Good morning everyone. Welcome to a new week. I just want to let each one of us know that my eyes are swelling.  I hope that's okay because it's swelling in both my eyes. Alright, let's begin this time with a word of prayer. Any one of us can please leave the prayer? Charles? Yes, boss. Dear Father, we pray to you for the name of Christ. Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity. Ask your guidance. You'll learn before you start your prayer. Well then, according to your holy will and we are good ministers for that.  Thank you Father, show your mercy and your wisdom and knowledge. I ask this prayer in the name of our Jesus Christ, amen. Amen, amen. Thank you so much Prabhakar. Alright, so we've completed our first Corinthians. Alright, so we'll get into second Corinthians. And again, second Corinthians has 13 chapters. So let's begin with second Corinthians. Now a little bit of background. What happened was, Paul was in Ephesus and he wrote first Corinthians there. And most probably he sent the letter through Titus. Now remember later on Paul says there's a great door. Remember we did that last week. There's a great door that's open in Ephesus. And he also says they were like wild beasts after him. Meaning there was so much of persecution for the Apostle Paul. But yet he decides to stay back in Ephesus because there was a great door of ministry open there. So he stays in Ephesus and from Ephesus Paul went on to Macedonia. Now Macedonia includes Neopolis, Philippi, Thessalonica and Berea. Now while in Macedonia Paul wrote second Corinthians. Now again, we know the Macedonian call. Paul gets a dream and a vision and somebody says come over to Macedonia. There's a door open here in the dream. And so Paul goes there but there was a lot of persecution there. There was a lot of opposition there. And it's not like God, it's wonderful to look at this. God opened the door but the opposition was still there. It was not like everything was made smooth for the Apostle Paul. He went through great oppositions even in Macedonia. But he was comforted by the arrival of Titus. So Titus comes and he gives them a good report. He gives Paul a good report. So most probably what would have happened was Titus went. He gave the letter to the call. They read it. They would have changed their hearts. And now he's coming back and forming the Apostle that things are changing. The church has agreed to follow the instructions that you have read. And so he was greatly comforted by both Titus' arrival and the response of the church. So now let's get into chapter 1. Chapter 1, 2 Corinthians 1, 1 and 2. Paul and the Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God and Timothy our brother to the church of God which is at Corinth with all the saints who are in all Akhaya. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Right now Paul begins his letter with a customary greeting. What he always does, he says call to be an Apostle by the will of God. And we look at the word Apostle many times. Apostle or which means somebody who is sent or a delegate and an ambassador. And then he says Timothy our brother. Timothy was part of Paul's team. Now I have mentioned this many times. He was a young boy probably about 17 years old. But Paul has come to a place now. He's well matured in ministry. He's finished his second missionary journey. And now he's calling Paul our brother at Christ. So he's honoring the call that is there on Timothy's life. And with all the saints who are in Akhaya. Akhaya is a region of Greece that includes Corinth and Sancria. Now if you see when Paul goes into Athens, from Athens he goes to Corinth. But from Corinth there's no mention of Sancria. But later on we know in Romans 16 talking about the church there, believers in Sancria also. So Paul intended that these letters be read by the believers in the region. Not just for the believers in Corinth but also the region in Akhaya and Sancria. So what we will do is we will be going a little quick because there's a lot of repetitions in a second letter. So we'll see what is important and we'll pick up on those points. But feel free to stop me if you have any questions or anything you'd like to share. So comfort in suffering. Verses 3 to 7. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. Who comforts us in all our tribulation that we may be able to comfort those who are in trouble. And with the comfort which we ourselves are comforted by God. And you see the word comfort is being used so many times. The Greek word is paraclesis. The Holy Spirit paracletos is the comfort. So he says here, he's using the Greek paraclesis. Somebody who consoles, who comforts us. Now Paul praises God the Father who is the originator of compassion, who is merciful. And he is the one who brings comfort and console to everyone who needed it. Now remember this, Paul has a team. He says I'm greatly comforted when Titus comes. But again he's trying to make it the point for the church to understand that yes, we are comforted by people around us, by our family, friends. But the greatest comfort is the comfort that we can receive from God. Because he's the originator of comfort. Sometimes people may comfort us. We may feel alright, but after a couple of weeks or months, we'll go back to how we were feeling. But when God comforts us, there's this assurance, there's this peace. There's this feeling of calmness. And that is way above the comfort that we can receive from people around us. Now it does not mean that we don't need people around us, it does. For example, if somebody has lost a loved one, and during the time of bereavement, it is nice for somebody to be there to bring comfort. But they can only do it up to a certain limit. Once they go back, the person who's lost a loved one is still going to be troubled. So Paul is saying God is the comforter. The God who comforts us in all tribulation. Tribulation, the Greek word here is klipsis, which refers to situations that are pressure filled and oppressing together. We know the word tribulation means trials and challenges. A time of difficulties. As he's saying here, God comforts us in those times of tribulation. Now Paul is sharing from his personal experience as well. So if you look at this previous to this, he was in Ephesus. In Ephesus again, he mentions they were like wild peace. And even from the first missionary journey, from the time the Apostle Paul began his ministry, we see that he was persecuted. And he remember the time when they beat him and threw him from the cliff. They thought that he was dead, but he got up and went on. Remember the time in Acts 16, Paul and Silas and Philippi in prison, they had beaten him and chained him. And so there are many tribulations that Paul is going through and has gone through. And he's talking from experience. Comfort, consolation and strength is something that God can give them. It's very easy to break during times of tribulations. It's very easy to ask questions, God, God, why is this happening? Why am I going through this? Why am I not seeing a miracle? All these things are there. But Paul is sharing and he's saying God is a God who comforts us through all seasons. Now he's talking from experience. It's not like Paul is sitting in his house, comfortable space, and writing this letter. He's writing from experience. And he says here, every trial is an opportunity to receive divine strength and enablement from the Holy Spirit. Look at that word. It's an opportunity for us. All of us may go through trials, challenges, but