Men, all right, we're there. Jeremiah chapter number 36. And if I want you to notice there in verse number one, go ahead and read the first few verses. The Bible says, And it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiachim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, that this word came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, take the role of the book and write there in all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel and against Judah and against all the nations from the day that I speak unto thee from the days of Josiah, even unto this day. It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purposed to do unto them, that they may return every man from Ziva way that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. So we're in a really busy time right now in the nation of Judah. There's a lot going on. So I think it'll be helpful if we look at the context of where we are right now in their history. Keep in place in Jeremiah 36 because we're gonna be here for the rest of the evening. But turn, if you will, to 2 Kings 23. If we want to get the context of where we are in their history, we're gonna wanna start with the king named Josiah. So Josiah was the king who was king when God first called Jeremiah. He's best known for leading Judah into the greatest revival that they had ever known. If you're familiar with 2 Kings 23, most of the chapter is just about his revival and what he did for God and the altars he tore down and all those great things he did for God. If you're there in 2 Kings 23, look at verse 25. The Bible says, in liken to him, talking about Josiah, was there no king before him that turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, neither after him arose there and he liked him. So Josiah was a great king. He did a lot of good things for God. And although he was a really good king, he made some mistakes in his life. 21 years after his revival he led, he decides to go fight against Pharaoh and the king of Egypt and God did not call him to go to this battle. He was actually warned not to go into this battle. He was told it has nothing to do with you, Josiah, stay out of this, but he decided to go fight it anyway and he ends up dying there. And it's really at this point when Josiah dies in battle, you can kind of mark where God's judgment began. God's judgment that had been building up for generations and generations, this is really the point where it kind of just, it all went downhill from here. After Josiah dies, they make Jehovah has his son king and about three months later, Pharaoh Niko, who Josiah died fighting against, decides to go invade Jerusalem. He's probably pretty annoyed that Josiah did that. So he goes, he invades Jerusalem, look at verse 34, see what happens next. 2 Kings 23, 34, and Pharaoh Niko made Eliakim, the son of Josiah king in the room of Josiah's father and turned his name to Jehoiakim. So this is our king and our story tonight. And took Jehoi has away and he came to Egypt and died there. So he comes, he invades Jerusalem, he takes Jehovah has captive into Egypt where he'll eventually die. And he makes another one of Josiah's sons who is most commonly referred to as Jehoiakim, the king. And then later he requires the nation to basically pay a tax or a fee. Jehoiakim pays that and Pharaoh Niko leaves Judah alone. And this is where our story begins tonight. We began when during the reign of Jehoiakim. And obviously this is what has recently happened is not good, but God's judgment has only just begun. If you're there and go back to Jeremiah 36, then we know a little bit of the context where we are. We'll go ahead and read real quick that again. And it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah king of Judah, that this word came into Jeremiah from the Lord saying. So look what God's telling Jeremiah to do. Take the role of a book and write therein all the words that I've spoken to you against Israel and against Judah. And against all the nations from the day that I speak unto thee, from the days of Josiah, even unto this day. So he says, I want you to take a book. I want you to write in it all the words, all the judgments, all the terrible things I've told you so far. And we see the purpose here. The purpose is because God is still merciful. Verse number three says it may be that the hells of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them that they may return every man from his evil way that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. So obviously God's going to certainly judge Judah if he has to, but he rather than just get right. He rather than just turn from their ways and get right. So let's see what happens next. Jeremiah 36 verse four. Then Jeremiah called Baruch, the son of Nariah. And Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord she had spoken unto him upon her role of the book.  I cannot go into the house of the Lord. Therefore go thou and read in the role which thou has written from my mouth the words of the Lord and the ears of the people and the Lord's house upon the fasting day and also thou shall read them in the ears of all Judah that come out of their cities. And again we see the purpose. It may be that they will present their supplication before the Lord and will return everyone from his evil way for great is the anger and the fury of the Lord that the Lord has pronounced against this people. And Baruch the son of Nariah did according to all that Jeremiah the prophet commanded him reading in the book of the words of the Lord and the Lord's house. So for whatever reason, Jeremiah is not able to go into the temple to do this. So he tells Baruch who's a scribe.  So the title of the sermon title is making intercession for God's word. And we're gonna look at some men who later in our story tonight who made intercession for the word of God. And I wanna talk about how we as Christians need to be making intercession for the word of God in the midst of a world that despises it and what it means to do so. So first tonight, to make intercession for God's word we must fear it. Let's continue our story, verse nine. It became to pass in the fifth year of Johoiakim the son of Josiah King of Judah in the ninth month that they proclaimed to fast before the Lord to all the people in Jerusalem and to all the people that came from the cities of Judah into Jerusalem. So it is the day that God appointed. This is the day Barrick's gonna go in the temple and read the book. Then Barrick, then read Barrick in the book, all the words of Jeremiah in the house of the Lord in the chamber of Gemini, the son of Shaphim, the scribe in the higher court at the entry of the new gate of the Lord's house in the ears of all the people. So Barrick is reading this book in the temple. He's specifically located in a chamber of a man of a scribe named Geminiah. Verse 11, when Micaiah the son of Geminiah, so this is the Geminiah's son, the son of Shaphim had heard out of the book all the words of the Lord. So his son hears all these terrible things. He hears all these judgments. Let's see what he does.  Then Micaiah declared unto them all the words that he had heard when Barrick read the book in the ears of the people. So he goes and gets his dad and all the other scribes that are sitting there and he basically tells them all these terrible things, all these judgments that Barrick is reading. Verse 14, therefore all the princes sent Jehudiah the son of Nethiniah, the son of Shemamiah, the son of Kushai and to Barrick saying, take in thine hand the ruler and now it's read in the ears of the people and come. So Barrick, the son of Narayah took the role in his hand and came unto them. And they said unto him, sit down now and read it in our ears. So Barrick read it in their ears. Now came to pass, I want you to notice this. Now came to pass when they had heard all the words, when Barrick comes to them and he gives them the word of God and he shows them the judgments that God has, it says they were afraid. Both one and other and said to Barrick, we will surely tell the king of all these words. So if you've ever read the book of Jeremiah or the other prophets, you know this is true, but normally with the usual responses to somebody of importance, whether it's the king or a scribe or a governor, when somebody of importance usually hears the word of God being preached, usually what they do is they would throw Jeremiah in prison or whoever it was, they'd beat him, they'd threaten him. They normally did not take this very well, but not with these scribes. In fact, we're gonna see later in our sermon that it is these scribes who made intercession for God's word. He said, well, why? Why did they not respond in a negative way to God's message? The answer is in verse 16, because it says when they had heard all the words, they were afraid. So they were afraid of God's judgments. They were afraid of God. And in the same way, if we wanna successfully intercede for God's word, we have to actually fear him ourselves. Turn to Proverbs 1.7, Proverbs 1.7. While you're turning there, I'm gonna read you Proverbs 3.7 that says, be not wise in thine own eyes, fear the Lord and depart from evil. Proverbs 1.7, if you're there, the Bible says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Turn to Proverbs 14.16, Proverbs 14.16. So here's what this verse is saying.  And you say, well, why am I a fool if I don't fear God? What about not fearing God makes me a fool? Well, if you're there in Proverbs 14.16, we find the answer. It says, a wise man feareth and departeth from evil, but the fool rageeth. Notice this and his confidence. One attribute of a fool is it says a fool is confident. Now, obviously there's a right way to be bold and confident, but when this says a fool rageeth and is confident, it's saying that in a negative way. Turn to Proverbs, I'm sorry, Exodus 9.13. Exodus 9.13.  