I've been using Emacs for a few years now and for most of that time I've been a Doom Emacs user because Doom Emacs is a really nice distribution of Emacs that comes with a lot of programs that most Emacs users probably want already installed, already configured. Things like Evil Mode, especially for those of us that are coming from them. We really need the Evil Key Bindings. So Doom Emacs is a really great project and I love it. But a lot of you guys were asking for more GNU Emacs content, like you want to see me take a standard GNU Emacs installation, a very plain vanilla GNU Emacs bare bones, and then slowly build it into something akin to Doom Emacs. And I thought that is a great idea. So we're going to start a series of videos today. This will be video number one in this series. And what we're going to do, I'm going to install GNU Emacs just playing GNU Emacs and then slowly we're going to evolve it into something special. So let me switch over to my desktop here. The first thing you need to do is you need to make sure that you have installed Emacs. So here on an ArchBase system, of course, I would do a sudo pacman-capitalS Emacs, right?  Get Emacs installed. And then what you want to do, open your file manager. So in my case, I use PCMAN-FM as a GUI file manager. Make sure that there is no current .emacs.d directory in your home directory. That's a Emacs config directory. So don't have any older Emacs configs that you've previously used on the system. Get rid of those. Also check in the .config folder because these days Emacs also has the more standard xdg-compliant .config-slash-emacs directory, which in my case, I also do not have. I've already deleted those directories. So now what I want to do is I want to go ahead and create a new Emacs directory in .config, right? So now I have in my home directory slash .config-slash-emacs an empty directory. And we're going to start writing a config file and start putting configs in this directory because I don't want to run Emacs, vanilla Emacs, which is this here. This is standard GNU Emacs out of the box. Looks very plain. It does have toolbars and menu systems to help you. Like if you didn't know any of the Emacs key bindings and things like that, because it is this graphical program, it's a GTK program that has this menu system. A lot of things can be found in the menu system if you need help at first. Just know ctrl-x, ctrl-c closes Emacs, that's how you exit. You could also exit it in the graphical menu system as well. So the first thing we need to create is an init file and init.el. Now typically I like to configure Emacs in org mode and I think a lot of you guys will eventually really fall in love with org mode and start writing a lot of your stuff in org mode. So let's go ahead and just start using org mode right away. So first of all, let me go ahead and launch Emacs. So I'll just run Emacs here from D menu and I'm going to do the standard find file command in Emacs, which is ctrl-x, ctrl-f, and now down here in the mini buffer, this little echo area, see I get a prompt find file and just type the path to a file. So I'm going to do home directory slash dot config slash Emacs slash and I'm going to type init.el. This is a new file that we're going to create here. Now to zoom in using the standard Emacs key bindings, I believe it's ctrl-x, ctrl-plus, ctrl-x, ctrl-plus, ctrl-x, ctrl-plus, yeah, that zoomed me in just a little bit. I haven't started typing yet, but that did make the text a little bigger. So ctrl-x, ctrl-x, plus, there we go. Now you will have to bear with me for a few minutes here because I have to try to remember some of the standard new Emacs key bindings because I'm used to evil mode, but we're going to get evil mode installed rather quickly. That way I don't have to remember some of these older key bindings that I haven't used in a long time. Now the good thing about the standard GNU Emacs key bindings, it's not modal like VIM. You can just start typing right away. For me, I'm going to do a lot of copying, pasting, just for sake of time here. So I'm going to do a ctrl-y to paste this here. So this is the only thing that's going to go in our init.el today. And you can see what it's going to do inside the parentheses here. Org-babel-load-file, so expand-file-name-config.org-user-emacs-directory. So what does all of this mean? Well what we're going to do is we're going to set up a file, an org document, to essentially be our config file. Typically your config file in Emacs is going to be config.el. Where we're going to tell Emacs our config file is actually going to be config.org, and then it's going to org-babel-load-file. It's basically going to take this config.org and transform it into a config.el automatically for us. That's all this code does. So that is our init.el. We're done with that. So we could click the button here in the menu bar to save. If you didn't have that menu bar, that toolbar up there, what you could do is ctrl-x, ctrl-s also for save. So now that we've got the init.el set up for us to be able to use a config.org config file. Let's do ctrl-x, ctrl-f for find file once again. Automatically the path is in our current directory, so .config-slash-emacs, and then type config.org to create this new config.org file. Once again I'm going to do ctrl-x plus a few times to make the font bigger. Since this is an org document, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go ahead and put some header information here. So typically you want the title. So the title of this I'm just going to call dts-genu-emacs-config if I can type. And I'm going to go ahead and add some other interesting heading information as well. I'm also going to add the author name which is me. Title and author are really important to have in your org documents, especially if you ever export them to something like HTML or PDFs and things like that. You already got this information that will be used once that conversion is done for you. For example, if you transformed your org document from org to HTML, the title header here for the org document will become the title tag in your HTML document. So that's nice information to have. I also added a description. I also added a startup header as well, show everything. What this means is an org has the ability to fold the document based on heading levels. I'm telling you, when I start this document, I want to actually see everything. I want the whole document unfolded. There's other options you could actually put in this as well, but you can look that up in the org mode documentation. And then the other thing is the options for TOC, that's table of contents, colon 2. If I create a table of contents, which I often do in my org documents, I only want the table of contents to include two header levels down. So the next thing we need to do is actually just start outlining our config. I'm going to go ahead and create a top level header, and I'm going to call this important programs to load first. So what are the things that need to be loaded first in your config before anything else gets run? We probably need to set up some kind of package manager. By default, Emacs has a built in package manager called package.el. Most Emacs users probably don't really use it. They install a third party package manager, and there's several of them. One of the most popular ones is straight.el. Believe straight.el is kind of the foundation of what DOOM Emacs does. Of course, DOOM Emacs does a lot of extra macros and stuff on top of straight as well. There is another really cool package manager I've been hearing a lot of good things about called Elpaca. And I think that's the one I'm going to install today just because I think it's kind of a neat project, and I don't know much about it because I haven't used it. So it will give me a chance to learn a different package manager. Another thing we of course want to load up right away is we want to make sure that we get evil mode started.  That way I get my vim key bindings. That way I don't struggle here like I am right now, trying to remember how Emacs works as far as the standard good new Emacs key bindings. And speaking of key bindings, we're eventually going to have to set some key bindings. So I'm going to have general key bindings, and by general, that is actually the name of a program. General.el is a program for Emacs that allows you to set key bindings. Now I could make probably a two hour long video about El Paca, the package manager, about evil mode. I could make a couple of hour video about general.el and key bindings. I'm not going to go that deep into any of these because honestly, if you want to learn about El Paca, read the documentation. If you want to learn about evil mode as a deep topic, go read about evil mode. If you want to go read about general key bindings, which is a massive documentation over on GitHub. There's so much you can do with this, so many different ways to add key bindings that have various different macros you can use if depending on whether you want to set key bindings for normal mode, visual mode, insert mode, whatever you have. If you're doing evil, for example, there's a lot to these programs. So know that I'm going to give you a very general overview for sake of time. So know that we're probably going to revisit most of these in future videos because I'm only going to show you the functionality that we're interested in right now. Later on, as we get deeper into this config file, we may revisit some of these topics, but I'm only going to hit the things that we need to know about for this particular config. If I try to do a video where I try to document every functionality and every Emacs package that I end up putting in this config, I would spend the next 10 years doing nothing but making Emacs videos. So let's start setting up Elpaq of the package manager. So let me go back to my browser and let's go back to the Elpaq of GitHub because on their GitHub, they do have some example code, this rather large block of coder. I'm going to copy that and what this is, this is code that they say should go in your init.el, I'm actually going to put it in our config.org because I think it'll be fine there, but this sets up our Emacs to actually use the Elpaq package manager. And let's go ahead and add a source code block here in org mode. So in org mode, all these headers are just comments, everything, all this and all of this, this is actually not going to be exported to the proper config.el that this document writes to, right? This is just comments. It's not actual code. So to actually put a code block here, what we need to do is I'm going to do the pound symbol plus I'm going to do begin underscore src for begin source, begin a source block and then space and then name of language that the source code block is written in. It'll be emacs dash lisp, lisp, not lips, and then we're going to do another pound sign plus and then end underscore source. That will be the end of the source block. And then I'm going to do control Y to paste that code that I got from GitHub. And you can see there is the emacs lisp and we get emacs lisp syntax highlighting because it knows the source code block is emacs lisp. So it's doing the proper syntax highlighting for this language. So that should set up Elpaq itself. Let's go back to the GitHub because there was one other thing that they suggested, or actually it's kind of required, is we need to set up an early init file. What an early