Acts chapter 1, we're going to be looking at verses 9 to the conclusion of the chapter verse 26. I'm going to give to you some information as we develop this, and we're going to move into a portion that I've prepared. I actually, just to give you a heads up, my notes usually consist of around four pages. Today there's six, and so I'm just letting you know. So we got a lot of things to look at tonight. So let's begin reading at verse 9, read to verse 11. Now when he had spoken these things while they watched, he was taking, he was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel who also said, men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? The same Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will so come in like manner as you saw him go into heaven. And so let's begin with an introduction. Throughout the ministry of Jesus Christ, he prepared his disciples for his death, his burial, and his resurrection. And so this kind of teaching was very new to them. And it was difficult for them to grasp that Jesus, the Messiah, would actually die and be buried and be raised from the dead. That was a brand new concept to them. You see, their knowledge of the Old Testament was solid, but there were things that were still obscure to them that was especially true in the doctrine of the resurrection. They didn't yet understand that Jesus was going to die and be resurrected. Now on various occasions he told them that this would occur, but they had yet to really grasp his teaching. It says, for example, in Mark chapter 9, verses 31 and 32, that he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed. And after three days rise again, but they did not understand this saying and they were afraid to ask him. So when Jesus was resurrected, he ministered to his men on various occasions. And that occurred over a period of 40 days. We saw that in chapter 1, verse 3, where Luke had said to whom he also presented himself alive after his sufferings by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during 40 days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. And so when Jesus was resurrected, he ministered to them on various occasions over 40 days. Now when you look at the Gospel accounts, you're going to see that Jesus appeared to them various times. You'll see that he first appeared to Mary Magdalene as it's recorded in John 20, verse 16. He appeared to other women, Matthew 28, verse 9, to two disciples going to Emmaus, Luke chapter 24. He appeared to Peter according to Luke chapter 24, verse 34. He appeared to the 10 apostles, John 20, verses 19 through 25. He appeared to the apostles including Thomas in John 20, verses 26 through 29. He appeared to seven apostles by the shore of Galilee in John 21 to the men and perhaps 500 witnesses on a mountain in Galilee in Matthew 28 and to James Jesus' brother according to 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 7. So again, verse 3 tells us that when he appeared to them, he spoke to them of things pertaining to the kingdom. So he continued instructing them. He especially was commanding them to wait for the promise he set up the Father. And we're going to be looking more closely at this promise when we get into chapter 2 because the promise of the Father is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. We'll be looking at that together in more detail. But as they were speaking to Jesus, they had asked him a question. They said to him, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel? It says that here in verse 6. Are you going to do that at this time? Are you going at this time to restore the kingdom to Israel? Now, I wanted to give you some things as I prepared to go into verses 9 and all. I wanted to give you some things that it didn't touch on last time. So you get a more full account of what is taking place here. And so they had an expectation concerning Messiah. An expectation that was common in the nation of Israel at that time. When you look at what is called the eschatological or the last times kind of calendar that the Jews had at that time, there were certain expectations that they had as it related to Messiah. They had taught that before Messiah came there would be a terrible tribulation. For them that would have been Rome. Before his coming there would be a forerunner sent who was like Elijah. They recognized that as John the Baptist. After those two events they believed that Messiah would appear and establish his kingdom. The unbelieving nations would ally to fight against Messiah. The nations opposing him would be destroyed for their opposition. Jerusalem would be restored and be the city of the great king. That the Jews scattered throughout the earth would be regathered. That Israel would become the center of the world all nations subject to Messiah. And after Messiah began to rule that the world would enter into peace, prosperity, and joy. Now as we've been going through and just concluded our study in the minor prophets we saw those expectations that were laid out for the nation of Israel. And that's what they believed and that's why they're asking Jesus are you about to restore the kingdom to Israel? I want to know is this the time that you're going to establish your earthly kingdom? Now Jesus had said to them this isn't your concern. What you're supposed to do is you're to go out and you're to preach the gospel. You see the men still didn't realize that God was going to produce something that is called the church.  