You're not afraid of God's judgments on your life. You're confident.  And I love Exodus chapter nine if you're there because this is a perfect example we literally see played out of this, what we see in Proverbs 14.16. In verse 13, the Bible says, in the Lord said unto Moses, rise up early in the morning, and stand before Pharaoh and say unto him, thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, let my people go that they may serve me, for I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart and upon thine servants, and upon thy people that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth. So we're in Exodus here at the time of the plagues that God brought upon Egypt. Skip down to verse number 18 for sake of time. Bible says, behold, tomorrow about this time I will cause it to rain a very grievous hail. Such as have not been in Egypt since the foundation thereof even until now. So God's gonna bring a hail. It's a very grievous hail. We're gonna see how devastating it is here in the next verse. But God is still going to give the Egyptians a warning. He says, send therefore now and gather thy cattle and all that thou hast in the field for upon every man and beast which shall be found in the field and shall not be brought home, the hail shall come down upon them and they shall die. So God's saying, this hail is gonna be so bad that anything that is left outside is going to die.  In verse 20 we kind of see this compare and contrast to people who fear God and the fools who don't. Says, hear that fear the word of the Lord among the servants of Pharaoh, made his servants and his cattle flee into the houses and he that regarded not the word of the Lord. So here's your fools, they're confident, they're bold. They don't care about what God says.  You better listen and do what God says. They don't care. It says they regarded not the word of the Lord, left his servants and his cattle in the field. And of course we know what happens. Those who listened to God and brought their animals and their servants inside, everything was fine. But anybody who left their cattle, their servants outside, they died. And so you say, well how important is it that I fear God? You know, is it, I mean I get we're supposed to do it. Is it really something that's a fundamental of the faith? And turn to Jeremiah 5.23. Jeremiah 5.23, while you're turning there, read you Deuteronomy 5.29. It says, oh that there was such a heart in them that they would fear me and keep all my commandments always that it might be well with them and with their children forever. So here's what God's saying. He's saying, fear me and it'll go well with you. It'll bless you if you fear me. He said, what if I don't? What is the consequence of not fearing God? Jeremiah 5.23, the Bible says, but these people have to revolting in a rebellious heart. They are revolted and gone. Neither say they're in their hearts. Let us now fear the Lord our God. They give it the rain, both the former and the latter in a season. He reserved unto us the appointed weeks of harvest. Your iniquities have turned away these things and your sins have withholding good things from you. So here's the chain reaction, all right?  That's what happens with the nation of Judah. The reason that God destroyed them, the reason that he brought his judgment upon them was because they didn't fear God and as a result of that they fell into sin and as a result of that God destroyed them. So we just need to make sure we keep in mind and we know that we fear God.  You should fear God because God says fear me and he'll be well with you. If you don't, you're gonna get destroyed. You're gonna, I will judge you. So we see if we're gonna intercede for God in his word, we must fear him ourselves. So first tonight I said to make intercession for God's word, we must fear it. Second tonight, to make intercession for God's word, we must further it, to continue our story in verse 16. Now came to pass when they had heard all the words, they were afraid both one and the other. It said unto Barak, notice this, we will surely tell the king of all these words. And they asked Barak, saying, tell us now, how does thou write all these words at his mouth? Then Barak answered them.  Then it said to the princes unto Barak, go hide thee thou in Jeremiah and let no man know where ye be. So I just want you to notice again that they are on his side. They are agreeing with him, they are genuinely afraid of the word of God. But verse 20 says, and they went into the king into the court, but they laid up the role in the chamber of Elisha and the scribe and told all the words and the ears of the king. So at this point, because I said we must to make intercession for God's word, we must further it. And I wanna real quick just give three reasons we should do that. Why should we further God's word? Why should we promote God's word? World one, and I know this isn't really too deep but it's true, but we should further God's word because it's just common sense. Why you didn't notice these scribes here, that's why they did this. It wasn't, they weren't, Barak is not telling them you need to go tell other people is what happened is they heard this, they were afraid of it and they said we need to tell the king. We need to tell somebody about this, which makes sense because, you know, put yourself in their shoes.  They heard this and the first thing they said is we will surely tell the king of all these words. They said we need to tell somebody about this, we need to make sure people know about this. Turn to 2 Corinthians 4-13.  This is what you do. It's not rocket science, it's just common sense. We're there in 2 Corinthians 4-13. I love this verse, it kind of gets this idea across that preaching the gospel, it's just, it's not a big special, it's just common sense. 2 Corinthians 4-13, Bible says we having the same spirit of faith according as it is written. So Paul's about to quote Psalm 116 verse 10 here. He says, I believed and therefore have I spoken. We also believe and therefore speak. I mean, it's not rocket science, he's like, I believe, so I speak, it's that simple. I believe, I learned that I was saved from eternity burning in hell, so therefore, for that reason, I speak. It's just, it's something you do. You would think, if you see someone walking towards a cliff, I mean, it wouldn't be considered a super heroic thing if you went and told them hey, there's a cliff right there. It's just common sense, it's just what you would do. But, second, obviously we should further God's word because it's just common sense, but second, we should further God's word because we're disobeying Christ if we don't. Turn to 1 Corinthians 9-16. While you're turning there already, Mark 16-15, we all know it, I'm sure a lot of you haven't memorized. Says, and he said unto them, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. That's not a suggestion, that's a command. Amen. It's a command, preaching the gospel is, it's a command for us to do in our life. There in 1 Corinthians 9-16. It says, for though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of, right? That's kind of what we just mentioned, right? It's just common sense. Even if you preach the gospel, you don't really have anything to brag about. It's not anything special.  Let's finish reading. It says, for necessity is laid upon me, notice this, ye, woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel. Here's what Paul's saying. He's saying, I better preach the gospel because if I don't, I'm in trouble. He's saying, woe is unto me. He's saying, I am in trouble if I ever would stop preaching the gospel. Curtis Hudson said this. He said, the only alternative to soul winning is disobedience to Christ. Turn to 1 Thessalonians 2-3. 1 Thessalonians 2-3. Gonna read you Matthew 12-30. The Bible says, he, this is something that Jesus said, he that is not with me is against me. And he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. Look, you're either helping gather or you're scattering. If you're not helping further the gospel and further God's word, you're hindering it. That's just how it works. That's what Jesus said. So first, we should further God's word because it's just common sense. Second, we should further God's word because we're disobeying Christ if we don't. But third, we should further God's word because God trusts us with it. If you're there in 1 Thessalonians 2-3, the Bible says this. For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor of guile. But look at this, but as we were, I love this phrase, I love this mentality that Paul the Apostle had. But as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak, not as pleasing men, but God which triath our hearts. You know, I think the reason, I do believe that one of the main reasons that Paul did so much for the gospel, the reason that Paul, just his whole life, he did so many great things for God and did so many great things for the gospel, is because of this mentality he had that the gospel, it's something I'm trusted with. It's not mine, it's something I'm trusted with by God. Because here's the thing, when you understand that you're trusted with something, you understand that it's not yours to do whatever you want with it. If God trusts you with something, you don't have the luxury of deciding to play it by your rules. When God trusts you with something, you do it his way. Turn to Matthew 25, 24. Matthew 25, 24. I turn there myself. You say, what happens if I'm not a good steward of what God gives me? What happens if you trust me with the gospel and I just really don't do anything with it? Well, let's look at, actually let's, if you're Matthew 25, let's start reading in verse 14, Matthew 25, 14. We're reading about the parable of the talents. Starting verse 14, the Bible says, for the kingdom of heaven is as a man traveling into a far country who called his own servants and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two and to another one, to every man according to his several ability and straight way took his journey. Then he that had received five talents went and traded with the same and made them other five talents. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained another two. But he that had received the one, went and digged in the earth and hid his Lord's money. After a long time, the Lord of those servants cometh and reckoned with them. And so he that received five talents came and the sought, brought other five talents saying, Lord deliverst unto me five talents, behold I have gained beside them five talents more. So we're not just skip down if you will to verse 24. But basically what happens now is the first two servants, all three servants were trusted with their Lord's money and the first two servants were wise with it. They did what their Lord wanted them to do with the money. But this third servant he, he what he did, the, that his Lord was not happy with. Let's look at verse 24. Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord I knew thee that thou art a hard man reaping where thou was not sown and gathering where thou was not strawed. And I was afraid. Isn't that the reason we ever don't serve God in our life or don't do something wants us to do? Isn't that why we do it? We're afraid of, we're afraid of people. We're afraid of our coworkers. We're afraid of money. We're afraid of whatever it is. This is why we, we do that. And I was afraid and went and hid thy talent in the earth and lo, here thou hast that is thine. So he gives those Lord the talent back. Verse 26, his Lord answered and said to him, thou wicked and slothful servant, thou newest that I reap where I sowed not and gather where I have not strawed. Now this makes thee seem a little extreme at first. I mean, if you think about it, he didn't lose the talent. It's not like he gave him the talent and then he lost it and he didn't give it back to him. He gave it back. He trusted him with something and he returned it to him in one piece. He said, lo, here thou hast that is thine. He said, why was he so mad? I mean, wicked and slothful, that's pretty serious, right? Well, let's look at verse 27. Thou oddest therefore to have. So here's what he wanted him to do. Put my money to the exchangers and then am I coming? I should have received my own with usury. Look, when God entrusts us with the gospel, he doesn't want us just returning the gospel back to him. He wants the gospel back with usury, with the souls that were saved along with it. And this is the mentality that we need to have. When we die, we need to make sure that we had the usury. We actually had the fruits of what God entrusted us with. Like I said, when we get this mentality that the gospel is something we're trusted with this and when we understand that, once we get that, we understand that the gospel is not ours to do whatever we want with it. We play by God's rules. So first tonight I said to make intercession for God's word, we must fear it. Second, I said to make intercession for God's word, we must further it. And we saw that the reasons we should is gives us common sense. We're disobeying Christ if we don't and God trusts us with it. But third tonight to make intercession for God's word, we must be faithful with it. Let's continue our story, verse 21. So basically they just heard the word of God, the scribes heard the word of God. They said, we're gonna tell the king, we gotta tell somebody about this. So they go and they tell the king, verse 21. So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the role and he took it out of Elisha in the scribe's chamber. And Jehudi read it in the ears of the king and in the ears of all the princes which stood beside the king. Now the king sat in the winter house in the ninth month and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. So just to set the scene a little bit, you have the scribes here and barracks probably with them. They have the scroll that they're reading to the king and then you have the king and all his servants and there is a fire there. There's a hearth burning there. Verse 23. And it came to pass that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he didn't even get to finish. He didn't even get to finish. And when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he, referring to the king, cut it with the pen knife and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth. Can you imagine? I mean, you read this and you think, how can somebody do that?  He said, how could somebody just go and just feel normally fine, just burning God's word? Well, the answer is in verse 24, here's why. Yet they were not afraid. Do you remember when Baruch went to the scribes and he read them the word of God? Remember their first reaction? It was what it says, they were afraid. But here's the thing, the world out there, they're not afraid. I'm not saying that every unsafe person out there is a wicked king, Jehoiak, and that's not what I'm getting at. But the world in general, they just don't fear God. That's why they live their lives contrary to God's word. That's why they don't care about God's word. That's why when you ask them, do you know for sure you died day to go to heaven? That's why most people say, no thanks, I'm not interested. Because most people just have no regard for God's word and it's because they're not afraid. They have no fear of God. Yet they were not afraid, no rent their garments, neither the king nor any of the servants heard all these words. I mean, how do you mean Baruch? I mean, the Bible says that Baruch was first told to do this in the fourth year of Jehoiakim and he read it in the fifth year, and I'm not saying it took him a whole year to write it, but can you imagine spending all this time writing this? I mean, there was no office pro printers back then. Everything was written by hand. He wrote the whole thing by hand. The Bible says here that Jehoi read three or four leaves. We don't even know what else. It was at least three or four pages long. That's a lot. Can you imagine just watching someone just burn that? Can you imagine someone walking up to you and taking your King James Bible and just ripping those words up?  Can you imagine how frustrating that would be? But I want you to notice verse 25. This is kind of our key verse for the sermon tonight. Nevertheless, the role was just burned, but it says, nevertheless, Elnathan and Delaea and Gemoriah had made intercession to the king. That he would not burn the role, but he would not hear them.  You know, we go to church Sunday morning, come back Sunday night, come back Thursday night, come back the next Sunday, the next Sunday night, the next Thursday, week after week, month after month, year after year. We try to read our Bibles every day and pray every day and, you know, week after week, month after month. We try to go soul winning. And we try so hard to fear God's word and just give our lives to make intercession for God's word, right? And sometimes it still seems figuratively speaking, of course, they still burn the role, right? The world still disrespects God's word. They still don't want to hear it. They still, they just don't regard it. They live contrary to God's word. I mean, the average person out there is involved in sins that they think are perfectly normal, but are actually serious sins in the light of the Bible, right, because they just don't fear God's word and they don't care about it. They say, well, what should we do, right? What's our response to that?   What should we do? Well, see what God said about all this. Verse 26, it gets even worse, by the way, with the King commanded, Jeremiah, the son of Hamalek, Sarah, the son of Azrael, and Jeremiah, the son of Abdeel, to take the scribe and Jeremiah the prophet, but the Lord hid them. So it gets even worse. He sends these guys to find Barak and find Jeremiah and basically arrest them. And, but look what God says in verse 28, or 27, I'm sorry. Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. After that, the King had burned the role. In all the words which Barak wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah saying, take the yet again, take the again another role and write in all the former words that were in the first role, which Chahoyekim, the King of Judah, had burned. Here's what God said. He said, do it all over again. Do it again, keep going, don't stop. God didn't say, take a break, give it a few months. He said, no, go back and rewrite the whole thing again. And this is what God's commandment is to us. And in fact, he actually had them do something else. He actually had them do even more. Verse 29, and thou shalt say, did Chahoyekim, King of Judah, let's sayeth the Lord, thou hast burned this rule saying, why hast thou written therein, saying the King of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy all this land and shall cause to cease from thence a man and beast. Therefore, thus saith the Lord of Chahoyekim, King of Judah. I love how he phrased that. He's like, yeah, I know you burned the role, Chahoyekim, but I'm still the Lord of Chahoyekim, King of Judah. I'm still your Lord. I don't care if you're saved or not.  I am still Lord over you. I still am in charge. Therefore, thus saith the Lord of Chahoyekim, King of Judah. He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat and in the night to the frost and I will punish him in his seed and his servants for their iniquity and I will bring upon them and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem and upon the men of Judah all the evil that I have pronounced against them, but they harken not. Here's what God said. He said, rewrite the whole thing and on top of that, I want you to go back to the King. You know the King who just tried to arrest you? You know the King who probably wishes you were dead?  