init is, it's things that need to happen before the actual proper init. Like it was the very, very first thing that needs to happen. And what we need is this one line in the early init file and this will disable the standard emacs package manager package.el, that way it doesn't conflict with Elpaq. So let me go back over to emacs. So let's do the find file command again. Remember control X control F is the standard GNU emacs key binding for that. And we've got the path home directory slash config slash emacs. And then we need to do early dash init.el. And then once we're here, control Y to paste that from the GitHub, right, for Elpaq. You can see set queue assigns a value to a variable. The variable name is package dash enable dash at dash startup. So package package.el is the emacs package manager enable at startup. We're setting that to nil nil is false. So when you're setting things to true and false and emacs list t is true nil is false. And now let's go ahead and save. I'll just use the toolbar here. And then I'm going to go back to our config.org. Now if I do meta X, alt X on the keyboard, I don't know the standard GNU emacs key binding to go back a previous buffer, but I do know the command previous dash buffer that I could just type here and go back to this. Now one other thing that we want to do here is Elpaqa does have the ability to use package. Use package is a standard emacs program that's got some nice little macros that makes the code blocks that you would insert into your config file for installing and configuring programs a little simpler to use. I'm going to go back to their GitHub page for Elpaqa. And this block of code here enables use package support for Elpaqa. So I'm going to copy that and then let's go back and then once again I'll just control Y to paste inside the source code block, right? So now I think we've got all the code for Elpaqa. Let me zoom out so you can actually see that's actually a lot of code, right? It was just a copy and paste job, but there is the begin source for emacs list. And then all of this is just basically setting up Elpaqa to work. And then we had the one line in the early init.eo we had to add as well. And if all of this works, I could save and let's close emacs. Let me go ahead and once again, I'll launch from Dmenu emacs cloning into Elpaqa repos. You can see Elpaqa is installing itself. It's setting itself up because we put that code in the config file. And then it's going to install a few programs going to install Elpaqa. And then it's also going to install looks like it's installing evil. That's interesting. It installed evil mode and then it also installed use package. Why did it install evil mode? Did I not? So this is an example block of use package, right? And the example program that they were using because, you know, this sets it up to use use package and then they give you an example of how to use use package to install a program. The program they install is evil mode. That's great. We've got evil mode in this without us even really wanting it. So now evil mode will not actually be set up because it's not running yet. But what I could do is, for example, if I get over here and do meta X and I type evil dash mode, let's say J and K now go up and down. Very cool. But let's actually set evil mode up in our config file. So it automatically starts without me needing to manually do a meta X and then type evil dash mode. So I'm going to close emacs out and let's get back into our config file. Which, of course, to get back into our config file, I needed emacs open. So that was my fault there. But I'll open up this new instance of emacs and I'll do control X, control F for find file and then dot config slash emacs, if I can type correctly, config dot org and then control X plus a couple of times to zoom in and then let's scroll down. Then I had this heading here to load evil mode. Now let me do a meta X and do evil dash mode so I can actually use my standard Vim key bindings here. I'm going to DD now to delete. Yes, because I'm going to move this header up here to where it really installed evil mode. Now, of course, that's going to break these source code blocks. So let me add a end source there and then start a new one here and then emacs list every source code block will need to have a language, but I don't need the header in the source code block. I need it outside the source code block. Let me colon W to write that. So do you guys see what I did there? Let me zoom out. I now have two separate source code blocks. They're the second one for evil mode. So that was that second thing I pasted from the LPAC of GitHub where it installed use package and as I can sample it installed evil mode. So that goes under the evil mode heading. And then this is the first source code block, which really just sets up LPAC up for us. So zoom back in now. Now there's a lot of things I want to change here. So use package evil just installs evil. It doesn't configure it in any way. There's several things I want to configure for evil mode out of the box and you probably will to you're going to want to make sure evil mode actually is the default mode for most things. You're going to want evil mode to set up how it wants to do splits. Do you prefer your vertical splits to be on the right or the left? Do you prefer your horizontal splits to be at the top or at the bottom? So we're going to have to add some configuration options here. And for a second of time, I'm just going to jump ahead to where I've changed this now. So use package evil and then I have some line breaks and I have this section. Use package inside the use package block. You have different configuration options. You have, you know, colon and yet. So what to do on initialization of evil mode. And then you have after evil. So this would be something after evil loads to do something else. You have colon config. This is your configuration options. Typically there's a lot of different things you can do with these use package blocks. But basically what I'm setting up is I set up vertical splits to the right is true windows below. So my horizontal splits at the bottom will be true.  Just start evil mode for me, please. I'm also going to add this use package block. So this is a separate use package block and this is installing evil collection because really you don't want to just install evil. You also want to install evil collections. So you have evil mode functionality baked into everything, not just your text editing.  And then just for educational purposes on this video, I'm going to suggest use package evil dash tutor. The evil tutor is kind of like the Vim tutor, except it's for evil mode in Emacs. So if you're not familiar with like your Vim key bindings and you need to run through an evil tutor, that's available for you as well. And so now that I've added that, let's go ahead and save. So I'll just hit the save button here, although now that we have evil mode, I could have done a colon W for right and I could do colon Q to quit. Now let me reload Emacs and now Elpaka should install all those extra evil packages because we had those use package blocks. And it is, it's installing some extra stuff for us. Looks like that completed. And now that I have evil mode loading by default, at least I think it should, I should be able to do a control WC to close a split. And that works. Now one thing I noticed is the font change the font is very small. I also don't have a logo anymore, but let me do control X control F to find file. So get back into dot config slash Emacs config.org, which I did not type that path correctly. Yeah, that's not the correct path. So control X control F, I typed the directory wrong. Part of the problem is the font is really small. It was hard for me to see what I was typing there. We're going to correct this font problem here in a minute permanently, but for now I just zoom in. So we've got important programs to load first Elpaka, the package manager, evil mode, of course, so I can have my VM key bindings. And then general key bindings. Let's go ahead and install general dot EL. So once again, let's do a outside plus and then begin underscore source Emacs dash lisp. Let's go ahead and add the end source block as well just so I don't forget it and create some space here. And obviously we need to add some code here. Now probably already you kind of know what we're about to do, right? We're going to do a use dash package and then name of program. The name of this program, you can go back to the GitHub for general dot EL, but you know it's general, right? So that's going to tell the Elpaka package manager that we want general, package general. It's not already installed. Install it for us. If it is installed, then we're going to give it some configuration options to set. And how do we do the configuration options? Well, you probably already know the colon config that I showed you earlier. Then inside parentheses, you know, we're going to set various configuration stuff. Now one thing I know we're going to need to add to general is for the config, we need general dash evil dash setup because I'm going to use evil, right? I like the evil key bindings, the Vim key bindings, probably most of you guys are also going to use the Vim key bindings because I love Emacs, the ecosystem, everything about it. I'm not a fan of the new Emacs key bindings, so I prefer to use evil mode. If you don't want to use evil mode though, you can ignore all the evil stuff I do in these videos. So you didn't have to set up evil mode, use package, space evil earlier or any of that. But a lot of you guys are probably going to use evil mode. So general dash evil dash setup. And then other than that, inside this use package statement, because I haven't closed it with a closing parentheses, right? Eventually I'll have a closing parentheses. But inside this, I'm going to have a code block where I also go ahead and set up some basic key bindings that I know right away I need, because for me, I'm struggling like moving between buffers, next buffer, previous buffer and things like that. So I'm going to set up some key bindings that right away I want to go ahead and set up and also just to have an example for you guys to look at. So I went ahead and added these blocks here. The very first block you can see I added a comment. Let me zoom in a little bit here. I set up the space key as the global leader key because I'm used to space and then more keys for key bindings because obviously using doom Emacs for so long. I prefer all of my key bindings to involve the space key. And then in parentheses, I have general dash create dash definer. So we have to create a definer. So what is basically create a label. And the label I created is dt slash leader dash keys. Now you could create this name to be anything. You could change dt to whatever you want. I'm going to do dt slash leader dash keys. And then you can say I have colon states, colon key maps, colon prefix, colon global prefix states because evil, the VM key bindings or their modal, right? Normal mode, insert mode, visual mode, Emacs mode essentially. Key maps are set to override prefix is set to SPC all caps. So that is the name of the space key. The global prefix would be meta space, alt space. And now that I've set that up. Now I can actually create some key bindings and that's really simple. So to create the key bindings inside the use package statement for general, I have dt slash leader dash keys, right? And then B. B is colon ignore. So this is not a real key binding. So that's why the ignore T for true is there. And then colon WK is which key. So if which key is installed, which we haven't installed it, this would be the description for this key. So space B does nothing. Space B is part of a key binding for other stuff. And until we actually press another key in the mini buffer, it's just going to say buffer, right? That's the description. So it's the buffer key bindings essentially. But until I actually hit another key like B, B to switch buffer or BK to kill the buffer, right?  