it's an opportunity for us to say, God, you are my strength. You will enable me. You will comfort me. You will build me up and help me over the season to overcome the season. And so Paul is writing to the church in Corinth. Remember that the church was also persecuted because they were a small group of people who, and in Corinth there was all, you know, we talked about the background of Corinth, sexual immorality, there was all kinds of things happening. So it was not like the church was enjoying themselves. No, there was persecutions for them as well. So Paul is saying be encouraged. So verse five, for as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds through Christ. He describes the kind of sufferings that he and his ministry team went through for the sake of the Gospel. Look at this in 2 Corinthians 11, later on we look at that. He says he was being whipped, imprisoned, stoned, shipwrecked, dangers of the sea, the wilderness, the city among false brethren, being weary, lack of sleep, hunger, thirst, being cold with inadequate clothing. Now look at this list. This is what Paul has gone through. And he's saying, God is our comfort. What an amazing, amazing attitude or what an amazing comfort God is. Imagine all of this happened to him. And I'm sure there were many other things, but he's just listing down a few of them here. Being whipped, imprisoned, stoned, shipwrecked, lack of sleep, hunger, thirst, the thing of traveling from one place to another. It was not easy. So he's mentioning here the sufferings that he went through for Christ. Again, Romans 8, 35 to 37 Paul lists tribulations. He says, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, battle, and sword, and declares triumphantly over all of this. He says, in all this, I love this verse, we are more than conquerors. So Paul is confident, right? He's saying the sufferings will come, the sufferings will go. And for the sake of Christ, the sufferings will increase. But where the sufferings increase, God's comfort, strength, and empowering will also increase. What a joy that is, right? When we're going through, many a times we feel, we're going through these problems. But where is God? He's there. He's there. It's just that we have to press on and say, God, give me the strength. So here's the thing, sometimes, you know, we look at those challenges. We look at those sufferings, those tribulations. And we focus on that more than focusing on what God can do, right? You know, yesterday, I was at church and all of a sudden my eye started burning, right? And I started to feel very nauseous. And then after church, many of them came for prayer. But my eyes started becoming red and just started swelling up.    I have things to do, you know, regarding the church. I've got to meet people, so many things to get done. And all of that, you know, I only focused on what the problem was. But I thank God that, you know, even as we, as I just, you know, look to God and I said, God, give me the strength to go through this season. There was a comfort, right? It's not easy. I can hardly open my eyes right now. I can hardly read. But God is our comfort. God is our strength, right? And we take consolation in that, that He gives us the grace. Let's look at verse 6 and 7. Now, if we are afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation, which is effective for the enduring and for enduring the same sufferings, which we also suffer, right? Or if we are comforted, it is for your consolation and salvation. And our hope for you is steadfast, because we know that you are partakers of the sufferings. So also, you will partake of the consolation, right? So wonderful. The sufferings that Paul endured for the sake of the gospel has resulted in great fruit for the Kingdom of God, right? Now, it was not like, Apostle Paul is suffering and suffering and suffering and there's no result. No. He's seeing the fruit, right? And because he's seeing the fruit, there's a consolation, right? Imagine this. Paul starts off in his first missionary journey. He goes into Galatia. He goes into these churches. He plans churches. But what happens in the first missionary journey? They persecuted him. They beat him. He went through all those turmoil. But he is seeing with his own eyes the fruit that has been of the gospel, the fruit of his afflictions, of his troubles. And here he's saying, he was strengthened to endure sufferings for the sake of the gospel. And he's seeing the fruit. So it was like Paul is saying, okay, there's going to be troubles, but I see fruit. I see churches being planted. I see people giving their lives to Christ. I see God is working. So we will take consolation. We will take consolation that God is working using us, but also we will take comfort that God will give us the grace through these trials and difficulties. So very important. Something that we can always learn is, during these challenging times, see the fruit. See what God has done probably in the past. Look at how he brought healing or brought deliverance. How he was there for you. He miraculously made a way. Look at those times that find consolation. That's what Paul is doing. Difficult times. He's probably looking at the fruit that he's saying, oh, this is, if we did this through the sufferings, but God was faithful to work in their lives. Verse eight to 11, for we do not know, sorry, we do not want you to be ignorant brethren of our trouble, which came to us in Asia, that we are burdened beyond measure above strength so that we despair even of life. Yes, we had a sentence of death in ourselves that we should not trust ourselves, but in God who raised the dead, who delivered us from so great a debt and delivered us in whom we trust that he will still deliver us. You also helping together in prayer for us that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the gift granted to us through many. So Paul is saying, listen, we want you to know some of the challenges that we've gone through. It's not like Paul is saying, he's not posting of those troubles that I went through, but he's saying, I went through, underwent these trials and tribulations which burdened and weighed them down. So they were able to overcome all of this. He's listed down there, right, fighting with wild beasts and emphasis, 39 stripes after being brought before the Jewish court. Those lashes were really painful ones. The riot and emphasis, they caught him, they beat him up and somehow they asked him, Paul escaped from there, the persecution shortly before Paul left for Troas. Now these are just few of them. Paul had seen many, many, many persecutions. But Paul is saying here, he trusts God who delivered them and he continues to deliver as he has promised in the past. He will promise, he will do it even today. He is the deliverer. He's the unchanging God. He's the same yesterday, today and in the future as well. This is an important and powerful truth about the nature of God that you and I can hold onto this promise. God, you have delivered me before. You have restored me before. You can do it now as well because God is the God who's the same yesterday, today and forever. So he's unchanging. If there are seasons we're going through, we can look to him. We can look to him and say, God, you've done it in the past.  