I don't think he had any intentions of like having them slow down. Take a little bit of a break. God said, keep going and do you know what? And so much more. And here's why.  Imagine like we're having a match of tug-of-war with the world, right? And we're over here pulling on this side and the world's pulling here on this side. What would we do?   The world disregards God even more. What would you do? Would you just like let go of the rope? Would you like slack off a little bit? No, that's the last thing you do. If the world starts pulling harder, you pull even harder than them. And that's what God was telling them.  He's gonna burn my role and disregard me even more. And then, you know what? We write the role and on top of that, go tell him this. Turn to Ezekiel 2-6, Ezekiel 2-6. Say, but the world won't listen to the word of God. The world doesn't care about the word of God. There's so few people out there who will even let us preach the gospel to them. Most people just, they just don't care. It's not that they're wicked, evil people. They just don't care. Say, what do we do? Ezekiel 2-6, I love these verses. In God talking to the prophet Ezekiel. And thou, son of man, be not afraid of them. Neither be afraid of their words, though briars and thorns be with me, and thou just dwell among scorpions. Today we dwell among scorpions. Briars and thorns are with us. He says, be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house. He says, I know they don't want to listen. I know they're a rebellious house. Next verse, and thou shalt speak my words unto them.  Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house.   And when I looked, behold, in hand, was sent unto me, and lo, a roll of a book was written therein. Sound familiar? And he spread it before me, and it was written within, without. And there was written there in lamentations, in mourning, in a woe. It's not a very pleasant message.  He says, I know they don't care about my word. I know they've forgotten me. I know they're rebellious. But he said, whether they hear or not, I want you to intercede for my word anyway. And that's God's commandment to us. It's whether, see, look, what the world does and their response to this book has nothing to do with what we do with it. It doesn't matter whether they agree with the word of God or they disagree with it. That doesn't matter. We shouldn't change. We shouldn't back off. No matter what, whether it's just the world's reaction or discouragement or just, you know, obstacles in the Christian life, we should not slow down. Turn to 2 Corinthians 4-8. 2 Corinthians 4-8. Look, God's word doesn't lose his power just because people don't want to hear it. In fact, it seems that usually the way it goes is the more people don't like God's word, the more power it has. They're in 2 Corinthians 4-8. Oh, wait till you get there. It's like Corinthians 4-8. The Bible says this, we are troubled on every side, aren't we? Aren't we troubled on every side from just people who, like I said, aren't necessarily wicked, evil people, but just have forgotten God, really care about God? You know, sometimes you can get, you know, frustrating just being surrounded by a world of people like that. Notice this, yet not distressed. We are perplexed. Sometimes it can be just kind of perplexing to seeing all the sin and the wickedness out there, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Didn't someone tell us I will never leave thee nor forsaken thee? Right? Cast down, but not destroyed. Always bearing about the body, the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. Look, no matter the obstacle and no matter the discouragement, we are, we're expected to keep serving God. Not even just, not even just stop completely, but just slowing down. We're expected just to keep going and to keep serving God no matter what.  We're, we're going, everything's going great. We're, we're doing good. We're fighting the good fight of faith. And sometimes I think God himself kind of puts an obstacle in their way. This is up that maybe would slow us down a little. And you say, well, why would God do that? Why would God put something in our way that would hinder us from serving him? You say, why would he do that? Because you know, sometimes I think God does just, he just wants to test us. He wants to test us and he puts something in our way and he says, I know this may slow him down. I know it's going to make it harder and they may get a little weary and they may have the temptation to slow down. And I'm going to put this here because I just want to watch and see if they're going to slow down a little, if they're going to stop or they're going to drag their feet a little bit. So look, when obstacles come our way, you know, we have to accept that as a challenge.  And look, that's not a test that we want to fail. There's a lot of Christians out there who they're doing, they're going great. They're serving God. Then the obstacle comes and God tests them and he says, I know they're serving me now. I just wanted to see if they're going to keep doing it. There's a lot of Christians out there who the obstacle comes or the discouragement comes and it slows them down. Suddenly they're not serving God like they were. Suddenly they're not doing what they were. And they're not fighting the good fight of faith. It's hard and as zealously as they were before. And look, if that happens to us, we failed. Like I said, it's not a test we want to fail. We got to realize when times like that come, because look, the two ways God tests people in the Bible are by blessing and by trials. By blessing to see if we're gonna kind of forget about God and forget about the God who originally gave us the blessings and just forget about God and let that hinder us from serving him. But sometimes by trials, what we just talked about where he puts those trials there and he wants to see if it's going to hinder us. Because look, if anybody had an excuse to slow down or be a little discouraged or upset, it was our scribes. It was Barak, it was Jeremiah. It was definitely Jeremiah if you are familiar with his life and his ministry. You know what, God, God expected them to keep going. God expected them to keep serving him. If you're there in Jeremiah 36, look down to verse 32. It's the last verse we'll look at tonight. Jeremiah 36, 32 kind of wraps the whole thing up here in this whole story we've spent the evening looking at. Verse 32, then took Jeremiah another role and gave it to Barak the scribe, the son of Nariah, who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah, all the words of the book, which Jehoiakim, King of Judah had burned in the fire. And I don't want, don't miss this, don't miss this. And they were added besides unto them many like words and only did God tell them to not stop and to rewrite the scroll and to keep going and don't slow down and on top of that, I want you to go back and bring this terrible message to Jehoiakim, but on top of that, they wrote even more. They served God even harder. They wrote even more in that book than was written in there in the first place. So what's the application tonight? What can I learn from the sermon tonight? Here's the application. No matter how the world responds or the obstacles that come or how weary it gets, worrying it gets or how discouraging it gets or the trials that come our way, no matter what stands between us and God's will, we need to keep serving God. We need to keep, we can't stop. No matter what stands in our way, we have to keep making intercession for the word of God. Look, the Bible says the world's waxing worse and worse, does it not? And the worse this world gets and the more they turn against God and the more they refuse to listen to God's word, the worse things get. The higher of a demand, the greater of a need is there, for people who are going to fear God's word, further God's word and remain faithful to God's word. There has never been a time when there's been a greater need for Christians to stand up and say, you know, I know it's gonna be hard, I know it's not gonna be easy, I know this obstacle is standing in my way, I know we're gonna get weary, but no matter what stands in our way, we need, there is a great need today for Christians who are going to put everything else aside and just give their lives to making intercession for the word of God. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer. Dear Lord, thank you for this chapter in the Bible, Lord, thank you for these men. Thank you for Baruch and these scribes. Even though things probably didn't really turn out the way they expected, they still kept going. Thank you for Jeremiah, Lord. I know he's not really in this particular story as much, God, but thank you for a prophet who really just lived his life like this, God, no matter what people's response were, no matter how many times he was beaten or thrown in prison or his life was threatened, no matter what came his way, his whole life was just devoted to, thus say it, the Lord God. God, I pray you would help us to be like this, God. I pray you would help us tonight, these people right here, God, to stay focused on serving you. And even though things may not be super easy all the time and things may get hard, help us to stay focused on what you want us to do, God. God, if we don't make intercession for your word, God, if these people right here, Fresno, California, are not going to do what it takes to make intercession for your word, Lord, nobody else will. Nobody else will. Pray you'd be with us, God, pray you'd be with this church. God bless it. Pray you'd be with us tonight in the rest of our week. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.


