Today I'm going to start a series called The Anointing and I'm going to start the first message today that will talk about what is the anointing, why we need the anointing, how to receive the anointing, and how to walk in the anointing. The title of my first message will be called today, Stay On Fire, somebody say Amen. Stay On Fire, 30 neighbors say Stay On Fire, 20 other neighbors say it's time for you to get on fire. Anointing really makes the difference, in the Bible prophets were anointed, kings were anointed, priests were anointed, sometimes they even anointed objects, or Jacob anointed a pillar, and he said that this would be the house of God, priests would anoint different objects in the temple to consecrate them to God. The word anointing it simply means to smear anointment on something, we know that Jesus was anointed, Jesus Christ, Christ is not Jesus's last name, Christ is just a Hebrew word for anointed, so Jesus Christ thought it was necessary for him to be anointed, how much more it is for you and I to be anointed by the Holy Spirit.  Without the anointing you know we just preach information, with the anointing we release impartation, revelation, manifestation and every other asian that is there in the book in Jesus' name, can somebody say amen. Anointing makes the difference, anointing is not about the numbers, anointing is not about the looks, anointing is not about the eloquence, emotionalism, anointing is not really about the manifestation, anointing is the unction, it's the power of God that moves through a person. We can write this down, anointing is the overflow of the life of God that's flowing through his dedicated servant, anointing of the Holy Spirit is the overflow of the divine life of God through you as a consecrated servant of the Lord. Really what the anointing is is when the overflow of God's life comes through you on every area of your life. It's very important to understand that Satan fights anointing. The spirit of antichrist that is at work today and eventually there will be the antichrist, a person that's going to fight the anointing, but right now what's at work is the spirit of antichrist. The spirit of antichrist is a spirit that typically works through religious people to fight and to try to belittle, make fun or mock anything that has to do with genuine move of God. Satan is afraid of the anointing because the anointing is his only threat. The Bible says the talents don't break the yoke, anointing does. Emotionalism don't heal people, anointing does. You know, screaming and yelling as great as that is, passion. It's not what really changes people's life. It's the anointing that changes people's lives. And Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit. He went about doing God's work and the Bible says destroying the works of the devil. The anointing is the threat to the kingdom of the devil. And that's why what he will do is he will raise accusation. He will raise all kinds of Google stories and news stories against anyone who is anointed to try to blamish their reputation so that people will be intimidated and frightened by them. It's a spirit of antichrist. He fights the anointing. He's okay with you knowing that Jesus is a good teacher. He's okay with you knowing that Jesus is a good man.  Satan trips over that. And he will do whatever it takes to try to stop from that. But we're going to be an anointed church. We're going to be anointed Christians. We're going to be anointed, we're going to have anointed home groups. And we're going to have anointed houses, anointed cars.  Can somebody say amen? When we were in the world, we were full of darkness. That's why we cursed. That's why we lied. That's why we slept around, smoked, got drunk and did all the stuff. We were full of the devil. Being in church, we are not full of religion.  And therefore, we will live in the anointing of God. Can somebody say amen? Put your hands together for Jesus Christ. I want us to open the first Samuel chapter 9 verse 19 and verse 20. We will tackle the story of Saul. And it says the following. Samuel answered Saul and said, I am a seer.   But as for your donkeys that were lost three days ago, don't be anxious for them, they've been found. I want you to see something. Samuel meets Saul. I want you to see this. Saul comes to Samuel about the donkeys because they were lost. And Samuel tells him, he says, I will tell you tomorrow what's on your heart. Means the donkeys were not on his heart. Oh, by the way, he says the donkeys, they've been found. That means the donkeys were on his mind. What was on his heart? The next day, Saul sends the servant away, anoints him with oil and says, you are the next king of Israel. That's incredible. Saul carried inside of his heart a dream to be a king of Israel. But he was so embarrassed to tell anybody and the reason why he hid is so deep in his heart because Israel has never ever had a king. Does anybody here has a dream that has never happened in your family?  You're crazy? What, you have a dream that you're going to do this? You're going to do that? And Saul had a dream to be a king. He carried that dream. He comes to Samuel because he has problems with donkeys.  Or by your donkeys? They're actually found. So the donkeys were never really on his heart. What was in his heart was his dream and his destiny. See, the problem many times in our lives is that the donkeys cloud the destiny. Sometimes the enemy uses our circumstances to cloud the real dream and the real vision and the real purpose that you and I have in our heart.  Means he wants you to just live your life from paycheck to paycheck.   But deep on inside, you were born with the destiny.   Tears rolling down your eyes, but there is a fear in your heart because what you are dreaming about is beyond your wildest dreams. That means that dream is from God.  But if it's from God, it will be buried deep, deep in your heart. Never apologize for the dreams deposited by God. Never shy away. You might not be able to see them come true today or tomorrow, but you have to understand true prophetic ministry is not to tell me what my donkey problems are. True prophetic ministry cuts through the donkeys and gets into what's buried inside of your spirit, which is a dream from heaven. It doesn't take a prophet to tell me what my sin are. They're pretty much all the same. All of us struggle the same. But it takes a prophet to cut through the sin and get into your spirit, where there's a dream that is laying there from God and pull that out and say, what you think is crazy is God. See, when I worship and I close my eyes, I see this large stadium full of people. Tears begin to roll down my eyes when I see them, because I know this is so scary. I see literally a row of wheelchairs. And I see as I'm walking up, pow, pow, pow, people just getting up from the wheelchairs. I close my eyes and I realize we just have ten people at morning prayer. But see, the Holy Spirit will always get through the mess you are in right now into what's in your spirit. And so listen, that which you carry in your heart is from me. Some of you here in your spirit right now, there is an idea to have a business. But the very idea of having a business throws you in a cold sweat. The very idea that you will be free, the very idea that one day you will be a millionaire and that you will sponsor, build orphanages. That idea says, but today I'm struggling and asking God, where will I get money to pay for my gas? Listen, your donkeys are not a reflection of the destiny you have in your spirit. The destiny is from the Holy Ghost. The donkeys will be solved. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Anybody here has a dream from God. Anybody here, if you be very honest, you see that dream is unrealistic. That means it is from God. Maybe you're saying, but that's not so, that's not me. That which I'm believing and keeping in my heart. That's why there is a prophetic word for you today. God says, I will tell you what's on your heart. The donkeys come to cloud that.   Satan will wrap you around it. And you may be sitting here today and you don't see one day you will be having a home group. You have never been to a home group in your life. But in your heart and in your spirit, there's a dream from heaven.  You were created by God, not just to go to work at eight and get off at five, and just eat and watch the TV series and rest on Saturday and playing golf. You were created by God to live for a reason and for a purpose. The Bible says through abundance of grace and through the gift of righteousness, we were destined to reign in Jesus Christ in life. Not just get through life, not just survive through life, not just make it through, get it by, but to reign means to thrive, to rise above and fulfill the true destiny God placed inside of our spirit. If somebody would have told me 16 years ago that this is what I would be doing, the once a month I would be invited to speak at conferences and youth camps and that I would be mentoring other people. I would say you are out of your mind. You are crazy. You mistake me for someone else. But deep inside I had that. When I saw a preacher preaching in our large church where I came from in Ukraine, it was about two and a half thousand member church. I saw that somewhere deep inside I said, I would love to do that one day. I didn't know that I would love to do that one day. It was actually God's voice speaking through an insecure 12 year old teenager saying, I bury that in your heart. Hallelujah. And so I want you to remember the destiny was in his heart. Donkeys were on his mind. Unrealistic dreams require the Holy Spirit. And that's why Samuel not only said, you have a dream. So he said, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. And he said, you will be a changed into a different man. Because to fulfill the dream God placed in you requires God's enablement, requires God's anointing. You have to understand in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, God didn't require a degree for destiny. He required anointing.  You see Jesus filled with Holy Spirit and God begins to use him.  