Matthew 12, what we're going to be looking at this morning is actually a very, very serious portion of Scripture. It is dealing with a sin that many of you have heard about. It is called the unforgivable or the unpardonable sin. It is referring to what has been called the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. And so as we go through our study here in the Gospel of Matthew, we've arrived at a portion of Scripture in chapter 12 where the Lord Jesus Christ begins to speak concerning this particular sin. So let's begin at verse 22 here in Matthew chapter 12, and I'll read up to verse 32. We're looking at the unpardonable sin, beginning at verse 22. Then one was brought to him who was demon-possessed, blind and mute, and he healed him so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw. And all the multitudes were amazed and said, could this be the son of David? But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, this fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of demons. But Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or else, how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house. He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters abroad. Therefore, I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come. Well, let me begin by saying something that's quite obvious is Valentine's Day. And Valentine's Day has come to be associated with love, especially romantic love. Now, a lot of us have more than likely experienced Valentine's Day for years. I mean, when you're in elementary school, they would have times when you'd actually bring Valentine's for the kids and all, and they were the Be My Valentine kind of thing. And you would give Valentine cards out. But a lot of us really don't know the, you know, the basic history of the day and why it's being observed even to this day. And I wanted to kind of share with you a little bit about that as a contrast. And so even as we're looking today at this passage about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, what we're looking at is a rejection of love. And Valentine's Day in the United States to this day, and I actually applaud the fact that we want to remember what, remember things about love, even though I believe very strongly that what Valentine's Day has become for many today is not necessarily a celebration of love so much as a celebration of lust, but that's something different. But in the origin, you may or may not know how it has traditionally evolved and how it came about. I was doing a little bit of a search on this and looking at it just to get some basic things and discover that Valentine's Day obviously is clouded by legend and myth, but it has ingredients that many agree upon. There was a Roman emperor named Claudius II, and he ruled from 268 to 270 AD, and he decided that single men made better soldiers than those who had wives and families. And because of this, he outlawed marriage for young men. So during that time, it was not uncommon for men to have more than one wife, and it would seem that some had become attracted to the Christian faith, but they wanted to continue practicing polygamy. The church taught that marriage was sacred and was to be experienced between one man and one woman for one lifetime and that the marriage arrangement was sacred. So that presented a problem to the church of what to do about the emperor's decree and the church's teaching concerning marriage. Well, there was a priest at that time by the name of Valentineus, and he realized the injustice of the decree, so he defied Claudius, and he secretly continued to perform marriages for young men and women. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death, and he was killed around 270 AD. His death provided the foundation for what eventually became a celebration of the value of romantic love. Valentine's Day was first associated with romantic love around 1,000 AD, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. In 18th century England, it evolved into an occasion in which lovers expressed their love for one another by giving flowers, offering candy, and sending greeting cards which were known as Valentine's. So Valentine's Day still lifts up the idea of love, but it does emphasize the romantic aspect of it. And again, love should be celebrated. It's something we all need. It's something we should learn to give. In this passage, though, we have an opportunity of seeing love and the depth of love that God has for us, but we also see within this passage that love should be celebrated, but there are consequences when love is rejected. And what we're looking at is what has been called the unpardonable sin, the unforgivable sin. It is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. And we will see that as we get to verses 31 and 32. So allow me to lay a foundation, and then we're going to move to the conclusion and actually conclude by looking at this sin called the unpardonable sin. We're going to begin by saying some very basic things.  We need to remember that the Bible teaches that man, humankind, by nature, is sinful and that we sin because it is natural for us to do so. We sin because we are sinners. We don't become sinners when we sin. No, we just do what is natural for us to do. And by nature, we are sinners. There are various words that are translated by the single English word sin. The common word that is used is a word that means to miss the mark. And when it speaks concerning, you all have sinned. It's simply a saying that mankind has missed the mark. It's like if I were an archer and I was aiming at a target and I missed the bull's eye. That's what we all do. Not a single one of us, the Bible teaches very clearly, hits the bull's eye every day, every moment of the day, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And we do that because it's our nature to do that. We miss the mark of perfection. And we're guilty. We're guilty of sin. We're guilty of sin in thought, in word, and in action. In Ecclesiastes chapter seven, verse 20, it says there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin. So the Bible condemns all under sin. Romans five, verse 12 says, as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death came to all men because all sinned. What that means is we have the Adamic nature. Adam is called theologically the federal head of mankind. And so because he had children with Eve, his sin nature, which has fallen, has been given to us. So every one of us has been born with a sin nature. Again, this is Bible 101. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The Bible also teaches that with sin comes the repercussion, comes death. Ezekiel 18, verse 20 says, the soul that sins, it shall die. And with death comes judgment. It is appointed and amended. I once and after this, the judgment, the Bible teaches nothing related to reincarnation other than there is no such thing. The Bible says that you live one time and it's that one life that you have that matters. You're not going to get a second, third or fourth chance.   You die in the grace of God and you enter into eternity in God's grace. But there's no second chances. There's no reincarnation. There's no opportunity to work off bad karma. None of that exists in scripture. And with death will come judgment.  So even the things that we think we're hiding, God sees very clearly. And so on the one hand, you have man clearly portrayed as sinful and ultimately dying and entering into judgment. But on the other hand, throughout the Bible, God is revealed by nature as being forgiving.  In Psalm 103 verse three, the psalmist said, God forgives all your iniquities. In first John 119, John said, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So God forgives. God by nature forgives and God forgives all sins. So God is open to forgive no matter how terrible the sin is.  But as terrible as some sins are, there is no sin that is worse than the killing of God's son. And yet Jesus prayed for those who put him to death in Luke 23 verse 34. He records that he prayed, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. So the Bible teaches God is forgiving and is able to forgive no matter how terrible the sin is. He also forgives no matter how long a person is sinned.  But I remember giving an invitation in this church where a man who was around 80 years old came up and gave his heart to Christ no matter how long you sin, even a lifetime of sin, God is willing and able to forgive. There was a man on the cross next to Jesus a thief. And at the very last moment of his life, he asked Christ for forgiveness. And Jesus said today you shall be with me in paradise. And God will forgive no matter what kind of sin we commit. God is able and willing to forgive. In verse 31 it said, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men. God will forgive any sin, no matter what kind of sin it is. I had a friend of mine, his name was Rick. His name is Rick. And I had been saved for a very short time. I was 23 years old. And there was a knock on the door. I was living at my parents' home. I had just gotten out of the military. And I was living at my parents' house and I'd started a Bible study. And I answered the door. And there standing in front of me is a friend of mine I went to high school with. Actually, I'd known him since we were in elementary school. His name was Rick. And as I looked at him, he was a little inebriated. And he said, I didn't know if you were going to be here or not. I just got out. He was in the military also. I just got out. And I thought I'd come in and check you out. See how you're doing. So I welcomed him into my parents' home. My parents were not there at the time. And we sat at the kitchen table and began to kind of speak and all. And I'd known him, like I said, since we were kids. And now we're in our early twenties.  And he says to me, why don't you walk with me? I want to go to the liquor store. And a five minute walk from my house, just at the corner, was a store that he wanted me to go with him too. And I began to think and I thought, well, you know, Rick, you're drunk, man. I mean, you've been drinking and I've been saved in just a couple of years. And my testimony, I want people in this neighborhood, because they knew me. My neighbors knew me and they knew what kind of person I was. And I don't want to soil my reputation.  And it's and I'm thinking within myself and it all just is going so quickly. And the Spirit of the Lord speaks to my heart and says, you need to go with them. And I remember saying, but I don't want to be identified with this. And he said, I'm identified with you. And I said, okay, I'll go. True story. I'm identified with you. Go. So I went with him. And yes, he went into the store and he bought himself a bottle of wine, but he was one of these real sneaky guys.  He likes to drink his soda that way and all. But he finished the bottle before we even got to my house. I mean, he just downed it. It was gone. And then he threw the bottle in the field. There was a field right across the street from where I lived at that time. Then he comes to my house and he sits down and he's across from me at the table and we're continuing to talk. And I finally begin to share a little more about the gospel. And I say to him, Rick, you need the Lord. You need Jesus, man. You need Jesus. And he says, why would I need Jesus?  You need Jesus because you're lost. I gave my heart to Christ and I told him how I had gotten saved more clearly, gave more testimony. He and I knew each other. Like I said, I mean, we got loaded together. We got drunk together, got in trouble together. I mean, we were friends for a long time and we were real mischief makers there where we lived and my friends, all of us were. And that was just the way it was. And Rick was part of the gang. Some of you guys will understand when I say this. Rick was one of the guys, though, that was kind of like the fringe guy. He was the guy that was the low man on the totem pole.  He was the one where we would yell dog pile and we'd jump on Rick and we'd lovingly punch him. That was the guy. You know, he couldn't take care of himself.  