You'll discover that in the Old Testament the world of humanity, mankind is divided into two sections, Jew and Gentile. And so when you go through the Old Testament and after the establishment of the nation of Israel and the coming in a relationship God has with that nation you begin to see how that God will speak of them as the Jew and the Gentile. So humanity was divided into two sections Jew and Gentile.  You'll see sometimes in the teachings of Christ that he alludes to that when he says in Matthew 10 to not go to the Gentiles but only to the house of Israel or when he's speaking to the Syrophoenician woman and he says I was sent only to the house of Israel. So you see that Jesus had continued ministering to the nation of Israel in his earthly ministry but he also had something in store for the world that the world had yet to understand and that was the church. And so when Jesus was speaking in Matthew 16 and giving to the disciples instructions he spoke to Peter and said you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. And that's the first mention of the word church, the Ecclesia, the called out ones. And so what Jesus was intending to do was to let them know that their ministry was prolonged. It wasn't something that was going to be over immediately but there was an age that is referred to in theology as the church age or the age of grace. There is an age that is going to be established where God is going to create out of the Jew and the Gentile what is referred to by Paul in his writings as the new man. The new man would refer to the fact that it's no longer the Jew it's no longer the Gentile it is also now the church. And the church is made up of Jews and Gentiles who come to faith in Jesus the Messiah. They didn't understand this. This is something that was still at that point something that was foreign to them. It was what would be called a mystery. Now the word mystery in the New Testament is used several times. In the way that we use the word mystery we will speak concerning a novel that is a mystery novel or a movie that is a mystery. But the New Testament word musterion the New Testament word mystery is a word that is really meaning something that at one time was hidden but now has been revealed. So when the word mystery is used and it is used in the book of Ephesians it will refer to and does refer to this mystery of the two becoming the one new man in what is called the church. In Ephesians 3 verse 6 it says this this is the secret plan or the mystery the Gentiles have an equal share with the Jews in all the riches inherited by God's children. Both groups have believed the good news or the gospel and both are part of the same body and enjoy together the promises of blessings through Christ Jesus. So Jesus' disciples did not understand yet that Jesus intended to create something called the church. They are asking a question are you about to restore the kingdom to Israel because their eschatological understanding their last days understanding had been developed over time and they still embraced it. And so the fact is no there is something called a church age and in order for people to be drawn into this kingdom that is going to be made up of Jew and Gentile who believe in Messiah you're going to need power. You got a message. The message is called the gospel but you need the power of the Holy Spirit and that's what we saw in verse 8 when he said you shall receive power after that the Spirit the Holy Spirit has come upon you you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and unto the other most parts of the earth. And I want you to notice something I don't know if I spend any time or much time at all pointing this out but I'll point this out very briefly and then we'll move into verses 9 following but I want you to see again in verse 8 what he said you shall be witnesses to me. A lot of times the church has made the mistake of thinking that our role is to do witnessing. I think that of course it's important that we go out and we share the gospel of course the church has been commissioned to go out you see that as I mentioned to you before that we have what is called the great commission that was actually given five different times a lot of times we look at the great commission and we say well Matthew 28 verses 18 through 20 and that's where you have it encapsulated but each one of the gospels Mark 16 Luke 24 John 20 and 21 there are allusions to what they're to do and Acts chapter 1 includes that and so in Acts chapter 1 he was giving them this commission but he was saying in the commission you need the power of the Holy Spirit you need the power of the Holy Spirit because you will never be successful in taking out this message without a transformed life see one of the things I was sharing with you last time touch this for just a moment and move on is the church today can do a lot of witnessing but what the church is supposed to be is a witness our lives that have been transformed by a message called the gospel is the evidence that God is in the life changing business if you will if any man is in Christ he is what a new creation a new creation I remember hearing a man true story of a man who had when Billy Graham was a young man doing evangelism he had given an invitation