You see David being anointed by the Holy Spirit. You have to understand degree is important. Connections is important. Natural abilities is important. Your eloquence is important. Your background is important. All of these things are important. But if you want to fulfill something that came from above, you will need the power that comes from above. And that power is the Holy Spirit. God anoints Saul. And Saul begins to step into his destiny. Your calling, your vision without the anointing is really not going to happen. It's a heavy burden without the anointing. With the anointing, you may say, but I'm in the business world. What is anointing has to do? Saul wasn't a priest. Saul ruled the country. You need anointing for your business. The same way preacher needs anointing for his preaching. You need anointing for your family to raise your family the same way that apostle needs anointing to raise churches. Anointing is not limited to religion. You have to understand when God created the world, he never created religions. He only created humans and he created this world. The Holy Spirit was never religious spirit. We boxed him into our religion. We divided everything into Christianity, Baptist, Pentecostals and everything. But in God's heaven, there is no boxes God fits into. There is no, there is a sacred and there is a secular and God's world there is only God who fills everything. And he created the world and he wants your world to be impacted by his anointing. Can someone say amen? Without the anointing, our calling is dangerous. With the anointing, you are dangerous. Come on. Hallelujah. When Saul drifted from the Lord and the anointing lifted from his life, he was anointed to fight Philistines. We know where Saul died. He died in a battle with Philistines. His anointing, when it was lifted because of different things that he did, the calling Saul had was no longer a blessing to him. It was not only a burden, it became his graveyard. Those of us who think the success of life is dependent on how great your career is, I have a news flash for you. If you're not anointed in your place of work and place of success, your success is dangerous. The Bible says that Saul, when the anointing lifted, he became madman. He became insane. Things start going so bad. The weight of his office, the weight of his calling, the weight of his influence started to crumble on him so bad that he chased his own tail all his life. He would chase David who wanted no harm to him. We know that Saul started to literally become a coward. He couldn't fight a battle. The only victories he would get is because his son would rebel against his protocol and that's how God would give victory literally. Saul became trapped in his own throne because the throne doesn't give you success. It's the anointing that gives you success. It's the anointing that pushes you to the throne and you need that anointing to keep you sane in the throne.  Yes, it will make it good on Instagram picture if you use enough filter and good lighting. But the inner happiness and inner success, the Bible says the blessing of the Lord enriches and adds no sorrow. The blessing, the grace, the favor and the goodness of God, the anointing of the Holy Spirit makes it smooth, makes it great, makes it enjoyable, makes you want to go to church in the midst of imperfect people, lift your hands and say, I love my God. I love my family.  Makes you go through life in the hardships or in the good times and there is a sense of purpose.  There is a sense of flame in your soul. There is a sense of intention. Your life has a meaning. Your life has a purpose.  You're living better life than I do because you at least don't have to work for it. I work for you. But I have to work for it. Nobody takes care of me. And when I cry, nobody answers. When you cry, I answer.  That's when you know you lost the anointing. Your dog has it. You don't. The anointing is a living life of purpose, living a life on fire, living a life with a sense, with a flame. I see sometimes people 25 years of age and they're dead. We're gonna have their funeral 40 years later, but they died already. No flame. They burned out. I say, you haven't done anything. Burned from what? You see already, they're exhausted. They're tired. Why? Not because the college, the sucked life out of them. Life is demanding. Life is like a vacuum. Religion is like a vacuum. Even church can be like a vacuum.  And if you don't have a flow of the anointing of God, there will be a time you will be draining on the inside. And you can't blame the vacuum. It's just there is nothing to take from you no more. That's why you have to have a life of God constantly flowing, flowing, flowing on your school, on your college, on your work, on your parents. Flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing. Anointing comes by association, but it grows by desperation. I want you to say this with me. Say anointing comes by association, but it grows by desperation. Anointing comes by association, but it grows by desperation. And this is the, let's get to the meat part of the message. First Samuel chapter 10 verse 11 says the following. And it happened when all who knew him formally saw that he was indeed prophesied. That he indeed prophesied among the prophets. So, King Saul. And the people said one to another, what is this that has come upon the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets? Hey, Holy Spirit came upon Saul when he was in the company of prophets. The anointing upon Saul's life came when Saul was hanging out with the prophets. And it was so crazy that people actually said, is Saul among prophets? It became a proverb in Israel. Means it was so unlike Saul. It was so unnatural to him. It was so his family, none of them ever kind of like, they're not the prayer warriors. They're not the kind of passionate. They're not the people who would fast. They were not the people who were interested in the things of God like that. And here is their son, one of their, you know, this handsome, tall, good-looking son. And he's hanging out with the prophets and he goes around. Thus says the Lord. Thus says the spirit of God. He's speaking in tongues. He's walking with the prophets and they're looking at him and they say, is this Saul? Is Saul among the prophets? See, when you start hanging out around prophets, you start prophesying. You can ask Adrian when he shared today. When he started to being around people who see visions from God and prophecy, now he goes on the street and look what he said. I was shocked myself what came out of my mouth. Why? Because anointing gets released by association. When you watch YouTube clips of deliverances, you will begin to notice when your minister, demon started to manifest. Why?  On the other side, if you watch someone who curses every other word two weeks and by accident, F-bombs will be released by you. You will notice that you're like, where did that come from? Anointing is released by association. We have some businessmen here in our church who would literally, in the area of their business, they reach out to the other businesses. They read the books and everything. And you're looking at their business, you're like, man, just two years ago, this guy's business wasn't doing so good. This lady's business wasn't doing so well. But because they got surrounded themselves with the associates, with their association became, they put themselves among the prophets. See, they grew up in the house of the kish. But where you put yourself is where really the anointing is going to change your life. See, you can change your future by changing the company you're around. That is why Apostle Junji came to our conference. That is why Bob Larson came to our conference. That is why we encourage people who read Derrick Prince, who read Pastor Benny Hinting on the Holy Spirit, who read Dr. Yungi Cho Why. We want you to be surrounded in your life not to reflect your past, but to reflect the association you put yourself in. Because anointing comes by association. You want to see the anointing move on your life? Associate yourself with the anointing. If you want success to move in your life, associate yourself with success. Did you know that Jesus got filled with Holy Spirit? Not when he was fasting, not when he was praying by himself. When Jesus went to a minister of God who was anointed by God, his name was John the Baptist. But John the Baptist did not have miracles. He was just anointed to preach repentance. And Jesus, the Son of God, comes to John's ministry and says, John, baptize me.  Because I am the Son of God. You have so much to learn from me, cousin. Because he was his cousin. But when Jesus comes to John and he says, John, baptize me. John says, no, no, no, no. You are the one that's going to give fire. And Jesus says, I know. But right now, I need to jumpstart. And when John baptizes him, the Bible says the spirit of God comes upon Jesus.  You may have a greater grace in your life than the people you associate with. But remember, it works by association. Come on, somebody. Can you say amen? The Bible says, he who walks with the wise is wise. But the companion of fools will be destroyed. You know what that means? He who walks with the successful is successful.  He who hangs out with the wealthy will be wealthy. He who always hangs out with people who criticize the wealthy and blame their poverty under something else will be just like that.  He who hangs out with people who don't sleep around, he will live in purity. See who you want to be. If you want to be this, change who you hang out here.  And you cannot hang out with the fools and be wise. Anointing works by association. And anointing came upon Saul because he was connected with the prophets. Anointing will come upon your life because you were connected by that as well, in Jesus' name. See, if you can hang out, someone said this. If you run with the wolves, you will learn how to howl. If you associate with the eagles, you will learn how to sort the great heights. Remember this. It is better to be alone than to be in the wrong company. As a mirror reflects man's face. But it is really shown the same thing as the mirror reflects your face. Your friends really reflect who you are. I just want to bring... Can you give me a few napkins? Because I think I'm getting too excited here. Remember I said anointing is not emotionalism. But it could produce great emotions. What I found out with young people is this. Because many times they want to associate themselves with very successful people in their perspective callings. And they get disappointed when those successful people, they don't have time for them. So instead of finding a different route, they blame those successful people by saying, well see, you became proud now. You don't even respond to my 300 word message on Facebook. You're no longer like my pictures. You became too arrogant and everything. And I want to teach you a lesson or a secret that I've learned. If you find people that you want to be like, but they don't have time for you. Don't ever seek their mentorship. Offer them service.  I had people write to me literally like an essay. I wrote shorter essays in high school that they wrote to me in messages. One guy had more questions to me recently than Job had to God. And I didn't know where to start. I wanted to start with the first question. By the time I got to the end, I was like, there's no way I can answer that. And people think that the only thing I do is sit on Facebook and look who's questions I can answer. I don't have time for that.  And many times people like that in our church, they have this. They're like, I want pastor to mentor me. I want this apostle to mentor me. It's not like that. When you start moving with God, your time becomes to be limited. And if you want to get the attention of the person you look to, don't come for mentorship. Come with service. See Saul didn't come to Samuel for a word. The Bible says the Saul asked his servant. He says, do we have anything to bring to the man of God? Really? Saul, why do you need to bring anything to the man of God? Because he's very busy. And the Bible says the gift makes room for the king. When he offered something, it was something very small. The word of God was released. I saw that last year when Apostle Junchi came to our church and our church blessed him and everything. And we started to call Junchi every Friday for a few weeks, actually about a few months. And Junchi would mentor us and just kind of talk to us, pray for us and everything. But he got so busy and he got so busy and we got so busy and things kind of stopped. This year that he came and it really just got in my heart saying, you know what, Lord, I want this man to just continue to bless me, pray for me and everything. And so instead of asking, hey apostle, can you call me every Friday? I said, apostle, I see your Apple watch is not working. Can I give you mine? Have you tried these ear pods? He said, no. I said, you should try them. He put them on. He said, they're so nice. I said, do you like that? How are they feeling? He's like, I'm like, they're yours. And I asked him, is there anything I can help you with? And I noticed there's one area that he needed help with. And I said, can I offer to help you once a week? No strings attached. Two weeks later, apostle calls me. He said, Vlad, how are you doing? I said, doing great? Is there anything? He said, no, just call me. Just let you know I'm praying for you. Two weeks later, he calls again. He says, I just want to let you know I miss you so much.  