Ok, people are slowly dropping in from lunch. I think it's about time to get started. Yeah, ok. Welcome here everyone. To the session about how to build a scalable platform for today's publishers. Presented under the site building track. So, what are we gonna do here today? First of all, I'm gonna introduce myself. Talk a little bit about the project that I'm currently working at. We're also gonna walk through some of the common requirements that you bump into building sites for publishers today. Some common requirements, not specifically in all tight to Drupal, but common requirements on a CMS for publishers today. Then we're gonna touch on why Drupal is the right tool for these kind of sites. And we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into what modules we've been using to solve some very particular problems around certain areas. And in the end I'm gonna give a short demonstration of some of the modules that we've been using. Ok, first me. Dick Ulsson, I currently live in Doha, in Qatar, right in the middle of the desert in the Middle East. I'm the lead Drupal developer at Al Jazeera, the TV channel, leading all the Drupal sites and so on. I'm currently on a leave of absence from Node 1. It's a Drupal consultant in Sweden. I'm also a very active core contributor. I also work on a lot of contributed modules, among them being UUID and Deploy. Ok, so, a time ago Al Jazeera started adopting Drupal for a lot of their sub-sites, smaller sites, smaller projects. And they did so in order to be able to move a little bit faster on the web to deploy projects, to reach the audience a little bit faster. One of the sites that was built was blogs.aljazeera.com. A site that turned out to be very important during the Arab revolutions that we've seen the past year here. It allowed the editors to reach the audience faster, live blogging and so on. Unfortunately, due to internal reorganisations, Al Jazeera is not ready to deploy Drupal for Al Jazeera.com yet. But we're definitely in the process. So the platform that we've been building for Al Jazeera, at Al Jazeera. We're scaling that, we're benchmarking that and we're testing that to match the requirements of Al Jazeera.com. We want to build a generic and good platform. Just to give you an idea of what we're benchmarking against and what we're working on. We have about 50 web editors at Al Jazeera. Around 30 articles or pieces are published every day. It contains news articles, opinion pieces, program packages, etc. All in all, you can roughly say it's around 60 to 100 nodes a day including all references and so on. So it's not a large number but still quite substantial. We have editors working in two shifts so they are constantly working on the CMS on the staff. And on the other side, average, we have about 60 million requests per hour hitting Al Jazeera.com. And during spikes, around 50 million requests per hour. That's about 14,000 requests per second, quite substantial numbers. Again, this is currently not a Drupal site but this is what we're scaling and testing for. Blogs.aljazeera.com is what is running in Drupal right now and we're in the process of upgrading to Drupal 7. Just to give you an idea of what we're benchmarking for. Okay, some of the requirements, not necessarily tightly to Al Jazeera but some common requirements that you often run into. First of them, being the platform that you're aiming for to choose should really support agile development. It should really support the process that your editorial team is working under, which is a very iterative process. So the platform really needs to be able to support that so that the development team can work in the same type of cycles. And also webpublishing itself is constantly evolving. New technologies come out every day. You need to be very fast, you need to have a platform that allows you to stay on the edge. Because time to market is crucial for publishers. You need to have a platform that quickly allows you to get something out there, reach the market fast and then iterate on top of that. So you can build prototypes for fast and so on. So that's the first requirement. Second one, being a little bit more obvious maybe for publishers. We really need to have a system that supports efficient workflows. It needs to support the editors daily work of course. It's a quite tricky one because organizations work very, very differently. As well as sections within organizations. Taking Azure as an example, the news desk works very differently compared to, for instance, the program department, workflows and so on. So puts the platform to some real challenges in configuring a very good workflow and so on. Third requirement, content freshness. What do I mean by that? It's basically the time it takes from when a publisher clicks publish until we reach the first impression from our audience, from our visitors. It sounds simple problem to solve but it's actually not that obvious for all the systems. Many systems, CMS sits on application server behind corporate firewalls. Lot of workflows generating HTML pages, pushing it up to servers when a new article goes out. Lots of different caching layers, we have content delivery networks, we have reverse proxy caching as well in some cases. And it's not always just instant publishing. We need to reach the audience fast with new pieces of content because minutes really makes a difference on the social web. Breaking with your story, a minute, two minutes before your competitors can really make a difference in driving traffic to your site. So we need to be able to reach audience fast without minutes of cash delays and so on. Being first is really vital and sort of to demonstrate this. For a large scale Drupal site it's not very uncommon that you have very many layers of caching. At the bottom you have your Drupal database of course, you have static caching in line in PHP. You have the Drupal cache API, on top of that you have varnish, reverse proxy caching. And even in some cases you have an additional layer with the content delivery network even in front of varnish. And getting all these layers of caching to play well together can be a real challenge. And editors, they don't want to sit around waiting three, four minutes before their articles reach their audience. Before they can tweet a link to their article. So this is a really important requirement. Scalability. It's really important when your story breaks, when your story gets out there, it's really important that your site stays up obviously.  I can again take Al Jazeera as an example. Breaking with stories during the Arab revolution, during the Arab Spring. If the site wouldn't have stayed up, I'm not sure that Al Jazeera would have had the impact during those critical times when stories were breaking. So the system really needs to be scalable to support these traffic spikes when visitors are hitting your site. Another challenge is that when the traffic spikes are the highest, your editors are going to require the cash time to be the shortest. Again taking Al Jazeera as an example, when Gaddafi was captured during the Libyan revolution. They were updating articles once every minute, twice every minute with corrections, more facts and so on. So they really want to tune down the cash times when the spikes are the highest on your site. And security. You can never forget about that. Online activism is constantly increasing and trust is extremely important for publishers brands today. Being compromised, being hacked, heard to brand obviously very much. And looking at it from the other side, information leakage from your CMS system could potentially jeopardize people's lives. Having source information, having references to people where you get the sources from. If that information is leaking out, there are organizations and governments that could do bad things to these people. If sources are leaking out, source notes taking in the revision logs and so on. Potentially could be very dangerous. Security of the system is obviously very important. And why is Drupal the right tool then? Reflecting back on the requirements we just went through. Agile development. Drupal har en lot of ready to use modules, as I'm sure everyone here knows. We can reach market fast, we can build prototypes very fast and then iterate on top of that. Efficient workflows has been one of the weak points in Drupal for a long time. Recently picked up a lot of good momentum in the community. A lot of good modules has been released solving a lot of the issues. A lot of good work is also happening in Drupal 8. We are going to look at some of the modules here for Drupal 7 and how we issues to solve this. Content freshness, again Drupal is a one click publishing CMS a little bit. You click save and your article goes to the front page. So by nature Drupal is good at solving the content freshness thing. But as I demonstrated still have many layers of caching that we sort of need to deal with. Scalability. Drupal 7 got a lot more scalable. A little bit slower but a lot more scalable. The new database API, master slave replication, better support for that. Pluggable field storage, better cache implementations. We have QAPI, we have entity field query. A lot of new APIs that really helps to scale your platform. In new ways. And being a very popular, very tested CMS Drupal is also very secure. Not only its code is secure but Drupal is also secure by process. Drupal has a very well defined process of how to deal with security, security patches and so on. Something that not all the other open source CMS has. So I would say the biggest strength in Drupal is that Drupal is secure by process. All software has security holes. All software will expose security holes at some point. Unfortunately, that's the reality of programming. So it's very important that we have a secure process on how to deal with security holes. And this is really where Drupal shines with its security advisory team. Okay, give me the modules. How do we do this? And I'm gonna fall back on to these requirements as I walk through the modules. Why we should choose particular modules and how those correlate to the requirements that we are running into. First module, being workbench. Or actually workbench core and workbench moderation. Workbench is a suite of modules. Provides easier content management. Easier ways to deal with your content, to deal with revisions and so on. And with workbench moderation, it's easier to set up flexible workflows around your content. And it provides much better coherence for your editors. Drupal out of the box is a little bit scattered for content authors. In how they deal, how they find content, how they filter and so on. Workbench provides much better coherence. Through something called my workbench. It's essentially a dashboard, a home for your editor. Where they