You know, young kids can be that way and that's how we were. And that's a lot of the boys where we just like to fight and mess with each other. And Rick was the guy who always got piled on. Always. And so as we're there talking and I'm sharing with them about the Lord, he says to me, does God forgive every sin? And I said, yes. Yes, Rick. He forgives every sin. So he says, even the sin of murder? And I said, well, of course, I said, Jesus said that even if I were to hate somebody in my heart without a just cause, I've he said, no, I'm not talking about theory. I'm talking about fact. I'm saying, does God forgive murder? And I looked at him and I sobered up. I'm the one who sobered up for a moment. And I said, what do you mean, Rick? He says, Dave, I killed a man. And as I'm looking at him, I'm thinking, no, no, you're the guy we used to pile on. You're the guy who didn't have that in you. You didn't have that in you. I said, you killed a man. Turns out he was in the military stationed in Korea. He was a courier. He would carry documents that were secret. They assigned him a 45 that he strapped on his hip. And he carried the docks in his briefcase. He was on a platform in a train station. And as he was there holding on to these documents, somebody came and took the police, ripped it off, and started running down the platform. Rick pulled out his 45 and leveled and said, halt. And the guy wouldn't stop. He said, I said, halt. He wouldn't stop.  I want to ask you again, does God forgive every sin? And as I looked at him, you never know what somebody's done. You never know what they've gone through.  You don't know. None of us do. God does. God knows your heart. God knows what you've done. God knows everything. I didn't know that. If you'd have asked me a thousand times, is this a man who could kill somebody a thousand times? I just said, no, of course not. This is Rick. He said, I killed a man. Will God forgive me? And I said, Rick, God will forgive every sin. If we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Yes, God will forgive your sin. In 1st John chapter 1 verse 7, if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son cleanses us from all sin. I said, Rick, you need to get right with God, man. You need your conscience to be cleansed by the blood of Christ. You need to release this pain to Jesus. And though he was a bit inebriated as we're speaking, he bowed his head there at my parents' table and I let him in a prayer to commit his heart to Christ and Rick began to come every week to the Bible studies that I would teach and he attended until he moved up north and he got his life together with Jesus Christ because God forgives every sin, every sin. Amen. Amen. Man, by nature, is sinful. God, by nature, is loving and compassionate and God will forgive your sin. He is open to doing it no matter how terrible it is, no matter how long a person has sinned, no matter what kind of sin we commit. The Bible teaches us very clearly that God will do so. How did he do that? Well, he has made provision for people to be forgiven. He did that through his Son. God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. The most famous New Testament scripture, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved. When Jesus was speaking in John chapter 5 verse 24, he said, most assuredly I say unto you, he who hears my word and believes in him who sent me has everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation but is passed from death unto life.  It's more than the Valentine's expression that we on a yearly basis remind ourselves that we ought to show affection to one another and it's deeper than romantic love it's that self sacrificing love of God that he gave to us even though he knew many would reject him yet he loved and poured out his love completely for us through his Son Jesus Christ. God loves us. God forgives and God forgives every sin with the exception of one and that is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and that's what we'll be looking at as we continue through this passage. So as we begin by looking at verse 22 let's look at that together and we'll come to verses 31 and 32 and summarizing conclude but let's begin by looking at verse 22 where it says one was brought to him who was demon possessed blind and mute and he healed him so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw and all the multitudes were amazed and said could this be the son of David but when the Pharisees heard heard it they said this fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub the ruler of the demons and so by now Jesus's ministry has spread far and wide and it is well known as a result people with needs are being brought to him on a fairly regular basis we've been seeing this through Matthew's gospel we saw in Matthew chapter 8 verse 16 when evening had come they brought to him many who were demon possessed he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick we saw it in chapter 9 verse 2 behold they brought to him a paralytic lying on a bed we saw it in Matthew 9 32 while they were going out a man who was demon possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus so people are now bringing people to Jesus Christ that's what we see in the New Testament and that's what we see even to this day believers still bring people to Jesus Christ and that's what they're doing they're bringing him bringing people with their needs to the Lord in this particular case they bring a demon possessed man now Matthew tells us he has basically what we would say is three afflictions he's demon possessed he's blind and he's mute and Jesus instantly delivers instantly healed this man Jesus exercises authority and what we're dealing with by the way is a question of authority and so Jesus is now exercising his authority over the demonized individual over the demons that are within him now he's already been demonstrating his authority and the demons already have voice that they know who he is when he was in Capernaum it's recorded in mark 1 23 through 25 that there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit and he cried out saying let us alone what have we to do with you Jesus of Nazareth did you come to destroy us I know who you are the holy one of God but Jesus rebuked him saying be quiet come out of him in Matthew 8 we saw it in verses 28 and 29 when he had come to the other side to the to the country of the Gurgazines there met him two demon possessed men coming out of the tombs exceedingly fierce so that no one could pass that way suddenly they cried out saying what have we to do with you Jesus son of God have you come here to torment us before the time they knew who he was these demons knew who Jesus Christ was when the people were denying him the the demons were acknowledging him when the Pharisees were were saying oh no he's of this sort the demons already were recognized that you are the son of God and they also recognized that he was going to bring them to judgment have you come to torment us before the time they knew who he was how did they know well Jesus is the creator of all things Jesus created the angelic hosts and the demons were part of the angelic hosts but what happened is they followed Lucifer they followed Satan when satan rebelled and he took with him a third of the stars of heaven so there was a great multitude of angels who fell and they're the ones that we refer to to this day as demons and so Jesus is there and he's ministering but they're aware of what's going on and they're beginning to ask questions concerning him and the things that he's doing and they know that Jesus Christ has authority and they know that he's going to exercise that and as that is taking place they begin to question him related to that well it says to us in verse 22 that he healed him so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw now that wasn't an unusual work for him to perform he'd been doing this already but this time the Pharisees are prepared to resist him so when it says in verse 23 all the multitudes were amazed and said could this be the son of David when this happened they began to ask a question now it says in verse 23 they were amazed the word amazed simply means to be astounded it is a word that speaks of being beside oneself with amazement and wonder they see this take place and they're amazed by it that Jesus has that kind of power and authority so they asked the question can this be the son of David now the reason they said is he the son of David is because David had been promised that Messiah King David in the Old Testament was promised that Messiah would come through his line in Psalm 89 verses 3 and 4 it reads I have made a covenant with my chosen I have sworn into David my servant your seed will I establish forever build up your throne to all generations the same thing is said in 2 Samuel chapter 7 verses 12 following it was a promise to King David Messiah would be from his lineage and so they're asking the question can this be Messiah is what they're saying but verse 24 says a Pharisees heard it and so they respond they said this fellow doesn't cast out demons except by Beelzebub the ruler of the demons Beelzebub is another name for Satan Beelzebub speaks of the prince of demons and it really literally is Lord of flies Lord of decay Lord of death is what Beelzebub is and so they're saying that that what Jesus is doing is happening but it's that Jesus is really being empowered by by Satan himself what's interesting is they encourage the doubt that the people have because the question is being asked could this be the son of David but it says when the Pharisees heard it they said this fellow doesn't cast out demons except by Beelzebub the ruler of the demons so what they're doing is they are they are capitalizing on a question they're actually attempting to encourage doubt the doubt that the people have because they're not saying this is the son of David they're saying could this be encouraging honest investigation and evaluation is a good thing Jesus will pass that test somebody says to me I don't know about God I don't know about Jesus you know I'll say read the gospel of John see what John testifies concerning Christ and then let's talk again you have questions there's nothing wrong with questions God is bigger than any questions you have so ask of God you think that you can stump him I don't think so do you think he'd lose at Jeopardy I don't think so he knows everything so go ahead and ask him don't don't feel that it's wrong for you to say but I have questions of the Lord I want to ask so that they may be answered God has the ability and an honest question should be entertained as a pastor I've had questions asked me that I honestly I I I don't know I I can't answer that but that doesn't mean there isn't an answer it simply means that I'm just not well versed enough to be able to do that I don't know everything but I do know certain things and the things that I do know I hold fast to and the things I'm not sure about I continue to study and in this side of heaven I may not know but when I'm there before the Lord then then I shall know even as I am known there will be no questions in heaven there are people who say you know when I get to heaven I'm going to ask Jesus some questions no you're not no you're not no all of your questions will be answered in that moment there are no questions in heaven only answers and so when you're there you're not going to say I just want to know why you didn't let me marry that girl you're not going to do that you know and how come I you'll never do that it's not going to happen I've had people say to me oh I'm going to you know I want to see the apostle Paul when I get to heaven I want to see the apostle Paul and I always encourage him to do that I'll say you know what that'd be great man spend time with Paul that gives me more time with Jesus because when you get to heaven and some people think he is a really a heaven well we're not studying heaven today but Jesus spoke about it and he made a promise and he said I go and prepare a place for you and one day he's going to return and take me to be with him and so that's my heavenly hope and indeed one of these days I'll see him face to face there's no doubt about that that's the root of my Christian faith that Jesus Christ has