We're going to go in and get started. Hi everybody, I'm EG, and this is G. And we are members of Consensus Working on the Hero Project. Woo! Woo! Today we're here to talk to you about our open architecture initiative. It's really great to be back here at the, oh, yeah. All right, well, it's really great to be back here at DevCon. This place is always going to hold a special place in our hearts because we launched at DevCon in Shanghai just over three years ago. And obviously, the Ethereum ecosystem has seen a huge amount of growth in that amount of time. Our team has grown. Our architecture is pretty much unrecognizable now versus what we had three years ago. And that's really what this talk is about. We entered into this space because we saw the troubles that people were having with trying to enter Web 3 and explore what could be done with building smart contracts and building things on top of Ethereum. And we thought we could help with that. And one of the things that we want to be now is share our lessons learned over the last three years. Talk about what worked for us, what didn't, and just continue to share our experiences and lessons learned going forward. And that's really what this open architecture initiative is about. So talking about single-node architecture is one of the, whenever we all got involved with Ethereum, involved with blockchain, you all start at the same place. You start running in the Ethereum client. It connects to the network. And you start throwing some requests for data at it, whether that's giving this list of transactions, let's get back to this smart contract. You're interacting with a single-node that's typically installed on your laptop. Maybe you start working in a co-working space with some people. And you start just sharing this and then because nobody wants to have all of that space taken on their Mac where you can't upload or upgrade your hard drive. So what you end up having is the single-node coming on the single-chain. And maybe the amount of requests that you're doing out there are starting to be slower than what you would expect them to be. What latency starts to increase. And you end up trying to do traditional wet-scaling tactics, which starts with rhythm-leasing. So that just means throwing more server resources at it. But that only takes you so far. At some point, these server resources scale beyond what you might have access to, but it's in which. And what we've seen is that developers end up building custom solutions around this. Whether that's custom catching, custom APIs, a bunch of sort of like scaffolding architecture around this. And what we've seen is that there is now like this inequality of data between different development teams, depending on whether or not a specific team has hard expertise with like wet-scale or if they have beyond the resources on time to put into this architecture. And so that's what we're trying to do is share more information about what's worked for us. There are different types of user profiles that use Ethereum nodes. For the majority of users, all you're doing is interacting with a smart phone track, checking that token balance and selling a transaction. You're probably using a lifetime, or you can be using a lifetime. And that's currently sufficient.  It's only when you start trying to do slightly more complex things with that data, like looking at historical information on chain, that you start needing to run like a full-net or a whole archive node. And maybe at some point you turn that into a business that is more focused on watching analytics. And at that point, you need this node to be always on the line and available because maybe you built an API on top of it that your users are consuming. And all three of these types of user profiles are using the same underlying Ethereum client software. Ethereum clients were meant to be ubiquitous. Everybody was supposed to have access to the same software and be given the same opportunity to access this data.  And it's not necessarily tailored towards their use base.  Like maybe this is like a Django app, or a medium-range app or something like that. The way that people typically solve web scale was by looking at this thing as subsystems. So what are the subsystems of an Ethereum client? There's the query interface, which is your JSONRPC web server. There's the peer-to-peer connections from network. There's the EVM that's actually able to process new blogs and transactions. And then chain data storage that actually stores that information locally. And then the transaction system that actually receives these transactions and propagates them out across the network. Talking about something like the chain data.  How do you pass what a specific method has? For depth, you're going to be using level DB for parity to use graphs DB. By taking this and thinking about it, not as this model like a piece of software, but thinking about it as subsystems, we started to apply just traditional like web scaling to this because we're not running this on just like a single Mac, but we're running this in the cloud. And so you start with or at least it. You put this on a server, it's maybe using eight cores, 60 gigs of memory. And these are usually pretty proficient. Then you can get to over 8,000 requests per second because we're running one server if you start to let them configure it correctly. And maybe you can get double what you started with for certain things that can just double the CPU or double the memory. But then beyond that, that's where people start running into issues. And so we have what we call our cloud type architecture. So we conceptualize this as taking those subsystems and being able to optimize and do the current thing. So you don't just say, this is level DB on a single instance. You say, this is the chain data. And if I want to be able to create this data more efficiently and retrieve this data more efficiently, I can build additional indexes of data. Maybe I take this and instead of putting it in level DB, I put it into Postgres, so I put it into DynamoDB or something like that that has like web scale behind it. And then you can index the data specifically tailored to your needs. And you can then do this with any other subsystem, turn it into a specialized microservice if you're towards your application. All of these things start with having that reliable node connection. And that's how you can quickly provision it. If you're trafficking that data on a client, it's much simpler than it used to be. It used to be on 2016, you didn't need extra tooling. You could work sync a Paraly node in minutes and you could get a get node in like an hour. But over time, that's grown in terms of donation as chain data has grown. And so the first thing that we tried was doing simple EBS snapshot. So if you're familiar with Amazon web services, there's this concept of elastic block storage, which is the ability to snapshot periodic backups and quickly spin up new disk types that can be associated with any server that you spin up. So instead of taking, say, 12 hours to sync a node, this thing can be up in online like an hour. And so additionally, these periodic snapshots gave us failure recovery. There were cave-in certain upgrades that corrupted chain data. And we had to find a way to quickly recover otherwise our servers would have been down. So that was one of the things that we started with. Lately, there's been a lot of improvements to sync times where it's gone from 1 and 1 half hours with get1.8 down to four hours with get1.9. These are, this is test data from the get team. They did great work in the center. And we're able to get these kinds of improvements specifically by optimizing IO utilization. IO utilization is really important because when we run these things, they use a huge amount of IOPS because watching data in terms of being stored in key value stores in the way that the data is verified is very read and write heavy. So we actually use this type right here, the i3-4x large, which gives you 825,000 random read IOPS available. If you weren't using this and you were using PES storage, you were going to be limited to a fraction of that, like one 10 of that is what you really have. This only gets you to that four hour mark and that's not fast enough if you need to quickly spin up and you know for a minute and breathe. And so we ended up combining this approach, combining periodic backups with being able to sync that directly to any node when we spin it up. Thanks to my crypto team for sharing their implementation of this. They were the first ones to really try this out in production and they share their implementation here if anyone wants to check it out. But this now got us to a point where this source of truth node is what we call it. Syncs from scratch, is able to sync from scratch and how long it takes, either a fast sync or an archived node to sync. Then we have a landing function that fires off every hour to backup that data to an S3 bucket. We can generalize this to any cloud that offers a similar tool. And then lastly, if we need to spin up any capacity to upgrade the node, these nodes have a high three-put pipeline between S3 and EC2 and it's fully able to saturate that IOS that's available to the server and get this node up and running about 50 minutes from the time that we started to the time that it's ready. So once you have this reliable node, you can start building additional services on top of it to optimize your traffic. And it really needs to be tailored to the traffic patterns that you and your application and your business have. So G's gonna walk you through the traffic patterns that we see. Can everybody hear me? Yes. I've memorized our traffic into three different types, near head, archived and full. Near head is any request that's within about 100 blocks behind head. Archived is requests that require approved data and then full is requests that do not require approved data. As you can see, the majority of traffic that we get is near head. It's fairly consistent whereas archived data can fluctuate anywhere between 26 to even less than 1% depending on what our users are doing at that given point in time. So the first thing we did was we passed our near head data using CDN. It worked really well but it just came with certain limitations. For example, we could only cash get block by number and get block number. It also wasn't really scalable. So we made a decision to store our near head data in a red CD and