will find the most crucial information around the content that they are currently working at. Or that other people in their team is working at. I'm gonna give you a demonstration of these modules that I'm walking through later on. Workbench moderation. We can assign different workflow states to our content. And this is very flexible, you can configure these as you go. And also the revision management. We can have a published revision out on the site. And we can work on a new draft for this. The green one here being published already. The red one is something that we're currently working on. Not something that Drupal Core is very good at. So workbench and workbench moderation exposes. And provides this functionality. Really, really helpful. So why workbench then? Unique workflows per content type. Unique workflows per row. We can be really agile and we set up everything here. And we've noticed that sections within our organizations map very well to content types. News desks are mostly publishing the news content type. We can set up workflows for that. The program department is working on their program packages and so on. So we can really be efficient with our workflows here. And provide better coherence as I mentioned. Next module. Deploy. A module that I'm the maintainer for. And that I've been writing during my time at Alte Sierra for Drupal 7. It's essentially a framework for pushing content. From your Drupal site to another system. Can be another Drupal site, can be an arbitrary system of any kind. You can set up this to be automated or manual. And deploys many times used to set up something called content staging. Basically you're separating your editorial site with your public site. Where editors are setting and editing content, previewing, reviewing content on your editorial site. And then pushed to the public site when ready. Essentially looks something like this. You have your staging site. Often on a secure network. Behind corporate firewall. So we can protect our revision log. So we can protect unpublished contents. And when they reach the ready state. When they reach the published state. Deployment is triggered out to the production site automatically. Simple screenshot over a dashboard where you can see and manage your deployment plans. Deployment plans being packages of content that is supposed to go out together at one time. We have two different plans here for instance. Instant deployments are queued on a very tight schedule. Weekend deployments and so on. Packages that goes out in the weekend. I'm going to demonstrate this again a little bit later. So why deploy then? We can separate our sites. We can actually deploy code and updates faster. Falling back on the agile development here. For instance if a bug appears on our public site. We can fix that bug and we don't need to run through the tests for all the editorial features and all the other features that are sitting on the editorial site. Because on the public site we've stripped down a lot of modules that we need because editors are not logged in there. So we can be much more accurate in fixing bugs, deploying updates and so on. We don't need to do as much quality assurance and so on. Because there's less code that we're touching when we're separating our two sites. Agile development. Falling back to efficient workflows. We can set up transparent content staging. Editors don't really care if this site is split up in two pieces, editorial and public. They just want to get their content out there. And we can set up this to be automated. So the editors don't really know or don't really see if it's split up on two sites. And security. We can have our editorial site on a closed network as shown in the graph before on the last slide. Also by stripping down modules that we don't need on the public site. We have less code running, a decreased hit area, so to speak. Less code that can contain potential security holds and so on. So it provides much better security as well. Next module. A new module that we've been working on at Al Jazeera. It's basically a very lightweight wrapper for listing functionalities. It's called entity list. We have very many different ways of listing and querying content on a Drupal site. We have views, we have node queues, we have Apache solar, we have search API in some cases.  They all work differently. They are all cached differently. They are all presented and themed differently. So entity list is essentially very lightweight wrapper around this. An entity list lives as context in your panels. For those of you that knows how panels works. And we unified output by injecting this context into our panel panes, into entity panes. This makes a unified output, we can optimize the output better. It's easier to theme. It's easier to cache. Because entity list knows more about what content that is actually in a view. Or in your pane. So it's easier to optimize. And we can also transparently switch query backends. For instance if we have an entity list on our front page that is supported by a view. The backend handler for this entity list is a view. And we are starting to run into maybe performance problems. We can transparently switch the handler for our entity list to for instance an entity field query. Without changing our presentation layer at all. It's completely separated and dealt with in panels. So we can work more agile, we can work faster and it provides better scalability by being able to switch out query backends. And it also integrates with a new module called cache tags. And what is cache tags? Cache tags is essentially back ported functionality from Drupal 8. The cache tags API is not committed to Drupal 8 but we are working on it. And I've back ported this to Drupal 7. And before I'm gonna walk into what it actually does I'm gonna describe how it works today in many cases without using cache tags. So we take an example, we have node ID number one. We have node ID number one on the front page in a view. We have the node page itself. And we have another page somewhere else where node ID number one is presented as a related article or something like that. We have three different cache entries. We have views cache in the first alternative. We have entity cache. And we have maybe another view with the related articles with three different cache entries to deal with. And since it's very complex to set up a good cache invalidation logic when an update is deployed, it's very hard to track where this node is appearing, what page we should clear the cache on, what views we should clear the cache on etc. We do like this we say I'm gonna cache this for five minutes because after five minutes there might be an update to this node that we need to display. So we're only gonna cache for five minutes and then clear the cache. After five minutes we might have an update, we might not have an update. So it's not really a very efficient way of dealing with it. So what cache tags does is that we can tag every individual cache entry with more information than just the cache key for it. We can tag it with, for instance, node one. So all those three cache entries are tagged with node one. And when an update to this node is being deployed or is being published, we can just say invalidate everything with node ID number one. That is tagged with node ID number one. And we can very efficiently clear the caches on all the panes and all the views and all the entity caches and so on at once. In a very efficient manner. So you can tag cache entries and you can also tag whole requests. So the varnished cache, for instance, the reverse proxy cache is living outside of Drupal. But we can say on this page node ID number one, five, twelve and 32 lives on this page. It's presented on this page. It's very easy to do that because we have unified the output through panels and the panels caching mechanism can tell the page that these nodes exist on this page. So we tag this whole page with all these nodes. And again, when one of the nodes are being updated, we can easily invalidate the cache in varnish by sending an invalidation command saying that all the pages containing node number one should be invalidated. So what does the configuration look like? Some simple screenshots is very easy configuration to set up your entity list. We can choose what the query back into use, entity field query, use, search API, etc. The lists are living as context in your panels. You add them as context and in your panels interface you inject them into either separate entity paints or a paint containing all the list. So we can set out item number one, two, three on our front page. We can set them with different view modes. Something that is not very easy to do with view sometimes. We can set full node display on the first one and TC view on the second one, etc. This is all configurable. And the cache tags interface for Drupal 7 requires actually a patch to cores. You need to be aware of what you are doing. But it basically adds another argument to cache set where you can give an array of tags that you want to tag it with. You can tag it with the node, you can tag it with its author if you want the ability to invalidate everything that has with a specific author to do. You can also tag requests with a separate function. And then it also provides a cache invalidate function where you pass in an array of tags that you want to invalidate. And it's invalidated across all the cache pins. Okay, so why entities and cache tags? We can refactor faster with better separation using entity lists as I described. Being more agile we can deploy updates faster and so on. Transparently switch query backends for better scalability. I mentioned that already. And with integration between entity lists and cache tags we have no more stale caches anymore. When our editors are deploying or publishing an update to a node we will instantly invalidate that cache and it will instantly reach our audience. Editors don't need to sit around waiting for three minutes for their update to reach our audience before we can tweet a link to our article before we can reach faster than our competitors out there. So we can instantly invalidate. And the power here is that everywhere on the site it will be invalidated on a related article list, on paints on the front page, on topic pages and so on. So we have a very automated way of doing this. At the same time we also get longer cache lifetimes. Because if we are not deploying or publishing an update to a node we won't invalidate it after five minutes. So we actually have longer cache lifetimes when we need it. So it scales better, performs better. Ok, so now on to the demo. Before I get started here I'm just going to see how we make, how we do it in time here. I think it's pretty well. Ok, so I'm not able to show our Al Jazeera site that we're working on at the