prepared that place for me through faith in him but the bottom line is is that questions are okay there's nothing wrong with having them and we Christians don't try to brutalize people and to believe in everything we say we allow the word of God to speak in the way that it does and there are answers and so encouraging honest investigation and evaluation is a good thing because the Lord will always pass that test but provoking people to reject him on the basis of bias and uninformed prejudice is not right and that's what a lot of people do a lot of people will just use their bias you see they couldn't tolerate the thought that Jesus might actually be their Messiah that's why they say this fellow when they say this fellow that's obvious contempt they're trying to undermine Jesus his credibility as well as his character and they were blind they were filled with theological pride and they're using sarcasm to bully and they're saying in essence well you know there are some who say similar things to this day I mean even in Bible studies like this there'll be some who will say perhaps they'll hear it on the radio or perhaps they'll converse after a service and they'll say that's his opinion you know that's what he thinks others who believe differently and all of that and I understand that kind of line of reasoning and all bottom line is that sometimes they do that because they want to convince the person that they're speaking to that their own opinion is greater than God's word years ago we had a lady in our fellowship many years ago now who came and visited on a Wednesday night Bible study this is when we were in Ontario and we're meeting in a location in Maple Street in Ontario and I was teaching through First Corinthians and I got to a certain portion of scripture that speaks concerning a variety of sins and as you know those of you who've been part of this church we do a verse by verse approach and we go through what the scripture says and so I was there in a particular portion of the Bible that spoke concerning a lot of different kinds of sins that included the sin of homosexuality and I'll always try to give you know a clear meaning and what that means and all and that's what I did that night I spoke concerning it I spoke how that many people in the Corinthian church have practiced a variety of sins but Paul goes on to say and such were some of you but you've been washed and cleansed justified and I shared about how we have our testimonies and we do have different sins but God can forgive us of all the sins and that's what it says and it's not like I was taking one sin and making it greater than the other it was a list of sins and these are all things that he's speaking about and so that's what I did and all and so shortly after this young woman approaches me and says can I speak to you you know a week or so later she approaches me and she says I want you to know I was in church on Wednesday when you were teaching at the first Corinthians and I said yes she says I want you to know that I'm a lesbian and when you were sharing that she says my girlfriend and I were present in the Bible study and I listened to what it said and I went home and we were living together she said and so I said to my girlfriend what we're doing is is not right the Bible says it's a sin and says that we shouldn't be deceived into thinking that it's okay because that's what Paul was saying let no one deceive you her friend said that's his opinion because she didn't want to step out of the lesbian relationship and she wasn't convicted but this other young woman was and so as I was speaking to this young woman she said that's what the Bible says she says I want to believe and act on what the Bible says make a long story short she gave her heart to Christ and as she gave her heart to Christ she was in our church for a long time then she moved up north and now she's a Facebook friend so I still have once in a while I'll have connection one former another with this young woman and she'll post pictures or she'll speak about her husband and her children and her life of service to Jesus Christ because God forgives every sin but you you will amen that's worthy of of saying thank you Jesus absolutely and yet you will have some will say oh no nah no and that's what the Pharisees are doing we have given invitations here where somebody has wanted to get up only to have a boyfriend holding them back I've had ushers tell me that that the young lady wants to get up and you'll see her and then the argument ensues nah no no that's what the Pharisees do the Pharisees did that so there's they're not denying that Christ performs these deliverances they're saying he does it through the power of Satan and they're trying to undermine who Jesus Christ is and what he does and they use a bullying technique to do that that the Pharisees are well known for their sarcasm in John 7 47 through 49 it says the Pharisees answered them are you also deceived have any of the rulers of the Pharisees believed in him this crowd that does not know the laws occurs that's how they would think and that's how they spoke so they weren't saying that Jesus didn't do works they were simply crediting those works to Satan they couldn't deny that he performed miracles so they had to find another source of his power and that's what they wanted to do this is an attitude that remains by the way it remains with them to the very end in John 11 47 and 48 it says the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered a council and said what shall we do for this man works many signs if we let him alone like this everyone will believe in him the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation this man works many signs they didn't deny that he was doing signs so they wanted to ascribe the signs of power to Satan now we've seen this before this isn't a new accusation when we were in chapter nine of Matthew in verses 32 through 34 there it says they went out behold and they went out behold they brought to him a man mute and demon possessed and when the demon was cast out the mute spoke and the multitudes marveled saying it was never seen like this in Israel but the Pharisees said he cast out demons by the rule of the demons that is common practice by the way when you are in opposition to somebody or their ideas or teachings if you want to undermine their ideas all you need to do is call question into question their character it's called ad hominem arguments you argue against the man not the ideas and if you could make the man look bad the ideas go out with the man you see this in politics all the time I'm not going to get political on you it's just something we're all familiar with that's what they do instead of arguing the argument the idea we just suddenly will speak concerning the person and in doing so we undermine their credibility but the bible tells us in verse 25 that Jesus knew their thoughts that word thought there means their deliberations or their plans Jesus saw through them he knew what their plan was the psalmist in psalm 21 11 says they intended evil against you they devised a plot which they are not able to perform so they intended evil against the Lord Jesus Christ now it's apparent that they're a distance away but Jesus knows what they're doing and what they're planning mark 323 tells us that he called them to him they didn't approach Christ they were at a distance but Jesus confronts them directly now what's he do well first he reveals the logical absurdity of their statement he's saying to them division undermines effectiveness in verse 25 every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation every city or house divided against itself will not stand if satan casts out satan he is divided against himself how then will his kingdom stand he says that's a logical absurdity if you divide everything you're going to destroy everything division undermines effectiveness when he says every kingdom he's speaking of government is ineffective when it has no common goal when he speaks about every house he's obviously referring to how families can be destroyed when they don't live in unity in verse 26 when he said if satan casts out satan he's divided against himself how then will his kingdom stand unity of purpose is necessary if satan is to continue to oppose God as the leader of the rebellious host that oppose him satan would not have them fight against each other because internal strife ultimately renders his opposition in ineffective any he will not tolerate that there has to be a unity in opposition we all know that we know that when a house doesn't get together when the family is divided there's no unity there's no peace and so unity is always a good thing and we know that if we're going to do something that we plan together and work together we can see good things happen but if we're divided amongst ourselves then we're not going to be able to pursue and to accomplish the things that we'd like to accomplish and so Jesus is simply pointing that out he's saying this is what's going on when he says in verse 27 if I cast out demons by Beelzebub by whom do your sons cast them out when he speaks of your sons it's not their biological sons the rabbis had those whom they were mentoring and they would be called their sons their sons in the faith so by whom do your sons cast them out therefore they shall be your judges you believe in casting demons out and you've even taught your disciples how to do it so the question I'm asking you is by what power are they utilizing to do the works that you're saying that they accomplish you see the fact is you are rejecting me because I'm not one of you and that shows your bias and that is a great sin because what you're doing is you're resisting the Holy Spirit and you're intentionally doing that when he says in verse 28 but if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God surely the kingdom of God has come upon you or else how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man and then he will plunder his house and so Jesus just makes his point he's simply saying I'm anointed by God I cast out demons by the Spirit of God if I do my work by the Spirit he's saying then my miracles obviously originate with God and if I'm doing this by the power of God then obviously I'm Messiah because you see Isaiah 29 18 a verse that speaks of Messiah says in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity out of darkness so he's the one who has opened up the ears and opened up the eyes that's a passage of Messiah and he's pointing out as he said in verse 28 that the kingdom of God has come upon you when he speaks of the kingdom of God we know that when you study your scripture that there's going to be a time when Jesus reigns and rules on planet earth for a thousand years it's called the millennium we know that the millennium will stretch into eternity that Jesus Christ is going to be ruler forever but in a very real sense Jesus Christ is a ruler right now over those who love and those who serve him the kingdom of God is already appearing in a sense with those who already are serving him in verse 29 he asks the question how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds that strong man then he plunders his house this is again showing the authority that Christ has because he's plundering Satan's domain he is setting captives free in 2 Timothy 2 25 and 26 it says those who oppose him those who oppose the Lord's servant he must gently instruct in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth that they will come to their senses escape from the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will Jesus Christ came to set the captives free and then he makes this powerful statement he who is not with me is against me and he who does not gather with me scatters a block there is no neutrality in this war there is no conscientious objectors in this war when I got saved I had been drafted I won't go into a long story other than say I had been drafted I was dodging the draft I had a friend of mine who advised me how to do that at that time when they had the draft they would send you a a letter the government would send you a letter and it said you are hereby ordered to report for active service or