and this man had gone forward at the invitation and so Billy Graham had ministers who did follow up and so one of his ministers went to visit with this man to be a very well known mobster he was a very very bad guy he was a mobster he used to call him mobsters I don't know what they're called anymore but a mobster and so I don't want to generalize because I don't know that he was in the mafia but that's the kind of mobster I'm talking about so when the pastor goes to follow up with his very well known gangster mobster whatever when he goes to speak to him he says to him now that you've come to faith in Christ your life is going to be transformed and the guy says yeah I'm expecting that well what are you going to do with your life now because he was a well known gangster and all and he says well I'm going to continue what I do and the minister says what do you mean you're going to continue what you're going to do yeah I'm going to stay in the lifestyle that I have and he says to him oh no that's really not a good idea to stay you know breaking people's arms and things like that it's not a good thing to do unless you're UFC no that's not a good thing to do the guy says why not well because what you do is simply wrong he says I don't think so he said there are Christian truck drivers Christian businessmen I'm going to be a Christian mobster true story I'm going to be a Christian mobster you know see the Bible teaches us that when Christ comes into our life our life changes that's why it's so sad today to see Christians who don't understand that arguing that it's okay to continue in sinful lives and we're still going to go to heaven why because of the grace of God no when you have actually come into into contact with the power of the Spirit and when you've begun to read the word of God and you begin to have a heart of obedience you demonstrate that you've been saved by the life that you begin to live you are not saved by your works but your works demonstrate that you've been saved and so Jesus said you shall be witnesses to me he didn't simply say to them you're going to go out and do witnessing he said wherever you go whatever you're doing you will be a witness that's why you are a witness on the job that's why you are a witness at home that's why you are a witness at the gas station that's why you are simply a witness wherever it is that you are and that's why it's important for us to remember that because it's not just going out with a Bible and telling people how they should live it's living that Bible so people have a model of what it means to follow Christ and that requires the power of the Holy Spirit who transforms lives to be conformed into the image of Jesus himself and so Jesus was speaking here and he's saying this is what's going to take place you are going to be witnesses and again when we get into chapter 2 I'm going to spend some time looking especially at the first 11 verses next time we're together I'm going to share with you about this baptism the Holy Spirit the promise of the Father and how that works within our life and so with all of that said in a nutshell what we were looking at last time and now as we pick up in verse 9 it says when he had spoken these things while they watched he was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight and so as he's speaking he actually is taken up this speaks of what is called the ascension Jesus is departing from earth and he's returning to the presence of his Father in Mark 16 verse 19 it says so then after the Lord had spoken to them he was received up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God in Luke 24 verses 50 and 51 it says he led them out as far as Bethany he lifted up his hands and blessed them he came to pass while he blessed them that he was parted from them and carried into heaven ask yourself what you would be thinking at that moment I mean think about it I have to be honest with you I've read this passage so many times over the years but I've never really allowed myself to think about how that would feel to watch something like that to see Jesus speaking and blessing I mean I don't even I can't get it I really don't to me it's like wow I mean are you kidding me one he was dead now he's alive he's been with me for 40 days in various times speaking to me that's been hard enough to deal with but to see him going up into heaven and be received by a cloud that's an amazing thing and so what we have is we have God the Father he's been up in his resurrection body and he's now at the right hand of the Father again that's referred to the exaltation of Jesus and he is now seated the Bible says at the Father's right hand the term at the right hand very often speaks of a place of power and authority so when you see Jesus described in scriptures being at the right hand of God or the right hand of the Father what's that referring to it is referring to the fact that he is there in a position of authority and power in Romans 8 verse 34 the question is who is he that condemns Christ Jesus who died more than that who has raised a life is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us in Hebrews 1 verse 3 it says a son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being sustaining all things by his powerful word after he had provided purification for sins he sat down at the right hand of the majesty in heaven so this