moment. So I've set up a very basic demonstration site here. We have a front page. We have two topic pages. With some very simple content types on. Everything built up with panels and entities as we showed here. First thing I'm going to show is my workbench. Basically the dashboard I was talking about. Giving editors an easier way to find and manage their content. We have a good overview here. And we can expand all the lists. We can filter it down etc. And these are all powered by views by the way. So you can easily change and optimize and add columns to your workbench views here. So what we're going to do now is just updating the title of an article. And we're going to put this as needs review. We have options down at the bottom. Where we can set this article as needs review for other to review. At Al Jazeera we have a very well-working peer-to-peer reviewing. So everyone can review and everyone can publish actually. And going back to the workbench here we can go to the needs review queue. Where you will see all the articles and pieces that needs to be reviewed. Assuming that I'm another editor logging in on the site. I can go in prove read this article. I can read it through. And when I'm done I can go to the revision overview here. I can instantly publish the last draft that we've been working on directly from this interface here. And we'll see that the latest draft turns out green and it's published. Basically the title is updated. Next thing I'm going to show is the deploy module. So basically what we're doing here is that we're opening up our production site. Production site I've made this read to separate the staging site and the production site to make it more clear. So what we're going to do now is that we're going to show you here the deployment overview. Sort of dashboard where you can manage all your plans manually if you want to. So here we have our two deployment plans. Our instant deployment plan doesn't contain any content at this point. And we can have an arbitrary number of plans with different workflows attached to them. So it's very flexible editing a plan. It's quite straightforward. All the different steps in a deployment is configurable. So how you collect your content could be a view. It could be collected manual. The deployment process itself is pluggable through Seatools plugins. You can queue it up with QAPI. You can use batch API or directly in memory. And you can also configure your endpoints at the bottom here as you see. Endpoints are basically the system that you're deploying to. In this case it happens to be another Drupal site. It happens to be our production site. Configuring it here we can configure authentication methods it's using. We're working on an OAuth plugin and it's not completely done yet. So in this example we're using session authentication. So we need to give the username and password for our production Drupal site. And an endpoint URL. Endpoint URL being URL basically to your services endpoint. That works with the services module. So here we now manually will add this piece of content to our instant deployment plan. And going back to the overview here we see that we now have one piece with an updated title. And we can deploy it directly from the interface here manually. And we get some good green messages here. That's a good sign. And updating the page here we see that on the production site our title is now updated. A very simple example. Obviously this is manual and it doesn't work for all the editorial teams. Many editorial teams will want to have very manual control over this. But in our case we have set up a transparent system where they don't know when it's deployed. Well they do know obviously when it's published. And we can set up rules here basically it's full rules integration. So what we're doing here is that we are configuring the rules module. Here we have a rule triggering on after updating existing and new content. We can set some conditions. The transition should be to published state. And the action is to add a piece of content to plan. We then have a separate rule. Where with higher weight that is deploying the plan itself. So when we now go back to our workbench update an article put it to published. It's going to be deployed automatically to our production site. Updating the title and putting our piece here as published. We'll now trigger the deployment automatically because we configured our rules here. We see some messages here. And walking over to the production site and updating we see that the title was updated. For those of you that saw that. Next demonstration. Moving forward quickly here. Is the entity list. Module together with cash tags. Configuring an entity list. Is as we saw on the screenshot the screenshots before. Very simple. We have a title for entity list and we choose what handler to use here. In this case we're using a view. To support this entity list. We can configure our settings here. Going over to panels. We see here at our front page panel we have added our list as a context. It's purely the data. The query of the data that lives as the context. The presentation is done with paints. So here we have our three paints. Item number one two and three. For instance. And we can configure this. To say that this is the list that we're going to use. This paint should use index one and this view mode. Again there are paints to present the whole entity list if we want to. But this can sometimes give you quite good flexibility in how you want to configure specific items in your list. So this is now set up with entity list without cash tags. With the sort of old way of dealing with caching. So when we go here. We have an unpublished piece of content that we want to push out to our production site. We publish the content here. And when we walk over to the production site and updating the page. We see that we don't have any content. We have to wait before the content before the cash is being cleared. No matter how many times we update here we need to wait one minute. Before the article is published before we can link to the. And waiting another minute here time elaps and our content is out. Not a very good way we need you know faster publishing. So now it's configured with cash tags. And looking at the headers here we see that this is a fully cashed page in varnish. We have two cash IDs in the headers in the response headers for this page. And we also have cash tags here in the headers. We have a cash tag for the list and for the nodes existing on this page. Fully cashed page at this point. So going back to the staging site now. And doing an update. And deploying that over to the production site. We'll say that we need to invalidate all the caches for this particular node. And remember that this was a fully cashed page that was on the production site. So saving here will trigger the deployment over to the production site. And updating the page here now. Will give us the updated title instantly. We don't need to wait for cash times. And we have actively invalidated the cash in both varnish. In both entity list or in the pain in the panel. And this is a very simple example. It's only one list here of content. We can have many different pains and the content can appear in many different ways. The next request is obviously a fully cashed page. And it will live on forever until it needs to be cleared. We have longer cash life times. Again we see the cash tags here in the HTTP headers. So a very short and simple demo. Showing some of the sort of strengths in these particular modules that we've been working with. Obviously there's a lot of more modules that you use on a publisher site. We have content locking a very very useful module. We use the media module of course. A lot of whistle weak integrations. But those generally work very well out of the box. And these are sort of the modules that we've been working very hard on trying to solve some particular problems appearing in the requirements. So are we going to release all these modules? Yes of course. Al-Dazir has picked up on open source very well. We are working very actively in sort of building everything as generic as possible. Releasing our solutions. Getting help from the open source community. Supporting and improving these modules. We are even looking into or we have been building our platform as a distribution. And we are looking into releasing as much of it as possible as a distribution for the open source community. We are not ready with the project yet. But we will probably release it as some sort of distribution later on. For others to take on, for others to improve and so on. So we are really excited about that. And that's about it. You can reach me on Drupal.org on Twitter. You can read my blog. I haven't put up the slideshare link as you can see. I will do that. I will tweet about it later so you can download the slides. And questions. Anyone. Please feel free to step up to the mic in the middle and present yourself and make sure to speak in the mic so it's recorded for others to see later. Yes. Hi, Damien McKenna. So the cache tags module looks like it's going to be possibly one of the best caching engines right now in Drupal. And it depends on improving it to have, say, more functionality out of the box to do more of the invalidation automatically. Because right now it seems that it's kind of an extension for memcache.  Yes, so for those of you that are going to the cache tags project page. It's currently maintained by Carlos. I've become the co-maintenor. And we've been working on a sandbox with a lot of contribute improvements. With cache tags, with panels, with node queue and a lot of other contributed modules sort of out of the box support. And since I've become the co-maintenor very recently we are going to merge that into the main project. So yes it's going to be a lot more better out of the box support. We heavily rely on this so we are going to add in functionality as we go into the module. So it's very soon going to be released with much better contribute support, yes. Also, given your push to try and make it part of Drupal 8 standard. And also some of the possible loosening of standards on what gets added to stable releases. Have you thought of trying to push to get your patch into Drupal 7? It has been discussed in the issue, on the core issue. I am perfectly fine with providing a back ported patch. I would love it to be honest. But it's quite a big API change although it would be backward compatible. Men ja, that is something that we need to discuss. Thank you. My name is Martin Rio and my question was. Most of the times when I use varnish there is a time to live on pages. So I was wondering how the, when you are expiring a tag or when you are deploying sorry a content to production. How is the Drupal invalidating the varnish entry immediately? So varnish has a command line interface or through telnet. And the varnish module for Drupal allows you to send terminal commands directly to your varnish servers. To all of them at the same time. So basically we are sending a terminal command to our varnish servers. The cache tag module takes care of that. And invalidates all the varnish entries based on that header. We basically send in a regular expression saying invalidate everything containing node ID one for instance. So it's done with terminal commands to the varnish servers. Is that part of the cache tags module you say? Or is it part of the rule for pushing things to production? So that is provided the terminal commands. The invalidation commands is provided by cache tags. And then we have contrib hooks in cache tag that says when a node is saved invalidate and so on. So yeah it's two pieces to it. Hi my name is Matthew my voice is going out so I apologize. I work for media company and we are currently stuck on D6. And we're having a hard time leveraging varnish with our cache times. We're noticing like things like our homepage. We're having a hard time when there's new content. Basically refreshing the cache and stuff like that. Is there any tips or tricks that you would say for a D6 that could help us out?  