active duty on such and so date but I was told if you write them a letter and say you can't make it they'll just write another one to you which is exactly true I know that because I did it so I was supposed to go in August 25th and actually went in it's a longer story than I'm going to give you but they said you know you were arrested for a felony and we need to review your records and we'll send you home so I went home well in September I got a letter you are hereby ordered to report for active duty and I wrote a letter sorry I got to go to court and I became a pen pal with whoever was writing me my my letters I did that for some time then I got saved and after getting saved I eventually volunteered for the draft and went into the military but before that happened I began to question whether or not I might be a CO a conscientious objector because I'm a believer and can I go into combat could I potentially take the life of an enemy combat am I able to do that as a believer and for me was a very very real crisis of faith do I or do I not enter into the military can I can I not be put in a position where I might have to in defense of myself or somebody else use a weapon in such a way I had to come to that conclusion and long story made very short Lord I find in my case has a bit of a humor because I was watching a movie called Sergeant York and Sergeant York who was decorated 82nd member of the 82nd was going through the same thing and he spoke and tried to get some direction spoke to a minister and then went off and prayed and sought the Lord and read the scriptures render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar unto God the things that belong to God he made his determination he went into the military and the rest is American in military history and and as I saw that I came to the same conclusion and that's how I went into the military is making a decision to do that which I should do you see I was not a CEO then and I'm not a CEO now I believe we're in a war right now and I'm not on the sidelines I'm somebody who's an active combatant the way we all are so you cannot choose to not be in the war you can't write letters to God saying you know I'm sorry I'm going to court it doesn't work either you are on his side and this is very very real either you are on the Lord side he says and we'll read it again and I'll say this he who is not with me is against me he's not saying potentially he's not saying could be no he's saying if you are not with me you are against me you see with the Lord there are some very black and white statements that he makes and I realize that today I realize that we'd like to find the loophole in everything so that we don't have to do what it says especially when it's difficult but that's not how Jesus works that's not how God works either he says you are for me or you are against me either you gather with me or you scatter but you're not going to do both at the same time that's where it becomes very very important for us to know which one am I Joshua made it clear in the Old Testament book of Joshua as for me in my house we will serve the Lord and he said to the nation of Israel you choose this day whom you shall serve whether it's God Almighty or the false gods that you were raised to worship but as for me in my house we will serve the Lord there has to be a determination you see you have to make a choice you cannot sit on the sidelines it doesn't happen that way you cannot go before the Lord and say you know you didn't give me enough time to make up my mind because God makes it clear and that's where people have problems listen especially in this age that's not new by the way the spirit of this age is not just simply this age that's the spirit that the enemy has been invigorating forever I mean the Pharisees were saying this man cast out demons by Beelzebub they've already tried to discredit him even before he went to the cross even before people began to understand there's no other way to God except the Christ Jesus he was already in opposition and that spirit of rejection is still here to this day it's just been kind of like streamlined into different ways of thinking oh you know the people of Islam they worship the same God no they don't no they don't in Islam they say that God has no Son but the Bible says Jesus Christ is God's Son they are not the same God God does not contradict himself you have to understand that it's a fact that doesn't mean we hate them no I don't hate I don't hate Muslims of course I don't hate Buddhists either but I love God and I have made up my mind I will stand with him because he said it it isn't something we made up let's face it if we made it up then we'd be kind of like the Buddhists you know follow your own path doesn't really matter all roads end up before God yes that's true in a sense yes all paths lead to God either as your savior or your judge so you have to make up your mind and that's what Jesus is saying that is not a popular message it is not a popular message today because people just don't want to believe it they never have but the enemy is working overtime to cloud the minds of people one he encourages you to be biblically ignorant not to read your Bible not to be in Bible studies not to be a real divider of the word of God he doesn't want you to be that he wants you to be a part-time Christian he wants you to be the kind who says I'll pick it up at church when he reads it to me and when he reads it to me I'll listen and then I'll then I'll say I do or do not believe because after all I've got all freedom to make up my own mind and all of that but in reality a person who thinks that way has not been set free by Jesus Christ yet they haven't totally understood now God is either God's word or it's not either for me or you're against me that's pretty strong that's pretty strong and so Jesus made that statement and he's making it clear the Pharisees are against him because they're saying that he's doing works but by the power of Satan and then he closes the door verse 31 therefore I say to you every sin in blasphemy will be forgiven men but the blasphemy against the spirit will not be forgiven men anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man it will be forgiven him but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit it will not be forgiven him either in this age or in the age to come blasphemy of the Holy Spirit the word blasphemy is the conscious denouncing and rejecting of God blasphemy is willful and defiant irreverence it is openly mocking defaming and speaking evil of God blasphemy is insolently opposing God and yet if someone lives a blasphemous life they can be forgiven perhaps you've used the name of the Lord in vain you've hit your thumb with a hammer you've gotten mad at somebody and you've used choice words and you've used God's name when you were using those words possible that you said you know Jesus I mean he's just one of many teachers you want to call Messiah call Messiah but but I just as soon think that that Buddha had some great things to say too and and Confucius was a great philosopher and and Krishna you know Krishna has some great things and observations and and you could be thinking that way so Jesus well he's just one of many teachers and many masters that this world has known and Jesus said every blasphemy every sin will be forgiven including including when I blasphemed God and I would use his name in vain including when I rejected Christ and I said he's just one of many and he's basically worthless he's not really the one who's going to bring me to to heaven he's just one of those teachers and he said those sins will be forgiven you but there is one that won't and that is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit now what do you mean by that well one they're attributing the works of Christ to Satan himself rejecting him consciously making a determination that they want nothing to do with him now how did a person how does a person get saved Bible in John 16 8 says it like this the Holy Spirit comes to bring conviction of sin righteousness and judgment when the Holy Spirit brings conviction it is not condemnation it is conviction when the Holy Spirit brings conviction it causes your heart to realize you're being spoken to it's no longer one of those oh I wish I had somebody in here that's been bothering me they should have heard this today it's when the Holy Spirit is saying no I'm speaking to you it's like when my my children were young and and I would be trying to speak to them and being young they would their eyes would wander all over the house and and I would have reached and on occasion I would take them by their little faces not in a mean way as in a loving way I'd gently draw their gaze to mine and I'd say daddy speaking to you I want to tell you something listen carefully and I'd say something very quick and then they'd look at me for a moment the Holy Spirit does that have you ever since that he does you'll be you know there's 378 tiles on the wall I've been counting them all service and the Holy Spirit says I'm talking to you and your attention is drawn because the Spirit with his gentle hand is taking you and he's gazed into your eyes and he has said this is true and you know I'm talking to you that's how I got saved that's how you got saved when I was there sitting on a carpet with 4,000 hippie kids and Arthur Blessed was speaking and I hear his message and the Spirit of the Lord begins to speak to my heart and says to me you're uncomfortable and I say yes I am and then I hear a question in my heart why and I say because I'm not like these people then he says and what is different about you and I say I'm not a Christian I'm not a Christian the first time I ever admitted even within my own self in my own mind that I was not a Christian came through the conviction of the Holy Spirit it wasn't just the words of that evangelist Arthur Blessed it was the Spirit of God speaking to my heart and me admitting it he brings conviction of sin righteousness and judgment but if we make a determination and say I don't need that I can do it on my own well God would forgive me for saying poorly things about him and God would forgive me for saying things about Jesus because I did and he forgave me all of my sins that's what we've read several times already the blood of Jesus Christ's Son cleanses us from all sin that includes all the blasphemy and all the profanity and all of the worthless that I'd say of Christ but if I would have said and the Holy Spirit is worthless too Jesus said that's the unpardonable sin why because if you reject the conviction of the Spirit you cannot be saved that's how you got saved and the Pharisees were making a determination that they did not want what God was offering and were even going so far as to try to convince other people that Jesus was empowered by Satan himself it's been called sinning against the light it's a determination to reject what God has revealed to be true and the question is asked in Hebrews 2 verses 3 and 4 how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord and was confirmed to us by those who heard him God also bearing them witness both with signs and wonders with various miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost according to his own will how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation the answer is there is no escape listen ultimately and we know this we have to choose we have to choose choose this day who you're going to serve is it the Lord or is it the enemy we make that choice I have to choose will I be gathering or will I be scattering but I'm not able to do both simultaneously I have to make a choice and that's what Jesus was saying here and he's saying do not blaspheme the spirit of God that is the sin that will not be forgiven I haven't committed that sin and I pray none in here do


I can't tell which one to do. Candles, right here where it all is. Big time up here, just be smart. Don't slip. That would be a crossfire. I said earlier you can't do that. This concludes your safety brief. Are there any questions? I heard my miss, you miss on the road. Thank you. Right here. Do you know where they go to? Do you know where they go to? Yes.  I heard it. Stay out.