God is willing to do it. Paul is stating the importance here of intercessory prayer by the church for those in ministry. Paul knew and acknowledged that the release of the gifts for effective ministry is from God and it's the answer of faithful prayers of the believers. So he's saying, it's important that we know that there will be trials, there will be challenges but it's important to have people pray. There's intercessory prayer that has happened. And we see all through the scriptures, especially the life of Paul, many a times he has focused on the importance of prayer. Even before going to King Agrippa, he says, I bow my knee to the Father. Which means I don't bow my knee to anybody else. I bow my knee to the Father and I pray for each one of you. And he again says, the burden for each of the churches that is there in him. He says, I pray for each one of you every day. So intercessory prayer is very important for those in ministry and for those who are believers, part of a church, it's very important to pray for your leaders, for the pastors, for the believers within the church as well. I think there's a question. Yes, Christopher, go ahead please. Christopher, do you have a question? Oh, yes. Thank you. My question is with intercessory prayer, is it possible to, besides asking someone who is here on the earth, someone who is an elder or a pastor or a close one, there are denominations where they pray to people who have passed on and people who are believers. So as well as, for example, the Catholic Church, they pray to Mary to intercede for them. So I just wanted to understand what your comment on that would be. Sure. So I would respond to this with one simple verse. It is 1 Timothy chapter 2 verse 5. And it says, And God wills that all should come to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus, because Jesus Christ is the one mediator between God and man. All should come to the knowledge of the truth because Jesus is the one mediator between God and man. So Christopher, to answer your question, yes, there are, as you mentioned, the Catholic Church that believe even in purgatory, they believe in, I think it is all souls they are not sure what that day is, but they pray to those who have passed on. Now it is not biblical, right? Because one, there is one mediator between God and man. Two, Paul also writes that he says, to be absent in the body is to be present with the Lord. Right? So if we are, you know, praying to a soul that is already passed, they cannot do anything. They are powerless. They may be the greatest, you know, evangelists or pastors, but they cannot really do anything because God says there is one mediator between God and man. Nobody else. Nobody else can take that place. So that, I think that verse itself, Christopher speaks for itself. One mediator between God and man. And he goes on to say the man Jesus Christ. So it's wonderful to see that, you know, Paul is writing the man Jesus Christ because it's the man Jesus Christ who can relate to us. I have used this example many times, right? So we are going through troubles, or for example, we are going through a time of fasting. Now the God, the Father doesn't know what it feels like. Right? He does understand this, but he hasn't gone through that because, you know, he's got the Father, right? But Jesus, being our intercessor, being our mediator, he knows what it is, right? He knows what it is to stay without food. He knows what it is to, you know, have pains in the body. So the man Jesus Christ relating to both his God, he's man as well. So Christopher, I would say that it is wrong and it is not biblical and it should not be done. Alright, so just to confirm, I mean, I guess the argument from these people is that if we can ask, you know, if I were to ask you to pray for me, I'm still going in a sense through you as an intercessor. So what they are saying is that can they go to, I mean, I think Mother Mary is the one that they keep, you know, they do keep, you know, mentioning. So they feel that, you know, in the same way we can get Mother Mary to intercede for them. Yeah, so the thing is, it is not biblical because Paul writes to the Ephesians. He says to the Ephesians, especially he says to them, you know, pray for each other, pray for your leaders. So praying for each other, that is okay. But I'm praying for somebody who has already passed away and gone. See, if I, for example, I have a prayer request, right?  This is what I'm going through. Can you pray for me? Now, Paul says the prayer of, I think it's in Matthew, the prayer of faith will heal the believer. So now, I am praying with somebody, right?  And the Bible says that, I understand where you're coming from. Your question is, you know, I'm asking you to pray. So why not I ask somebody who's, for example, Mother Mary or a great saint who has passed on, why can't I ask them to pray? So the thing is, when I'm praying with somebody who's a brother or a sister in Christ, we are praying with understanding. We're praying for each other, right? But here it is, it's more of a one-way prayer. And I would say it's not biblical, first of all. But again, over the years, these ideas and thoughts have come into the Roman Catholic Church especially. So it still carried on. But I would say, if somebody asked me, I would say that, you know, I wouldn't do it because there's one mediator between God and man. So I'm not praying to the person when I'm praying with somebody. I'm praying with the person, right? So somebody's praying for me, for my prayer request. I'm praying with him, but I'm not praying to him. I'm not saying, okay, I hope this guy, this person I'm praying with is able to heal my sickness. No, I'm praying with him to the Lord Jesus. Here I'm praying to the soul, which is wrong. So I hope that I may not be very, if I'm not very clear, maybe we can, you know, I can just get some more thoughts and share with you later on as well. So I think that's something we must remember just first. So I'm praying with somebody or I'm praying to somebody. Okay, Sayi has lifted his hands, raised his hands. Yes, Sayi? Yes, Pastor, not to be too vocal, but just to support your comment is that, I think this takes us back to church history, which you took us last year. Sorry, this year rather, last year, this year, I can't remember. But I know we discussed basically that there were a lot of pagan worship practices. Now we're, you know, adopted into the Catholic church. And one of it is what has been mentioned by Brother Christopher and so we just have to be very careful to understand that if there's nothing in any practice that is done by any faith and it's not consistent with scripture, I think we should just discard it because the practice of praying to Mary or to the saints was something they adopted from the pagan practices they were into before Christianity was institutionalized in the Roman, in Rome at that time. So, but we must be consistent with scripture. Just like you pointed out, you know, we only have one person in whom we pray in and to and true. And that's Jesus Christ. No, none of the saints who have gone, even the apostles, even the Mary, none of them have any power, you know, to carry on our prayers to God. The only person we have been who to pray to or, you know, it's Jesus Christ basically. So I think we should just put that into context and put that in mind that many things that are done in the Catholic church today is as a result of the pagan worship then. And it's interesting that there's actually a segment of the Catholic church called the Charismatic Catholic Church who have identified some of all these practices and they have stopped all those things, though they still regard themselves part of the Catholic church, but there are