is speaking of Jesus being raised into heaven and he's now seated exalted there at the right hand in verse 9 it says a cloud received him out of their sight of course this isn't an ordinary cloud this would speak of the presence of God in the Old Testament it's referred to as the Shekinah Glory in Normach it was called the Chicano Glory no this is the Shekinah Glory of God and you see that in reference to that in 1 Kings for example chapter 8 in verses 10 through 12 where it says it happened that when the priest came from the holy place the cloud filled the house of the Lord so that the priest could not stand to minister because of the cloud for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord Solomon said the Lord said that he would dwell in this thick cloud and so the picture that you have here is him being received up into heaven and the glory of God now as this is taking place verse 10 well they look steadfastly toward heaven as he went up behold two men stood by them in white apparel who also said men of Galilee why do you stand gazing up into heaven the same Jesus who has taken up from you into heaven will so come in like manner as you saw him go into heaven so they are transfixed their feet are solidly planted on earth as they are watching in amazement as Jesus is received up in glory and there is these two men in apparel these two men in white apparel are obviously angels who are speaking to them we know that on occasion in the future they will take the form of men you see that in Mark 16 verse 5 where it says they entered the tomb and they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed this young man was actually an angel so there are times that you will see them taking upon themselves the form of a man the appearance of a man and so here they are they are gazing transfixed towards heaven they are in utter amazement and the angels actually rebuke them and they are telling them what are you doing standing around didn't you hear what he said you need to get busy now again maybe they thought that as Jesus went up he was going to come straight back down but it says here no you got things to do and as a matter of fact notice what it says in verse 11 why do you stand gazing into heaven the same Jesus who has taken up from you into heaven will come in like manner as you saw him go into heaven now they remind them and this is important by the way if you take notes you might want to note this and you'll see why in just a moment the angels are rebuke them telling them get busy and they're reminding them that Jesus will literally return to the earth he's returning not in a secret or hidden manner he's returning in an open manner on the clouds of heaven as it says here now why do I want you to think about this for a minute there are false teachers that have said that Jesus will not literally return to planet earth I was reading something in excerpt from a tract that says you can live forever that's the track title you can live forever it was put out by the watchtower bible and track society it's found on page 147 the watchtower is the mouthpiece for the Jehovah's witnesses and it says Christ's return does not mean it literally comes back to this earth rather it means that he takes kingdom power towards this earth and turns his attention to it he does not need to leave his heavenly throne and actually come down to earth to do this as we have seen in the previous chapter bible evidence shows that in the year 1914 God's time arrived for Christ to return he was ruling it was then that the cry was heard in heaven now have come to pass the salvation and power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ the watchtower organization all the way back in the early 1900s said that Jesus returned invisibly and that he was ruling in Brooklyn, New York in the watchtower organization now that's why it's important to read your bible that's why because they've been teaching this since early 1900s of course that specifically contradicts Jesus' teaching remember in the gospel of Mark chapter 14 verse 62 you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of the mighty one and coming on the clouds of heaven Jesus said that Revelation 1 verse 7 look he is coming with the clouds and every eye will see him even those who pierced him and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him so shall it be, amen there was no invisible or secret return every eye will see him scripture says it over and over again and so I wanted to give you something because there are people who knock on your door and they will tell you that and you need to be prepared for those kinds of things to be able to give an answer well it says in verse 12 they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet which is near Jerusalem a Sabbath day journey so they went about a half a half a mile and that was the farthest that a faithful Jew could travel on the Sabbath and verse 13 when they had entered the upper room where they were staying Peter, James, John and Andrew Philip and Thomas Bartholomew and Matthew James the son of Alpheus and Simon the zealot Judas the son of James these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and with his brothers and so this again is giving us an account of what is taking place simply says they returned to Jerusalem and it says in verse 13 they entered into an upper room so they enter