Hi, everyone. Welcome to the monthly Fedora Council video meeting. I am not Matthew Miller. I'm Ben Cotton, the Fedora program manager. This month we have Peter Robinson, who is the lead for Fedora IoT, talking about Fedora IoT. Peter, why don't you just go ahead and take it away. Thank you, Ben. I'll give a brief overview of myself, what I do, and then another view of what Fedora IoT is, where we're going, and kind of why. And then from there we can open it up for any questions that anyone may have. So I'm Peter Robinson. I've been involved in Fedora to some degree or another, basically from the outset. I have been involved in a lot of different things throughout the project. Over the time I have been on council and previously on the board as well. I have done community roles and then around five and a half years ago I started officially working on Fedora related things as part of release engineering, doing what at the time was referred to as secondary architectures is now referred to as alternate architectures. And then about three and a half years ago my senior vice president at the time or senior vice president of rail at the time, did a student mass basically gave me the job of investigating IoT in the context of the Linux operating system. So Fedora and related distributions but explicitly doing that sort of research and development around that in the Fedora community space. So Fedora IoT was basically born out of that remit to basically go and investigate IoT for Red Hat. So that's a brief overview of me. I've been at Red Hat about seven and a half years if memory serves me correctly and been working towards Fedora IoT for about three and a half of that. Anyway, so Fedora IoT, it's fully based on Fedora, fully upstream in Fedora. We don't have any forks. It is an RPM OS tree based remix or addition actually now of Fedora based out using atomic and Core OS technologies to produce a addition that is focused on IoT and device edge. The term edge and the term IoT are very similar to cloud in that they're very, very, very overloaded terms. Are we looking to run on your thermostat?  No, we are not. You basically need to have a system that is essentially a Raspberry Pi or larger. So reasonable amounts of RAM able to run a full Linux distribution. We are in the short term at least just primarily due to the amount of resources that are available in terms of people and related that are actually actively working on this. We're focused on primarily a gateway style or an endpoint style Linux device without a graphical display. So, you know, we're not sort of currently going looking at sort of display related technologies. It has certainly been discussed. It has certainly been, it will possibly eventually be on the roadmap, but we're nowhere near that side of things. So, how does Fedora IoT differ from server or cloud or workstation, you know, delivery artifacts? We only deliver an RPMOS tree based image. It's relatively minimal, nowhere near as minimal as I would like. Applications are designed and meant to running containers with sort of just enough operating system underneath it to boot the hardware and interface with the hardware. We have a focus around security technologies. We have a number of large companies that are actually running Fedora IoT in production. And we're engaged with customers, partners such as ARM, Lonaro and various other areas of the ecosystem to sort of provide feedback and engagement and support in the sort of things we are doing. For example, the Lonaro ledge or the Lonaro edge initiative uses Fedora IoT as one of their reference platforms. And yeah, so generally a small OS, mostly rolling release RPMOS tree based where with Fedora 32, we're moving from a initial setup based config. So when you first boot, it would typically prompt you to create a username and various other bits and pieces so that you can log in and continue. While that's very good from a developer point of view, because it will run up and allow you to provision, it's no good for a widely like. So we have customers that are running hundreds and looking at running tens of thousands of instances. And obviously you want to be able to auto provision that. So yes. And so we're moving to an ignition based provisioning system. And there's a web interface for that so you can sort of DD out an image for say the Raspberry Pi and go to provision dot Fedora project.org. You will need to have a wired network connection currently because we don't have the ability to deal with wireless interface config locally. And anyway, you can then sort of claim the device. The service is relatively new. It is still under sort of development. I'm still need some enhancements. So if people are interested in IOT and are interested and capable of doing. Python Django, I believe it is written in based web development. Certainly reach out to us because we're doing some quite cool and interesting bits and pieces there. And yes, that is a general overview of it. Thanks Peter. Open up the meeting to questions from anyone. Just jump in and unmute yourself and shout your question out or put it in the chat if you can't. My question is, what's the biggest difference between IOT and Fedora coro s. So Fedora coro s is designed or has a focus of being a Kubernetes based distribution. Fedora IOT isn't focused on that. So we deal with a lot of things that you wouldn't get. So you wouldn't run a Kubernetes distribution typically over say a wireless wham link or low bandwidth. Yeah, it's designed also because of Kubernetes to be sort of in groups of machines. So cluster based where a lot of the Fedora IOT and device edge use cases are single use cases. So designed not to run in clusters and designed not necessarily to use something like I think it's airship to do sort of cluster based reboots. And movement of workloads and things like that. So basically coro s is very much focused on primarily being an OS in which to run Kubernetes on top of we are not. Ben, were you talking because I can't hear you. Oh, you think I'm supposed to unmute. Is that important? Anyone else have questions? I'll throw one out. Can you talk a little bit about the release streams and upgrades process because one of the big issues with IOT devices in general is they ship with some software and then they never get security updates and then everything is terrible. So how do we deal with that in Fedora IOT? So from a release stream point of view, we have three main streams. We have the stable stream, which is currently Fedora 31. We have Devel stream, which is currently 32. And we have roll hide, which is constantly rolling against the main Fedora roll hide. The stable stream will be switched to Fedora 32 on release day. And basically you will be actively upgraded through to that. There's a number of reasons for that. One, basically it's primarily a rolling release. And two, we just really don't have enough people to maintain multiple streams. So that leads into another question I had written down is how can people contribute to Fedora IOT if they're Fedora contributors who want to join in and help out? So we have all the usual Fedora means of contribution. We have IOT mailing list, IOT IRC channel, which is Pound, Fedora hyphen IOT. We have a Pagger instance with a number of Git repos that are primarily used around docs and the release engineering side of things. And we also have a Fedora-IOT GitHub page where we host a few of the other more general projects around that. So the provisioning system, which is the project name is Zaziri, is based there along with some of the security related stuff. Green Boot, which is a project around upgrade and rollback. So if a device, you can set up a bunch of health checks. And once you upgrade and reboot a device, if it can't connect to, say, the network and the update system and various other or C bits of hardware that are specified within the health check framework, it will rollback to the previous version. So there's a number of different ways to get involved. The mailing list and the IRC channel are probably the two traditional ways that most people actively involved in Fedora will know how to get involved. So I know you mentioned earlier, Ignition required some Django experience, is that right? What other sort of technical areas or non-technical areas are you really looking for contributions from right now? So some of the, I wouldn't call them non-technical, but more easy to get involved area is documentation and testing is always useful. We support currently a small amount of hardware with Fedora 32. The supported hardware is widening out quite a bit there with addition of devices from Pine 64 and a couple of other companies, which I will be able to talk about shortly. So documentation, testing on the technical or the more engineering development side of things. We have Zaziri, which I mentioned, which is the web-based provisioning system, and there will be some other functionality coming to that. We have a handful of sort of issues open where we track functionality.  And then we have lower-down related stuff where we've got quite a big focus on TPM2-related stuff and things that utilize the TPM, such integrity measurement and application-related stuff. And so there's a bunch of work that's being done there. And a whole bunch of other sort of feature enhancement-related stuff that if people are interested in, I am sure that there are a lot of other ideas that aren't exactly coming to my direct to my mind at the moment. Any questions from anyone else? I'll throw another softball your way, Peter.  I would say 100s, and in actual fact, in the coming, well, it was due to be in the coming weeks. I think probably due to the current pandemic at the moment, it will be some time in the coming months. I am due to move house, and I was actually planning on documenting all the devices in a series of blog posts when I moved. But I would say from full-on ARM devices, like the Pine 64 and Raspberry Pi 4 and similar-related devices through to devices such as this device, which is Zephyr-capable, so much more RTOS and smaller and can be run on a battery. Well, and truly into the hundreds. So how much of the Fedora IoT work is done sort of on Fedora IoT itself versus on component packages or upstream to make sure things work right on ARM hardware, for example? So there's a lot of testing in Fedora and Fedora IoT directly around the ARM-related stuff, but also X86-related stuff. There is, I do a lot of contribution into other upstream communities. So Uboot, for example, for device enablement, and a lot of that is sort of more done in my own time and as part of the Fedora ARM effort. I'm directly involved in a bunch of upstream standardization organizations as part of my job at Red Hat and as part of my remit there. So I mentioned Lanaro, and so Lanaro actively uses Fedora IoT and there are some other sort of ecosystem and standardization bodies that I participate in as well. So it's a combination like right across the ecosystem in my opinion. Great. Any other last chance for questions from anyone else in the audience? I think we might have a question coming up, but we can't hear them. I got a question. I'm not on the council, but I'm here for the meeting. Please. Whatever happened to the ExxonMobil and Fedora deal? Can we talk about that? So ExxonMobil is actively using Fedora IoT. I wouldn't call it a deal per se. They're a company like a number of other companies that are using Fedora IoT. We're lucky in that they quite happily have openly spoken about their use of Fedora IoT in a number of forums. Okay. Just curious. I remember hearing it flock. Is there any way that the community can help with ExxonMobil's efforts or is that even something that they've requested or need? I mean, help in their efforts is an interesting... I mean, they are actively following along the discussion that happened in the community. They don't tend to speak up in that space a huge amount, although there are certainly individuals there that sort of actively sort of participate in that sort of space. Community directly working with Exxon is not really something that's sort of easy to do. But yeah, no, they at the moment basically use pretty vanilla off the shelf Fedora IoT. They layer a few packages on for specific low level bits and pieces that they need and they run a lot of stuff in containers across a bunch of different use cases. Thanks, Peter. Anyone else? This is open questions. You don't have to be a council member to chime in with questions for Peter. In fact, we encourage people who aren't council members to give him the business. Well, it sounds like we've reached the end of questions. Peter, do you have any last comments you want to make? No. Obviously, I've tested feedback. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any other questions or queries around Fedora IoT or any suggestions. All right. Thanks, Peter. And thanks to everyone who joined in and participated. We through our council does this every month with different guests as suggested by members of the community. So if you go to the Fedora Wiki, the council slash video meetings page has a list of the upcoming meetings and a place where you can submit ideas for people we should be talking to. And with that, everyone have a great day and we'll talk to you next month. Thank you, Ben.