a number of things they have discarded and one of it is this, right? So we must be consistent with scripture. I think that's a summary basically. Thank you, Pastor. Yes, thank you so much. Say yes, being consistent with scripture. And also I think another thing is, you know, in the book of Acts, you know, I have had a lot of discussions with people from Catholic faith that they asked me this question. Why do you say it's wrong? My answer was very simple because, see, in the book of Acts, firstly, they say they call her the Virgin Mary and we know that she's not a virgin. She did have other children after that. So that debunks the whole Virgin Mary thing. And then two is when the 120 were praying for the Holy Spirit, she was there. Now, we do honor her. We do respect her, but we don't worship her and we don't pray to her because she herself was there praying for the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Rupa, you have raised your hands as well. Yes, sir. Just while you were discussing with Brother Christopher, suddenly a verse popped up in my mind. I just wanted to share Revelation 14-13 and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Right, blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth. He said the Lord that they may rest from their labors and their works do follow them. After a person dies, even if he is a saint, his works is rested. He is resting in the Lord. He is no more interceding for anyone. That is what I got from that verse, sir. I just wanted to share. Thank you so much, Rupa. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. Christopher, I hope that helps. Rose has also commented here praying for the, praying for help from the dead. It falls on divination. Yes, yes, it does. Remember the Old Testament? The witch at Endor. I forget the chapter, but the witch, Saul goes to the witch of Endor and says, bring up Samuel so that he can tell me what I must do. And, you know, so Samuel, the witch was able to bring a person, but we know that it was not Samuel. So it's divination. It is, it is not something that, as Rose has mentioned, it's a abomination in the eyes of God. But again, it's God's grace. It's the lack of understanding. You see how the enemy is a deceiver. He's able to bring in things that can just, you know, divert people from the truth. That's all he wants to do. He just wants to go a little astray, right? So something that is truth. If you go a little away from it, it becomes false. But most of it may be true, but yet it still remains false because we've gone away from it. So the enemy is, you know, he works in that way. So we, as believers, must be very careful on what we, let the word of God be our basis. That is the standard of which we, you know, on which we should step. Right. Thank you, Charles, for saying it's not godly to ask help from the dead. Even praying for them is idolatry. Yes. All right. So let's continue from where we stop. So verse 12 onwards, Paul is mentioning about, you know, hidden motives or actions. Verse 12, what our boasting is this, the testimony of our conscience that we conducted ourselves in the world in simplicity and godly sincerity. Not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God and more abundantly towards you. Paul's conscience was clear. Right. He conducted himself in sincerity, in honesty, in integrity, without pretence, without hypocrisy. So he was clear. He didn't have to hide anything. He didn't have to portray himself as somebody else. He was clear. His conscience was clear. He knew that everything that he did was for the benefit, is what God called him to do and also for the benefit of the church. And so he, there was no pretence. There was no hypocrisy. Right. For we are not writing any other thing to you than what you read or understand. Now I trust you will understand even to the end. There is no self seeking here. Paul is saying, as ministers, we must follow a good example. Live life with a clear conscience. Simplicity and sincerity. And I think some of these two are very important. There's power in simplicity and there's power in sincerity. Right. Humility also. Right. It's powerful. And as leaders, you see Apostle Paul, he was a humble man. Yet he brought correction in the right way. He was sincere. Yet he, you know, he was sincere for the church and the things that are happening. He was a simple man. Right. You know, Paul does not mention about his, you know, his great achievements. There was only one time when he was talking about himself. He was saying all these things I was, but all of this I counted rubbish at the side of God. So he was, he was actually a great man. Studied under Gamelia, the commander of the temple guard, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. But you see that there was some kind of simplicity in him. He never used those credentials as a way of, you know, manipulating people or trying to, you know, rule or boss over people. He never did that. He explains that he only says that I did ministry with a clear conscience, simplicity and sincerity. Right. Verse 15 and 16. And in this confidence, I intended to come to you before that you might have a second benefit to pass by the way, by way of you to Macedonia to come again from Macedonia to you and be helped by you on my way to Judea. Therefore, when I was planning this, did I do it lightly? Or the things I planned, do I plan according to the flesh that would mean there, would mean there should be yes, yes and no. But as God is faithful, our word to you was not yes and no. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, by me salving this intimacy, was not yes and no, him was yes. Right. So now Paul is writing to the church and he's mentioning a bit of changes in his travel plans. Right. He's saying, I would love to visit you at Corin when I'm returning from Macedonia. Then he says, Paul changed his mind and visited himself. So he's here in Ephesus. He has to go to Macedonia and now it says that on the way, probably Paul changed his mind and he said, okay, before I go to Macedonia, let me go visit Corinth. Right. Now the visit, this visit was difficult one for both Paul and the Corinthian church because now remember the first letter? Paul was stern. He was, he had to confront people. Remember, he also said, hand them over to the devil, meaning just take them out of the church. Now on this, after seeing all this in this first letter, Paul had to go and he wanted to still meet them. Now this visit was unpleasant and didn't seem much beneficial. Paul did not visit Corinth while returning from Macedonia but wrote to them a severe letter instead. Right. So we see that on the way to Macedonia, he visits Corinth. But while coming back from Macedonia, he says, no, I will not visit Corinth. Right. Instead of visiting them, I will write a letter. Right. And that's when he wrote second Corinthians. So Paul declares with utmost confidence that even as God's nature is faithfulness, God does not say yes when he wants to say no and vice versa. Right. So in some manner his words were also true. And so basically what Paul is saying is whatever I do is not led by the flesh but what I do is led by the spirit. The decision that I made to change my travel plans and come to you before going into Macedonia was God's leading. Now while returning from Macedonia, I'm going to, I'm not going to visit you because when I visited you, there was, it was not a pleasant visit. It was not beneficial. Maybe some of them were still upset with Paul's letter. Remember