculous to just be like throwing the spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks right or gumbo you're putting everything in the pot like no that's fabulous well hey we don't have much time left and I didn't want to leave this this Good Friday and it hasn't been a Good Friday with you LaShonda we kind of teased this at the beginning but as we speak today there are really less than two dozen tickets left to cultivate it's sold out last year talk to us about what goes on and and what to expect to cultivate so cultivate 2024 is the conference that you don't want to miss we're very excited Julia as she said we've got less than two dozen tickets left we'll talk about ways to cultivate knowledge relationships and impact we have speakers from across the US we're very excited to offer 18 sessions that will be very intense some of them will also include opportunities for real-time action planning we'll have networking opportunities and most importantly we will have the opportunity for everyone who is present to be able to be a part of something unique something different we've lined up our keynote in our plenary speakers and if you want to know who they are you'll have to go to our website because I'm teasing just a little bit more but we have phenomenal folks like when I say phenomenal we're very very excited we just released it on um LinkedIn and on Instagram all the social media earlier this week and we are looking forward to engaging everyone who is present to help them amplify their cause and most importantly provide them with some useful tools that they can use immediately upon the conclusion of the conference you will have information that you can apply in real time this isn't something that you have to think about and ponder over you're going to be ready and equipped to go full throttle the next day all of our topics are encompassing things that are current trends so that you'll be very knowledgeable of things that are currently happening we have some information on AI we have information on metrics because we're always talking about metrics you know you know we mentioned earlier the donor-centric concept so there is a variety for everyone we have something for executive leadership we have some things for those in that middle space and then for those that are newcomers and just in case if you're not sure where you fall in the spectrum or where you want to be you can create your own schedule and be able to kind of sample some of the different things that you feel like you need specifically so that you can grow as a professional so we are looking forward to cultivating relationships impact and knowledge this year for the second year in sunny san diego to a day and a half of very enlightening and amplified ways to increase your fundraising abilities i love it now let me ask you one quick question before we go do you have to be a professional fundraiser or could you be a CEO or cfo or even you can be a CEO a cfo there is something for everyone when we pull together the the schedule we wanted to make sure that we could address everyone so for the novice or for someone who may even be interested in transitioning into the fundraising space so we have something on every level whether you're the expert or whether you're the novice and you're just kind of muddling your way through we wanted we were intentional with making sure that we had something for everyone and i think that's why we're less than two dozen tickets away i'm just like stunned well we will be there the nonprofit show will be broadcasting there um from live from uh from san diego um on that friday so come by where you'll see a setup and introduce yourself and who knows maybe we'll even get you on the show um well shonda thanks we i gotta believe that this is going to be sold out by mid yes and i'm thinking i'm thinking over the weekend julia everyone that's listening right now is going to the website and once they see our um our keynote and our plenary that is going to completely seal the deal we have a dynamic lineup of speakers again from across the country whose areas of expertise um are wide range um in fundraising something definitely for everyone i love it well la shonda williams mpa cf re one of the great trainers and i always say one of the great minds from fundraising academy you're always a joy to be with check out the work that fundraising academy at national university does at fundraising academy dot org the majority the majority of their site has free content and it is astonishing what you can learn for yourself independently for your team and for your organization um i can't recommend them enough it's just an amazing amazing place of knowledge and again another amazing part of what we get to see each and every day here at the non-profit show is the support of our sponsors they are truly remarkable and they include bloomerang american non-profit academy non-profit thought leader staffing boutique your part-time controller 180 management group fundraising academy at national university jmt consulting non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk hey my friend have a wonderful safe and blessed holiday weekend thank you and you too and i'm looking forward to seeing i know it'll be a lot of fun everybody as we end each episode of the non-profit show we like to leave with this message and it goes like this to stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here next week thank you everyone thank you leshawnda