If I don't recall wrong here I think actually cache tags has a release for Drupal 6. I think Carlos has worked on that. I haven't been involved in that at all. We've been working on an improved version of the seven Drupal 7 version. But it might actually have a Drupal 6 release. I'm very sorry that I can't answer that to you right here. But look into that. I think it wouldn't be too hard to actually provide that functionality for Drupal 6. There is a release someone says here in the audience. Thank you. Hi with security being a requirement. I had a little bit of conditional question. I remember saying about month, month and a half ago. I was here got hacked. Of course news didn't distinguish. Was it the Drupal side or was it the non Drupal side? And I was just wondering if it was Drupal. Are there any lessons that you learned from that? Definitely. It was a Drupal site unfortunately. But it was what you call social hacking. Basically password leaking out. Someone just directly logging into the system. It wasn't very much technical. We could do in that point. It was all very quickly though. And the lessons learned from that. Because the Drupal 6 site that is released at this point. Their editorial staff is logged on to the public site. In our Drupal 7 release we're splitting these up. We only have editorial users on the staging site. And we don't have any user accounts except user ID number one on the public site. With a very strong password obviously. Very well protected. So that is definitely the lessons learned from that one. Splitting up the two sites. Definitely, yeah. Thank you. I see that Deploy still just has a dev release. Can you maybe just speak to you about which parts of it are stable and working and which ones? So the core functionality in Deploy at this point is I would say quite stable. The reason why it's still in dev is that because we want to make some additions to the API before a release. This is something that we're going to work on on the code sprint on Friday. And hopefully a first alpha release will come out of that code sprint. Because we're very, very close to release for the first alpha. But if you know what you're doing, if you have an engineering team that can support you. You can start using Deploy today. But you need to be of course aware of the challenges that you deal with. Building on a dev release of the module. But it's very close to release. What about UUID? UUID has alpha releases. There are some bugs that we very recently solved. That was blocking a beta release. And I'm probably going to roll the beta release on Friday as well here. So we're very close to a more stable UID release as well. Great thanks. Do we have any more questions from the audience? Please feel free to step up to the mic. Okay, I say thank you again. Have a nice time here at Gruppokon. Don't forget to evaluate our sessions here. Thank you.


Freedom lots of news very little time first things first animated banners They're a thing now if you will look behind me You will see that we can now have animated banners These are uploaded in gift format and they are kind of size sensitive So you'll want to be really careful about that in the description down below is the link to the channel that has Let me know that they are the first one to implement this around here anyways Second thing is the where is George stuff is taking off a lot of you guys are doing this I'm very glad that you're doing this because it's letting us know who our editors are and are not I would like for you the freedom community to give me ideas for challenges and things like this to do in the future I was thinking the next one this one here is going to end The first week in August so you have until then to do your complicated edits and all that stuff the Next one. I was thinking about doing a short skit short film type thing Probably a maximum of three minutes long if you're a gaming youtuber You can do this as machinima if you're a vlogging youtuber you can do this as vlog style So yeah, have fun with it But that that one's not Complete yet, so don't hold me to it. We will see what we can do all right third thing is Okay, so I lied there is no third thing My question to you freedom is this What is it that you would like this community to do that is not? Currently happening. We are trying to do as much as we can to involve you to educate you to keep you up on all the YouTube news even the stuff that YouTube hasn't really talked about yet So, you know the only way that we can make this better is with your input So put your in in the comment section till next time. I'm Anthony with freedom who like subscribe comments, please Click the first video for a fireside chat with George where he shares our future and how he grew from $20,000 to $120,000 in just one month and click the second video to see how to monetize all of your videos with just a few clicks to enable all ad formats and monetize in all countries and We will grow together as a family because this is the freedom family You are part of it. We are all part of it and we're all growing together so grow with us and Partner with freedom that play now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get Started Hey, glad you stuck around. Um, so should we make the Anthony show a thing or Yeah, forget I mentioned it never mind


Chapter 10. We'll begin reading here in Daniel chapter 10 at verse 1. I'll read verses 1 through 3 and give you a brief introduction to our chapter and then move into our study. Daniel chapter 10 beginning at verse 1, reading to verse 3. In the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, a message was revealed to Daniel whose name was called Baltheshisar. The message was true but the appointed time was long and he understood the message and had understanding of the vision. In those days I, Daniel, was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant food, no meal, no meat or wine came into my mouth nor did I anoint myself at any time or at all, at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled. Okay, so the last three chapters of Daniel, chapters 10, 11, and 12, the last three chapters of Daniel record what are called detailed prophetic revelation. It all is pertaining to future events and the fact is that chapter 10 actually serves as an introduction to chapter 11. You'll see that when we enter into chapter 11 how this actually proceeds into chapter 11 verse 1 and was really in a sense an introduction to the 11th chapter. You see when you get into chapter 11 and you look at verses 2 through 35, there's prophecy that's spoken of there and that relates to what would be called during the days of Daniel the immediate future. But from chapter 11, 36 to chapter 12 verse 4, these are events that are in the distant future and actually before the second coming of Jesus Christ. And so when you get to chapter 12 verse 5 to the last verse of the chapter, Daniel will conclude with the final message as well as a revelation. We're going to be seeing that as we go through it. But these last chapters contain prophecies that are related to the nation of Israel, to the people of Israel. And so when you look at verse 1 and it says in the third year of Cyrus, King of Persia, a message was revealed to Daniel whose name was called Balthashezar. The message was true but the appointed time was long. Notice he understood the message and had understanding of the vision. And so we're given a date here for those who take notes. This occurs in 536 BC which would be late in the life of Daniel. Daniel it is estimated at this time is in his 80s, somewhere around 85 or so, maybe a little bit older than that. So this is occurring late in his life. We know that Daniel had entered into captivity right around 606 BC. And at this time he's been in captivity for about 70 years or so. And so this message was revealed. It was revealed to Daniel and it says whose name was called Balthashezar. So Daniel receives what is called a prophetic message. He receives what we today refer to as a word from the Lord. So it's a prophetic message because the Lord would communicate to certain individuals those things that he intended to do. They were the prophets. In Amos chapter 3 verse 7 it says, Surely the Lord God does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets. And so what he's doing is God is revealing to a servant Daniel who is a prophet what he is about to do. Now the message is relating to future events but it's something that is very clear to him. Notice how he says that he actually understands it. This is something he understood. It says he understood the message and had understanding of the vision. In other words he didn't have to have a revelation of some sort or an explanation of some sort given to him by an angel or any other. And so this time he understands the message. He has an understanding of the vision and notice how he speaks of it. He says the message is true. Well obviously we would expect it to be true because the message is from the Lord. But he says also that the appointed time was long. Now when it says here that the appointed time was long that's interesting in a way because the word long here has different connotations and one of the commentators I use made a point that I want to make to you as it relates to it. Because he says the appointed time was long. The word long has more than one meaning. Obviously the word long and you see this could be speaking of a long period of time but also the word long and the way that it's presented in the original language speaks of a strenuous