it was much more scalable and also allowed us to store all of our near head data. In addition to our near head cash, we have a set of specialized micro services that either index or cash like specific types of data. The one I'm gonna talk about today is our log indexer which services are get blocks request. The way that Ethereum clients retrieve block data from the get barely time consuming, it retrieves every block, compares it with a blue filter, then it retrieves the transaction for the match blocks and then again, compares the generated logs with the filter. It works really great for a person that's just querying their own blocks using their own node but we get up to like a hundred million get block requests today. So when that happens, it overburns our Ethereum nodes. It also increases the response times for our users. So we actually index all our logs with incoming new blocks. One of the issues that you can run into when you do this is to correctly account for rewards or you might be servicing incorrect data. So the log indexer actually uses another micro service that we have. Sorry, called re-work tracker and re-work tracker gets dead in blocks. So if we have a block five million, it outputs that data to a consumer in which case is the log indexer. The log indexer then can push the events to its DB but we use MongoDB and continues on with block five million and one. Log indexer updates that information and then when we get block five million and two, re-work tracker then realizes that the parent hash of the current block does not match the block hash of the previous block that it receives. So it actually, and it's a rollback event which the log indexer then consumes to delete that information. And then when re-work tracker retrieves the correct block information, it can then make sure that it has correct logs for block five million and one and then it just continues on with the incoming blocks. It's fairly simple but, and we use it right now to index logs but it can actually be used to index any kind of data that's associated with block information. So this is a fairly simple view of how we handle our requests. The majority of the traffic that we get gets handled by our near-head cash layer and then we have our set of indexers and caches that handle the more frequently called requests and then whatever is left is then service choir theory gets. So those are some of the microservices that we use to help handle the large amount of traffic that we get but we also have a set of internal tools that we use just to help maintain our infrastructure. One of the recent microservices that we have consourced is key router. It maps keys to a consistent set of nodes. It helps route specific kinds of traffic to a consistent data source. A member of our team, Andrew Petrov, created the VIP node which is like a way to incentivize the use of live clients but we actually use it to manage peering or nodes. If anybody's interested, go check it out, it's pretty cool. And also we have our node monitor that monitors the health of our nodes. It tracks like latest block number and then compares it with an external source like ether scan to make sure that our nodes are near-head. It also monitors like clear cow and whether or not it's sinking and that all helps to make sure that the peering nodes are healthy for our users. And then I'm gonna head back to Michi. Yeah so this is really just the start of our open architecture initiative. Having this source of truth infrastructure, having some standard way of indexing is really just the start. Over the next few months, we're going to continue sharing more information about how we've optimized specific parts of your client's subsystems. And one of the things that we wanna do is continue working with partners in the ecosystem to continue to improve this and share knowledge so that we can keep building methods going together. And we always wanna do it in a way that's open collaborative and standardized. We never wanted to hit for the API that was non-standard and server bots, people want to be just one provider, one specific service. And so the next thing coming for us is the tracing API. If you've ever tried running the tracing API available on your local node, that's something that we're going to be building on top of this, well we're already building on top of this and we'll be available in the next couple of months. Outside of this, this architecture is generalized. It's not specific to Ethereum. It's definitely easy to support EVM-based chains using this. We'll be adding multiple chains in the near future. So if you have any questions, we're gonna be doing a Q&A session from 9 a.m. to noon tomorrow. And at the consensus booth, please stop by, ask us about, if you're a plus, this open architecture initiative and just really come by and chat. You can have these great debt-confined limited-edition cookies available if you want to come and check it out. And a couple of members of our team are gonna be in the back, handing out some swag after this. We want to say hello to Tim and Andrew. And that's it. Thank you.


Nothing is impossible with God. We've had a major breakthrough in our ministry. I have a very, very big announcement that I know you're going to love. Make sure you watch until the very end of this video so that you can hear what God is doing in our ministry. Big announcement, don't miss it. There is no limit to what God can do with the life surrendered to the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit is powerful and effective. The Holy Spirit inspires worship in us. The Holy Spirit helps us to pray. The Holy Spirit helps us to understand the word. The Holy Spirit helps us to walk in holiness and to evangelize with boldness. He is the secret to the Christian life. He is the power source to living for God. But some of us are stifling his work. Some of us are putting out the fire of the Holy Spirit in our own lives. And some of us are doing it without even realizing it. I want to talk to you today on this edition of Spirit Church here on the Encounter TV Network about stifling the Holy Spirit. I'm going to show you four things that many believers do that stifle the work of the Holy Spirit in their life. I know this message is going to challenge you and it's going to help you go the deeper levels in the Spirit. But first, Stephen Moctezuma is here with me. He's going to lead you in some anointed worship. So worship with Stephen and come right back and we're going to get into this lesson here. This Stephen Moctezuma. So the Holy Spirit wants to accomplish the work of God in our lives. I like to say that God the Father has commissioned a work of art. Jesus is the model. The Holy Spirit is the painter and your life when it is surrendered is the blank canvas upon which the Holy Spirit can paint the countenance of Christ. The Holy Spirit wants to work on you. He wants to cause you to become more like Jesus every moment of every day. The Holy Spirit wants to mold your character. The Holy Spirit wants to make you a person who is godly, who is powerful in nature. He wants to bring out the Christ in you. He wants the flesh to be done away with and he wants the characteristics of Jesus to be portrayed from your life. He wants you to emanate with the love of God and the power of the Spirit. He works in us. He does many things for us and without him we're helpless. We can't do anything without him.  Really the secret to ministry, the secret to power is to just walk around with the Holy Spirit. When you carry the presence of the Holy Spirit on your life wherever you go he goes and wherever he goes there is deliverance and freedom and healing and revelation of truth the power of the Holy Spirit moves wherever the presence of the Holy Spirit is. But as I said many of us are making the mistake of stifling the work of the Holy Spirit and I'm talking to every believer now. I'm talking to new believers. I'm talking to seasoned believers. I'm talking to ministers and pastors and evangelists and prophets. We need to be so careful as to not stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. I'm going to show you this portion of scripture here. It's one verse, a very simple verse we're going to read. First Thessalonians chapter 5 verse number 19. Do not stifle the Holy Spirit. I'll read verse 20. Also do not scoff at prophecies verse 21. But test everything that is said hold on to what is good. Stay away from every kind of evil. I want to focus in here on do not stifle the Holy Spirit. The King James version words it do not quench the Holy Spirit. That word quench in the original language in the Greek is actually talking about the putting out of a fire. It's the same word exactly that is used in the same portion of scripture in Ephesians that tells us to quench the fiery darts of the enemy. So if we are to quench the fiery darts of the enemy and not quench the Holy Spirit then we can clearly see that the Holy Spirit's fiery nature is revealed through this verse. Now here's what concerns me about this portion of scripture. This letter for Thessalonians was written to believers. It was written to those who love God. It was written to those who desired a move of God in their life. Who desired that God would have his way in their lives. And yet they have to be warned do not stifle the Holy Spirit. Here is the warning. Stifling the Holy Spirit in your life is never done intentionally. I should say rarely done intentionally. I don't think that any true believer wakes up one morning and says I want to stifle the work of the Holy Spirit in my life today. I want him to have as little influence in my life as possible. I don't think anyone does that. No I think when you wake up in the morning if the Lord is the first on your mind you're thinking Lord how do I please you today? I often say that to the Lord. Lord I just want to offer today to you as a sacrifice. That's something I've prayed since I was 11 years old. I say Lord I want you to take the entirety of my day every action every thought. And I want you to take it as an offering. And so with that in mind I live my life in a way that hopefully is pleasing to the Lord. But when I'm looking at this portion of scripture I'm concerned because I realize that the discussion here the warning here is being given to believers. So I don't think anyone wakes up and says well I want to displease the Holy Spirit. I want to displease God. No they wake up and they say I want to please the Lord. Hopefully