the first few chapters of first Corinthians? That was really stern. He says, he starts, you know, he's so upset with the church. Maybe some of them are still upset with him or, you know, they didn't, you know, they didn't accept him the way that he wanted or probably the whole visit was not beneficial at all. So he says, okay, I will write a letter to them. For the promises of God in him are yes, and to him and in him, amen to the glory of God through us. In Christ's promises for each of us, I'm sure we've all gone through the book who we are in Christ. As believers, we have a whole list of promises that God is giving us because we are in Christ. Look at this verse, first Corinthians 670, he says, but he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. You are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8 1 therefore there is no condemnation for you for those who are in Christ Jesus. So as believers we are in Christ. Colossians again, he talks about being in Christ. So plenty of places Paul writes were being in Christ. All of us have been promised by the Father that when we are in Christ Jesus is assured us a yes and an amen. In Christ promises are ours. So and we've learned this in who we are in Christ. We it is just imputed into us. The moment we become believers, we believe in the Lord Jesus, the work that he did on the cross and we accept him as our personal saviour. All the promises that are in Christ is imputed which means it's just poured out into us. God is not going to say, okay, have you prayed one hour a day? Have you done this? Have you done that? Have you read your Bible? No. He has imputed all those gifts or the promises into us. We are saved, we are healed, we are delivered, redeemed. We are the child of God with the air of Christ and co-heirs with him and those wonderful, wonderful promises it all is for us because we are in Christ. Verse 21 and 22. Now he who establishes us with you in Christ and hasointed us in God has sealed us and given us the spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. God does these for the disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are established in him. One of the word established means to make firm or to make sure we're established. So no matter what the devil comes and says, you are like this, you are like that, we must be established in him. We may not feel established but we are established. Two, we are anointed by the Holy Spirit. Christ has anointed us in God and the Greek word anointed here is Kriyay which is to rub oil or to smear to concentrate for holy use. So God has anointed us, he has empowered us, he has filled us, separated us for his service. He has anointed us by the Holy Spirit. We are sealed by the Holy Spirit and Paul says in many places I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit. Do not leave the Holy Spirit with whom you have been who is a guarantier of our soul and so he has purchased possession he has sealed us, he is saying we are his and the Holy Spirit is our guaranty a down payment as a pledge that the full redemption will be made in the future. Holy Spirit is our guaranty a down payment for us. Finally the last two verses Moreover, I call God as witness against my soul that I spare you I came no more to call it not that I not that we have dominion over your faith but our fellow workers for your joy for by faith you stand. So again Paul is stating out of concern that he did not visit them as planned since he did not want them to be even more sort of you see the heart of Paul here you see the heart of a father the heart of a loving father and you know when you read 1st Corinthians it looks like why is he so angry but it's just the love of God that he he is saying here this sentence itself is so touching look at the church when you picture it the church and Corinth are they are a small group of people just trying to live a holy life they are finding it difficult Paul is correcting them some of them are taking it some of them are upset some of them are sad so Paul is saying I didn't want to come to you because if I see you you will be more sorrowful and I also will be more sorrowful so that's why I will write a letter to you but Paul is saying that there is a responsibility that I have we called as an apostle he has this responsibility with the believers so he did not boss over them and he did not dominate their faith but he was only doing what he was doing out of love but he was correcting them sternly but he did it out of love he did not want them to lose faith in God he did not want them to just walk away from the things of God and we see that apostle Paul had that heart it's very sad when you think of this Paul would be sorrowful and even Paul would be sorrowful maybe he felt that first visit that he came maybe he saw that they were sad or they were upset and that he got upset or sad for this but his main aim was to build the believers up to get them to do the right things and it is by their own individual faith that each corrupted believer stood for Christ and lived their life and verse 24 is wonderful not that we have dominion over your faith but we are fellow workers for joy for my faith you stand so Paul is saying I may be an apostle I may be the one who came and started the church but I am not overpowering you I am not having dominion you have to listen to me he says he talks about the right of an apostle and he is saying this is what I am but he is saying this not to dominate over them but to just tell them we are fellow workers in Christ together we can see the joy of the Lord because it is by faith itself that we can stand he brings this first chapter to a close alright let's take a break and we will begin with chapter 2 10 minutes break thank you


Live from the San Jose Convention Center, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Hadoop Summit 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Hortonworks. And by EMC, Pivotal, IBM, Pentaho, Teradata, Syncsort. And by Atunituandisco, now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Silicon Valley in San Jose for Hadoop Summit 2015. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles Flagship Program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Ames. I'm joined by guest Peter Goldmacher, who's the VP of Strategy and Market Development, Aerospike, formerly theCUBE on the panel as an analyst at the Big Data NYC, which was a smashing success. You had great commentary. That was the most engaging panel. Lights were a little dim, but the content was smashing. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks John, great to be here. Big Data, you've been there, you've seen the different perspectives of this as an analyst. Now you work at Aerospike as a strategy. What's the chessboard look like? I mean, strategy is about the chessboard. Three dimensional chess, you're looking at it, you got this, that, going on. What's going on in this industry of Big Data? Obviously Hadoop is open source based. Open sources has been validated and continues to be legitimized every day.  