into an upper room this is more than likely the upper room where they had the last supper and where Jesus administered to his disciples I want you to notice that there are 11 apostles remaining these are the ones who have been appointed by Jesus obviously one of them is not there we know him by the name of Judas and notice what they're doing in verse 14 they're continuing with one accord in prayer and supplication so they remain in unity they remain in prayer and they're waiting for the promise that we'll see in chapter 2 so that's what believers are supposed to do believers are to remain united to pray and to trust the Lord to keep his promises and what's interesting there are others mentioned simply as the women and so seeing that they're named you have to supply who they could potentially have been simply by the women that are mentioned in scripture that were normally with him so we know for example Mary Magdalene was there that Mary the wife of Plupus would be there Mary and Martha Salome these are women that are mentioned as being part of the group of people that followed Jesus administered to him and the number would also include Mary the mother of Jesus and that's what it says here the mother of Jesus and his brothers we're going to look at that for a minute I told you I have a lot of scripture to give you today here's some more notice how scripture refers to Mary and I want you to see that scripture refers to her in a fairly casual way I want you to see that with me I want you to see and I'll read it to you again these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and with his brothers now why am I saying that I want to spend a couple moments looking at Mary the Bible never affords Mary any special recognition never affords Mary any priority of privilege and the Bible never encourages inordinate interest in or even inordinate affection for her in Mark chapter 3 verses 31 through 35 the Bible says Jesus's mother and brothers arrived standing outside they sent someone in to call him a crowd was sitting around him and they told him your mother and brothers are outside looking for you who is my mother and my brothers he asked then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said my mother and my brothers and he goes on to say this whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother now it's interesting brother sister mother but he doesn't say my father brother sister mother in other words anybody doing the will of God is part of my family he's part of my family she's part of my family so his mother didn't gain her special recognition or privilege in the church there was no special treatment of her but she is recognized as being blessed by God we read in Luke 11 27 and 28 as Jesus was saying these things a woman in the crowd called out blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nurse to you he replied blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it so there is no special recognition found in scripture she is recognized as the mother of Jesus a tremendous example to all but she also gave birth to her savior Jesus her son so she is not our co-redeemer she is not our co-mediator in the religious background I had she was called the co-mediatrix and co-redemptrix see I went to to mass in Latin in the Latin mass and we were taught that and so the Bible does not teach that but that's what we were taught what does the Bible teach concerning her well the title redeemer and mediator those are titles that belong to Jesus himself according to 1 Timothy 2 5 and 6 there is one God and one mediator between God and men the man Christ Jesus who gave himself as a ransom for all in 1 Peter 1 18 and 19 it says you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed to you from your forefathers but with the precious blood of Christ a lamb without blemish or defect Jesus is my mediator Jesus is my redeemer and so I've had more than one conversation and I know that for some who are devoutly Catholic that this could seem to be very offensive and I understand why it would seem that way no I'm not bashing Catholics but I am speaking concerning Mary she's found here in scripture and thus we need to have a balanced understanding of who she is she's the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ she's the person that we respect she was blessed by God an amazing woman and a great example of godliness there's no doubt about it but she's not my mediator you see my mom taught me as a little boy again I was raised in the Catholic church baptized in small church in Los Angeles at my first communion and my confirmation at St. Pius X Church in Santa Fe Springs I was going through the four of the sacrament sacrament of penance and all I went through those things and I had my upbringing in that religious belief but also within that I discovered that there were things that were added to what the bible says and and that's just a fact I had a friend of mine who was Bill I still have him used to be my friend and I meet with him monthly he comes here monthly we were in the same kindergarten class so I've known him for a while and so Bill used to get angry at me and argue with me because he was starting to go to Calvary Chapel and he knew that I as a Catholic would not agree with what he was learning and he and I would argue about theology he was going to bible studies so I try not to be