He spent 10 minutes talking to me to the point I had to ask him to hang up because I had nothing to ask him. Because I know the anointing works by association. And if I cannot get associated with him by mentorship, I'll always get associated by serving. Just serve. Ask where you can be serving.  God looks at you. How do you treat people who want to be like you? How do you treat people who want to start a business in the same field you're starting? And when you feel insecure and threatened, what we do is we shut them down and we say, you're not good, you won't succeed.  And they treat us the same way we treat them. If you want to improve how your association treats you, change how you treat your associates. You know what happened to Saul? Saul was looking for Samuel's advice. But when David rose up and wanted to be a king, he chased 20 years trying to kill him.  Why?  That's why I'm not going to let someone else mentor you to be like them. That's why I ask myself today, not only how can I serve my pastor instead of just kind of milking all the wisdom. As I serve him, God will release the wisdom. But secondly, I look at people who look at me and say, Vlad, how can you help us in this, in this area? And I say, how can I help them? Like I just came from a trip last weekend when I was in South Dakota. Amazing youth group as I went to visit them. And I saw that a lot of mistakes that they were making that we made just a few years ago. And I was so busy there at the trip that I wanted to work on the internship lessons and so many other things. I planned out that the whole week I'm going to finish all of my lessons. As I am there, Holy Spirit convicted me. He said, Vlad, they need your advice. They need your input. I want you to begin to mentor them because they're looking to you guys to get to your level. And I said, but I don't have time for that. You see, the Lord start convicted me. He says, you can't expect an apostle to pick you out to his level if you don't take them to yours.  If you want to have association, watch how you treat your associates.  And you may say, well, you know, there's not too many. See those people who look to you for advice. Give them the same attention. You want someone else you will look to to give it to you. A lot of sewing and reaping will always work in your favor. Can somebody say a man? Come on, put your hands together for Jesus Christ. Anointing comes by association. I want you to say this with me. Say anointing comes by association. But it grows by desperation. Say it again. Anointing comes by association. But it grows by desperation. And so I want you to focus on this now. Anointing grows by desperation. And the verse that we read is this. And he also stripped of his clothes all and prophesied before Samuel in like matter and laid down naked all day and all that night. Therefore they said is Saul among the prophets for Samuel 1924. I want you to see this verse looks so familiar to the chapter 10 or chapter nine we just read. Except in this story you see Saul now sends one set of soldiers to Ramah to capture David. They go there and it's the prophesying. Anointing, words by association. Amen. He sends the second set of soldiers. They start prophesying. He sends the third set of soldiers. They start prophesying. Because Saul is afraid to go there. He knows what's going to happen. And then finally he musters up the strength and he goes in there. But he doesn't go there to see change in his life. He goes in there to capture David because David is there. And the Bible says as he goes in there this is what happens. God's spirit comes upon him. He starts prophesying. He kind of goes a little bit awkward weird way. Almost looks like a demonic manifestation. This would have been in our church would be screaming out, out in Jesus name. But because it's all testament I'm pretty sure this was acceptable.  So day and night he prophesied. But I want you to see something. Association without desperation for God equals tribulation. Equals problems. Saul got up from this prophesying experience and went back to his old life. Sooner or later every association every manifestation and experience with God has to fuel our hunger for Jesus. Otherwise those experiences they only enlarge our pride and they actually hindered us from going to God. Saul had association. Saul had even manifestation he experienced but one thing Saul lacked in his life which I believe why the anointing never remained on his life is Saul was never hungry for God. Hunger for God grows and maintains the anointing from God. Saul had experiences but he never repented. He never became hungry for God and therefore anointing always lifted. Actually there was another Saul in the Bible. Remember the New Testament? When Saul went to Damascus I was in Israel and I oversaw where Damascus is from Jerusalem to Damascus it's actually a very long way to walk to ride a horse. Saul went for a very long way to go to Damascus he wasn't going to Damascus to prayer meeting he was going to Damascus just like King Saul he wanted to attack Christians Saul wanted to attack David and Saul in the Bible wanted to attack Christians and Jesus knocked Saul out of his horse he falls on the floor he goes blind just like this Saul he falls on the floor he goes naked but I want you to see the difference one Saul gets up and goes back to his old life this Saul while he was there with the encounter with God he asked the questions he said who are you Lord? and secondly what would you have me do? that Saul shaked and baked, laid and rolled spoke in tongues filled the spirit felt the goosebumps got up and he said that was good and went back that Saul said God who are you? I want to know you I'm hungry for you I persecuted you Jesus I thought you were a force Messiah but I just have I have a change of heart now I see you are truly the son of God what would you have me do? and God leaves him blind for three days because for the first three days in his life he could actually see and after three days we see his eyes get open and he is filled with the Holy Spirit he gets baptized in water he goes to Damascus the next day and he starts to preach the gospel see King Saul became an apostate but Saul in the New Testament became an apostle because it's not experiences that change you it's the hunger of God you derive from your experiences God replaced a man who knew it all and had it all with the boy who was after his heart Saul knew how the kingdom works Saul had the servants he had the reputation he had everything but he didn't have one most important thing that God looks for in every person is hunger for him and one time when Saul in the peak of his pride when he didn't obey God and he instead of being concerned with the callousness of his heart and repenting before God he grabbed the rope of Samuel and says Samuel but honor me before people meaning I don't care that God rejected me I just make sure my reputation stays intact and Samuel looks back at him and he says the way you ripped my rope is the way God ripped your kingdom from you and God has found a man he's a boy he doesn't have experience in reigning he doesn't have military experience nobody knows him but he is after God's heart he doesn't have a God's heart he is not perfect but he is fascinated he is captivated by God and God says since he is God he loves people that are passionately in love with him and he says Saul he will raise that boy up and he will give him your throne and he will bless him and protect him and boy David was not perfect he needed worse sins than Saul but see when you are hungry for God you repent when you are passive you make excuses when you are hungry for God you make mistakes but you never make excuses when God even winks at you and says that something is wrong there you drop on your floor and you say God I am sorry I am not going to blame it on my mama I am not going to blame it on my daddy I am not going to blame it on my boss God it was my fault and I am sorry and when you do that your hunger stays for God but Saul when you are not hungry you make excuses you blame everybody you lose that I want to let you know if you want to keep fire for God in your life you got to keep repentance in your life many of us don't fall out of love with God we only fall out of repentance are you with me I want you to open this verse with me at the end Revelation chapter 2 verse 4 and 5 never the less I have this against you that you have left your first love remember therefore from where you have fallen repent and do the first works or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lamp stand from its place unless you repent this verse used to intimidate me when I heard preachers talk about this verse I just felt so sick in my stomach it's kind of one of those like yeah they are going to tell me again right now that I have fallen from God but now this verse has become one of the greatest encouragement to my life because the fact you can lose your first love and find it again gives me source of comfort every single person in here your first love for God is when you got saved your passion for Jesus was all time high you were literally curious you were curious George you were just curious about God you were just like passionate about God you literally complained because they didn't meet a church you barely have time to come to church once a month but when you just got saved literally every prayer meeting every single thing no sacrifice was too high nothing for Jesus was too difficult today anything for God is a burden but before it was just a passion it was a privilege to do this for God and see with time sometimes we lose that and I love the fact that God comes and he always gives me a second chance and he said listen you can relive those experiences for the rest of your life if you do this remember repent it works it's a recipe to find that passion again for the Lord in my experience as a youth minister for over 14 years I found out four things that always killed my fire number one it was a fence any time I got offended at somebody I lost my fire people leave the churches because of a fence actually 99% of people that leave the churches today leave because of a fence and for those of us who think yeah it's about church do something so the people stop leaving the church because of a fence actually in one meeting Jesus had 75 of his key leaders leave him if you think that if the church will get perfect less people will leave the church because of a fence if the church will get perfect more people will leave because of the offense because they could not live up to their perfectionism a fence is unavoidable we can only stop causing offenses but we cannot ever stop having offenses you will be offended and a fence is the devil's trap to cause your fire to die out it's just a devil's