Welcome. Thanks for joining me today for the fun easy guide to Apple photos. I really appreciate your being here and hope we have a great time together. Let me talk a little bit about what we're going to do. I expect to spend about 45 minutes to an hour and what I did this for is to answer a question that many many of my clients and friends and other people have asked me about which is how do I find my way around in Apple photos? I think Apple photos is an amazing application. We all get it with our iPhone. We are using it every single day but there's so much that's packed into it that it's easy to get kind of lost and so what I want to do is just do a high-level fun easy tour to show you guys all the cool things that you can do in Apple photos and to help you find your way around get a good foundation and see what's going on. So here's our little tour bus. We're going to get aboard this and go around and show you a few things about the system. So here we go. So first of all I wanted to emphasize that Apple photos is an ecosystem and that's one of the reasons that it can seem a little bit confusing to people because what you're really doing with each device is reaching out and changing things everywhere.  All of these are connected through iCloud so that photos that you work on in one place end up being adjusted someplace else or edited or deleted or enhanced and you can share them from every place. So it's basically everything everywhere. This is the thing about Apple photos that makes it so unique and makes it so cool. So today just to simplify things we're really just going to be talking about the iPhone and a little bit about iCloud and your Mac. So we're going to be talking about how to get around how to see things in the basic Apple photos environment and how that looks on the iPhone and how that looks on the Mac. Now one good way to think about the Apple photos universe is that photos is really kind of a repository. It's a database. So what you're doing is you're creating these photos whether you take the pictures yourself or whether you're importing them from your emails or text messages maybe even a screenshot and all these are going into this one sort of collective space that you can get at in a whole bunch of different ways. You can think of it as kind of like a bank account where you've put all your photos into your bank and you access them from your ATM or you know from the lobby or you know from your browser on your computer. You can also think about them like iTunes because in fact it really is kind of built out of the whole iTunes concept and if you're used to iTunes you know that you have this the central collection of your music and then you have a bunch of playlists and what we're going to find as we go through this is that the albums that are created within Apple photos are essentially like playlists for your music. So it's the same idea and as we go through this I hope you'll start to see where the similarities are and make the whole process a little bit easier for you. Right now as you look at this picture you know this is this is how many of many people sort of look at their Apple photos. There's just all these pictures and they don't quite know how the heck to deal with them. Well that's what we're going to deal with today and so by the end of today you'll see how to find your images, how to organize your images and how to share your images. So those are the three things we're really going to focus on. So let's go take a look at how that works on the iPhone. Okay so I'm going to the iPhone. Okay so here we are and so what you see here is the iPhone setup that most of us are going to tap into. Now we're going to start with finding so this is this is the place if you don't take away anything else from this talk that you want to really get a handle on and that is the photos tab in Apple photos. I'm going to back out here a sec just to show so if I launch my photos this is what I'm getting and if we look at the bottom of the screen here you're going to see that there are three tabs and a search field across the bottom so four so we have photos we have a for you tab now we have an album tab and then we have a search tab. So we're just going to start out with the photos tab because that is the most important place to start. Now all of us are used to swiping through their photos to to try and find something and you're sort of looking at it as a as a long continuous group and that's fine you may be able to find steps that way but what's important about photos is that it's actually created as a chronology so everything is sorted from oldest to newest and if you look at the bottom in this newest version of the software we now have these four groups so we have all photos which is where a lot of us spend our time searching but now we also have years days and years months and days so let's just start with years so if you go to years and you have a sense as many people do of kind of when you took a photo of it's an older photo what you can do is scan back through the years and it basically just gives you a place older for each spot now what's cool about this is if you just let it sit for a second it actually will scroll through the months automatically and show you what months sort of a representative feeling for each month you can also swipe sideways and scroll through those months manually so if you're not sure which year some big event happened this is kind of a quick way to get there and say yeah this is this is the year I want to work with now when you tap on it what it does then is it drills down as you can see at the bottom it it goes two months and then you can scroll through and within those months it will find may find groups that it wants to zero in on if you tap those you'll go down to the day view and in the day view it starts to show more detail about what all was going on in that period so this is a really easy way to zero in really quickly on uh events that you you know you you know the date for and you can you can find simply chronologically now if you go back here to all photos now we're in that area now we can scan through and we can see all photos that apply to that particular timeframe so this is a quick way to again start with years months days and all photos for you to find your find your images what's really interesting about this view the all photos view that not many people realize is in the upper right hand corner we have a little plus and minus so we can tap and we actually get separate pluses and minuses and by doing that we can actually zoom out to another version of the year view and actually swipe through here to get to a year that we might want to zero in on this one is like 2013 in my collection was a pretty big year you can see that it there's quite a lot of stuff in there and so i can go to this and then i can start zeroing in on some fireworks and scenes and and other things that i've done back out now i can also then i can zoom in i can also zoom out and you will get to the point where you basically have just a single view like like so one other nifty thing about uh getting to a single view is if you find one let's see if we can find a photo with some more information okay here's a great example so here's a photo that i got to and if you hold and swipe up slowly it will show you more information about the photo so it'll show you where it's where it was taken if it has a an id on it and you can see other nearby photos other photos that are in the database that are and that's from that same area so this is really cool if you're looking for someplace you know maybe it's a summer holiday kind of place you go to every year you went to a couple of years you find one photo from that group and when you zero in for locations you can actually see everything in your library related to that area from prior years so it's very cool and that's a easy way to to get around so what you're going to find is this this whole tab the photos tab is the place to go and get familiar with to start finding your photos and and searching quickly so you're not just randomly swiping through it's really pretty cool so we're going to go back to now another thing about that is we can go into the search tab and the search tab will actually give us a similar kind of feature so we can actually search on these places this is where we get into the find you know more of the fine stuff if i if i type in beach and hit search look at what i get so the the cool new thing about the photos is that you can actually search on criteria you can search on keywords you can search on people you can search on a bunch of things and in this case what it's done is to return me all these beach related searches so i so there is a category of beach which is what photos artificial intelligence is actually identified as beach related photos so you know you can do the same thing with dog you can do the same thing with other search terms there are two photos on here that were taken on beach boulevard boulevard wherever that is there are 587 that were on or near compo beach road beach activity is is basically just a artificial intelligence search beach chair i've got 64 pictures of beach chairs so this was really cool right um i can click on the see all button and it will just show me the whole collection of photos that it's found that relate to beach if i tap on a see all it'll show me all 1150 photos that that it returned from that search it shows me that there are three that there are these moments three five seven moments that apple has created from collections and photos that relate to beaches i have these all these albums that are related to beaches have beach names and them are are beach places and then it shows these categories which again are from artificial intelligence of what apple photos recognizes fireworks you have a couple where i put keywords on them that include beach memories titles whole list of things so this is this is again a part of the part of the find category here and it's a really cool thing to do you can search on if i do new york same kind of thing here are a bunch of moments a bunch of albums keywords memories places that are that are all related to new york so between our photos searches which can be very high level or very very reduced and the searches you have all the tools you need to find these pictures that that you've added in a chronological way so you can see that compared to the old standard of folders and subfolders of you know you have a folder for 2013 you have january 2013 you have february 2013 that way just doesn't cut it anymore we have so many photos to stay in age that you really really benefit from having a database that can be searched in multiple ways and organized in multiple ways and so this is how you look at it we will be taking a look at how this is on the mac as well but it's the same process with just just a few minor differences so again this is my big takeaway that i hope hope you play with try the different views to get down to something that you feel really comfortable with this is really a great tool now next on our tour we're going to take a quick pass by the the for you section this is labeled a little differently on the mac but it's the same idea so what memories are are groups of photos that apple photos looks at and creates dynamically so these these are all things primarily that that apple has created and their their collections that it believes have some meaning for you either because of you know repetition or the people who are in them or the kind of advantages the kind of stuff you like to do apple softwares analyzing this kind of stuff to give you some kind of nice surprise pop-up features that you know you'll enjoy so here are some featured these are featured photos that it found that it believes are are