offensive to those who hold fast to their Catholic upbringing because I'm not here with the intent to insult people but I do have a background and I do understand some of the things that people feel in all of that related to it and so for me, Bill would say things to me and it would get me upset and all so it caused me to wonder about what I had been taught so I went to one of the parish priests there at St. Pius X in Santa Fe Springs I set up an appointment and I walked in and I sat down with this particular priest and I was 20 years old 19 years old at the time and I said to him, listen I have a friend of mine who is a Protestant now that was supposed to get the priest mad who is a Protestant and he's arguing with me about Jesus and he keeps telling me things about the Bible that I need to be born again and I've been telling him that I'm a Catholic I'm part of the first church that Peter is the first pope and the things that we've been taught are the truth but I need ammunition to deal with this guy that's what I did I wanted ammunition I wasn't walking away from the Catholic Church I did not walk into that priest's office with the intent of walking away from Catholicism I walked into the priest's office I wanted some ammunition to deal with this heretic named Bill that's why I went in that's a fact I went in so I get some ammo so I could argue with him and I'll never forget this as I was there seated across from the priest I said this is what he's saying how do I respond he's saying I need to be born again how do I respond and the priest leans back in his chair and kind of like folds his arms and he looks at me and he says I've tried it all I tried Eastern mysticism and he starts telling me the different paths that he had taken and he leans back and he says to me and I came back to Catholicism and that's no problem and that was his answer that was his answer and so when he said that to me now remember I don't know how to contextualize this but I'm trying to say I was a hippie I was a doper I was an alcoholic and I thought I was a Christian and I wanted help so I could rip up this Protestant this Calvary Chapel Protestant I was upset give me some ammo and when he did that and this is I walked out of the office he doesn't have an answer he can't give me answers I was raised like many of you if I had you raise your hand many of you were raised in the Catholic Church many of you were the majority of my church was raised in the Catholic Church you understand what I'm trying to say it was like a light bulb began to go off in my head and I said he doesn't have an answer he doesn't know how to deal with this he's just telling me relax I'll be okay and I'm not okay I'm a doper I'm a drunk I'm messed up I'm a lying thief I'm a candidate for the passage that's a fact he doesn't he doesn't have an answer that's what made me more curious when I thought maybe there is an answer to these questions God used that he used that in my life and so when I came to faith in Christ I have never come in with an attitude of disrespecting I don't want to disrespect people some are very thin skinned and they're expecting to be I'm not disrespecting I'm trying to speak truth and trying to encapsulate truth in a human form if you will trying to say this is how as an example so I came to faith in Christ and I was instructed from the beginning God's word is true that was no problem for me because if God is God and he can create all things I'm certain he can keep his word pure enough to communicate to me if he can't then what kind of God is there he's weak so the God that I know of in Scripture gave us his word that's when I was seated looking at this big old family Bible that weighed like 200 pounds and I was flipping it over and I was looking for things in this my sister-in-law's Catholic Bible and I was just looking for the doctrines I had been taught I didn't go there to argue with her I wanted to tell her about the Lord but she was in another room there's a Bible I've been taught to read it I look at it I open it up it actually has a Z-Catholic doctrine so I think well I might as well educate myself I'm a brand new Christian I hadn't been a Christian more than two weeks three weeks at the most and I just start to look up starting with the letter A well the assumption of Mary is that where where's the Bible say that and it doesn't I kept going and I looked up all these doctrines penance doesn't say it it doesn't say that she is co-mediatrix anywhere co-redemptrix anywhere it doesn't say she's the queen of heaven and I keep looking and I start saying well if it doesn't say that there's no there's no place some of you may not have ever been taught the doctrine of limbo where the souls of M-baptized children go in a perfect bliss but not heaven so I look to see limbo there's no such place and the only place I've mentioned this before that purgatory that was an interesting thing to me and it said purgatory does exist it's junior high ministry but outside of that and so listen the cry of those who were called the reformers was solis griftura the word of God only that's what our faith is based on and so the reason I'm even taking some time to look at Mary is just to remind you that the Bible is strangely silent about her it does speak of her as being blessed amongst women it does speak concerning her giving birth to Jesus our messiah it does