trap that's all it is if you look today somebody offended you tomorrow you are unknowingly you are going to offend somebody and it's the devil's trap to kill your fire that's all it is the second thing that I've seen in my ministry and personally in my life what kills the fire is disappointment it's when you dream you believe you fast you pray and it doesn't happen you prayed for somebody who wanted if you believed is they going to be healed and nothing happened and next thing that happened is that becomes like a water that goes on your fire and it's very important I want you to see this when you get offended honestly Jesus doesn't really go after you and tries to butter you up when the guys got offended Jesus didn't go after him so he guys let me explain I didn't mean you to eat my flesh I meant communion Jesus didn't do that but when guys left Jerusalem he walked beside them encouraged them with preachers until their hearts got on fire again anytime you're disappointed Jesus will walk behind you and remind you of his word so your heart will catch fire again and the third thing that kills our fire is honestly business it's when we become so busy that we don't have time to spend time with the Lord we don't have time to even make you to church and please understand intimacy intimacy makes you fruitful not busy business could be a result of intimacy but business itself does not make you successful only intimacy with God makes you successful if you are too busy to pray you are too busy if you are too busy to be with God you are too busy and this is what I know about busy people you actually don't make more money you make less because you break God's rule God ordered for us to rest on Saturday if you say but I'm gonna work 3 jobs 4 jobs I mark this you will not make more money because God blesses order and you are out of order God blesses order not out of order I mentioned how Chick-fil-A decided not to open its fast food restaurant chain on Sundays and people said did you know that on Sundays all the fast food restaurants make the most money and the main guy of Chick-fil-A he says I know but God said people should take a rest at least one day and he says and I'm gonna choose the most busiest day to rest average fast food restaurant makes $1 million a year Chick-fil-A makes 5 why because when you but it doesn't make sense nothing with God makes sense but when you follow the order God blesses you same thing when you give it seems like but you're gonna lose money somehow you have enough when you hold on to that it seems like it's never enough business is good if it comes out of your fruitfulness and it doesn't affect your intimacy with God but the moment you see your file is dying out your file is dying out cut back on some things catch your breath relax you're still gonna die it sucks so hard that you waste your ruin your health to get more money and then you spend your money to get your health back why don't you just keep both at the same time because this is not just about relationship with God this is about your health being this is about your kids knowing who you are this is about your family this is about your spouse this is about everyone everything being intact and the last one is materialism materialism is not when you have stuff it's when the stuff has you I have this Apple watch I have this watch this watch doesn't have me because at any moment this watch can be yours not today the most freeing thing for my relationship with God has been is when I can hold things without holding on to them when God has the right to take anything out of my hand and I have the privilege to take anything out of his pocket because some of us you slip your hand into God's pocket and God has his hand denied to cut touch your pocket materialism kills fire is when we run after things when we think that the more things we have the more happy we'll be materialism a young boy came to Jesus he was morally sound everything was great with him and he had a lot of things but it's not the things that he had but when Jesus signaled and he says can you give sell everything you have and it's amazing Jesus didn't ask him to give it to his ministry he says I want you to sell everything you got and give it to the poor and then come and follow me and the Bible says that man's heart was hurt he went with grief why? because he didn't have things those things have had him anything you cannot give has you now that doesn't mean God will always ask us to give everything but there are times when the Lord leads you I found out when my passion for the Lord dies out and the Lord prompts me to sacrifice something that alone literally shoots it through the roof and it's not the act of giving it's the act of obedience in giving I want to call those people who got baptized today to the front let's give them a round of applause please please come to the front right here you know I want you to look at these precious people you know some of you know how this young lady came a month ago drunk to the conference drunk people are welcome by the way God touched her at the conference and delivered her from his evil spirits she got saved and since that time she's been free from alcoholism and she came on on Wednesday because on Wednesday the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues God gave her his influence and she looked at me and she said my life is changing too fast and I look at her I look at Kayla and one thing that does something inside of me is how unfamiliar they are with God and how fascinating they are with him there's that curiosity because when I hear their story literally it's like that fire gets poured on my own heart because I'm reminded of myself when God baptized me with the Holy Spirit the fire in your eyes the fire in your mouth and that's why it's so important to associate yourself with brand new believers in the home group because so that your flame can remain the same you know this young lady she doesn't have anything today she just got her house a place to live and she had no place to live one day she'll share her full testimony breaking testimony but one thing that she does have that many of you here today you don't is she has love for Jesus and that is what David had and God raised them up but it's important when God begins to raise you up that you don't lose that love for Jesus because it's that thing that will keep you on track same thing with Kayla some of you remember that night prayer when Kayla was manifesting and God delivered Kayla from the bondages there and that deliverance continued her sons start coming to the Lord other people start coming to Jesus Christ and same thing Kayla you know people have to pick her up she doesn't have a car but she has a passion for God and today it's car keys this is car keys and the reason and the reason why we wanted to bless them is because we wanted to be reminded seek first the kingdom of God and everything else shall be added I understand some of you may say you are enabling these girls are hardworking these girls are going to serve God and these girls are going to make a difference in our community and I want to pray today that God will give fire in your eyes fire in your soul for Jesus anointing comes by association but anointing grows by desperation we are a hungry generation we are hungry for God we are hungry for the move of the Holy Spirit we are hungry for Jesus every eye closed every head bowed if you're in this room this morning and maybe you've been coming for some time but you realize today you walked away from God or maybe you used to be as a child that's when you were serving God and something is stirring inside of you and you know that this is your time you are that person who used to repent and come back to God and you would love to give you that opportunity for Jesus to come into your heart today for Jesus to forgive you of your sin for Jesus to come inside of you like the fire of the Holy Spirit and live inside of you maybe you brought a friend with you today and they want to come and stuff you can come with them just bring them to the front and if you're the person who say I want to get saved fast of light I want to give my life to Jesus just come, just come to the front that's it, that's all it is God is waiting on you Holy Spirit is waiting on you He's waiting on you He's waiting on you He's waiting on you and I know there's more people here today the Lord is calling you God is waiting on you, just come just come to Him today He's gonna forgive you, He's gonna cleanse you just come, He's waiting for you, thank you I see people coming out I see God moving on people's hearts right now thank you Jesus thank you Holy Ghost thank you Holy Spirit thank you, God bless you Hallelujah, thank you Jesus thank you Jesus, we're gonna take a moment right now and minister to them right now in the name of Jesus if I can have some more home group leaders to come up and just minister to them right now Church, I'm still waiting there's some people coming out come on, come on, the Lord is waiting on you the Lord is waiting on you the Lord is waiting on you Church, stretch your hands right now for them right now, it's beginning to release blessings I want more of you God in the front we're gonna take a moment, I'm gonna lead you in a prayer and I ask you that you pray this prayer from the bottom of your heart to ask Jesus to come into your heart to baptize you with His Holy Spirit and deliver you from the devil pray this prayer, mean it from your heart I want you to say this, say Lord Jesus I'm a sinner I come to you and I'll repent I repent for the way I lived my life for putting my trust in other things please forgive me of all my sin and wash me with your precious blood Oh Holy Spirit come and live in me and change me from the inside out deliver me from every demon and generational curses and fill me with your precious fire right now Thank you for watching this content I hope this was a blessing to you if you're like me and you like to click on things click on this subscribe to our channel and the content will come to you every time we post it and remember the best is yet to come