time that involves great suffering. And so it's not just a period of time that's being spoken of here in terms of the revelation but it pertains to something that is long in time but also has a lot of pain. It has a lot of difficulty and that's what's going to be taking place. And so this is a message that's true. It's from the Lord. It's going to be a long period of time that is strenuous. It's going to be a long period of time that is filled with conflict for the nation of Israel. And so he understands this. He understands the message. He has understanding of the vision. So verse two here's his response. In those days I Daniel was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant food. No, no meat or wine came into my mouth. Nor did I anoint myself at all till three whole weeks were fulfilled. And so after receiving this message his reaction is mourning, fasting and praying. The contents of the revelation great cause great concern for him. So he goes into an attitude of prayer and he mourns. He fasts. He prays. In other words, he's sad and he's greatly troubled. He's greatly troubled at what he's having revealed to him. And by the way, the way he responds to troubling news or something cause pain. If you want to to consider this for a moment with me, that's the proper response of someone who is sensitive to the Holy Spirit and the working of God. When there's something that that they become aware of that causes concern. The best thing you can do is to actually pray fast, perhaps and even have a time of grief as you bring your your heart and pour it out before the Lord. In the book of Philippians in the New Testament, Paul said something in chapter four verses six and seven that I think applies to this. He said be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your request be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Cast your cares on him Peter said because he cares for you. Jesus said your heavenly Father knows those things you have need of before you even ask. And I think that I've had people say something similar to this in the past where they say well you know when there's nothing else to do you should pray. No, it's not the last thing you do guys. It's the first thing. It's the first thing you do. When you hear troubling news the first thing you do is take it to the Lord. When it when it impacts you when it concerns you and it causes you to mourn it grieves you and there's something that you come into contact with or hear about that you get concerned about the first thing you do is you take it to the Lord in prayer. Why? Because he cares for you. Because he can do abundantly above all you can ask or think because there's nothing too hard for the Lord and you need to as a believer you need to you need to live in that awareness because I'm telling you there have been many many times that I've had needless concerns and needless worries when I should have just cast my care on him in the first place. Instead of carrying this burden on my own shoulders for so long I've learned over time to be quick to release it to be quick to hand it to him and that's what happened here. He began to mourn he began to fast began to pray his heart is troubled at what he has heard and notice what he says he says in verse 3 he says I eat no pleasant food no meat or wine came into my mouth nor did I anoint myself he abstained from his normal diet he followed what would be called simply a plain diet he had no delicacies no special foods and and he says in verse 3 till till three whole weeks were fulfilled so he didn't anoint himself at all during this time of prayer and fasting when I was reading this today and it says he didn't anoint himself I said he must have stunk after three weeks I mean that's kind of a practical thing and so you know because because Americans are we're so used to the idea of cleanliness and and bathing not every American I've been around a few who have haven't come to that awareness but somebody once said you you know what your nationality is whenever you get into an elevator and it's true you can go to other countries in some places they just don't bathe there's a fact I wonder how many of you know what I mean it may some of you perhaps who've never really traveled you may think that's a mean thing to say no it's a true thing to say it's a true thing to say it's always interesting I mean I was in Germany when I was 25 years old and I used to wear tank tops because when you're 25 you can and I was standing holding on to a strap on a subway and this East German woman was next to me and I looked at her and she had a hairier armpit than I did I thought I put my hands in my pockets that's really embarrassed and that's exactly what Daniel wants you to know but when we speak of anointing in this context anointing is something that you do when you're joyful it's a picture of joy is what it is when you anointed yourself it was a sign of joy it revealed a joyful attitude and that's why he said I didn't anoint myself what he's saying is because of the fasting because of the morning because of the sorrow and grief of my heart instead of doing what I would normally do eating better foods and all I stopped eating those things I ate plain foods and I stopped anointing myself which is another way of saying that I wasn't in a state of joy and so that's how he's responding and he did that for three whole weeks he said in verse three I didn't anoint myself at all till three whole weeks were fulfilled so that gives you the timeline these are actually three seven-day weeks so verse four now on the 24th day of the first month as I was by the side of the Great River that is the Tigris and so he gives us the date this is April the 24th day of the first month the first month this would be April and he says I'm by the Tigris River it is also referred to as the Hedekal and if you have that in your Bible it's the Tigris it's just north of the city of Babylon so he says I was by the side of the Great River that is the Tigris verse five I lifted my eyes and looked and behold a certain man clothed in linen whose waist was girded with gold of buffa's his body was like burl his face like the appearance of lightning his eyes like torches of fire his arms and feet like burnished bronze in color and the sound of his words like the voice of a multitude I lifted up my eyes and behold in this description and I'm gonna give you a little bit of information here in this description what we have is called there's two words that are usually associated with this one is theophany how many of you ever heard that word just so I know theophany the word theophany is it's an appearance of God theophany it's also called a Christophany a Christophany is a pre incarnate visitation of Jesus himself it's called a Christophany Christophany or a theophany it's a it's a it's it's the Lord is who he's describing and so what we have here is an appearance of Jesus just prior or prior to his incarnation now many times in the Old Testament when you have a Christophany a theophany it is very often referred to as the the the figure is referred to as the angel of the Lord you probably have heard that or read that in your readings of the scriptures I'll give you examples for example judges chapter 2 verse 1 the angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bohem and said I led you up from Egypt and brought you to the land of which I swore to your fathers and I said I will never break my covenant with you no angel ever made a covenant with with Israel this is obviously the Lord who is speaking but he's referred to as the angel of the Lord in judges chapter 6 verse 22 now Gideon perceived that he was the angel of the Lord so Gideon said alas oh Lord God for I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face and so again this is a Christophany this is an appearance of Jesus Christ prior to his physical incarnation in birth through Mary in judges 13 verses 21 and 22 when the angel of the Lord appeared no more to Manoa and his wife then Manoa knew that he was the angel of the Lord and Manoa said to his wife we shall surely die because we have seen God and so what we have here as we're looking at it here in this description and all this man clothing linen etc is actually a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ and he begins to describe him here in verses 5 and 6 he says his body was like barrel his face like the appearance of lightning and so it refers to the fact that his waist was girded it's girded with gold so this this this this belt that he has his waist is girded it would be linen it was like the fine white linen that was worn by priests you see that in Exodus 29 he speaks of the belt and the belt is also referred to as a girdle and it's embroidered with perfect gold his body verse 6 is like barrel it that's actually a chrysalite or topaz which is a gold mixed with green his face is like the appearance of lightning his eyes like torches of fire his voice is like a multitude it's loud it's mighty and what we have is a description that is very similar to one that we saw in the book of Revelation when we went through Revelation recently and this is a picture of majesty and a picture of of dignity when you look in Revelation in chapter 1 verses 12 through 15 John said it like this he said I turned to see the voice that spoke with me and having turned I saw seven golden lampstands and in the midst of the seven lampstands one like the son of man clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band his head and hair were white like wool it's white as snow his eyes like a flame of fire his feet were like fine brass as if refined in a furnace his voice is the sound of many waters and so what Daniel has is a Christophany he has a he sees the Lord in a pre incarnate appearance and as he sees this it's an it you'll see a moment his response now notice how it says in verse 7 I Daniel alone saw the vision for the men who are with me did not see the vision but a great terror fell upon them so that they fled to hide themselves this reminds me of Saul in the New Testament who would later become Paul and his road to Damascus experience we see that experience in in the book of Acts in chapter 9 when when Luke who wrote the book of Acts speaks to us concerning how that Saul was breathing out threatening against the followers of Jesus Christ and that he had obtained letters giving him permission to arrest any who were following Christ because they considered it he considered Christianity a heretical sect false faith and then he would take him in chains and bring him back and try them as heretics and we know the story of his conversion how that while he was on his way to Damascus having obtained letters giving him permission to arrest people how that he himself was arrested how that the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him