that's what you say to him and hopefully you offer your every day as an offering to him. And so because that warning is given to believers and because we recognize that believers don't do it knowingly we need to be very attentive to what we do. I'm not saying walk in paranoia or fear or walk with a religious weight over your shoulders. I'm simply saying that we need to be considerate of the Holy Spirit and make sure that we are not stifling his work. The first thing I want to talk to you about that we do that stifles the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is number one its distraction. Now distraction comes in all forms. Distraction comes in responsibilities. Distraction comes in entertainment. Distraction comes in busyness. Distraction comes in everyday life. Work can be a distraction. School can be a distraction. Am I saying don't go to work? Am I saying don't go to school? By no means. But I am saying that we must not allow these things to distract us from what the Holy Spirit wants to speak to us. How often have we felt that pooling to the prayer room and ignored it? I can't tell you how many times I've ignored that pool into my prayer room only to look back later in the day and realize that was the Holy Spirit speaking to me. And I fail at this point. I know many of us fail at this point and maybe you fail in this point. But this is something in my life that I've determined to say I don't want distraction to keep me from experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. I don't want to put out that fire. If that fire, that passion, that zeal, that love for the things of God and doing things for God that love for worship is beginning to die then maybe you're distracted. It's possible to become so distracted by the cares of this world that we become weighed down, that we lose sight of what is important, that we lose sight of what the Holy Spirit is speaking to us in our lives. It's possible that there is so much noise around us. There is so much chaos around us that we fail to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit. Put away distraction. Put away the things that don't matter. Growing up, I can't tell you how many times I walked away from a movie theater or I left a gathering of friends to go home and pray because I sensed the pool of the Holy Spirit on my life.  But don't allow those blessings. Don't allow those responsibilities. Don't allow your ministry. Don't allow the busyness. Don't allow the entertainment to keep you from hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit. The second thing that stifles the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is doubt. Now, I'm going to give a fourth point in just a moment that can seem very similar to this, but doubt is an internal mindset. It's a state of being. It's a position. It's a posture. Doubt is living with the attitude of lack. Doubt is living with the attitude of being an orphan when we are children of God. Now, I want you to really think about this. How many times has doubt kept you from approaching the Holy Spirit? How many times has doubt kept you from seeking the Lord in prayer? Because maybe you doubted that he heard you. Maybe you doubted that you were actually forgiven. So in shame, you shied away from prayer. Maybe you doubted that the prayer would actually affect anything. Maybe you doubted that God was speaking to you. Maybe you doubted that the Lord would meet with you if only you would open the word. Those doubts keep us in a posture of being unable to receive from God. Now, here is what breaks his heart. This saddens the Holy Spirit because when we doubt him, we are indicting his character.  It breaks his heart when we doubt him. Why? Because he's never done anything that should be caused for doubt. Doubt kills faith. Doubt kills those radical actions that we take that cause us to move further into the call and the destiny of God. Set aside the doubt. Don't stifle the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. Move forward in faith. Don't dwell on the past. Don't worry about the future. Don't be distracted in the moment. Instead, have faith and just embrace what God has already done for you. Have faith and approach him confidently. Know with faith that the Holy Spirit dwells with you. Number three is division. When we slander one another, when we talk evil and say ill things about others' ministries, just because we don't do things the way they do things, or just because we don't necessarily believe exactly like they believe, that grieves the Holy Spirit and it stifles his work.  Let them be accursed. That's what the Bible says.  Let them be accursed. But if someone disagrees with you on something that's not primary to salvation such as the gospel or Christ, don't cut them off and call them a heretic or a false prophet. I addressed a little bit of this last week. But in this context, I want to address it in the sense that it's something that we do that stifles the work of the Holy Spirit. He wants to unite us and cause all the believers to move as one unit, one body. He desires that we move as one in this earth and impact those who need the love of God, yet division kills the move of the Holy Spirit. There is something to be said about fellowship and unity and love. Those things, when they unite us, bring about great power. Think about the Book of Acts. Often when there was a powerful move of the Holy Spirit, it was in the midst of their unity. So number one is distraction. Number two is doubt. Number three is division. Number four is disobedience. What is the Holy Spirit spoken to your heart? What is the Holy Spirit spoken to do? He wants to work in your life. How can He bless what you're cursing through disobedience? I'm not saying God curses you. I'm not saying we even walk under a curse necessarily because we are covered in the blood of Jesus. But we by our actions work against God. You see, God is trying to bless you. God is trying to bless us. And often we work against Him trying to bless us by our disobedience. He wants you to cooperate with Him. He wants you to work with Him. He wants to use your life. He wants to mold you. He wants to shape you. He wants the image of Jesus to emanate from you. But disobedience kills that. How are we supposed to experience breakthrough? How are we supposed to experience the work of the Holy Spirit? How are we supposed to keep that passion, that fire burning when we disobey? Disobedience quenches the work of the Holy Spirit. You would be amazed at how years of obedience can be quenched with one fatal act of disobedience. I'm not playing games neither is God. This is serious business. Disobedience stifles the work of the Holy Spirit. How is He supposed to bless you? See, you know, I'm just going to say it because I love you and I want you to hear the truth.    Some of you are praying for breakthrough, the Holy Spirit to work in your finances, but you're disobeying when He tells you to give.   How are we supposed to allow the work of the Holy Spirit to go on when we're quenching it with our disobedience? Often our lifestyle contradicts our prayers, and when that happens, you may be praying, God do this, God do this, but your actions are telling Him, Lord, I'd rather have this. The key to living a life that is set a blaze with a passionate love for Jesus, the key to living in the work of the Holy Spirit is to not stifle Him. Don't let Him be stifled through distraction. Don't let Him be stifled through doubt. Don't let Him be stifled through division or through disobedience. Instead, say, Holy Spirit, I apologize. I'm sorry. I acknowledge my wrong and I turn from these things. Help me to surrender. I want to pray with you now. Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray for that one receiving this prayer now, and I ask, Lord, that they would begin to walk in the fire of the Holy Spirit. Lord, I pray you would remind us, be our constant companion, and remind us of the times that we're being distracted. Stir within us the gift of faith. Spirit of faith, do away with doubt. Forgive us for dividing and slandering and gossiping. Father, I pray you would give us the grace to obey and be our constant reminder in Jesus' name. Let somebody watching me.  You're in ministry. You preach the gospel and you like to teach the Word. But there are some men and women of God that you've slandered with your words. You've spoken against them. And you're wondering why there's this obstruction in your ministry, why you can't seem to get to the next place in ministry. It's because you spoke against God's anointing. This isn't for everyone. This is someone very specific and you know I'm talking to you because what you said was set out of jealousy. What you need to do is two things. You need to call this person or email however you need to contact them and you need to apologize for what you said to them. You need to humble yourself. The second, you need to sow a seed into their ministry. I know this is for someone. This is not for everyone. This is for someone specific because as I'm talking, the conviction of the Spirit is coming upon you. And you know this is you. I'm not talking about a disagreement. I don't want everyone getting paranoid now. I'm talking about someone who, it wasn't a doctrinal disagreement. It was just done out of jealousy. And that's something that you need to go and get right before your brother or your sister in Christ. And that word was for someone. Well, I want to welcome now the new members of Spirit Church. There you are up on the screen. We love you and we are praying for you. I always say that because I always mean it. If you like information on how you can join the Spirit family now over 4,000 members strong, then again, just go to DavidHernandezMinistries.com slash Spirit Church. When you join the Spirit family, you get an email every week from me. I get, I send you a brand new teaching fresh and anointed from the Word of God that will bless your life, that will help you, that will cause you to grow in Christ. Also, we send you, Stephen Mock the Zuma's worship music. So you'll get that every week as well within that same video. And you can reply to that email that you get every week for prayer support from our ministry staff. Join the Spirit family today. It's free. I am asking though, if God puts it on your heart, you're a member of the Spirit family. Sign up to become a partner, which I'm going to talk about in just a moment. But I want to talk to you