And the way this is the name of the program, the actual name of the Emacs program you're running and then colon WK for the which key description that should appear if you're using which key, which we're going to install which key in just a second. Now let's go ahead and verify that all of this that I just put here actually works because I'm not positive that all of this was legit code. You never know until you actually run it, right? So let me go ahead and restart Emacs. So it is installing some more stuff. I really like the Elpaca package manager for just using it just for a few minutes.  Man, these fonts. I don't know why the fonts got really small all of a sudden, but at some point playing with the config, the fonts just got incredibly small. I can't even read the mini buffer. I'm just being honest. That's partly why I type the wrong path to the file sometimes is because I can't actually see the confirmation in the mini buffer of what I'm typing because that font is so small, but we can play with the fonts here in a minute as well. So let's see if setting up space for our leader key works and let's see if these key bindings for these buffer key bindings work. So if I do space BB to switch buffer, space BB does switch buffer. I've got it down here in the mini buffer. It says switch to buffer and I'd have to type the name of a buffer. I do space BP for previous buffer. I go back to the welcome screen for Emacs. I know this video is already running long, but the very first video has to be kind of long because I don't want to leave you guys if you're following along with a system that is still kind of incomplete. Like I really, this is still hard to work with until you do, until we add a few other things like, for example, these fonts are so bad. Let me go ahead. I'm just going to do a quick copy and paste. I'm going to add a new header here, top level header for fonts. You can see, and you can see I have a comment here, defining the various fonts that Emacs will use and then a second level header. We're going to set the font face. And then you see I have these three blocks here. I set face attribute default. That's the default font. I'm going to use JetBrains Mono because I have it installed. The height is going to be 110, so it's like a 11 point font. Weight will be medium. Then I also do a set face attribute for variable pitch font. So that will not be monospace fonts. That's your variable fonts. And you'll see variable fonts if you use things. For example, like the web browser in Emacs, E-W-W, when you're reading web pages, it's not monospace font. It's variable pitch font. I'm going to use Ubuntu font for stuff like that. And then set face attribute fixed pitch. So specify fixed pitch. I'm also going to use JetBrains Mono typically. This one and the default font should be the same probably. And then I have set face attribute for comment face and keyword face. So comment face, what I'm doing is I'm making comments be italicized. So right now in Emacs list, that's a comment. Emacs list comments start with these semicolons. Well, just for these comments to stand out, I want these to be italicized from now on. So I'm going to add that line. And then I also have keyword face italicized. Well, any kind of keywords in the document will also be italicized as well. And then one other thing, because I'm going to eventually start using the Emacs client, you know, the Emacs server. And then all my Emacs windows will be Emacs client windows. I've noticed fonts for whatever reason, even though all of this works just fine, just running Emacs the Emacs way, just typing Emacs without the server, right? But opening it as Emacs client windows, I've noticed I always have to add this line or else fonts just don't look right in the Emacs client. So add to list, default frame a list, and then set the font. And then I also set Q dash default line spacing to 0.12. So that's just obviously line spacing. Now let's see if that block of code actually works. I'm going to do a colon WQ to write and quit. Let's launch Emacs without the Emacs client. So just standard Emacs and you can already tell the font here. So this is our variable pitch font, the Ubuntu font. It actually is a little bigger, still small for purposes of this video. But it's definitely a better font than what we're using. I can actually read the mini buffer now. I can actually see what I'm typing and I'm not doing a good job of typing right now. But yeah, you can see the fonts are better. By the way, the comments, I told the comments to be italicized, right? So anything that is a commented line. So all these comments here in elist are now italicized font. So that was our new fonts section. And I added a second level heading but I don't think I really needed this because I don't know if I'm going to add anything else to this fonts section here. I think we pretty much covered that. The next thing I'm going to go ahead and do, there's a few things that I don't like about Emacs out of the box and things that most Emacs users either enable or disable. Most Emacs users are not going to need the toolbar and the menu bar. So the menu bar supports file, edit options, your standard menu on a GTK program, which is what Emacs is in this case. And then the toolbar has your icons that do various things like close and cut and save and all of that. You probably just want to go ahead and disable that. The other thing I want to do is I want to add line numbers to all of my files because I want to know what line number I'm actually on. So I'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and paste a new section here for graphical user interface tweaks and do control X plus again to zoom in a little bit. So you can see what I'm doing and this is pretty straightforward. Menu dash bar dash mode, menu bar mode is displaying the menu. If it's set to negative one, it's turned off. Toolbar mode, negative one, turn off the toolbar. Scroll bar mode, negative one. I don't need a scroll bar on the side of the window. You really don't need that in Emacs. So just turn all of that stuff off. I just want a box that displays text, nothing else. And then the second level heading here, display line numbers and truncated lines. Global display line numbers mode is one, turn on line number mode and then global visual line mode T set to true. We should have line numbers after writing all of this. I'm going to do a colon WQ for write and quit, relaunch Emacs and then control X, control F for find file. And then let me navigate to dot config Emacs config.org. I'm getting tired of typing that as well. But already this looks much better. The fonts have straightened themselves out for some reason, right? They look a lot better all of a sudden, the line numbers. So that is nice. Yeah, syntax highlighting already without too much work. This is looking pretty good. We figured out how to use the package manager. We figured out how to add key bindings because we're going to add a lot of key bindings. There's going to be hundreds of key bindings that will eventually add to this thing. The fonts look good and the visual tweaks turning off the menu system and all of that. A couple of other things we need to go ahead and do because which key is such an important like integral part of most people's Emacs config. Let's go ahead and install which key. Everybody pretty much installs which key. So I'm going to put this block here. It's your standard use package block, right? Use package, which key installs the which key program tells Elpaca install which key. And yet, so on a net, I want you to which key mode one. So which key mode is one, turn it on, right? If it wasn't one, if it was negative one or something else, some value that's not one, it would be off, right? Then we have colon config and we set these various variables. So where should which key be? I set it to the bottom of the screen, for example. How much padding should it have? How many columns should it display? What is the separator? I'm going to use a right pointing arrow. So all of these variables should be kind of self-explanatory what they are. So that is which key. And let's go ahead and colon WQ to write and quit, restart Emacs. And it's installing which key. So then control WC to close that split, control X, control F for find file. I need to find a better key binding for find file. We'll eventually get to that as well. So now let's see if which key is working. Remember the general key binding section where I did space B plus other keys for the buffer key binding. So if I just do space B, and wait a second, there is all the key bindings, right? B will switch buffer, K will kill buffer, and I even get a description when I hover over it. I kind of would like to turn that off. We'll get to all of that. But yeah, which key is definitely working by do control X and nothing else. There are all the other key bindings that would work, control X plus something else, right? So that is which key. So that is nice to have working. And the very last thing I want to add is, you know, I mentioned we would eventually add table of contents to all of our org documents. Well, org is not set up for table of contents out of the box. I also want to set up org to use bullets instead of these asterisks for headers. It just makes things look a little nicer. So I'm going to go alphabetically as best I can with these top level headers. And I'm going to add a org mode section here. So I'm going to go ahead and paste this block here. So top level, org mode, and then second level, I've got two second level headers. We're going to enable the table of contents. We're also going to enable org bullets. Enabling the table of contents, you simply need to do a use package. Let me zoom in so you can see use package to see dash org is the name of program table of contents dash org. And then commands wanted to run this command to see dash org dash enable and then a knit ad hook org mode hook to see dash org dash enable. Now, if you're not familiar with Emacs list, you may be wondering what this is, but just know every mode has a hook. So org mode has a org mode hook. And we're just making sure that anytime we're in org mode, basically that to see dash org is enabled so we can have a table of contents. And then enabling the org bullets, very similar kinds of code, right? We're going to add hook or mode hook once again, and then we're going to add org in that mode. And we're also going to use package org bullets, install org bullets. And then after we install org bullets, ad hook to org mode hook. And then you can see we're going to turn on org bullets mode because it's set to one, right? So it turns the bullets on. Let me colon WQ to write and quit. And now let's load this up. It's installing the TOC dash org package control WC to close that split control X control L for fine file. And then dot config slash