Alright, so cool-looking dendrograms, you can do a lot more, but I just wanted to show you that you have to write a function, and then this function is applied to every node, so every node of the dendrogram, and you can color and change every node if you want it to. You have a question, Shurik's Kurita, that's why I put in the queue, so that when people have a question, I see a hand raised. Alright, so dendrograms and phylogenetic trees are very related to each other, but there is this special package called APE, you have to remember to install it, and that can help you make really cool-looking, no, don't be sorry, that's okay, and that can help you make really cool-looking phylogenetic trees, and phylogenetic trees are ubiquitous in biology, so you can use it for more or less everything, to kind of show like inheritance of alleles, but you can also show, for example, the distance, you can use it to make a tree of life, and they are used a lot in biology, and they're kind of really understandable pictures. So you can load the library, you have to install it first, but after you've loaded the library, you can just use a haklist object or any other clustering method, of course haklist is not the only clustering method that there is, but you can use any clustered object, so a haklist object, and then you just say as phylo, and then it makes a phylogenetic tree out of it, and then you can plot it, and you can for example do things like magnification and label offset and all of these things, but you now also have the option to make things like cladograms, unrooted trees, and you can also make fan plots of your clustering. So how do these look? So this is more or less how the basic tree looks like, it's a standard kind of dendrogram, but then rotate it on its side, and the cladogram is the same thing, but then it uses the triangle format, you can make unrooted trees, which kind of look like this on the same data, and you can also make fans, which start in the middle and then fan out in a circle surrounding the plot, so it just gives you a little bit more overview of how they look. So just try it out on your own data, or try it out during the assignments, and make a couple of these things, and of course also here you can use the phylogenetic tree and also add colors to it using the same kind of system, where you define a function which then is applied to every node in the graph. So a little bit of a real-life example, I wanted to show you how I plot chromosomal data, so data which has for example a chromosome position, and for example some kind of statistics on each of the markers that you have. So imagine that you did a snip chip and you genotype like a hundred individuals, and now you want to show some statistical data on each of these hundred positions or a thousand positions in the genome that you measured. So there's two things that we have to do, we have to plot the chromosomes first, and then we want to add some information to the chromosomes. So the data that we have is something called markers, and markers are single nucleotide polymorphisms, or they're like duplications in the genome, or anything that we can use to kind of distinguish one animal from another animal, or one human from another human. So a marker has a location, the marker is located on chromosome one at 10 megabases, and of course these markers have some kind of a statistics. I could have calculated for each marker the amount of animals in one group versus the amount of animals in the other group, and then I can do like a statistical test to see if there's an over-representation of a certain amount of animals in the one group versus the other one. We might have things like genotypes at these markers, so for these hundred individuals some individuals might have an A there, and other individuals might have a G there in the genome. And of course chromosomes, they have a length, and I need to know the length of each chromosome to be able to plot them. So the first step that I'm doing is I'm using a mouse example, so I'm saying make our chromosomes, so I do as character 1 to 19, because a mouse has 19 autosomes, it has an X chromosome, a Y chromosome, and it has a mitochondrial genome, which is called MT. I read in the data, so the lengths of the chromosome are mentioned here, so this is just a very basic matrix, which has two columns. The first column is the name of the chromosome, which is a character, and the second is a numerical value with just the length of the chromosome. So it looks like this, chromosome 1 has a length of 195 million base pairs, chromosome 2 is 182 million base pairs. And I have some kind of statistic, right? So the statistics that I have is called ratios, so these are just some random ratios that I came up with, and here what we see is we have a gene, right? So if for example a certain gene, which is located on chromosome 1 at this position, and the ratio at this gene was 0.78, and of course we have like perhaps 100 or 1000 of these measurements across the whole genome. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to create a plot, and I always start with an empty plot, right? So what I'm going to do is say, find the maximum length, so the longest chromosome, and put that in a variable called M length, so max length or the maximum length of the chromosome. So then I'm going to do my plot, so the Y axis is going to range from 0 to the maximum length, the X axis is going to range from 1 to the number of rows in the chromosome info, right? So the number of chromosomes that I have, type is none, because I don't want to have 0, 1 and max length number of rows plotted, because otherwise it would put two circles here and a circle here. I'm going to say that don't plot a Y axis, don't put anything on the X label, don't put any Y label here, and don't put any X axis there as well, because I am going to do the axis. So the first thing that I'm going to do is just say I want to have some lines in the background, so that I kind of can see where like 10 megabases is, right? So I'm saying here, use a sequence from 0 to the maximum length of the chromosome, and step per 10 million every time. And then the color of these is light gray and they are dotted, so they look a little bit more fancy. So I'm then going to add the chromosome, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the lines function, and I'm just going to draw lines from bottom to top, so how this works is I'm going through the chromosome info, and I'm going to call this N, so I'm just going to go through every row, and then I'm going to plot a line where the X position is NN, so the start will be N, the end will be at NX, right? Because the start here is at X1, and the end is also at X1. So I'm just going to say X equals CNN. Then I'm going to take the Y position, and the Y position of course every chromosome starts at zero base pairs, and I'm just going to take the length of the current chromosome and just plot it, and so the lines Y position is here at zero, and here at like 190 million base pairs. Type is line, color is black, line type is one, line Y is two to make them a little bit more bold, so to speak. And then I'm going to add the ratio data to the plot, so I'm going to use the apply function, so I have this old data right, which contains all of my genes, and the ratios and the positions of these genes. So I'm going to go through the rows of all data, and then I have a function which gives, which every time gets one row of the matrix, and I'm going to call the row of the matrix X in my case, and then I'm going to say, well I'm going to match the chromosome name to the chromosomes, and this is of course because three of the chromosomes, like X, Y, and MT, are not numerical values. So I have to match them to get the correct position, because of course chromosome X will be at position 20, Y will be at 21, and mitochondria will be at 22. The Y lock is the start position, so that's the position of the gene where it starts, and this is the Y position, and then I'm just going to define my color right, I'm going to just say, well if the ratio is above one, then I want to have it colored red, and if the ratio is below one, I want to have it colored black, so I'm just going to ask, is the ratio above one, so this will be true or false, so true is one, false is zero, and then I have to add plus one, right, because otherwise zero is not a color in R, so R colors like black is one, red is two, and I think green is three, but so every color has a number as well, and then I'm just going to use the points function, and I'm going to say at the position X, right, so at the start position, or at the at the chromosomal position, which is the X location, the Y location is the start position of the gene, I'm going to use the PCH of just a straight line, so this is just the minus symbol, which I want to use, and then I'm going to say the color is the color that I just computed, and I'm going to make them a little bit bigger, and then my plot looks like this, which is a kind of representation, so now you can see that we have a marker here of which the ratio was below one, and we have a marker here on chromosome 3 for which the ratio was above one. Of course I want to add the axis and a legend, so I'm just going to say put axis on one, right, so at each position, and so take the names of chromosome info, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, but also X, Y, and Z, and put these at 1 to the number, so at 1 to 21 in our case, LAS is 1, C axis 1.5 so that they show up a little bit bigger, and the LAS is so that they get rotated in the right position, and then on the second axis, I'm going to add the position 0 to the maximum length, I'm going to step by a million divided by a million, so I'm just going to put every million base pairs, I'm going to put a number, but I don't want the number to be like with 6 or 7 zeros behind it, I'm just going to divide out this million, and then at these positions, I'm going to write the length instead of writing down one million, I'm just going to write one, and then of course I want to have a legend on the top right of the plot, and it would say up and down because the ratio is either above or below, and then I'm going to say use the fill function 1 and 2 and make the CX 1.2, so then in the end it will look like this, so I have my legend here, I now have my chromosomes here, and here you see the mega base pair positions of each of the chromosomes. Of course, is it really finished? No, this is not finished by far, there's still a lot of things that we need to do in R because we want to have a good plot, so we need to add a title, we need to add a description to the Y-axis, we need to add a description to the X-axis, and here you see that the blue dotted lines go behind the legend, so we want to give the legend a background color to be on top of this, so it takes a lot of time to create a good plot in R. My procedure to plotting, plots are often a multi-step procedure, I usually draw them very quickly by hand, very coarsely, and then I start thinking of how to make the plot that I want to make with the data that I have, and the way that I do it is I first do the static kind of things, so the layout like chromosomes or grid lines, and then afterwards I take my data and I plot my data kind of row by row on to the plot that I have, so that's kind of my standard procedure for plotting. So remember it takes time to make things beautiful. Also make sure that your plotting code that you are writing is flexible, right, so you can see that in the chromosome plot I take a lot of effort to not specify 23 or 22 or 21, I never write down the number of chromosomes that I have explicitly, I always use the input file, right, so that in case I want to now not plot for mice but want to plot for cows, cows have a completely different number of chromosomes, but the plot function will still work because I can still, I can add more chromosomes to the chromosome info thing, and then that will automatically get picked up by my script, and it will automatically draw 31 chromosomes instead of 19 or 20, so that is what I mean by use flexible plotting code. So code which doesn't have hard coded numbers in there, but uses numbers from a file, so I can just update the file or use a different file for a different species and I don't have to change the code. What I also always do is that I make two versions of each plot. I make one version which is suitable for presentations and I make a version which is in PDF for an eventual publication or a paper that we're going to write, and so there's different requirements for plots that go into a presentation compared to plots which go into a paper, right, a presentation you generally want to use like bigger dots and you want to have like good colors while sometimes papers or journals, they want to have black and white plots, so instead of having