Big vendors are playing in here. Apache, super successful. What's going on in open source and in the Big Data? Yeah, it's a great description. It's not just a chessboard, it's a 3D chessboard. So when you look at a lot of the technologies that exist in the market, a lot of them are lower cost replacement alternatives for what has historically been proprietary software dominated by a lot of large vendors with enormous pricing power. So a lot of what you're seeing in the open source community is a reaction to abuse at the hands of the established order for the last 20 years. So a lot of Hadoop opportunities and NoSQL opportunities come about because customers say, hey, there's a better, cheaper way to do things. I've been restricted to what the proprietary guys sell me, now I have new opportunities. But the incremental layer, and what I find so exciting is these technologies are actually enabling new, new things. So if I think about compute, we've got a new way to do old things better. But the technology, both software and hardware has come so far that they're now new, new things you can do. And a big- That are disruptive to the guys with the pricing power and market power that could have wielded that power even 10 years ago. They're disruptive to everything. Now that they're becoming powerless in a way because open source is so powerful that they have to join. So open source is, open source is a separate topic. I think about just the technology. Let's not worry about who's writing the code or who's making a commercial available. Let's just talk about the technology that exists today and the things you can do with it. That's an amazing story. Open source is a whole nother wrinkle that- Let's go down and say, let's talk about the new, new things. So expand on this new, new things. You're talking about like internet of things. You're talking about new and analytics. So I'll use concrete terms. When you look at the marketing, go-to-market strategy for companies like MongoDB and data stacks and couch, their primary message is, hey, we're an oracle alternative. There are things that you built an oracle or any relational database. And the reason you made that choice was because you had an oracle site license and it was the best technology available at the time. But now there's new technology. Technologies move forward. The price points are very attractive. They're often free. And you actually have an opportunity to build, use technology to build applications and that underlying technology is more appropriate for that application. So in Mongo's world, they do a lot of content management apps. They do a lot of product catalogs, a lot of web-based apps. And this is better technology for these use cases. Oracle is typically overkill for things like this. And data stacks and couch have much of the same opportunity. So their primary go-to-market is, we are an oracle alternative. One of the things I like most about being at Aerospike, which is, has raised a fraction of the funding that Mongo has and is in a smaller, but I think faster-growing market is, we can help you do old things better and I can give you some concrete examples. But if you look at the preponderance of our use cases, these are in brand new categories. These are in categories like ad tech. Ad tech did not exist 10 years ago. Ad tech exists because now you can take advantage of enormous gains in software and hardware and have a make immediate decisions on a mix of historical data that you can capture in Hadoop and immediate data that comes into the app from whatever you're doing on your cell phone.  We know who John is because we built a profile of John in Hadoop and we know John is a 20-something guy and he's got a wife and he's got two kids and he lives in this area so we've got a profile of who John is. But if he's going to the Nike website and the Adidas website and the Puma website right now, if we serve him a banner ad for a big five sporting goods or a Models or a Dix or whatever this, the probability that he clicks on that link is high and I can sell that banner ad for a much better price. Re-targeting. Re-targeting, but it's re-targeting with much better visibility than you've ever been able to have. So you're basically identifying intent in real time. So our customers are and the way our customers are able to identify intent is because they've been able to collect enough data and make an immediate decision based on all that data. So that's not an old thing. That's a brand new thing. It's funny, the curse of our success in ad tech is it's still such a new industry. We have these customers with amazing workloads. We have customers doing two million transactions a second on 150 terabytes of data. And if I gave you their name, you would probably never have heard of them. So we've got these industrial case use cases that don't have the brand recognition of some of our later clients that saw the use case and then said, okay, we get it. So in that case, you guys are providing such high performance that you're giving them an edge in arbitrage of the new capabilities that impact revenue. It's kind of like a financial trader who wants to have that second edge advantage over the other guy. I mean, Walmart, for example, I know, looks at this stuff heavily, like literally the performance of like in seconds change millions of dollars in revenue. If you think of the business as a commodity, the way you get an advantage in a commodity is speed. So we offer our customers speed and speed at scale so that the bigger your opportunity gets, the bigger your data set gets, you don't have to, it doesn't slow down your opportunity to take advantage of it. That's a great point. I'm going to have to tweet that. Commodity speed is, so let's talk about speed. Let's talk about open source for a second. Let's get down to that. What's going on open source? What's your thoughts on open source? Yeah, so my thoughts on open source trace back to my time as a research analyst on Wall Street. And what I find so interesting about open source is it's not clear to me that for anyone other than Red Hat, it's a commercially viable model for other than a very small subset of the companies that are currently open source. I think the genesis of open source comes from the reality and the reaction to abuse at the hands of the proprietary guys, right? Oracle has had so much pricing power in its install base for so long, when you have someone come along and say, hey look, this stuff is free as long as you, it's free and it's community built and you can have it for free, the pendulum swinging the exact opposite way of pricing power from the vendor is no pricing power from the vendor. So one of the nice things about open source is you get pretty dramatic adoption because if it's free, it's someone certainly willing to try it because you don't have the overhead associated with a big price tag. What do you think about the different approaches of Hadoop? Obviously there's a post Hadoop world. You got Hortonworks at Cloudera. Enterprises seem to be attracted to on a large scale, much more of a Hortonworks, but yet they see the Apple deal with Cloudera, rumored to be north of $50 million from licensed deal. So the challenge with open source now is, I don't know how many open source companies have been funded by the venture community. It's got to be well over 150 and the amount of money they've raised is enormous. So what you have is these open source projects that aren't really open source in the sense that the community is contributing because the majority of open source companies have a commercial entity behind it that write 99.99% of the code. And that's true from everyone from Mongo, certainly Aerospike, that's the dynamic we find ourselves in. So the challenge is, how do you make these commercially viable entities? Look across the open source landscape. I don't think anybody makes money. The only one we can really talk about is Hortonworks because they're public and they have