meaningful to me and in fact most of them are here are some actual groups so this particular one was a photo shoot that i went on out in the snow locally and it it interpreted this as a really nice little memory that i might like to enjoy and keep and so i can i can see this as a video and it will create this little ditty that i can enjoy or i can then apply some things to it i can share that if i want to we'll get into sharing a little bit later and so there you have it these are fun things to take a look at nice to scan through you know when you have a few minutes and kind of see what it's done and what it also does then is is collects identifiers for people that it recognizes in there as well as again another location and some other related memories so that's that's the memory thing see beyond memories featured photos and we get into shared albums now on the on the phone shared the shared album activity shows up in the for you tab and gives gives you an update as to photos that have been you have been shared to you by other people through shared albums or activity that that you've created as well and then the fact this is a new thing actually in fairly new in apple photos where the software identifies pictures that you've taken and this is the case where there's a live photo that i took and it's suggesting to me that i should make a loop out of this and shows me kind of what it looks like rather than just the the quickie live photo thing it extends it i'll be talking on another session about how to do effects like that and they're a lot of fun okay next is a is the albums tab and the albums tab is a little bit of a mix it used to be all albums that you've created yourself so this is this is sort of the ultimate in organization and apple photos where you identify pictures that you want to include in something and it it puts them there essentially like a playlist we talked about that a little earlier so this is these albums you can think of them kind of as your photo playlist it also shows shared albums which we'll talk about in sharing and it had this is where they group the people tab places you know if you just go straight into places it shows you all the places that you that you have photos from and that's pretty cool too then it also has these media types now this this is another nice little addition these are excuse me these are all photos that are still from this primary photos library so again this is where everything is this is you'll have a copy of everything here but like any good database it is looking at those photos and finding specific things about those photos that will create subgroups so it automatically gives you a album of all your videos so if you know you took a video it might be faster just to go to the video tabs and go back into the dates you know the all photos or years to track it down it keeps track of all the selfies you've done it has live photos portrait you can see these this is a this is a good thing to go into and kind of familiarize yourself with the kind of things you've done and you know after over time you may not realize for instance how many burst photos you've taken and burst photos again are a sequence of photos that that happens either when you do a timed photograph or with a self-timer or if you if you choose to do a burst photograph there's a lot of cool things you can do with them but they do create a lot of pictures that you may want to go in and delete or at least edit down so you have something that's a little more meaningful so anyway that is what the album tab gets you and for our purposes most of where we're going to be is probably in the album groups that we've created ourselves and i will go into how we do that when we get onto the Mac what i am going to say here if we go back to photos um is to organize these to create those i just want to show you quickly how you select on the Mac or excuse me on the iPhone because as as you get into these okay as you get into these right next to the plus minus button there is a select button and you can select either by tapping individual photos or you can swipe a group of photos like so and once you have those selected then you can go to the share button in the lower left hand corner and tapping that you get access to a whole bunch of other options here which we'll go into later in terms of copying or emailing or in this case adding to an album we can tap that we can create a new album and just say test and there we've saved this old group to its own new album which we'll show up here and there it is test because those are the ones we just created really really easy if i wanted to i could delete that album it does not affect the photos in any way so that's how albums work all right um that is that is a basic overview of photos and again i think i think the photos tab is the is the primary place to be but you can go in and play around with all of this stuff and my hope is that what may have seemed really overwhelming and and hard to navigate will seem so much easier to navigate once you spend a little time playing with this all right so let's take a look now at how this looks when we go over to the map hang on with me while i switch screens okay so here we are on the mac so hopefully this looks a lot more familiar to you than it did a little while ago so this is this is my same photo database on the mac and now instead of having those four tabs across the bottom we now have a sidebar with these groups set up here so again we're going back to photos up here at the very top of the sidebar and we have the same tab now on the top instead of the bottom where we have all photos we have days we have months and we have years just like we did before and like before if we click into one of these we'll get a month view with these are again sort of computer generated groupings of things that it looks like we have a lot of interest in this is in fact a weekend that i i spent in new york at a photography an iphone photography class and we went out and we shot a bunch of pictures around town so this was this was really pretty cool these are these are the results of some of the places that we went um this it drills down so we started years we drill down the months and now we're uh at days and if we go into the individual picture we can now scroll through like we did before to get a better look at things and ultimately if we want to to edit the photos now in this case the information that we get about these photos is up here in the info tab and so we can click on information we grab this here's here's the little pane that pops up there we go like so so now we actually have quite a bit more information about this photo than we would see on the iphone which is another good reason to get comfortable with working in photos on your computer uh you can do a lot more work a lot faster and you can the photos are much bigger so you can see what you're doing better so um i you know most of my primary work i do on on the computer but i will do a lot of quick edits and so forth on my phone um and up here we have the same we have the location information again we if we want to we can add keywords here which we'll talk about in a sec and uh add a description so this all works in the same way that it did on the phone and now uh we will go to let's see we'll go to these memories and memories have been broken out now from that other one the for you so for you has now gotten expanded and there's my friend Ripley um so we have the same kind of thing going on and now you know these these will let me double click on them we get more to look at and can drill down to individual photos okay so that's under memories you can save these memories as well you can you can favorite these so if it comes up with something that you like you can come back to it again and again we have favorites here as a separate separate section these are all pictures that we've favorited with the little hearts um we have a people album here and my people album is still getting getting created uh so we'll let that finish scanning i just upgraded my computer and so it's still processing places here again is a bigger view the places tab recents and imports are basically the most recent photos that have come in to the database uh so sometimes if it's something i know that i photographed yesterday i may come straight to recent instead of go to photos and and scroll down all the way to the end uh and then recently deleted now deleting requires a little bit of an explanation which is that when we delete something in photos it actually does not delete it completely right away uh if i go in and delete something i'm going to hit the delete key here i'll get prompted to uh say yes i want to delete this from all devices um that is the kicker you want to be aware of when you delete something on one device it gets deleted everywhere because as you remember we have all of these devices that you have connected to your iCloud with the same information um you're the iCloud photo library its sole job is to make sure that every device is attached to it has the same pictures and so if you delete a picture in one place it deletes it everywhere if you add a picture in one place it will get added everywhere if you rename a picture if you crop a picture whatever you do on one device gets transferred everywhere else so one of the things that comes up uh quite often are people who are running out of space on their iPhone and they mistakenly believe that if they delete photos or videos on their phone that those will not get deleted from their iCloud and from other places so um in a case like that we have to figure out a different strategy because um if they went ahead and deleted stuff it actually would get deleted everywhere uh the good thing is when it when you do delete it goes into here's here's the photo that we just deleted a second ago it actually goes in here and you'll see that it says there's 29 days left before it actually gets deleted so it goes into the sort of slush fund here um where it sits and it waits in case you have second thoughts and want to come back and get it and in case you do you can go into recently deleted you can go to appear in the upper right hand corner the button says recover and i've selected it now it's gone back into the collection here it is again now so now it's back where it was so this is another cool thing about apple photos that it really is is doing its best to try and save as home from ourselves so you know who doesn't need that so that again all of these in my mind kind of belong to this this photos section okay this is this is for you know if you're interested in finding things this is where you find them and this is um easy to get around it's easy to scan again this grid in the all photos view we have a little slider in the upper right here now instead of those plus and minus things that we can we can zoom in and out to get a size that we like working with and we also have a little button up here that's kind of cool where you can you can actually have these sort as square let's see here i guess we have to go out a little bit you can have them sort as square or you can have the full frame image once it gets once it opens out to a certain size if it's a little too small it automatically goes into that square grid because they just need them for space so there you are um that is the photos tab now after that is where we get in to the searches and the organizing and so forth and down here again in this albums tab which we had on the phone here are the the premade groupings again videos selfies et cetera panoramas i love to do panoramas so i i have quite a few of those burst photos and so forth we now have screen recordings as well which you can do animated uk it also has a screenshot we all have tons of screenshots and a lot of them