now about the comments that were left on last week's video. Now, this was an interesting week, I'll say, to say the least. It was, I was led by the Spirit to do this and man, did it stir up spirits. But we're going to read the positive comments from last week's teaching, false prophets and heretics. And so here are the comments from last week's. And by the way, if you would like me to possibly read your comment on next week's edition of Spirit Church, go ahead and be sure to leave your comment right now. Oh, and don't go anywhere. I have an announcement after I read these comments. First commenter, Joseph Valdez writes, thank you, Brother David, for this message. I usually like to read the comments section in videos I watch. The comments about false prophets, all these ideologies and doctrines have been getting to me. I just thank you for your clarification in this video from the Holy Spirit. God bless your ministry. Well, thank you, Joseph. I'm glad you encouraged. That was my goal, to bring clarity to that issue. Because there is a lot of emotion behind that subject. Some people, if you're not harsh enough, they say you're compromising. Some people, they say, if you're too harsh, you're judgmental. That's why I can't care about what people say. I have to just say what the Bible says. John Abraham writes, I am so happy to be a member of Spirit Church. I will always stay strong with the Holy Spirit every day. My Jesus, amen. Vivian Roberts writes, awesome and powerful message, Brother David. God bless you and use you mightily to touch people's lives. Maria Yurda writes, Pastor David, you nailed it here. Thank you for giving us a platform of peace to go about dealing with this very tumultuous topic. As Jesus is the Prince of Peace, those who do His will walk in a situation and can calm the storm. I see this video as the peace of Christ that calms the storm on the boat. You have an excellent gift of delivering the gospel with simplicity and pure effectiveness. I thank you for that compliment. I receive it. I'm encouraged by it. And I would like to say all glory belongs to Jesus. And really, it's the Word of God. It just clears up many situations. And the final commenter, Naomi Camille writes, a timely word. I have always been deeply grieved by this vicious infighting over doctrinal differences and the casual use of the words heretic and false prophet. Sad to say, I have been guilty of criticizing other ministries in the past too. By the way, Naomi, so have I. And I had to repent of this very thing. She goes, Naomi goes on to say, Jesus is not returning for a bickering bride. We must set aside our differences on focus on what unites us. That's true. And what unites us is this. Jesus saves. Jesus is the resurrected Lord. Jesus is God. And he is the only hope of humanity. Jesus is the only way. There are not many ways. And so this is a call that we are sending out to turn from your sin and turn toward Jesus. Repent and be saved. That's the message. It's the gospel. Of course, I could go on with it, but that's where we unite. We unite on the gospel. We unite on the essentials. We unite on the fact that the world needs Jesus. We need Him. This world needs Him now more than ever before. And let me tell you, we're expanding this ministry to respond to that. I'm so excited to announce that those of you who have been supporting us monthly and those of you who have given to our building project, I'm excited to announce that we have reached yet another major milestone within this campaign. Spirit Church, we've found our building. So I'm going to show you some pictures now. This is the facility. It's in Cerritos, California. And it is a beautiful area. It's a beautiful property. It's just right. I'm telling you, it's just right. And what was interesting here, check this out. It's been exactly as far as when we record. Today's June 14th. But I got the lease on June 13th, 2018. We were looking back through our old YouTube videos and the first day we announced publicly that we started this campaign. I don't know if some of you remember this. Remember when I was going week to week raising monthly support saying we needed a thousand new $30 a month partners? Then we got that. Now with that monthly support, we can enter in this new facility. But that has been one year exactly. We released that public announcement on June 13th, 2017. We didn't plan that. So it's been exactly one year to the day since I said we're starting to the day we got the lease for this new facility. And so we are so excited because this facility is more than just a building. Some people are wondering why are you getting a building? They're not criticizing. They genuinely want to know why are you getting a building? What's the purpose? Let me tell you, when we're able to pull all our staff in together in one place, when we're able to work daily, you see where we are right now, we can only record once a week. Think about all we've been doing with a once a week recording and we got maybe four hours in the facility. But with this new facility, we have 24-7 access. It's ours 24-7. We can film every single day of the week. We can get out more content now more than ever before. We're going to have a place for a studio audience where you can come in occasionally to a live taping and you yourself can attend in person. Stephen will lead in worship. I'll teach a lesson. We'll pray for you. You can come to those live studio audience tapings. This is going to be a place that we can pray from 24-7. We said we wanted 24-7 prayer center. That's what this is going to be. We're going to launch the encounter TV network. We're going to plan from this center now that all our staff is united. We can all come together and now more effectively plan our miracle services all around the world. So you're going to see us adding more miracle services all around the world. Bottom line, the ministry is growing. More people are being saved. Our broadcast reach is growing. Our events are growing. This is a big step. And so I wanted to give you that announcement. If you like some updates on this, you can go to davidhernanisministries.com slash project DTV. See where we are with that. We're in phase two. We need your help with that. But I'm not going to do fundraising, as I said, for the campaign anymore. I'm just going to talk now to you generally speaking for the ministry. The ministry just generally needs support. It needs support in its growth and needs support in what we do. We are winning the lost and building the believer through events and television. If you want these videos to keep coming out and look, we don't charge for them because some people can't pay for them. We don't charge for our events because some people can't pay for them. So we always want to keep some events free and at least all of our content for free. I can't remember the last time we sold an audio or video message. This is something I believe we have to get out there. And so help us. If this ministry has blessed you and if you've ever thought I want to support the ministry, there is no better time than now. Now is the season. And I believe that as you give into this ministry this anointed soil that's going to unlock that door of blessing in your life. That frustration that you've been facing is going to be appeased because there is blessing that comes with giving. Now I'm going to be doing a teaching soon on this but I want to just share a little bit in my heart. Our generation needs to learn how to sew. We need to learn how to stop thinking so small and we need to learn how to think big. So help me by becoming a monthly supporter. If you would like to help me then sign up to become a partner for $30 or more a month. If you sign up at $30 a month or more then I'll send you either carriers of the glory 25 truths about demons and spiritual warfare or encountering the Holy Spirit in every book of the Bible. You can choose any one of those books it'll be my gift to you. I will sign it and I'll send it to you. That'll be your initiation gift. Everyone else who's watching listen. Maybe you can do it one time.  Maybe you have a business or something like that. We have wealthy people who give to the ministry all the time. Perhaps you're someone who's wealthy and a gift of $100,000 is something that you can do but you're like well I don't know yet I maybe I'm thinking about it or maybe you can do 10 or 5 or 1,000. Perhaps God has blessed you with this. Let me tell you something. God gave that to you for a purpose and you're watching this for a reason. I'm challenging you to release what's in your hand so that others might be saved so that you can win souls. Maybe you're watching this and you're not a wealthy individual but you can become a partner at $30 a month $100 a month $50 a month or you can sew a one-time gift of $100 $500. And you know it's not even the wealthy that have to do the $1,000 gift maybe that's something God placed on your heart. Whatever it is I make no apologies and I challenge you give to the gospel overcome that spirit amendment overcome that mindset overcome poverty thinking and say I'm going to invest in this not so that David can live in luxury not so that David can put it in his pocket I don't touch it but so that the gospel can continue to go forward and advance all around the world. So today contact our ministry by going to the using the information at the bottom of the screen. If you're watching this on YouTube wait until the end of the video click on the red button that appears at the very end of this video it'll take you right to where you can give if you're watching this on the app or Apple TV then wait for the video to end I'm sorry not on Apple TV yet if you're watching this on the app in general then use the information at the bottom screen or wait for the video to disappear and then click on the button that says partner with David if you're watching this anywhere else davidhernandezministries.com slash donate well that is it for this edition of Spirit Church until next time remember nothing is impossible with God


People who are violent towards others in Andorra would now have to deal with the law. The state governor, Aruti Miyakiri-Dolou, has signed the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Bill into law. The Sunshine State has now joined the League of States that have domesticated the law. Governor Akiri-Dolou describes it as a wonderful document. Take a listen. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.