Emacs config dot org. And there we have it. We have our bullets. So now this is a much cleaner way to view a document instead of having all those asterisks because second level headers were two asterisks, you know, fifth level headers would be five asterisks. And it actually expands the asterisks, right? It's a little clunky to read just using bullets for the headers. I like that a lot. Let's go ahead and add one more top level header. And it needs to be called table of contents. You can label it anything, but then out to the side of it, space colon TOC colon. And now let me escape, let me write. So colon W. And as soon as I write it, there is our table of contents. It automatically gets generated. It automatically changes itself as I add more headings to an org document. I love these table of contents. And of course, if I click on something, for example, org mode, it'll just take me right to that in the document. So I know this very first video was very lengthy, but I really think that we had to get all of this set up on day one just to have a proper text editor that you can actually begin to work with. We had to talk about the package manager. We had to set up evil mode. We had to at least talk about how to set up key bindings because almost everybody's going to want to set key bindings right away. We had to talk about the fonts because the fonts and standard Emacs are terrible. We had to talk about getting rid of the menu bars, toolbar, like this is stuff that we just had to do in Witchkey. It's such an important program. Witchkey should probably just be a default part of Emacs. Somebody should actually put that as an issue on the Emacs issue board. Witchkey should just be baked in by now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and save this document. And I've created a new repository over on my GitLab. I'm going to call it configuring Emacs. So just look for my configuring Emacs repo on my dot files over on my GitLab. And what I'm going to do is for each one of these videos in this series, I will add a new directory with the config as it existed at that point in the series. So this will be video number one. So I titled this 01-lpaqa-evl-general just to give you an idea of what we did with the config. I'm going to go ahead and put the config over on my GitLab. And then, of course, that will be not just the config.org, but also the init.el and the early init.el as well. That way you guys can go grab these configs or you can clone the repository. That way you can pull down the new configs as we go through this series in the future. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim, my homies to bald man, Mitchell, Paul, Royal West, Armored Dragon, Bash, Potato, Chuck, Commander, Angry, George, Lee, Marshall, Methodist, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Arch, Maduro, Polytech, Realities for the West Red Prophet, Rollin, Tools, Nebler, Willie, and Zenabit. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This fresh start with GNU Emacs, it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, I'm going to see more videos about free and open source software like GNU Emacs. Peace. Getting started with Emacs is a lot of work, but it's so worth it.


One night on stage you go, hey, I see you grabbing your love handles. I didn't even know I was doing it. Yeah. Well, that was helpful. That told me a lot about you that, that like sort of like broke down a great wall between us. But I'm interested in your, cause I don't like, you're open. You have a eating disorder, sort of that you, that's ongoing. Yeah. Have you gone to 12 step programs or I have tried that. But it's, you know, I'm not, I, you can't look like me and go to an eating disorder recovery thing. Like it's just like, it's like smoking weed and going to N.A. or something. No, it's just like, you know, most of the people in there have over-eating issues. And, you know, I have, but I am mildly anorexic. Meaning you will under eat. No, meaning that I have like bizarro food issues around gaining weight. You're against it. Totally. You have a scale? I do, but like I'm okay with this stuff now. Like I have been okay. I had to do a lot of work on it, but it is like if I get above a certain level of discomfort physically, like I really become totally diminished. And like I feel like zero self-worth, zero confidence. If you're over 180, 85-ish, 86-ish, you know, like I think, I mean, I've got, I've gotten heavy, but like I can't handle it. And I've spent a lot of time as I get older, just being like, dude, just enjoy yourself.  And I try to sit in that for a minute and I just can't do it. And now I'm vegan, like, you know, for the last few months, which I don't know if it's affecting my weight, but I feel better about what I'm eating. But that food stuff is so deep and it's so dug into me. From your mom, right? Yeah. Yeah. She had an eating disorder? She still, you know, she just, that was her life was, was, you know, maintaining a weight of like 119 or 116.   Maybe I, I hope you didn't write it ahead of time. I hope you just thought of it on stage. I think I must have. I hope to God. Of course they did. But you didn't just, you didn't actually sit down. That structured like a joke, but it's not a laugher. You know, like it's just a sad piece of information in a way. It gets a jarring laugh. It doesn't quite make sense. No, that's a laugh. That's funny. I mean, that could get a laugh. Yeah, but like it still, it plagues me still, you know, like I think about food constantly and about what to eat, how to eat, you know, what I shouldn't eat, how much shame I have. It's, it's, it's deeper than drugs. And it affects my. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, I guess it's cause you have, it's, you can't avoid it. It's the same kind of thing.   And, you know, it was, it affected everything. The two of them, the, the, you know, the selfishness involved in both my parents, but that eating disorder really, really got me. Like I remember I went away to college my freshman year and I, I got as skinny as ever. God, I was down in the 160s and I looked terrible, but I was, I just wanted my mom to be proud. Was she? Nah, not really. She said I looked weird. There was no winning. Right. You know what I mean? It was always, it was always a little stick. Yeah. But I think that's where I got the sense of humor too. It was always a little stick. I would think you think of yourself as a combination of your parents. Yeah. Like this one, like just ascribe. Yes, but I still try to think like, well, not that. Well, no, I think that you can have a little control over that. I can't, I do think that you can make choices in your life, you know, and also there's something proactive about isolating the bad things that you got from them and trying to sort of cognitively deal with those and embrace the things, you know, find the things that you got from them that are good. I think that's a great, you know, recovery thing, not necessarily recovery in the terms of 12 steps or anything, but in terms of psychological recovery to accept the parts of your parents that, you know, kind of made you who you are in a good way, you know, and then deal with the other ones in a different way. Like, you know, I can make different choices than to honor that monster. Your body. Yeah. It's funny, the amount of guys on here who all confess to body stuff. Yeah. And I, me included in terms of just like gripping, Maren caught me gripping my love handles on stage one time in a very subtle way. And I was like felt, but what is your body stuff?  Yeah, that's, that's the goal. Yeah. But I think I'm always like, well, I have a funny Olympic story, but I always am at a weight where people, I look like I just lost weight. That's very funny. That's, that's my way and true. That's your, that's your weight. Yeah. And we call it the Dave Wrath in the business. He's very skinny. He's very skinny. Yeah. But in my head, he's overweight. Yeah. He's like, he's big boned. Yeah. So every time I see him, I'm like, you just lost weight, but he hasn't in decades. But I went to this vitamin guy, gave me all these vitamins. Again, you can't don't look up the vitamin guy. You can't get there. You got to use net worth minimums. There's cutting edge, cutting edge. Yeah. And so he gave me all these vitamins and they gave me like a shot. Give yourself a shot this once a week with this. Take all these vitamins for this reason.  I don't know what the shot is. I mean, I may have looked at what the name of it was. But I didn't recognize the name. This is what Barry Bond said about. About steroids. Yeah, go ahead. So I never like just rubbing the cream on. And so I take the vitamins. I'm really good about the vitamins, but I like I'm always uncomfortable giving myself an injection because I literally just think I'm going to have an air bubble and die. Like I just have an irrational.  Yeah. So so shot.  So I, I do it randomly. Like I'm not being good about it, you know, so over 20 weeks, maybe I did it six times or something like that. Supposed to do it every day. Supposed to do it once a week. Got it. So I don't really do it enough, right? So then we check the blood work. All looks good. Everything has gotten way better. And then they give me slightly different vitamins and the shot. And then I go, what is this shot? And I think it, it's not ozepic, but like basically ozepic. And then I thought, this guy didn't even tell me he was giving me this drug. Like he never explained it to me. Like I was giving you this as part of it. Like we didn't even talk about what the shot was or that. And so I was just laughing like I was almost tricked into taking. Yeah, you didn't be involuntary. That's funny. So like it's like me too, but with ozepic. Yeah. But I always feel like I could take ozepic and still gain weight. I feel like I'm the person that could pull that off. You believe that you're capable of? Yeah, yeah, I can beat ozepic. It's like the people who would beat the gastric bypass.  Multiple times apparently. Yeah. What's your, you like, I think you just like snacking. Oh man. I mean, I feel like food as a. Self-medication, reward, shame, eating, like it's all, it's all good. What's your shame? You know, just binging, knowing it's bad for me and then taking it too far. And I've gotten so much better because like our house doesn't have a lot of junk in it. That's the key. You just can't have it. Yeah, I can't have it, but I, you know, I find ways to sneak. But when I was a kid, you know, my mom would buy like Chocodiles. Remember Chocodiles? I remember, yeah. It was like Twinkies with chocolate on them. And we liked them so much the second they got in the house, I would like hide half of them. I would just open it up and hide half from my brother and sister so that I wouldn't not get enough of them. And when my parents got divorced, I used to like make myself hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches and eat Intamin's cake with it. And like, it was a lot of food happiness. Got it. And no one could, neither parent would say don't. No, they were never buying for your attention. It was in one discussion of health that we never got no health. Those are the rules. There's never like eat that because it's healthy. Don't eat that because it isn't healthy. Literally no discussion of health. I didn't eat broccoli till 12th grade when it was in a Chinese food. I never ate salad as a kid. The vegetables generally corn or peas from a can. I just didn't even know what healthy food was. And then when I lived with Sandler, when we were young comics, we loved to eat. We would talk about it all day like, oh, man, we're going to go to Red Lobster tonight. And and even now we'll reminisce about meals. Oh, God, you remember that night when we went to that restaurant with that Chinese food? What's great is everyone hearing this can hear Sandler doing it.  