and said Saul Saul why are you persecuting me and you remember the story how that he responds and he says who am I person who are you who are you Lord and he said I am Jesus and and when you persecute one of these who believe in me he said you're persecuting me and so we know that famous story of his conversion the most famous conversion in history and later on he was speaking and he was sharing some tidbits of that particular testimony and and there were these Jewish people who were opposing him at that time they had thought that he had had brought a non-Jew a Gentile into into the temple area which was forbidden where they had said that they had believed he had brought this non-Jew who actually wasn't brought into there into that area but he began to defend himself to those who were accusing him and and so in Acts 22 let me read this to you found in verses 6 through 11 he was given his testimony and he said about noon as I came near Damascus suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me I fell to the ground heard a voice say to me Saul Saul why do you persecute me who are you Lord I asked I am Jesus of Nathara whom you are persecuting you replied my companions saw the light but they didn't understand the voice of him who was speaking to me what shall I do Lord I asked get up the Lord said go into Damascus and there you will be told all that you have been assigned to do my companions led me by the hand into Damascus because the brilliance of the light had blinded me well this is something very similar here because it says in verse 7 I Daniel alone saw the vision for the men who were with me did not see the vision a great terror fell upon them so that they fled to hide themselves the men with Daniel didn't see the vision but Daniel did which reminds us that the Lord reveals himself to whomever he wills well in verse 8 therefore I was left alone when I saw this great vision and no strength remained in me for my vigor was turned to frailty in me I I retained no strength the immediate effect was that he became weak he lost all of his strength and and he even appeared is even changed in his appearance he was completely drained of strength and he fell to his face now why would he do that because in seeing the Lord Daniel saw himself you know the origin of true humility is simply having an opportunity to more clearly see who he is because when you see God for who he is you will see yourself for who you are there is no room for boasting in your life when you actually have a close walk with God it's a matter of fact rather than becoming a self-righteous person you become what the world refers to as a humble person because the origin of true humility is coming into contact with the Lord a great preacher of another day by the name of Charles Spurgeon said it like this he said it is not humility to underrate yourself humility is to think of yourself as God thinks of you it is to feel that if we have talents God has given them to us and let it be seen that like freight in a vessel they tend to sink us low the more we have the lower we ought to lie and so if you want to have humility it comes to spending time in the word of the Lord and in prayerful presence of God and and when he had this experience he said I had no strength my strength diminished my vigor was turned to frailty I retained no strength and so he became weak in his presence becoming aware of his own frailty yet verse 9 I heard the sound of his words and while I heard the sound of his words I was in a deep sleep on my face with my with my face to the ground completely drained in complete weakness and humility he fell before the Lord in his line face down and it was in this complete weakness that Daniel was to be strengthened for revelation one of the one of the scriptures all of us in this room are familiar with is found in 2nd Corinthians 12 verse 9 when the apostle Paul had been speaking concerning the multitude of revelations and extraordinary experiences that he had with the Lord but to keep him humble he said the Lord provided something for him that he didn't want he gave him a thorn in the flesh when you read 2nd Corinthians 12 and he speaks of the thorn in the flesh when you think of thorn we Americans we think of thorns we may be thinking of those goat head thorns that you can step on when you're walking you know and they're they're small no the thorn he's that the thorn that's being referred to is actually a tent stake it's not some small thing it was a huge thing that he was speaking about he said a thorn was given to me why why did this did you have this this intense pressure and pain why did you have this basically thrust upon you he said to keep me humble to keep me humble he said so that I wouldn't glory in the multitude of revelations because remember during that day in when you read 2nd Corinthians you'll see this he was actually being he had opponents who were trying to undermine his ministry and and and and they were saying they were calling themselves super apostles Paul refers to him as the eminent apostles but the word eminent speaks of them being super apostles and they were actually comparing themselves with him and they were saying the things that he's done they've done mightier and he says listen there are things that I could speak to you about I can talk to about revelations how that I went into the third heaven and I saw things and I heard things that are not lawful to repeat I could speak concerning those things but God because of the multitude of revelations that he gave to me gave me also a tent stake that was in my flesh he said to keep me humble so I could learn one lesson and that's in 2nd Corinthians 12 9 my grace is sufficient for you for my strength is made perfect in weakness and that by the way is one of those prayers that most of us never asked God to answer God would you please give me a stake in my I want to get married no God would you put a stake in my flesh God would you will you bring humility to me do you want it I think that sometimes sometimes we learn prayers that are appropriate to pray in front of people that we never pray privately oh Lord humble me we say in front of crowds or friends but in private we don't pray that because we know that humility comes at a cost and if you walk with the Lord for a while you begin to learn that oh Lord I'd love you to give me patience and then you go how do you get patience you go through trials you go through pain right the only person who sincerely ever prays for patience is a doctor everybody else just say I want to I want patience and Lord I want to learn to love what does the Lord do he brings people into your life that difficult difficult to love doesn't he you know I don't want to love that much Lord you know and so I've discovered that have you I'm sure you have when you begin to pray the Lord will answer your prayers but he very often does it in ways that you didn't expect Lord I want patience and you go through trials Lord I I want to learn to love you encounter difficult people but I want to live with hope and you go through terrible trials struggles pains and losses that's how it happens that's how your faith is refined and why is that well because God says my my strength is made perfect in weakness and therefore I will glory in my weaknesses because God's strength remains on me that's the mature thing to do well in this particular case we have Daniel going through some very difficult time and and there he is on the ground and and as this takes place verse 10 suddenly a hand touched me which made me tremble on my knees and on the palms of my hands he said to me oh Daniel man greatly beloved understand the words that I speak to you and stand upright for I have now been sent to you and while he was speaking this word to me I stood trembling well this other person is is an angel this is not Jesus this is an angel but notice with me that Daniel was trembling on his knees but he also was trembling while he stood and again that's what happens when God reveals himself to us in Psalm 96 verse 9 it reads worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness tremble before him all the earth and now he's going to explain why Daniel's answers for his prayer had been delayed and this is this is really interesting as we look at this in verse 12 he said to me do not fear Daniel for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and to humble yourself before your God your words were here we're heard I have come because of your words but the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days and behold Michael one of the chief princes came to help me for I had been left alone there with the kings of Persia now I I have come to make you understand what will happen to your people in the latter days for the vision refers to many days yet to come and so from the time you determined to understand the message your and prayed your words were heard now in chapter 9 we saw in verse 20 21 while Daniel was speaking in prayer we saw how that Gabriel came to bring the answer and remember as I said to you last time as Daniel was praying the answer was already on the way God's ears were open to his prayers this reminds me of 1 Peter 3 10 3 12 where it says for he who would love life and see good days let him refrain his tongue from evil in his lips from speaking deceit let him turn away from evil and do good let him seek peace and pursue it for the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayers but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil well God's ears were open to the prayers of Daniel but in this case there's a delay have you ever wondered why sometimes there seems to be an incredible delay in the answer to any prayers that you pray there are times that we will sense a delay sometimes we may pray and we wonder why our prayers seem to go unanswered and and there are there are biblical reasons for this for example sometimes we're simply in sin you know we're living in sin and here we are praying and the Bible tells us in Psalm 66 18 if I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me but here we are in sin just living and practicing in sin and we wonder how come heaven seems to be you know close to me why are why are the heavens like brass my words seem to rise only as far as the voice travels and then they fall to the ground unheard well sometimes it's because I'm living in sin and all and I have to deal with that sometimes we may pray with selfish reasons we we're asking God for something not not not to bring glory to him or to be a blessing to others but just because we want it for ourselves in James 4 verse 3 it says when you ask you don't receive because you asked with wrong motives sometimes we have unanswered prayer because we're asking for something that's not his will for us and that I think a lot