like very colorful plots, the journal requires you that the plot is black and white and uses a certain font and that of course you can put in, so I always make two versions of each plot, one for PowerPoint and one for PDFs. Okay, some requirements for a good plot, it has to have a clear axis, a clear label, it has to have a good representation of quantities and I always add the units to the axis, right? I want to know if it's wind in miles per hour or in centimeters or in meters, so you have to have units in your plots. A plot always needs to have a legend and a legend always needs to mention everything in the plot, so if there's a line in the plot, the line needs to be in the legend as well. And of course if it is available, add things like error bars and standard deviations, because that's the way that if you work in science, you have to show that there was some variation in your measurements. So when you have a box plot, or not a box plot, but if you have like a bar plot, right, then the bar plot should have an error bar, which is the standard deviation that you saw in your data, so because you're not having a single measurement, you're having a group of measurements. Alright, and then I'm through, so I took a little bit more time than I have expected, so if there's any questions, then ask them now, I will mute my desktop audio and then I will call Misha to see if that works. Alright, so I get actually bothered by like a loud sound. Alright, so there we have Misha. Hey, let me put the Skype thing open, that should be like this, and then see if that works. Properties, and I am talking to Misha, and then okay, and that works. Alright, so there you are Misha. Can you say something? Yeah, I can. Alright, very good. No glitches. No glitches. Can people hear Misha? That's the first question. I'm going to


The marshmallow spirit is this. They put a bunch of four or five-year-olds in a room. They placed in front of them a plate and one marshmallow. And they said that you have two choices. You can have this marshmallow now. I'll enjoy it. Or I'll be back in 15 minutes. And if I see the one marshmallow is still there, I'll give you two marshmallows. Four or five-year-olds. And the person leaves the room. The reports say that there were individuals who within three seconds devoured that marshmallow. There were other individuals who physically were fighting themselves to not eat the marshmallow. Some would close their eyes. Some would turn their back against the marshmallow. Some would hide under the table where the marshmallow was on. Some would pick up the marshmallow and stroke it like it was an animal. Okay? Some would pull their hair, their little pigtails. Some would walk back and forth.  They say two-thirds of the children deferred and were able to eat two marshmallows. The one-third of them couldn't handle the 15 minutes. The experiment says that we followed these four-year-olds until they were 15, 16, 17-year-olds. And we find that those individuals who deferred the gratification of the marshmallow to have two of them were individuals who were more patient, had more resolve, had more willpower, had more self-recognition, were able to go through less divorces. They were successful in the higher SAT scores. All these things were there because they were able to train themselves to defer their gratification. Now, the problem lies, not the problem, the challenge lies in the fact that we were created to be haste individuals. What should be happening at the age of 15 and 9? What should be happening? Is that the intellect comes in, says, guys, guys, guys, look, you guys have been with this guy since day number one. I am now here. I'm going to run things, not things, we're run teens, and I'm going to lead the entire group.  That's what should be happening. The reality is it's not happening. Our desires get bigger and bigger and bigger because we keep feeding this monster inside of us. Every time the desire says jump, we say, yes, sir, let me keep jumping up and down, like buffoons, and our desire gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and we wonder why our desire just isn't getting full. The more we feed it, the bigger it gets. And our intellect, bachata is somewhere in the corner saying, guys, remember me? Remember me? I'm the intellect. I'm the guy that's supposed to, you know, tell you what you should be lacking or what you shouldn't be lacking.  I've been here since for the past 15 years.  I'm a 15-year veteran. You don't tell me what to do, right? I get on the plane. You get 20 minutes again. I get 40 minutes again. That's how it goes in sports, right? Same idea. You can't come in as a rookie and tell me, okay, you sit on the bench. I'll take your role. No, you won't. I've been here. This is my playground. This is my hood. You can't come here and tell me what to do.  Okay? And this battle begins at 15 and 9, and it's a serious battle, man. Oh, my goodness. Several times a day this battle ensues. And the very, very special youth are those who weaken their desires and who strengthen their intellect.  And to do that surrounded in this society is even more difficult. It's possible. But the ulama before I tell us that one of the areas that you can certainly gain this idea of deferred gratification is to weaken your desires. You don't always need to say yes to your desires, guys. If your desire is saying, look, I want this. I want to eat this food. I want to buy this person. I want to buy these shoes. I want to love this person. I want to marry this person. And all of that is bad news for you. God forbid we say no. You know what? I don't want that to happen. But this society will tell you to make your nafs your God. Whatever your nafs says, you do it. No one has any right to tell you that you can't love this person. You can't marry this person. Your parents are begging you. Your community is begging you. The alim is begging you. Look, man, she's bad news for you, bro. Don't marry her. Right? Don't get fooled by his blue eyes.  Look at his duct-wine pliety. Not his hair. I'm not going to mention his hair. That's what's going on right now. Until we get this thing, desire, which is out of control. And when that happens, when that happens, when desire is out of control, we become habitual sinners. The same sin we do over and over and over again, to the point, can you imagine, to the point where we're doing this sin in the middle of the sin, we're telling ourselves we shouldn't be doing this. And we do it. Right till the end. And afterwards, we kick ourselves, we bang ourselves, we slap ourselves. What's wrong with you? You shouldn't be doing this. We beg Allah, Allah, stuff for the law to be wa'atuh. That's it. I'm done. Wa-lahi wa-lahi wa-lahi I'm done. No more God. No more God. You wake up in the morning. Bam, that sin happens again.   You no longer control your desires.  And you're going up the mountain and something like that. The donkey was made to carry you off the mountain. Not the other way around. You have this load of desires on your shoulders. You're walking around. You're trying to get on the


So, let's get started building a theme with the WordPress REST API. Why would you ever want to build a theme with the REST API? You know, WordPress has had basically the same theme structure more or less for a long period of time. I'm sure everyone in this room has come to kind of know and understand its template hierarchy and the structure and how queries work. And what I'm going to talk about is kind of a completely different way to do that. So what are the use cases for this? First one is that you actually can do this. The WordPress theme repository does allow themes that are powered by the REST API. The second one is that you're working on a site where the contents has a need to be dynamic and needs to be refreshed without doing a full page refresh, something like news, breaking news, stock information, sports scores, that kind of stuff, or single page web application things. The other one is you want to build a theme that's kind of a reverse mullet where you have your business in back and your party in the front. You don't like writing PHP, but for some reason like writing JavaScript. Or like myself, you just spent the past two years of your life wasting away working on the REST API project and want to be able to show something you can do with it. The requirements to do this are you need to be running WordPress 4.4, which will be out sometime next week or so, where the infrastructure for the REST API is included in WordPress 4.4, and then you're going to need the WP REST API plug-in, any of the version twos, where with that you get the custom endpoints. And in this demonstration, I'm using a few JavaScript libraries. One of them is jQuery. First of all, none of these are actually specifically required to do this. There's a myriad of ways you can do this. This is just the approach I took. jQuery simply because it's easier to show code snippets with jQuery on screen, since it's less verbose than pure JavaScript. Underscore.js I'm using to do the templates, the JavaScript templates to show the view logic and director, which I'm using for client-side routing. So let's see what we're going to build here. This is my theme. And if I scroll all the way down, I have a little next button here to do some pagination, and it loads pretty quickly. I can click on the image in the header and go back to the home page, or if I click on one of these titles, I then get routed to a single page view. Also, if I enter in a URL here, my client-side router actually handles all of this and detects it, this actually isn't WordPress or PHP. So let's get back to this line. So that's kind of just an example of what it is that we're going to build. So let's set up our theme. Again, with the idea of trying to use as little PHP as possible, I have a function to PHP file where all I'm really going to do is enqueue my scripts and styles. I have a logo image. I have an index PHP, which is my only template file, and a JavaScript file to hold all of my routing and callback logic, and then a CSS file. So this is my theme. And in my index file, in my index PHP, I'm going to use the PHP tags, WP head and WP footer, which then allow scripts or styles that I'm enqueuing to then display as well as WP head allows all the document title and additional meta tags to display there. But as you get kind of farther down, in the header, I'm displaying my logo. And then if you see the highlighted area, I have a div that has the ID.js hyphen data. And that's where I'm going to add all of the view content that I'm going to determine based on the routes. I'm using the aria live tag here, which then tells screen readers that as the DOM content there changes, like then read it out to the individual with the screen reader. So that way they know to watch that and then anything that changes, any of the content that changes there, then they know to read that out. So in my function's PHP file, all I have is, as I said, I'm just using it to enqueue my scripts and styles, enqueuing my CSS style, and then registering the director script because that's not bundled as part of WordPress. And my main JS file for my theme, I'm just enqueuing that and declaring the dependency of jQuery underscore. And then the director script, I enqueued just before that. So that's all that's in my function's PHP file. And so let's start scaffolding our JS. Here, if you can kind of, starting at the highlighted area in director, the way it works is