to follow their financials. They don't make money, they're not going to make money. It's going to take a long time. So as long as... How do they make money? I mean, the railroad analogy, Herb used electricity was the word that Rob Bearden used. Well, I think... That's commodity one and it's utility. It's a monopoly. I think the way they make money I think the way they make money is if you become the standard and you become bigger than everyone else and you become the vendor everyone goes to then everyone else just kind of falls off the back of the bus. So what Hortonworks and Carrera are doing is they're saying, we want to be the one. So they collect enormous sums of money either from public markets or private markets and they build out these massive distribution markets on a complete field of dreams. Thought process that says if I build it, they will come. If I can establish myself as the leader, however I choose to monetize I'll be successful because I've got heft in the market. So what you're seeing is these guys if you look at their financials their spend on sales and marketing relative to their spend on R&D is massively skewed towards marketing and not towards product. And we'll see what happens, right? I mean, there's only a few field of dreams scenarios. I mean the .com bubble was built on field of dreams, right? That's a big deal. How did that work out? It didn't work out very well. Yeah, but I mean that's a all-in go big or go home kind of way. I mean. It is. And simple math would tell you most of these vendors are going to go home. Okay, so of Hortonworks and Clouder which one do you like better for the I'm going all in and I'm not going to go home? Well. Or can they both be the guys? They have pretty different strategies. I think they're both committed to keeping the open source core vibrant and Hortonworks model is primarily a support model and Clouder's model is proprietary software that you sell software on top of that open source core so they're augmenting the core. I don't know. I don't know. They're both interesting enough and it's tomato tomato, right? Some people are happy to pay for support and innovate themselves or layer in technology they choose. Others want a bigger part of the solution and they'll buy it all from Cloudera. What we find at Aerospike is there is a very high correlation in our customer base between someone who's using Hadoop and we're agnostic whether or not they pay for it or they're using open source and they're likelihood that they use Aerospike. Almost all of our customers are actually Hadoop users so we care a lot about the Hadoop ecosystem remaining vibrant and the situation is what you can do in Hadoop is you can, the value proper Hadoop is fantastic. I have a very low cost way to take in a ton of data and find the value in that data but once you find the value in that data what do you do with it? We give every Hadoop user the opportunity to execute on that data immediately so you're not constantly building profiles and then taking three days, six months to get the value from that profile. We're saying give me a profile for John. Give me a weighted. You're instant pipelining the data to the transactional. Well our customers are writing applications that take in Hadoop data.  Well we're just a database. So I'm going to ask you about Spark, okay? Brian, the founder of Aerospike, when I first started talking about this in-memory thing I was like, man that is badass. Almost too early, right? It's like classic innovator, right? Way too early but now it's mainstream. Spark's on the, people are buzzing about Spark but that enables, again, Spark to me highlights the Aerospike Viper, am I right to kind of connect those two in concept or are they different? Definitely connected in concept. So in-memory is another kind of big word now that's very trendy but there are different flavors in-memory so let's be specific. So what Spark does is basically because it runs in-memory you can put more compute behind it. You can do what you normally do in Hadoop faster. So if you want to run a batch, let's say in a traditional Hadoop environment it takes 10 hours in Spark, let's say it takes two hours. Which is great because it means you can build your profiles faster. So you've got actionable data that you can build that profile faster. But when you talk about in-memory you've got to be specific or you're talking about RAM or you're talking about SSDs because there's an enormous price performance difference. So when you- RAM is what everyone, that's the killer. Well RAM is the killer but you pay through the nose, right? So when you talk about SAP's HANA and you talk about Exadata and you talk about a lot of these guys that say they run in-memory what they're saying is we run in RAM so we take our code that's always existed we put it in RAM and we can run that code 20 to 30% faster. It's a distinction between RAM and persistent memory which is SSD in our flash. Yes, so what they say is put more hardware power behind your traditional software code and we'll make it run faster. What we do is we say no we've written a completely different kind of database to run explicitly in SSD. So you're not doing all the normal database operations in aerospace you're running right on SSD so we don't talk about 20 to 30% performance improvement we talk about 100 to 150 times performance improvement. I got to ask you a personal question about Aerospike. I mean I have a personal connection with Brian I love that team over there because I like them because they're great engineers and they got a great value proposition but they're also underfunded relative to the big hyped up markets out there so kind of root and form to kind of kick ass. You have a lot of choices to go why Aerospike? I mean what made you join the company from a TAM perspective? What dots did you connect besides being enamored with the technology? What was the next level? So in my experience as a research analyst on Wall Street I met with I don't know how many hundreds of companies and you can generally divide a company into one of two categories. Shitty product, great marketing or great product, shitty marketing. And Aerospike for me was if you look at their install base and their customers and the things they can do it is a great product. And the opportunity to join John Dillon who's the ex CEO of Hyperion of Arbor of Salesforce.com with Engine Yard. They were just at Engine Yard. And work with John who is a go to market guy and have that experience and take what we know to be a great product and bring it to market. You just you can't say no and to compound that decision even more my commute is 51 miles each way every day and I'm in the office every day. So it's incredibly I mean, you're not mailing it in.  That's a hundred. I'm not a math guy, but that's 102 miles. So the opportunity Check those suspension force. The IRS will be like, okay, let's set those mileage calculations. They better get you a car. So, you know what? I agree. Or a driver or a helicopter.  