You know, like, yeah. And so that was all also connected to being a bad athlete because I was the youngest kid in the grade. I just resented anyone who was accomplished with physical things. So it's it's also a struggle to not be angry at the idea that I have to do anything for my health, exercise, food. Like it feels connected to somebody that tortured me. What's the best shape you've ever been in? The best shape I've ever been in was so funny. Someone asked me to do a movie, but it required me to be kind of ripped. And I said, no, because I'm like, I'm not going to get. Ripped. How much how much time would that take? And so I can't eat anything. The best shape I've ever been in, I think maybe during covid, I lost like 17 pounds and got healthy, probably out of just general health terror. And did you like it? I liked it, but not enough.  It's so hard to not eat like bread. Like it's so easy to not lose weight because like you can eat great all day.  And in that, yeah. And then you were like, well, this day is fucked. I might as well have ice cream. Exactly. Where are the chocodiles? And I have a theory, which I talked about in a month, but it is sort of what I always think, which is I think no matter how much you eat, you can only gain one pound a day. So once you let it go. And by the way, there's no science behind this. I really feel like you can only gain one pound in a day. So if you're going to let it go, really let it go. Oh, right. Because it's you're already you already gained the pound. Yeah, it's not going to be two pounds. For some reason, I've decided that science. It is not science, but that's what I decided. Yeah. Well, somebody, a buddy of mine made the observation and I think is right. If you drink tea with dessert, it melts. The dessert really in your stomach. It doesn't at all. But just the weird things that we all go like, you know what? I've intuited something that's entirely made up and pure nonsense. I mean, I always was a nerd. I still am a nerd. I was always physically very slight, you know, tiny, very small shoulders, never liked how I looked was always physically weak and a thing that you were aware of. Oh, yeah, it was devastating to me. It's one of the blocks on there, I think it was devastating to me.  You know, when I was a kid, I wouldn't go to like the store because I thought they wouldn't sell me stuff because I was so ugly. It just had like a real thing of it. It like was where do you get the idea that you're ugly? I don't want to get into all that. You know, you have people will like say something without knowing what they're saying or what they're causing. And I think one of the things that hurt was that up to the age of like five or six, I was objectively very cute and then shit turned. I never thought you weren't kind of cute. OK, well, thank you. I appreciate that. I thought the eyebrow, like the uneven eyebrow thing. This was like it's a natural rock. But so I never never liked it, never liked how I looked. And then in my 20s, did a lot of work to like be like, you know, it doesn't matter. Actually, you know, being good at something that you love gives you a lot of confidence. And so when I started doing stand up, you know, right in college, I was like 21 or 22, didn't have confidence until I started doing well on stage. And then suddenly everything changed. Like my whole life, the way I thought of myself, the way I carried myself, the way I talked to people, the way I talked to girls, they just changed. You know, all came from stand up being really good at something that I loved and wanted to be good at was awesome. Yeah. So that sort of changed everything for me. And then and then, you know, I started acting as nerds and all of this stuff. And this industry, it really puts you in a box. It really is like this is what this person does. This is what they play. And after doing that for years, I was like, you know, there's so much work that I don't have access to. I feel like all they want me to do is play this kind of beta male. And that, you know, and that was 10 years ago, I did that special. And that's how I presented myself. Right. So that's what I'm saying. Like as much as it's their fault, it's partially like you were. That's how you kind of thought of yourself. That's how I thought of myself. And that's how I thought I could get work. And that is how I got and stand up will will be a negative. It's a bit like you get laughs saying it. So then you're like, I guess this is who I am. You know what I mean? Like sort of. And that is how I felt. But, you know, I had that thing of that. I think someone like Conan has, you know, where all these jokes are about how he's beta, but he's not Conan's alpha. Yeah, sort of like that. So I really had that like, you know, drive and motivation and ambition and all this stuff. My jokes on stage were about how I'm terrified of stuff. But in real, in real life, I really was, you know, I wanted to be really good at it. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to like crush on stage. If I went on a show, I wanted to be funnier than everybody else. I wanted to bury my friends, you know, that's very fun to acknowledge. Yeah. And that and I love. I always knew that about you. You did. I always knew that about you. So I always knew that about you. So I'd go to like this sort of communal meltdown thing. I was like, no, this is for keeps. Yeah. This is like, there's definitely a competition here. Oh, yeah. It's not it's not it's not a commune. No, it wasn't for me. It was for some people. It was for a lot of people. And I know that some people didn't like that about me, that at the meltdown, which was such a great room and this communal space that I was sort of like, I want to do. I want to invite all these people to my show, all these really funny people. The funniest people in the country, every famous, you know, comedian did that show. And on that night, I want to bury. I want to be funnier than them. That's the spirit of alternative comedy, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, diet. Do you mean dieting or just general diet? Probably both, right?  You don't you seem about right? The thing is that somebody you're and I feel this way about Roy Wood, too. Like that's just the size you are. So I can't really notice kind of much of it, but I've had my swings.  Yeah, super shirtless, just for myself.  Like what size? What size do you think your body is supposed to be? I feel like I'm semi close now, but I could be more muscular.  I brought shoulders, you know, I mean, I don't think I was supposed to be like a very skinny person necessarily, but you know, it could be better. Maybe in the thighs, I don't know where it's supposed to be. It's going to say size. Yeah, that's what I had on my phone checking show me thighs. Do you beat yourself up when you're overweight or when your thighs aren't right? No, I'm in full denial. You know what I mean? Like I look in the mirror like, all right, this looks like, you know, symmetric or whatever, longer t-shirt. They don't turn like the actual frontage. You just turn sideways. I'm like, oh, that looks kind of skiniish. And he turns and you see how wide you are. Like, no, no, that's not the best. No, no, no, this is the wrong. Yeah, this angle is not appropriate. I'm good. So that part, you know, bothers me about that. What's your inner monologue like? You don't need that extra sandwich, you know what I mean? You don't need is it like, oh, is it friendly in the beginning? When it gets out of hand, it's like, yo, what are you doing, bro? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, look at yourself. Like take all your clothes off and look at yourself. And you think this is a good idea to just do Chick-fil-A for the third day in a row type thing?   Yeah. As far as dieting concerns, dieting and exercise is kind of the only way to take care of your body. You can take this pill. You can do that. Well, now the shot. Yeah, you can use this equipment, whatever, but you just, you have to do them both. You got to do something. Yeah. Do you worry about, like, you got, I have daughters now. I should be more, like, do you worry about that?   You know what I'm saying? You still doing that cliff parkour?  That hardcore parkour, bro. I would love to come by. Let me know, text me, bro. I'll be right there. So we have a good time. All at night. Wow. All at night. So they just, you know, got a bit, but I do want to set a good example for, you know, good living and stuff like that. Hey, did you like that? Did you like that? Yeah. Did you like it though? You want more? Don't want to work would rather watch videos of me grab acid with people.  This is like when the weatherman says there's a high pressure system coming in. I'm not really used to the green screen.


Chapter 6 verse 1, children obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right. Honor thy father and thy mother, which is the first commandment with promise. They may be well with thee, and the dumbest live long on the earth. The fathers provoke not their children to wrath. Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Slaves, I know the King James Version, and probably all of your Bibles says servants. Not an accurate translation. Slaves. Be obedient to them that are your masters, according to the flesh. With fear and trembling and singleness of your heart. As unto Christ. Not rely service as men pleasers, but as the servants of Christ. Doing the will of God from the heart. With good will. Doing service as to the Lord and not to men. Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord. Whether he be bond or free. Your masters. Do the same things unto them. For bearing threatening, knowing that your master also is in heaven. Neither is there respect of persons with him. Simple summary. The second half of the epistle, after all as a brother Brian rightly laid out for us this morning. Following the pattern of Paul, he always tells us who God is and what God has done for us. Spends the first half of the letter painting the picture of how awesome God is. And how much we owe him. And then, you know, the pivots somewhere in the middle of the epistle, usually in the word therefore, in light of how good God has been, here's what we ought to be doing. And he lays it all out. And so very practically, as practical as that, he's got something to say to everybody. Husbands, wives, children, fathers, slaves, masters. We all have a duty, right? We've all got a duty. We have an obligation. And he lays out that obligation. It's in light of all that God has done for us that we look at our duty, our obligation, and go, okay, this is my thing. And I need to do this. Signing off the letter, he begins in the tenth verse to say, finally, this is the summary of this letter, the end of this letter. Preachers do it in, you know, a live setting to give you hope. And finally in closing, it's the thing that preachers are famous for for bringing you back to consciousness, getting you excited. Oh, it's almost over. And finally in my first closing, but Paul here, what he does is say, this is the end of the letter. This is the last thing I want to say to you. Finally, be strong in the Lord. Be strong. He says, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Now, what I'm going to say to you may be somewhat repetitious if you've had to endure my preaching before. I'm going to say again, God made us male. He knew it. He had something in mind when he made us male. It was the gender distinctions are his doing. It is really sort of what creation, you read the account of creation and everything goes from one level of good to another level of even better. There's a progression to the whole creation account given to us in Genesis chapter one and two. But it's all moving somewhere. And the ultimate act of creation is God creating man in his own image, in his own likeness. But he's not done. You can tell he's not done when he says it is not good. For everything that was done, it's called good. But he's not good that man should be alone. I'll make him a helper suitable for him. God said it is not good that man should be alone. I'll make him a helper. So that is God kind of clueing us in that this is the high point of creation. This is what all of this creative action has been leading up to. And that is the creation of gender. Among humans created in the image of God. God takes the one man that has been created in his image and he takes that man created in his image, puts him into a deep sleep. I point out often, I'll point it out again, what God did not do was worth noting. God said I'll make him a helper. He did not repeat what he had done to make Adam. He formed Adam out of the dust of the ground, breathing in his nostrils the breath of life. A man became a living soul. God did not repeat that to make woman. God did not form her out of the dust of the ground and breathe in her nostrils the breath of life and she became a living soul. He didn't do that. What he did do is he put the man into a deep sleep. And he took from him what he made into a woman. And there is a mystical sense in which God actually took the likeness of God, the image of God and divided that into two. So that for us humanly speaking, we look to a mother and a father for things that actually come from God, the father. Our father in heaven is actually best seen when a man and a woman come together. In the holiness of marriage.  They make up for the lack that each other has. They are what each other lacks. There is something about this wonderful thing when a child, and most of us did not have the benefit of this, but when a child can look at that relationship, can look at that union, can see two people that are actually functioning as one. You see two people that are actually complementing, actually completing one another. There are things that you can only know about the goodness of your heavenly father as you have seen it in the kindness, gentleness of your mother. There are things that you can only know about God the father as you have seen it in the courage and the strength, the clarity, the decisiveness of a father in an ideal situation. It is in that thing, family, this invention of God in marriage that God is actually seen. There is a sense in which the very image of God is restored when two people who know the Lord, two people in whom the Spirit of God lives, come together as a man and wife, and they truly become one in a way that no two men can, in a way that no two women can, they become one in a way that everything else attempts to mock, everything else attempts to imitate in that union. There is a sense in which the image of God is seen, best reflected. So I would maintain that the creation of gender, the distinction between men and women, were really what all of creation was moving toward them, the scriptures. God made us to be men. And in making us men, I maintain, brothers, as I've said many times before, He made us for a war. And every one of us, since we were born, when we were little boys, we were born into a cosmic conflict between good and evil, a universal war, and we knew it innately, and we wanted to affect it. We wanted to be in that fight, good versus evil. We dreamed about it. We dreamed of greatness in that great conflict. So I find myself coming to this section of this epistle, finally my brethren, be strong in the Lord. Biblically speaking, something else I'll repeat to you right now, manhood is in fact associated with strength. Strength of character. Yes, even physical strength. That 40% of the average man's body is muscle tissue, whereas it's about 25% of the average woman. God made us to be the stronger. God made them to be the weaker. Weaker doesn't mean inferior, but weaker. First Peter chapter 3 just means more easily broken, delicate. There's a beauty to that weakness. There's a beautiful sort of weakness, a delicateness that the scriptures reveal associated with womanhood that is not supposed to be a characteristic of a man. I was a boy once, just like your fellows were once boys. And we dreamed of being men. The question I would ask you at this moment, are you the man you dreamed that you would be? Are we, are we at least on our way, as a man that I look to as I thought about growing up? I want to be a man, I want to accomplish great things. I want people to see me as great. I want it to be respected. I think there's some of that that is the total expression of the very image of God in us. Oh yeah, the image of God is messed up by sin, and men will go way beyond just wanting to be respected to wanting to be worshipped. That's the reality.  There's something in the heart of my little boy, my now seven-year-old son, that every time he accomplishes anything on the wrestling mat, he looks to see did I see it. The first person he wants to address is me. I'm very grateful for that. What a privilege. Now, some of you guys don't know my story, but I didn't grow up with a dad. My dad had left us when I was very young. There was two teachers that played significant roles in my life. Two male teachers. There was a boy. One played the role of a messenger from Satan. He was a homosexual, and he really did mess up my mind. He did, in fact, try to drag me into a relationship. All the time I thought he was just feeling like a dad. The day I was being groomed for a romance, the repulsion that came over my soul at the realization of what this was really all about on a camping trip, really almost completely derailed my life, sent me down a path, a really messed up path, a path where I was just weirder and more violent and more bitter. My only ambition as a boy after that season was just to get big enough and strong enough that nobody could ever mess with me. Nobody could mess with me, nobody could take advantage of me, and I could take vengeance on a world. But there was another man that came, another teacher, a male teacher, and I didn't have a relationship with this guy. I just saw him in the classroom. I didn't go on camping trips with him, because I'd kind of been burned, right? I wasn't asked either, you know, I'm not... But this man was a Christian. This man was a Christian. This man was sent by God into my life. He taught me science in middle school. His job was to lay out the fear of evolution. I've often testified about this man. Lawrence Easton. My little son, Ben, bears the middle name, Lawrence, for that very reason, for the role that this man played. The role that was so very significant, because it was more than just what he knew that he was passing on to me. It was who he was. It was the kind of man that he was. The way he lived. Mr. Easton, he was tall and strong. He was handsome. He had a beautiful wife. He had a really cool magnum PI mustache. And he knew things. He knew established scientific laws. He laid out for me all the laws of science that this is the 1970s, the laws of science that destroy the theory of evolution. He told me every reason why Darwin was wrong. And it was the very Bible that he owned that he had on the corner of his desk that he was not allowed to read to us. That I connected who he was and all that he knew with that book. It was the day that I asked the question, Mr. Easton, where did we come from then? My 13-year-old heart had to know and I remember him turning to face the class and him saying, I've testified to this before to you, man. He took a deep breath inside, searching for the words, shaking his head. He said, it's against the law for me to tell you. Which was the perfect answer to give to this rebel? Because once he said that one, oh, really? Oh, it's against the law so they don't want me to know. Well, I've had enough of them already. They don't want me to know. I must know. It's that book, isn't it? He said a lot by what he did not say. I aspired one day that would be he taught science and health. I remember him just telling us in class, remember one day he said, all right, listen, it was a health class. He had a muscle, growing muscle, muscle tissue and he just mentioned, he wasn't boasting, he mentioned curls. He's a national guardsman and on the side of his teaching gig and he tries to stay healthy and I remember him saying in the class, I curl 100 pounds this many times but if you curl it a whole lot more times a lighter weight, it's a lot better. I remember just being a 13 year old one, you can curl 100 pounds. I remember the thought.   His witness, who he was and everything else, I started reading the Bible that year because of his witness. Recent weeks, if I go, I went along with my old friend. Lauren sees that he is in hospice care. He's dying now and he's dying like a man and I've always said I want a glorious death myself. Always I've said, you know what, I want a Muslim bullet right through my head.  I want to be right in mid-sentence.  Now there's a high degree of probability on that. So I make it a matter of prayer.  I want to die for the cause. I want a worthy death. A death whereby you can glorify God. I've always said that. It's different. I've watched my old teacher, I once aspired to be like, I've seen him embrace the weakness of his dying. I've watched him as he's changed, as his hair is gone, his strength is gone. I go down every Wednesday. I drive down an hour and a half to where he lives on the coast. Every Wednesday is sort of a new landmark. And he goes, well, I can no longer climb the stairs and sleep in the bed with a wife of mine here. Down here now on the first floor, I get this hospital bed. Every week it's something. Last week, he's a man. But embracing it with such humility, such humility with such a gratitude that I'm going to heaven. I talk to him about heaven. I talk to him about what little our minds can grasp about where he's going and about the prime, the prime that he's never known. The prime is ahead of him, not behind him. I talk to him about the glory that will be his and the reward waiting. We've had some great talks and such humiliation. A week ago, he looked at me and said, I have a question. We talked a lot about his funeral. We planned that out. We overplanned his funeral. But he said I have a question. I understand you say no, the awkward. He said you think you're strong enough that you could lift me up and put me on the commode. So I got this bedpan. It won't work. My legs won't work. I can't do it. I said I had no one strong enough. I've been lifting weights my whole life just for this moment, just for this honor right here. So I bare hugged my old teacher and get it done. And ultimately, he got to endure the humiliation of his wife cleaning him up while I hold him.  