of times people have a difficult time with that one you know know everything God's God I read this on Facebook with the Facebook theologians all the time social media pastors it's interesting I read these things and I think you and I sometimes I think my goodness you're not getting taught the word and you're certainly not reading it because what you're writing is in scriptural at all and yet you're giving this advice and all of that well you know what sometimes people say just asking you receive you know whatever you want just ask well in 1st John chapter 5 verse 14 this is the confidence we have in approaching God that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us now I'm so grateful to God and I won't belabor this you all agree with this I know I'm so grateful to God that he didn't answer every one of my prayers in the way I wanted him to I am thankful that God has said no that there are there are prayers that I prayed where he has simply said no and you know what I appreciate that because I had learned I have learned God I just want to do things according to your will I don't want to be anywhere that you're not I don't want anything you don't want me to have you know because he can give like the psalmist said he he answered their prayers he gave them what they desired but sent leadness to their souls I don't I don't want to be asking for something that is going to take me from you I'm not going to ask you for that a young lady many years ago and I'm talking about probably 37 years ago she's not a young lady anymore neither I'm not a young man anymore but anyway she she came into my office and we were talking and she was she asked me would you please pray for me I said of course she was about to leave and I said and what would I be praying for and she said I I want you to pray for me so that this boy she was in high school she said this boy that I like in high school that he'll he'll become my boyfriend you know I don't pray those kinds of prayers I have to be honest with that but anyway so I'm but that was her heart and I said really and and let me ask you one question and she said what is that I said is he a Christian and she says no no he's not a Christian I said why would you ask me to pray for something God doesn't want you to have because God says if you ask anything in my name I will give it to you and that's where a lot of people's minds are to this day if you ask anything in in my name I will give it to you I said no we need to learn to pray according to the will of the Lord and sometimes people don't get their prayers answered in the way they want because it isn't the will of the Lord there are times that we simply lack the faith to trust that he's going to answer us again in James chapter 4 verse 2 you don't have because you don't ask sometimes we simply don't ask and so there are times when when your prayer doesn't seem to be answered or isn't answered quickly or at all but in this case we see a reason for the hindrance to the answer of prayer it's satanic opposition God had heard his prayer but the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood now this gives us insight inside into Satan's work of opposition you see sometimes when prayers aren't answered quickly opposition is occurring all during his time of prayer and fasting there was a battle taking place notice verse 13 the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days that the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia is a fallen angel what you have is you have fallen angels that are given in Satan's hierarchy of authority certain places that they actually exercise certain influences if you will this one's referred to as the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia and so he's over a certain geographical area they're called demonic principalities in Ephesians 6 verse 12 Paul said we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities against powers against the rulers of the darkness of this age against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places so there is an actual organization of evil where Satan is overseeing it and he has placed demonic influences over certain geographic areas this one is referred to as the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia so it's a demonic stronghold there are demons overseeing spiritual oppression does that exist to this day absolutely there are certain countries that are dominated by demonic spirits countries that have have yielded themselves to false beliefs so you can look at like different areas with different religions that are the main religion they have yielded themselves to demonic oppression they resist you if the gospel they forbid you from speaking it in that area it's a stronghold but not only countries there are states here in the United States when my mom when my mom moved to to New Mexico I wonder if I have any new Mexicans in here with me do I raise your hand if you're from New Mexico I can't see so that means you're not here but there may be some watching right now you guys know your food isn't any good but anyway I get in arguments with my new Mexican friends I have family in New Mexico my mom lived there and my sisters live there I have a brother who lives there and also I have family in New Mexico so I tease about it but with that said when my mom moved there my mom would would talk to me on the phone and she would say she says son this is a very demonic place it's a very demonic place and I and I have to agree I have to agree when Marie and I've gone to New Mexico many times and you can sense the strongholds it's true you can sense it that there is a sense of evil there is so much so much in certain regions and you can actually take that to cities you can take that to cities anywhere there is a university in in your area here you're gonna have a stronghold and somebody says are you kidding me about that no you're gonna have a stronghold you're gonna have a stronghold Claremont has several universities there it's just it's a stronghold I ministered in Claremont for a long time there as it's a stronghold it's very difficult minister San Luis Obispo used to have a very conservative feel but they have Cal Pali San Luis Obispo and I was just speaking with somebody just yesterday who is telling me how the entire city has changed over the years and it's become a principality it's become a stronghold and it in and I'll tell you especially in ministry there are times and when you know because God gives you the Holy Spirit and I as a minister will enter into an area sometimes and and I'm not trying to tell you silly stories it's just true and some will understand others will think this is nonsense but it's true you can sense you can sense there's something evil here there is something evil here you can sense that and what that's called it's it's it's it there are principalities there are there are areas that are oversaw oversawed by by demonic entities in this particularly area you have it here you have the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Persia is is demonic it's a demonic stronghold and the opposition was so strong that the answer to the prayer that Daniel had been praying was actually it took three weeks for it to actually be answered and notice what he says here when he's speaking about that he says in verse 13 the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days behold Michael one of the chief princes came to help me for I had been left alone there with the Kings of Persia Michael had to come and help me because it was a stronghold that was so mighty Michael is an extremely powerful angel and so the way that the answer is coming is by using one of his mighty angels here and this angel needed to call on Michael for help when we get to chapter 12 verse 1 and I'll read this to you you're going to see something about Michael that's revealed to us it speaks of Michael in verse 1 of chapter 12 it says at that time Michael shall stand up the great Prince who stands watch over the sons of your people so the way this Prince of Persia was in opposition Michael is the angel that has authority there the one who keeps watch over the nation of Israel and so Michael came to help now this is this is just something I'm going to give to you because well because you may need to know this someday and I'll make it brief and this is not an aside this is just an added thing when you speak to people who represent the Jehovah's Witnesses how many of you have spoken to Jehovah's Witnesses almost almost all of us almost all of us Jehovah's Witnesses in their theology there are a lot of people who believe that Jehovah's Witnesses are Christian they call themselves Jehovah's Christian Witnesses so there are a lot of people would say oh they're Christians just like we are no they're really not no they're not what do you mean well Jehovah's Witnesses for example will say that Jesus Christ is Michael the Archangel did you know that some of you did some of you don't Jehovah's Witnesses will tell you Michael the Archangel is Jesus Christ Jehovah's Witnesses will say to you that the name Michael means who is like God and so they will say that Jesus Christ is actually Michael the Archangel and I've had many discussions with Jehovah's Witnesses about this and that's exactly what they say oh no no Jesus is not God in the flesh there's only one God Jesus is Michael the Archangel is what they say because the name means who is like God and the response to that is that is not true at all when you look in the New Testament book of Jude verse 9 it says even the Archangel Michael when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said the Lord rebuke you so Michael did not have the authority in himself to rebuke Satan he didn't have that so he had to call on the one greater than himself that's why he said the Lord rebuke you but in Matthew 4 when the Lord Jesus Christ was being tempted by Satan it says in verses 8 through 10 that the devil took him up on an exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and he said to him all these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me Jesus said to him away with you Satan for it is written you shall worship the Lord your God and him only you shall serve notice that Jesus did not say the Lord rebuke you Jesus himself rebuke him and so that's a great difference and when I've spoken to Jehovah's Witnesses I've said why is it that that that Michael had to call on the Lord to rebuke the enemy but Jesus himself didn't have to do that it's because Jesus isn't Michael the Archangel it's because Jesus is God in the flesh in the flesh that's how that works and so with that said one commentator pointed out that the Prince of Persia is speaking of an angel and but if you look at this and I don't want to go without touching this it says in verse 13 again I had