are pretty temporary we don't really need to keep them forever so this is a handy way to go and find screenshots that you really want to just clear out okay um the my albums is where we go to see um the albums that we've created here's that test album that i made on the iphone and it's still here but if i delete the album here by right clicking and saying delete album i will get this uh notice that says are you sure you wanted to delete this album the items in this album will still be visible on your iphone live iphone library okay so here is the test album that i created on my iphone and if i right click on that it'll give me the option to delete the album rename the album duplicate the album but i'm going to show you if you delete the album you get this alert this says are you sure you want to delete this album the items in this album will still be visible in your photo library and other albums that contain them this album will be removed from iCloud photos and all your devices so what it's saying is you can delete these albums but you will um not delete the photos that are in the albums and that's really important so you know albums are very fluid there's easy way to organize uh we showed about how to make an album on the phone the same thing happens here if i delete this i can go back to my photos collection i can select a bunch of photos in this case i can go down to my albums hit the plus sign and say i want to make an album of these pictures that i've just selected so it will do that and now i have a an album here that will allow me to name i'll make this test two and again that's that's all it takes to create an album so again we've gone through how to find your pictures this is how we organize the pictures and i'm going to share one other trick that is something you can do on the mac that you can't do on iphone and that is use a smart album now a smart album is basically a search it's a saved search so if you recall on the phone we did a search on beaches so i'm going to do the same thing here i'm going to call this my beach album i'm going to click on these criteria and say um album uh i'm going to say description includes beaches okay i didn't find a lot with the description i'm going to go to i'm going to edit the smart album i'm going to add another criteria where we say the description that's a bad one okay now i'm going to talk about a couple of ways to create albums from searches so the first thing is we have this option now to create albums from uh as smart albums which and smart albums are really saved searches so i'm going to create one so instead of album i'm going to choose smart album and i'm going to call this beaches and i've keyworded some of these now keyword is just a tag that gets added to a photo and in this case i'm going to look for the keyword beach because i have added it to um let's see see what i can find i'm paused yeah yeah i ran into a couple of glitches here i can't demonstrate unless i figure this out yeah nice right i'm not sure that's the other thing i need to oh it does have a timer but i i don't think i'm i mean i actually think i'm close to the andre right now but i don't know oh good so now i want to show you about another type of album which is a smart album and a smart album is basically a a saved search and you can search on a number of criteria but what it does is it makes this automatic search that's always looking for photos that have a certain criteria that you've defined so let's show you how that works i go down on um i go down to the my album section again because we're organizing this and the little plus sign that shows up next to my albums i click on that and one of my options is a smart album so in this case i am going to i'm gonna call this beaches to i did another beaches before and here's my search criteria now i'm going to in this case i'm going to do it based on keywords so um keyword uh that's attached to that photo keyword is a tag essentially you may think of it that way i'm going to say is and then i'm going to search these are a list of all the keywords that i've used somewhere in this database i'm going to use beach as my search and it shows that there's 445 images in here that have the keyword beach so i'm going to say okay and here they are so it has gone back to the photos collection the main photos collection it's looked for all the photos in here that have a beach tag on it and then it's collected them down here just as we said before like a playlist would on uh in itunes so this is a great way to create a collection that is going to be added on to so so now anytime that i i add new photos that i take at the beach i can add that keyword to it and it will automatically show up in this group along with everything else now how do you add a keyword good question so keywords are accessible up in the window menu and we go to keyword manager a keyword manager can also be brought up with a command k and with this in place you can you can actually select an image and then add the keyword to it in this case it's already there another way is if i go to a photo a photo of a loaf of bread if i go up to the info palette for this there are it says add a keyword there are no keywords there but i could put in bread and now there it is and if i created a new smart album where the keyword is bread that would now show up in the album so this is a this is a cool way to do it if you if you have like recurring themes that may not be found automatically with a with a search you want to make sure that they stay the same if if you do people tagging that will also you'll also be able to use smart albums to group those if you choose to it's just a another way that you can organize your photos so the final one that i want to show you is projects and projects are a way to organize your photos for things that you want to create so if you're doing if you like to do photo books for instance my projects down at the bottom of the albums list is where you would do that and what's great about this is you can import extensions from the app store that will let you create books for various manufacturers right within apple photos so these are these are a few of the photo book plugins see here's a project for a bookmaker called motif there are other bookmakers right right now as of as of today mpics which is a popular with many people offers prints i think they offer books as well you can do calendars you can do cards you can do wall prints you can do some cool wall prints so many things right from within photos so you don't have to export out you don't have to go to a web book builder in order to to create them it's it's a lot of fun and i i'll be going through how to do that in some other live training but for right now it's important just know that they're there and when you go to create a project what will happen is you will get a pop-up again you have a little plus sign down here by my project this shows you all the different categories of product that you can create all of these all these manufacturers have book design these have calendars card printing wall decor prints photo prints and then slide shows you can you can create right within apple photos and just email them out to people so that is another way that you organize your photos and then share them which is the last category we're going to talk about so you can share you can share your photos as products that you print and sand or or have somebody send for you there's a lot of cool options to do that but in terms of basic sharing in on the mac and on the iphone sharing is really just a matter of making a photo selection and using the share button which is the square with an upward arrow and in both cases as soon as you make your selection and choose the share button you get all these options of ways that you can share your your images through mail messages airdrop you can save them to the note staff or Evernote I like to do that a lot or you can send them out as as links to for somebody else to download multiple options so just keep in mind all it is is to select the photos that you want use the share button and just follow the prompts to send it in the way that you would like now there is one special thing in apple photos and that is the shared album which we talked about and i'll just we'll go through that quickly and i'll leave you with that as a final as a final sharing option if you select some photos and then choose the share button again you'll see that shared albums is one of the options now what shared albums are are photos posted to iCloud that other apple users can have can subscribe to and it shows up right in the sidebar of their photos app if they're on windows you can send a link and it'll essentially be like a web gallery so it's a great way to share these these things with people who you just want to see them it's cooler than sending an an attachment email because it's like always there you can add to it you can download from it and it it's not taking up space on your your email feed or your messages feed so what i would do in this case is i've selected the images i've said add to a shared album i can put comments in here saying this was us going out getting a christmas tree i can then add a name for the album i will call it tree hunt and then i can invite people so from here what it does is it looks at the contacts that you have on your mac or on your iphone and it literally lets you add people to it and once you hit create it will send them an invitation to join or subscribe to the shared album and where that goes is down here in the sidebar in the shared section here are shared albums so these are all albums that i'm subscribing to that either i've created and shared to somebody else or somebody else has created and shared with me and i've subscribed and i can go in and take a look at these photos whenever i want and whenever something when anything changes i'll get an alert to say hey there's a new photo showing up in the album so there we have it so we've gone through how to find your photos we've gone through how to organize your photos i'm going to flip back to the other screen and yeah so find your photos find your way around so we went through how photos the photos tab is really the the best place to start and then you can do most of your work right there we also went through search so you can you can search on multiple criteria gets better and better all the time currently i think they say that the app for the photos app can recognize about 4 000 different objects and situations so that gets better and better all the time you can add keywords if you want to be able to search on specific things over and over again and you have locations and people tagging so all of this makes it easier for you to find them and share your your work organizing we talked about albums how you can create your own albums your own proofings and when you you can the albums are kind of your playground they're just like a playlist in itunes if you you can add things to them you can delete things from them and it doesn't affect your overall photos library and then finally we talked about how to share your photos which really is as simple as selecting the things you want to share and going to that share icon wherever it is on the on the iphone or the mac and then just following the prompts to to get those photos out to whoever you want in the way that you want so i hope that you had a great time learning how to get around photos and taking our tour today it was a lot of fun here and there are going to be more of these types of live trainings so i hope to see you again on one real soon this video will be posted online and we'll have some show notes about it maybe a couple of other tidbits that you can download and enjoy in the future please tell your friends and come back soon