He's weak, can't do anything. He's apologized. I said, do you understand the witness that you gave to me? Do you understand what you did for how God used you in my life? This is the greatest honor I've ever known. And I read honestly, I still welcome a Muslim poet, but watching the humility and the faith of a one strong man watching strength leave and embracing it has altered my whole perspective on that.  Remember when it was when we were little boys and we dreamed one day we're going to be big and strong and we're going to do things, right? Remember? Please consider now all you've grown up little boy that this is that day that we dreamed about. Now is the day for any real greatness that is ever going to come out of these lives of ours to the glory of God to manifest. Now's the time. Now's the time for us to put away all that boy stuff, childish things. Even if we've carried those childish things all the way into this season wherein it's time to put them away. Because the hour is late. We have been invited into a fight that we cannot possibly win on our own. We've been invited into a fight as he says, you've got to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. And he tells us in the next verse why the subsequent verses here will point out to us. We've got to put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil where verse 12 says, but we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and against powers against the rulers of the darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places. We're in a fight that I've said to you before so outside of our weight class it's outside of our life form class even. That we have been invited into a fight against higher forms of life. I will remind you once again that according to the 8th Psalm God made men a little lower than the angels. He made men a little lower than the angels and then having made us a little lower than the angels has invited us into a fight with angels. He made us a little lower than the angels and then calls us into a fight with beings in a higher forms of life they've been around a long time they've studied our kind they see us we can't see them they got all kinds of advantages we're absolutely as he said I send you out of sheep among wolves now how do you like that I'm sending you out of sheep among wolves when your lover would have said I'm sending you out of wolves among sheep but he didn't we're not going out with a black leather jacket we're going out with a little fuzzy sweaters on among wolves be strong in the Lord in the power of his might but we wrestle not against flesh and blood this is not a flesh and blood fight it's against principalities and powers and rulers that's really kind of intimidating me if you really stop and grasp this if you really stop for a minute and think about what we're against and what they would if they had their way what they would do with us how this whole thing wouldn't end wouldn't end with just a little public humiliating knockout it would end with our souls in the hell and everyone we love likewise in the abyss think about all that is at stake think about this one reality and maybe you can relate to this better you who have done any of you who have done any prison time I'm sure in the room full of us sinners some of us who have been incarcerated yes you've done the time there you know what a punk is a prison punk that in our absolute sick society which by the way you guys know prison was never God's idea God said beat him and get him back to work the law was plain that crime ought to be dealt with justly, swiftly, justly, evenly eye for eye, tooth for tooth though wrongly applied to personal offenses was God's idea in the law with regard to crime and punishment simple restitution is God's idea public beating I like the proverbs Proverbs 18 about the fool's mouth and bites of beating his lips call for strokes strokes were once the way right it's oh the genius of it but instead what we've done in our modern society in being humane we've done something so sick and cruel to human beings we lock them up together with a worst of you know humanity so they can do awful things to each other and so in prison they in fact do you know it's crime school people are in bitter it's not the deterrent that anybody assumed it would be instead you come out worse right thinking of this little dude who used to come five foot seven guy little white kid always bouncing around his long hair he wanted to be a drummer rock and roll drummer had dreams always had these drumsticks these back pocket he was hanging around me and the guys in my band and going hey guys you think you know I can make it you know if we practice really hard remember this kid he's like 17 years old we always say well what do you mean how do you define making it you know we try to talk to him about his life and about the Lord he was just one of those kids you know they started doing burglaries he did a big string of burglaries and ultimately he got caught in fact he was committed to burglaries my little kid's sister you know she got juvenile time he goes off to the big house you know I saw him two years later when he got out you've seen this he looked like an old man the guy had been used been used as an object of you know he'd been a sex slave in prison he'd been an object of of men's abuse not an awful thing and you know he didn't the bouncer was gone in his walk he and he snapped to this kid his name was Dale in fact Dale's the father of my niece he just snapped one day he just snapped he's out prostituting himself after prison because he completely destroyed he sees he's nothing he sees no value in his existence he's just down in you know homosexuals always got a place they got a park right in the middle of Bangor man he's down there just prostituting himself and ultimately one day he just told his brother whoever picks me up today I'm killing him I'm not killing him and he did he executed some you know middle-aged bank manager from the little Canadian border town came to our town for his perversion you know Dale executed he's gone away for life that's what he's doing now you've seen what happens to people in those places what happens when someone becomes that kind of slave do you understand that what's at stake in the fight that we're in I want to paint a picture for you I'd like you to feel something about this in fact I'd like you to get mad because there are devils that would like to punk you out they would like very much to make you their slave and they would get gratification from your sin you think that you're doing your will you think that you're doing your own will and that you're the man and all the time you're another but their toy everything that they would do to you they want to do to your children they want to do that to your wife they want to do that to everyone you love they would have them all enslaved and drag them right down to the abuser so there's a lot at stake in this thing we've been invited into a fight which there is a lot at stake and we are absolutely incapable of winning this on our own so the scriptures couldn't be any more invading with be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might and put on all your armor and get your weapon get it get your armor get your weapon I'm not going to focus on the armor of God the weaponry just that one thing that we must be strong in the Lord you got to take up this one this one weapon the word of God we're going to take under you the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand stand therefore I mean your Lord is good about with truth and having on the breastplate of righteousness and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace and above all taking the shield of faith whether you should be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked and take the helmet of salvation and the word of God praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit and watching there unto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints what are we to do in this world? we get suited up as our brother Sandy called this to you suit up get in your uniform get on your armor get on and then take your weapon and then do what well you use it you do what with it three things primarily number one you lit it number one you apply it number two you preach it you preach it you speak the very word of God number three you pray it we're called to it right here do this you suit up in the spirit watching there unto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints and for me Paul says verse 19 pray for me suit up arm yourself and pray pray for me that utterance may be given under me that I may open my mouth boldly and make known the mystery of the gospel some of the modern translations have him saying pray for me that I would speak boldly this gospel as I should it's an intimidating thing to be standing against the entire world as he was do you realize that you now as a Christian like Paul stand against the entire world you guys all understand what's going on right now in your time right you understand that worldwide I'm going to say something you can take and weigh out worldwide the American Christian or the professing American Christian has exercised profound influence and it has not been good in recent years the apathy of the American Christian is responsible for the current leadership of this country coming to power and that current leadership has changed America's role in the world it is the very American Christian apathy that causes them to not engage not take a stand not think biblically and not vote biblically that is causing Christians in Nigeria to be slaughtered 65 million according to George Barnas 65 million identify themselves self-identify themselves as evangelical Christian that is to say that about some kind of life-changing experience with the gospel they attend church at least once a week they actually own and read a bible they give a portion of their income and according to Barnas 65 million in this country think about this for a second 52 million only 52 million votes elects the entire federal government of all of what? 350 plus million people in this country only 52 million vote actually elects that entire federal government 52 million votes now there are 65 million who identify themselves as Christians only half of which are even registered vote and of the half that are registered only half actually go vote and when they go vote there is not any significant indication with exit polling it's like they know the bible so we are where we are persecution for all the brothers and sisters has erupted around the world on a level that at no time in human history has it been like it is right now according to those guys with voices voice of the martyrs and other organizations Amnesty International other organizations that actually track these things they have determined that there is more actual persecution for Christians happening now than there has ever been in the entire 20 centuries since our Lord Jesus came the church was born and it was born under the Roman emperor the tyranny of Rome and you know of the 6 million oh so Christians that were slaughtered those first 3 centuries what's happening right now he is eclipsing all of that worldwide and the irony of it that it is the American Christian who just doesn't care he is