So the opportunity, so the way I look at the opportunity is look we're not an Oracle alternative. We don't go to market as an Oracle alternative. We go to market for very forward looking developers that are thinking, look, I've got an opportunity if I can have unbelievable performance in my database what are the kinds of applications I can build? So we are in a way the commercial version of the technology that Google and LinkedIn and Facebook use to build these businesses. These are data businesses. These are the guys that said I have an idea but I can't execute on the idea unless I have unbelievable technology and they built that technology that's all proprietary. So you've got a great engine. You've got to get this Ferrari built out, shine it up, take it around town, top down kind of thing. So you got to kind of, you know, the engine's solid. Now you got to kind of put the bells and whistles around it. So the go to market for you guys is just run like the wind on the go to market sales and then more top level marketing. So one of the things, one of the decisions that was made when John and I made together and I think it's a decision he let me make, I think he was already there is. Look, if I have a dollar to invest, do I want to invest in a great product or do I want to invest it in telling people about a mediocre product? So one of the things I did when I got there was I took the marketing, so let me take a half step back. John Dylan says, hey, come join me at Aerospike. You can be my strategy guy. You'll work for me. You don't have to, you won't run anything. You'll be an individual contributor, which for me was love it. That's exactly what I want to do. And then about four weeks after he says, you know what? Why don't I put marketing under you? And I said, well, I don't really want to do that. And John said, I really wasn't asking. So when he put me in charge of marketing, I said, boy, we spend a lot of time trying to build awareness in a market that's not really our market. And we've raised a 10th of the funding that Mongo has raised. We've got the smallest megaphone in the echo chamber. Let's get out of that business. Let's fall back on our strengths which is product. The budget I had allocated, I want to give back to my product guys because there is no better marketing dollar than a happy customer that tells his friends, boy, this Aerospike stuff works. Yeah, the referral is the key. Because customers are talking to each other right now. Absolutely. So what we've done is we've, we have completely regeared our marketing to go after developers and development teams because our thought process is if we can give these guys a great experience, then they become our advocates. So we have a, what we think of as a virtue of cycle. And check this will value the product too because they like the Ferrari. It's a Ferrari model.  You got to drive it around town. You got to have the red one out there, top down, doors swinging out. You know what I'm saying? That's kind of where you have the high end product. Well, we look at it, we look at it as an awareness to advocacy cycle where we drive awareness and then we eventually make our customers our advocates. And that's our best, that's our best marketing. Okay, we got a break. We're getting the hook here from Leonard. So I got to ask you one final question. Yeah. What's next for you guys? What's next for this ecosystem? Oh, I think for us, you're going to probably start hearing about some pretty industrial strength use cases and things where you say little company, enormous customer, what are these guys up to? We've got a couple customers in the pipeline we haven't publicly announced yet that when we do people will say, wait a minute, I should probably start paying attention. And in the ecosystem, I would say everybody is investing aggressively and go to market and they're spending a ton of money on this stuff and the burn rates for all these companies are extremely high. And as long as the venture community is active and vibrant, then I don't think much changes. If that's dynamic changes and capital gets a little bit harder to come by, I think we're going to see a couple of pets.coms and webvans in the open source private company space. Great, we've got some great chats, comments on the crowd chat. Appreciate the comments. Certainly getting it out there in the trenches is the way to go. We love that strategy. It's theCUBE, of course.  We have Aerospike on theCUBE here at Hadoop Summit 2015. Move right back after this short break.


This is stock number 9J333A. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used Jeep and Jeep Compass headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2019 Jeep Compass Latitude 4x4. This vehicle has a 2.4 liter 4-cylinder motor pumps out 180 horsepower. It has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. The vehicle has been gone through mechanically 100% as 100% ready to go. Bright white is the color. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device turn them on right now because it is definitely your best way to check out the vehicle quality and condition wise before seeing in person. If you want to check out all the photos on this Jeep in the upper right hand part of your screen is a link right to our website. Click that. Check us out there. 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As we hop inside the vehicle here I'm going to turn the air down. There we go. 5,161 miles on this vehicle. You get the digital speedometer, outside temp, range to empty. You can do miles per gallon. All that good stuff in the corners there. Instrument clusters very nice and clean. This vehicle has never been smoked in. Comes with the heated leather-wrapped steering wheel, cruise controls on the right, Bluetooth and information center controls on the left and audio controls on the back of the steering wheel. This one comes with the seven inch. You connect 4C radio, AMFM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on this radio. You also have Android auto and Apple CarPlay capabilities. So you have a navigation system on your cell phone, such as Waze or Google Maps. You can project that right to the screen and you can use it through the screen. So you can have navigation on there through your cell phone onto the screen using Android auto or Google or Apple CarPlay. 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You do get map lights up there and we'll take a quick look at the back seats. And then we'll check out under the hood. I did want to show you the key fob here. It has the remote start on there and that's the enter and go key fob. Oh, also you get the electronic parking brake stability control and that's your start-stop capabilities. You can turn those off if you did not like them. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips, no tears back here. It does have the latch child safety system for all the child car seat needs. You got that honeycomb design in the cloth and all-weather floor mats as well. You do get a USB and a 115 volt, 150 watt plug-in back here. And finally you do get the child safety locks on the back doors and the bottoms of the doors all look really good as well. Take a quick look under the hood. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you will been able to tell just how clean this vehicle is all the way around inside and out. Under the hood we have the 2.4 liter multi-air motor and jambay is very clean, runs very smooth. This Jeep has been fully inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off and this one's 100% ready to go. I would highly recommend it from a quality and condition standpoint. I don't think you're going to find a cleaner one with this kind of mileage on it. And to see more pictures of this Jeep or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, halftones, recoder tons, one-tons. You name it we got to go to our website www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at www.summitauto.com. 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