there's a route object and you set up each key to the callback you want to use that you want to say if a browser, a window location is detected for here, then use this callback and you can pass in a river parameter from the URL you would like to that callback. So I have, I'm declaring three routes here. One is just straight root or home and thus the root with a page where then that's like the paged parameter. And I'm sending both those to a callback function list posts with pagination that I don't have any logic to find in yet. But then my other one is just slash news and then slash post name as a parameter. So like the post slug with your like the pretty permalinks we're used to. And I'm gonna pass that to another function that's a view post that doesn't have its logic filled in yet either. But this kind of gives me the idea of this is what we're gonna do. And here are the three routes we're gonna handle. This is where we're gonna send versus where we're gonna send people when they hit those routes. So kind of continuing in my main JS file, I'm just gonna declare a few global variables here. One is API URL and I'm gonna set that to slash WP hyphen JSON, which is the, which is the index for any site that has the rest API available and enabled. If you visit that page on a WordPress site with the API, it'll then list out all the routes and all the information there. So I'm gonna store that because I'm gonna use that in all my Ajax requests in a bit. But for here, I'm just going to do a simple click event on the logo where I say if you're clicking on the logo instead of, instead of actually performing the href, instead just let's use our client router and set the route to the root, which then passes us to list posts with pagination. And also does a history push date, so it will update the URL and the browser for them. So it's kind of a shorthand for doing those two things. So just to recap, what I've done here, I've created a theme directory with the file, with some files. I filled in the header and footer logic in our single template file. I enqueued our JavaScript and CSS files in the functions PHP file. And then in our JS, we started getting dirty by defining our routes and initializing our client side router. And add an event handler just on for visitors to click our logo to make sure they can go back to the homepage. So let's start having some fun with some JSON endpoints. And to do that, in the bottom of my index.php template, I'm going to create a JavaScript template. And I'm going to use the script ID here, post-tmpl. And in here, in a bit, I will add all the logic that we need. But first, let's go back to that list, post with pagination, call back, and start filling in the logic. So what I want to do here is I'm passing in a page parameter. And if it's undefined, I'm just going to set it to one, which is the same as my homepage, so there is no pagination, there's no page variable there. And then I'm going to pass that to the API. And we defined the API URL variable earlier, where that's slash wp-json. And the post's resource is wp-v2-posts. Again, if you were to just visit wp-json on a site, you'd be able to get this information. But for the sake of moving along, that's where this is. And then I'm going to pass the page parameter so that way I can use the same function if we're on page two or page three and reuse it. In my AJAX request to the rest API endpoint, this post endpoint, the response, I'm going to put that in an object called output and pass that to my underscore template. That's the post-tmpl with that ID and have it fill in the HTML inside that template. And then I'm going to append the contents of that underscore template and append it to that JS data div ID inside in the middle of my index PHP file there. So in going back to now I need to take that output object that I've now passed to my underscore template and I need to make it so I can display the actual posts that are inside of it inside my JavaScript underscore template. And so going back to the little template, we scaffolded it out a few steps ago and go in. And I'm just going to put an each statement, which is kind of the same as it's like a JavaScript version of the loop. And for each of the posts that I'm passing in from the API response object, I'm saying let's put the post ID on a div so we can uniquely identify information. And then let's put the post slug in a data name so I can do kind of the in-app routing somewhere. Let's set an href so people can get to the individual link of this post as well as display the post title and the post excerpt. And it'll loop through all those and then it would display what I end up with is those displayed. So to recap again, we just created an underscores JS template with the post slash TMPL ID. We then filled in our logic in our list post pagination callback and then we sent a get request to the WP REST API post endpoint and passed the response data back to our underscores template. And in the underscores template, we then added the presentation logic to loop through the posts and the response and then display the title, excerpt, and URL for each post. So what you end up with in the homepage is something that looks like this. So now we need to add some pagination and we're gonna go back to that list post of pagination callback because we're not quite done yet. The way in the API we passed you information such as how many max pages you should expect from something that lists out, something like post or a custom post type is we set a header that's like X dash WP dash total pages. So I'm gonna go ahead and get that as part of the response data from my request to the post endpoint here and I'm adding two variables. I'm gonna get the current page and make sure it's an integer and I'm gonna get the max pages from the response header and then just a few lines down I'm just gonna check and say like, okay, if the current page is greater than one, then on the output data that we're passing to our underscore template from our last step, let's set the previous variable to be the current page minus one and then if the current page is less than the max number of pages, let's also add the data for a next value and we're gonna, just as we did before, still pass that output variable to our underscore template and then just at the bottom of it underneath the each logic that we did before, we're just gonna add a div ID for pagination and then just check and see if the previous value was defined. If so, let's create an anchor link that says previous and links people back, links people back one page and do the same for next. So again, just a recap, added logic to our list post of pagination to determine if the pagination value is relevant and if so, let's just include them in the data that we're passing to our underscore template and then add the presentation logic to our underscore template. And what you end up, there is, so if I go to slash two, then I get the next page in the pagination list and then at the bottom, I get the previous and next links and text there to show. So just one more route here to handle. So let's do the single post display and routing. Let's create another underscores template called post dash TMPL. And in this, I'm gonna display the single post response, but I'm also gonna pass in a parameter that's called that's underscore embed. And what that allows me to do is it includes in the response all of the related post data.  And you tend to do that all within your single post template. Well, those are actually different objects in WordPress, like the author data is actually a user object, the comments or comment objects. And WordPress right now and the way we're used to it kind of muddies that all together. And it's in an API, you have to keep your resources a little separate. So when you're displaying a single post, you wanna be able to show all of that instead of making a bunch of requests to the API, you can pass this embed parameter and you'll get all the related data back in the response object. So because I'm doing routing here based on the post name, I'm gonna keep using the post, just slash post with some parameters instead of doing post slash ID, which also would work and then just give you just the one single post object and you could also pass like embed to that. But again, just for this example, because most commonly people wanna get a single post by the post name and not actually by the ID, just showing here how you can do that where in my view post callback, I'm gonna send a get request via Ajax using that same API URL prefix, but then sending the request to WP slash V2 slash post again, but I'm adding this filter name equals and then I'm passing in the post name and I'm also including the and underscore embed parameter, which is that's what tells the API to embed all related data. And then in the response, I'm going to take the first response object in the response, I guess, because we're using posts and not the single one, it actually will return an array of posts, but I only am looking for one post, so I only need the first one, so that's why I'm just using like data zero. And then I'm gonna pass that to my post dash TMPL underscore template. And then again, I'm gonna append that to the JS data container there in the middle of my index PHP template. And this will handle anything that goes slash news and then has a post name. So in my single post template here now, filling in the logic, I just wanna use the featured image and to do that, I'm gonna check if the embedded featured media isn't undefined, then I know that I can display the featured image there and then I'm gonna display the title and then a little farther down, I'm gonna say written by and within the embedded data, I'm gonna use the author URL. The first author I'm gonna use their avatar URL with the key of 24, which is the size of the 24 pixels and then I'm gonna display their name and then I'm gonna end the template and that to recap that just, we're just kind of repeating pretty close to the steps we did for the post one, but just one just for a single post where we're gonna create our underscore template post dash TMPL, we're gonna fill in the logic of our view post callback and send a get request to the WPAPI, the WREST API post endpoint, but we're gonna set query parameters for the post slug and embedding related data and then we're gonna pass all that response data to the underscore template and then add the presentation logic to our underscore JS template that displays the featured image, title, author avatar, author name and content. What you end up with is something that looks like this. So that is it. I have some resources here, so the WPAPI REST API to get the endpoints, there's the link for director on GitHub, as well as I put all the theme files that I took to make this up on GitHub and as well as linked to my slides. I did actually tweet out my slides before we started, so you should see them under the WCUS hashtag and thank you, I'd like to take some questions. If anyone has any? Yes, hi. Hi, so building a theme this way sounds really good, but in terms of using an API, what's the practice for plugins that you would have to add like PHP code on the front end such as ACF or maybe like a social media bar? Sure, so you're asking about ACF as an advanced custom fields? Yeah, plugins like that where you have to add PHP stuff in the front end. Sure, so the way the API endpoints are set up in the plugin is very extensible just like WordPress itself, so we actually give you a function that's like register API field I believe is what it's called and what you have to do is, so ACF uses post meta, right? The problem with post meta is like it's not actually part of the post object and the way people use it is really different. You know, the way you might use it for the site for dry cleaners would be completely different than an e-commerce site would use it and so by default we don't show it, but if you use the register API field function you can add it to the response of your post response so then you could use it. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, thank you. You're welcome. So using this way to create a theme, what issues would it have with SEO and you know, since it's all AJAX, one call. Oh, it's fantastic for SEO. You get the best link juice this way? Yeah, really? Yeah. No joke. Tweet that please. Tweet? We need people to use the version too. Please, if I bet you if I, if you tweet that I get like, you know, honor people using it, no problem. No, in all seriousness, I would say ask Yoast. I don't know. I'm not an SEO expert and I don't play one on TV. So if your content is your content is there so in the DOM there might be some things you're gonna wanna do like provide, honestly if you provide like no JavaScript fallbacks you'd be covering yourself on the SEO and doing dynamic content for places where you need it and it supports it. People's browsers support it. That really honestly makes sense, thanks. Hey, Rachel. Hi. Thanks, that was great. I can see the appeal of this for doing your own website, building your own themes. I'm a little bit unsure about distributed themes in the short term at least because one of the things that has got WordPress to where it is at the moment is the fact that there are millions of articles telling you how to do things. Right. And when people go and Google something and they find an article saying just edit single.php and it's not there, that could cause problems. What's your take on that whole issue? Yeah, so it's a very valid point that's, I don't know. I could argue that there's a lot of theme frameworks out there right now that kind of do this with magical name their own hooks already. I think one of the coolest things about this is it makes it so the traditional theme structure of using PHP can still exist. And building a theme this way for a distributed, something you're gonna distribute and fully support. I think it's a little early for that right now, but I think all of this starts with people getting familiar and starting to have an idea on how this could and should work where we're always gonna have the education problem and hopefully soon enough the amount of people that are telling you how to do this and what to do if you look and there's no single PHP file, like where then to look instead, hopefully soon that starts catching up and then we won't have to worry about it. Cool, thanks for your answer. Thanks. Hey, Rachel, great job. Come find me, I'll gladly buy you a Diet Coke for your two years of hard work. We appreciate it. So you mentioned the routing stuff. Yeah. And I think that's something like your average steamer might not think like, oh gosh, I have to handle routing now because I'm theming in this new way. So what are some other additional kind of gotchas that you might have to handle whereas if you're just theming in pure PHP that you might not even think about? Sure, so the other one honestly is, and I didn't touch on this necessarily, it's document title, like you're gonna wanna make sure you switch out the document title and all that header information as you change your routes. The other one is just is because there's hooks like the content, right? The way the API works is we run the content on the content.rendered for you. So if you have plugins that are hooking in something like social sharing buttons and that kind of stuff, that all will include that, but if people are hooking somewhere else, I can't really think of a great example off the top of my head, I don't know, maybe like in widget areas or something like that, those are things that by default won't be there. So you kind of have to then figure out, okay, how can I take this information and make it something that's available that I can display in my theme. The other one actually that I can think of is menu navigation, where right now WordPress handles this for you, right? Like on a new page request, it then figures out what the current page is and then like changes that to your, to be like, you know, have like the current CSS class, right?  Those are the two biggest ones I can think of. Thanks again. Yeah. I'm curious about the embed param and how much stuff gets in there. Considering like the amount of processing to query all that stuff and also the payload size, can you limit what's in there or is that even a concern? Yes, it is a concern. Actually, Joe Hoyle and I were just talking about this yesterday and he actually has a plugin that allows you to like limit what actually gets embedded there. I think as the end points evolve, we're gonna, if you've ever looked like our version two, I'm sorry, if you've ever looked at our version one, the way our post response was, we actually included some author information, category tag information, like that already in our post response. The WordPress.com API does this as well. If you look at our version two, we don't include a lot of, like we'll include author ID, which isn't really useful. Like you kind of, you're not gonna explain like your single post view, just their ID, right?  So passing the embed param just for that seems a little wonky to me to get all, like when you pass it, you get like all comments. If you're logged in, you'll get revisions, the categories, tags, et cetera. So I think in the end, at some point, we'll find a happy medium between the two with the end points. In the meantime, as I said, Joe has a way to limit that and I think that's something we're gonna look into supporting directly in the API in the very, very, very near future. Thank you. Hi, when it comes to scaling, does this methodology scale the same way? You can scale WordPress by caching, using varnish and things like that. Well, so you can, you're hitting an endpoint and getting back a response and you can cache this. You can very well cache this with varnish and it would pretty much work the same way. In fact, I would actually say, if you, there's certain things you, with varnish you can't cache, right? Like you can't cache every admin Ajax request and those are really heavy from our performance standpoint because you're kind of loading in most of WordPress admin when you hit admin Ajax and our API doesn't do that. So actually from a pure performance query standpoint, this is a lot lighter on servers and the, since the end points are just on there, you can, you can set cache headers on them and make them cacheable. What's up Anthony? Hey Rachel. I have a two part question. So the first part is, I learned best by taking a theme that's in the theme library and disassembling it to figure out how to work on it. So with- We call that breaking it. Yep. So with 4.4, will we see any of these in the library? And then part two is this a model that will ever see a default WordPress theme that ships with WordPress? Well, sure. So you can create a theme and submit it to the review team that relies on the WordPress REST API. That's allowed in the theme repo right now. I don't think anyone's done it yet. You should do it first. And then I can't speak to what the next upcoming default themes in WordPress are gonna do, but I think this would be very cool. This question just kind of goes on that same line of thinking. Like in a looking down the road for WordPress, does this make sense? The theme that you created here as an example, does that really seem like a future way to use the REST API from a theme perspective? Or does like the way that I've done it before is like building like node apps or something like that that are completely separate from WordPress and just using it as an API for building the view layer for a site? Well, probably the way you did it. Well, so there are two different things, right? Like this is using WordPress, a theme within WordPress and actually not using WP use theme and setting that to false and having your view layer be a completely different location. One of the cool things about the REST API, honestly, is like there's so many things we can do with it, there's like mobile apps, there's viewing information from WordPress in a completely separate app, which is what you're talking about, or using it within the same site and to pull and display data. I think from a popularity standpoint, at a Word camp, I think more people will start maybe possibly here or with some sort of like custom endpoint that they create from like a plugin or something and then display it. I mean, think about like if gravity forms or event calendars kind of things, like they all have APIs, if you can use their, they use our endpoints, if you use them, you can start, submit a form and then immediately show like, thank you, we'll send you an email with when we read this or something. We can do, you can do all that kind of stuff. So I think that's the best place if people are gonna start, but I mean, the cool thing is there's no limits. Guys limit, Jake. Thanks. All right, well, thank you guys very much.


More than a thousand people attended the 2016 SOAR Summit in Pikeville which focused mainly on areas of innovation in southeast Kentucky. Organizers of the event invited business leaders and members of the communities across the region to bring ideas and possible solutions to the summit with the hopes of showcasing those ideas. We all know the hurdles that we face here in eastern Kentucky and it's very important to get people together and convene regional leaders from legislators to other elected officials to business folks to nonprofits coming together to talk about those issues but also to talk about finding solutions for those issues. Congressman Hal Rogers, Governor Matt Bevin and a host of other elected officials addressed the group reminding everyone that solutions for problems facing eastern Kentucky don't always have to be from sources within the region. What SOAR has done is it's gotten all the minds of the region and outside of the region all the way to the national level thanks to Congressman Rogers to come in and see the issues that we're facing in eastern Kentucky and thus continue to bring us together and talk about those issues. For many attendees of the SOAR Summit, the main reason they attend here after a year is solely for the networking opportunities. While the classes and all the gatherings are very nice, what goes on in the halls, the networking opportunities is where it's really at and that's how you change. It's getting that one-on-one connection. Whenever you get out the hallway and you can meet and discuss one-on-one with folks, I think that is a very important time. But one thing everyone did agree on at today's summit is that county and city lines need to be erased and everyone needs to focus on the needs of the region as a whole. Getting everyone together and to work toward one common goal of making eastern Kentucky a better place is what it's all about. And we need to break those barriers of county lines. There's so much ingenuity amongst our own people that if we utilize it, we can do what we want to do. Reporting in Pikeville for EKB News, I'm Shannon Deskins.