comfortable believes he's on his way to heaven so let the world go to hell don't engage don't vote don't think biblically our pastors generally speaking are not teaching the bible you're blessed man you've been led by the Lord into good pastor you have pastors like your David Rosales who will open up this book and let the sermon pick him he will open it up and take you from one end of this book all the way to the other end of this book model given to us by pastor Chuck Smith by J. Bernard McGee by others who've come long before but outside of our movement guys there is a horrible level of biblical illiteracy ignorance ignorance that I thought I never would see in my lifetime Barna he polled in fact this is one of the most extensive polls that have been done in our lifetime very revealing poll that reveals exactly where Christians stand on the very fundamentals this is Christians who were polled they would ask these questions just six basic do you believe in absolute truth do you believe the bible is accurate three is Satan a real being four heaven cannot be earned is that correct five Jesus lived a sinless life right number six God still rules in the world today nine percent nine percent of all the Christians polled by Barna agreed for those very fundamental truth so we live in the time of great apostasy and great apathy the apathy is the real thing that I'm trying to do something about I really do believe we can affect that I think we should we must try I believe in the words of John Quincy Adams you know duty is ours results God whether we actually turn anything around or not doesn't matter it doesn't matter is that we stand and that we take a stand and that we speak for God and we speak God's word polls request that we would suit up that we would arm ourselves and that we would then pray that we would that we would apply the word of God that we would preach the word of God and that we would pray the word of God you take the sword of the spirit and do it praying all kinds of prayers praying in the spirit I would ask you to pray for me as you pray for your pastor you guys are doing that right let me ask you this question if I told you if I told you if I spoke out enough against Islam radical Islam ethnic Islam is dangerous in that it dopes men's souls into hell but it's non-violent but you know true Islam radical Islam is a horrible thing that must be spoken against your pastors done that very boldly and if I told you that he was on a list on a hit list would you engage in prayer on his behalf set up like a 24-hour prayer cover you know get a clock and just say who can pray for 15 minutes and just sign up on the clock and pray and just intercede on behalf of your pastor wouldn't you do that if I told you that was the case I bet you would you jump up and go well we're going to cover him in prayer his legs are in danger do you understand he's already been targeted by something worse than any Islamic hit man those punks are nothing compared to what's after him it's a scary thing it's intimidating in fact if your pastor, if any of us failed to look at the awesome strength and the awesome might of God you can find ourselves quite overwhelmed because there is a lot of stake and there's also a lot against us I boarded a plane about a year ago I did a red eye from Ontario to Philadelphia I declare brothers a devil got on a plane with me whatever I just laughed, whatever the meeting was that I preached at it was fruitful and initially I was excited was all fired up, grateful had that attitude that I'm just so glad that God could find something to do with me that he could that he could ever do anything good accomplished anything through this life is a miracle it's a testimony to his grace and I'm thinking these thoughts but at some point or another I declare some principality set beside me bringing a plane and just started whispering in my ear just leaning over whispering in my ear boy what do you think you're doing who do you think you are don't you know that the greater the sphere of your influence the greater the destruction is going to be when you go down you're going down it's the level of moral purity required but this is beyond you you can't do it telling me I really started getting freaked out because I know me you know you I know me the potential of stupidity the potential of failure is enormous and it freaks me out that God has trusted me with anything honestly I find myself just getting so full of anxiety I'm trying initially to pray I can't even pray out of it it was so bad honestly I'm not that that fickle panic attack I'm going to I need a pill I try to act like a man all the time I am freaked out like some little kid by the time I landed in Philadelphia daylight it was so bad I was so overwhelmed with anxiety so intimidated honestly it was like I tuned into Goliath his trash jar get over here boy I want to feed you to the birds get over here am I a dog that you've insulted me as a giant with that stick get over here and now I've listened to it I've really provoked a giant with a stick what have I done what am I doing out here really did that awful feeling and it was so bad I didn't know what else to do I just had to call the brother and call Joe I loved him a voicemail call me it's needed to call me needed to talk to me no joke my brother he called me he listened for a minute let me remind you of all that is for you let me remind you of who is with you who is in you that conversation was stirring me man he reignited a fire I find myself just growing not that sort of you know carnal puffed up kind of but just the reminder of God in his might the power of his might that he's made available to you and I us little weaklings us pitiful little humans a sheep he has empowered us to actually allow that power to flow through us when he's given us this powerful weapon it occurred to me why is this giant talking since trash oh because he's scared he doesn't like the little human bugging him I got so fired up brother I got so stirred so encouraged I would have if you would pray for your pastor get your pastors on a regular regular get do it guys get a clock you know have somebody just put a clock together we do this thing at home called the prayer watch just asking everybody can you do 15 minutes I'm not even going to say can you not carry one hour with me can you just do 15 minutes can you not carry one quarter of an hour with me will you just sign up maybe you got 15 minutes of drive time you could commit to interceding at that time for your pastor for your spiritual spirit in fact doing that at drive time here might keep you from sin you know commit to some intercession there's just some other time that you can set aside and you can look at that clock and you see vacancies holes in the clock and get to where you're like there's enough of us we can cover our pastor in prayer it's like keeping a watch man just being a century a spiritual century consider that will you guys initiate and just do it I would ask if you would pray while you're praying pray for me like Paul said pray for me to have boldness pray for me that I would speak the word of God boldly God's opened a great door I've got 16 states just over the next 8 weeks from Alaska to Colorado we have the privilege of going and speaking cross-denominationally to pastors and inviting them to do what we've been doing in Calvary for all these years and let's get back to Bible exposition more Bible your people are biblically illiterate now listen that's um that's not an easy thing to have somebody tell you when you've been preaching your heart out and preaching sermons for you know decades when you stand up there with these white whiskers and go alright you need to change you need to get the whole Bible to these people you need to make systematic study of the Bible you gotta get your people reading the Bible the whole Bible and you gotta get them to stand up and speak we gotta stand up to who much is given much is expected we the heirs of the freedom that was bought and paid for by the lives of soldiers the heirs of the freedom that God has provided us here are people to whom much has been given I say that much is expected much is required we have the opportunity to influence the entire world from this land we've neglected it the apathy of the Christian abandoning the spiritual fights and can I just say one more thing not even voting if you're a Christian and you don't vote you're in sin it's like Peter denying the Lord it's like Peter saying I don't know him you don't vote you're like it's like saying no I don't have a stand on moralistic I know million and a half babies for your being slaughtered in abortion but you know can't do anything about it you don't vote you're in sin your vote is not some little you know right or privilege it's a prophetic witness that you're bailing on when you don't do it you know vote with a Bible in one hand and a ballot in the other and be bold the fight that we're in brothers is way bigger than us you gotta pray we gotta plead with God we can't just cop the attitude that so many evangelicals sort of cop that you know what it's all gonna go it's all gonna burn it's all gonna hell it's all sort of fatalistically they're like you know what one world government antichrist one world money system it's all moving in that direction that's what it's supposed to do there's a lot of mystery on this stuff guys one thing I do know is that we have a duty our duty does not change we have a duty to stand against what is wrong and what is absolute tyranny and tyranny is what we're seeing in our own day the executive branch of our government has presumed rights that are not its own violations of our constitution you know why it's happening because we've all let it happen Christians who vote or don't vote Russell Kirk philosopher he said politicians are just actors performing a script that is written by the audience politicians are just actors performing a script that was written by the audience people that are in power right now you say well they don't represent me no they represent the people that voted for them they represent the people that vote I want to encourage you brothers to be in the spiritual fight don't be ignorant be in this fight pray suit up pray the word of God speak the word of God live the word of God but ultimately duty is ours results God let me just ask you one question in clothing I want to start about your life you're the kind of man that will come and be here all day long and listen to men speak the word of God to you you have heard God's word bespoke we ain't much we stammer use our limited understanding and use our limited use of language to try to convey something to you that would change your life you know forever but it is up to you to receive and respond I want to ask you before we leave today are there men in this room that have yet to respond perhaps earlier today invitations were given and you had a strong suspicion that you probably ought to do something but you didn't because you're practical don't be an idiot honestly brother you've ignored kinder invitations today you said through kinder invitations more gracious more patient honestly I'm just saying as your brother if God is speaking to you if God is talking to you about changes you need to make some level of surrender that you need to actually do do it don't be an idiot don't rip yourself off don't let your pride cheat you out of the plan that God has for your life