been left alone there with the kings of Persia so you have the prince of the kingdom of Persia but he says I've been left alone with the kings of Persia so one commentator pointed out that the prince of Persia speaking of an angel but the kings of Persia were not speaking of an angel the kings of Persia were referring to the political power and a major victory was won over the demonic forces that were influencing Persia and the kings became more open to the spirit of God because of what is taking place here which is another way of saying that the enemy has a tendency of trying to infiltrate the political systems on the face of the earth to make it impossible or difficult to preach the messages that bring people to salvation that's part of what we're seeing in the United States right now in the forbidding of proclamation of the gospel when churches and I won't go into this a long time don't worry but when churches were being shut down by fiat by governmental orders that you were seeing was a demonic work to keep the gospel from going forth but with God all things are possible and the enemy can't shut down the gospel of Jesus Christ and we saw that and so with that said he says I've come to make you understand what will happen to your people I've come to reveal to you what is going to happen in the latter days this we're going to see in chapters 11 and 12 and so moving into verse 15 and moving to conclude when he had spoken such words to me I turned my face toward the ground it became speechless suddenly one having the likeness of the sons men touch my lips I opened my mouth and spoke saying to him who stood before me my Lord because of the vision my sorrows have overwhelmed me I have retained no strength for how can this servant of my Lord talk with you my Lord as for me no strength remains in me now nor is any breath left in me and then again the one having the likeness of a man touched me and strengthened me and he said oh man greatly beloved fear not peace be to you be strong yes be strong so when he spoke to me I was strengthened and said let my Lord speak for you have strengthened me and he said do you know why I've come to you and now I must return to fight with the Prince of Persia and when I have gone forth indeed the Prince of Greece will come but I will tell you what is noted in the scripture of truth no one upholds me against these except Michael your prince so once again Daniel is speechless Daniel is weak and so one having the likeness of sons men touches his lips and he recovers his speech and as he recovers his speech the first thing he begins to do is confess his weakness his weakness that he's experiencing is a physical reaction to his sense of unworthiness and as this is taking place versus it 18 and 19 tell us that he received a touch and encouragement and it strengthened him and notice how it says here you are greatly loved fear not receive peace and be courageous because God loves you you can be courageous and you can have peace when I was a young believer and I was in college and this has happened in other places but it always comes to mind is a new believer and knew very little scripture I'm still a new believer I was you know I was learning I was studying going to school but I was going to secular college and all and I can still remember when I went to school that the Lord began to minister to me something that I want to encourage all you to and that is he said open your mouth and I will feel it he said it's the spirit of my father who speaks in you you need to take into yourself the word of God so that you have you're filling yourself with God's word and then you need to be ready to speak when given opportunity in our day it seems to me that people are afraid to speak out openly and and and if there's ever been a time when believers need to with love grace and and all of that you know we need to we need to be willing to speak but we need to do so with love and grace I believe that a lot of Christians right now are actually have lost their courage have lost their ability to speak and and recently I was sharing with somebody about the Jesus moving and all and I realized that that's ancient history but it's still it's still a benchmark in my life that helps me to understand what I'm to be doing now 50 years later and the bottom line is is during that day one of the reasons you saw the movement of the Spirit of God in the way that you did in that day is because young people like myself didn't wait until we had seven years of college experience in theology to begin to present what we did is we simply gave what we knew of the word of God and we mixed that with the experience of our testimony that's how it worked and so I was one I can still remember saying this listen I can't answer questions like that I don't know but I do know this I do know that I was raised in a religion I do know that that religion didn't set me free I do know that there were traditions and things I was told to do that was supposed to make me a believer and and bless my life and those things did not work and let me tell you why they didn't and I would say this it's because Jesus wasn't in the center of it Jesus wasn't there it was religious tradition without spirit and so when I came to faith in Christ I didn't know much but I knew this I was once lost and now I'm found I was once blind but now I see I was once without the ability to hear but now I can hear the spirit and I may not be able to answer your question but you cannot argue me out of my salvation because Jesus Christ sets the captive spree and that and that's all I knew I didn't know anything more than that but it's absolutely true it's absolutely true we got to come back to that we got to come back to that Isaiah sees the Lord in the year the king as I died I saw the Lord who was high news lifted up his train filled the temple there was smoke throughout the temple light I saw the winged angels as they're crying out holy holy holy and I said to myself I said out loud he said oh I'm an evil man a wicked man a man of unclean lips I dwell amongst the people of unclean lips for the Lord said who will go for us and God took a coal from that are from that and a coal was pleased and his lips from that that altar purifying him and he said go and that's how it works I made a statement to the Lord long time ago as a young man I said Lord if nobody else will speak for you please give me the courage to do it somebody has to somebody has to speak in your name to a world that is lost today to a generation that is hopeless I came from a similar generation a hopeless generation then we found out there is hope and it's in Jesus Christ there is forgiveness of sins it comes to Jesus Christ there is such a thing as love and it can be pure and it comes to Jesus Christ I don't need the drugs I don't need the alcohol I don't need those sexual relationships what I need is him and when that comes through your life is transformed and and he was strengthened it says in verse 19 oh man greatly beloved fear not peace be to you be strong be strong yes be strong and when he spoke to me I was strengthened the Lord will strengthen you from within and so he closes by saying in verse 20 and 21 do you know why I've come to you and now I must return to fight with the Prince of Persia when I've gone forth indeed the Prince of Greece these are two demonic oppressors like the Prince of Persia Prince of Greece same thing I will tell you what is noted in scripture of truth no one upholds me against these except Michael your prince and so this is actually an introduction that to what is going to take place as we get back together and look at chapter 11 and he simply saying there's going to be a continuing spiritual war but I'm going to give you insight into what is about to take place and what will take place and we'll stop here and we'll pick up next time at chapter 11 our father we asked that there's so many things that we could be asking you to help us with but we would ask that our our our ears would be open to what the Spirit says and our eyes would see that there is demonic stronghold there are demonic strongholds Lord even in our area and Lord it can appear sometimes that there's nothing we can do but as we see that Daniel was without strength because he saw of how great you were and that was a good starting point for him I pray that we would realize that we too are in in a different way but we are without strength and without you we can do nothing so I pray for the church I pray for all of us I pray that you would work within us and that Lord you would have your way and that we would follow you with all of our heart and that your word would actually be our guide and that your word will be the joy in the strength of our lives and so Lord I ask that you would strengthen each person in this room right now and that we would be used as a mighty army to reach people to be willing to speak we ask that we would just open our mouth and and Lord just allow your spirit to give us the words to speak even as our eyes are closed before we conclude there's anybody right now who needs prayer neat you need to get right with the Lord I want to pray for you before we close and if you do need prayer to get right with him would you raise your hand let me pray for you right now right where you're at father you see these hands you know the reason why they're being raised to you and I ask in Jesus name that you would reach down and touch each one whose hand is raised to you you know exactly what is needed and Lord we would yield to you right now we would yield to you we thank you for your washing in your cleansing we thank you for the newness of life we have in you and we receive by faith Lord and we will walk with you now so we bless you and thank you thank you Lord you can put your hands down and again if there be anybody in in this room right now that has a need for a physical touch a healing of the Lord I want to pray for you for that too before we close if your body is breaking down you need prayer I want to pray for you would you raise your hand before we close Lord you see these whose bodies are rebelling against them right now I ask in Jesus name that you would by your power that you would touch them Lord is they over their heart and they say God we need your touch we need to be healed Lord our bodies are in need of you would you please Lord because you are the Lord our healer I pray that you would touch these lives and that you would bring healing and father that all the glory all the glory will go to you by faith we say God please and we ask that you will and we would by faith receive and thank you for it and we bless you thank you Lord you can put your hands down and Jesus I ask that as we're about to leave as we worship in one last song I pray that you go with us and we give you praise in Jesus name