not ever refer to her as the mother of God never does so there are things you were taught perhaps that just don't find revelation in Scripture and so Mary was one who gave birth to our messiah so I have conversed with people on this before and they think I don't respect her and I do I said do you and I've said but do you oh yes I do you respect her yes do you do what she says well what do you mean I said all you need to do is look in the Gospel of John chapter 2 and Jesus is at the wedding of Cana of Galilee and while he is there his mother approaches him and says they have no wine Jesus responds to her and says woman what do I have to do with you and in this conversation Mary says something she says whatever he says do it now if you honor Mary then honor her words are whatever he says do it what did he say believe in me I'm the savior follow me become fishes of men see that's one of the reasons that you can feel very confident to follow him to follow him because even his mama said to do that which is biblical and so yes I do I honor Mary's words Mary said whatever he says to you do it and so we have Mary mentioned here we also have his brothers I don't want to go into a long thing with you about that I can do that too I won't but scripture records that Jesus had brothers and sisters who initially did not believe in him Matthew 13 verses 55 and 56 the question is asked isn't this the carpenter's son isn't his mother's name Mary and aren't his brothers James Joseph Simon and Judas aren't all his sisters with us where then did this man get all these things John 7 verse 5 says even his own brothers did not believe in him you see what was taking place was at that time his family didn't come to faith or did not have faith in him after his resurrection is when they came to faith in him they came to faith in him now moving on verse 15 you can see now why I have six pages of notes in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples altogether the number of names was about 120 and said men and brethren this scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke before by the mouth of David concerning Judas who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus for he was numbered with us and obtained a part in this ministry now this man purchased a field with the wages of iniquity falling headlong he burst open in the middle all his entrails gushed out and it became known to all those dwelling in Jerusalem so that field is called in their own language aquildama field of blood for it is written in the book of Psalms let his habitation be desolate let no one live in it and let another take his office therefore these men who have accompanied us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us beginning from the baptism of John that day when he was taken up from us one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection they proposed to Joseph called Bar Saba who was surnamed justice and Matthias he prayed and said oh Lord who know you oh Lord who know the hearts of all show which of these two you have chosen to take part in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas by transgression fell that he might go to his own place he cast their lots the lot fell on Matthias he was numbered with the 11 apostles so in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples verse 15 when you read your bible you see something about Peter that is charming and interesting at the same time he had a very strong personality very strong personality and he had tremendous influence this was a man who was willing to speak out and you see that as you go through scripture and you see this man as he's mentioned and the scriptures that pertain to him so in many ways he was a very strong leader in what has been called the apostolic circle when you begin to look at the lists of the apostles you find lists found in Matthias chapter 10 and Mark chapter 3 and Luke chapter 6 as well as Acts here in chapter 1 his name is always first in the list of the apostles you will see that every time the names are mentioned of the apostles is always the first name mentioned through the gospels and Judas Iscariot is always the last and he's normally spoken of as the one who was a trader or the one who betrayed Jesus Christ when you go through the gospels and you look at this man by the name of Simon Peter when you go through the gospels you see that this is a man who loved Jesus Christ and he's a man who had a tremendous faith you know it was Peter who walked on water to Jesus as it speaks of that in Matthew 14 it was Peter who confessed that Jesus is the Christ the son of the living God in Matthew 16 it was he who said to him Lord to whom shall we go you have the words of eternal life in John chapter 6 it was Peter who said we have left all and followed you therefore what shall we have in Matthew 19 and it was he who said we have to die with you I will not deny you this is a man who is very strong and a man with tremendous faith in the Lord Jesus Christ but it was also Peter who failed to hold fast to his confession of courage and it was Peter who after he failed in such an open way who was restored by Jesus in an open way we remember how Jesus restored him and how that he commissioned him to feed and to tend the lambs and the sheep and so in the life of Peter his brokenness placed him in a place of leadership with a greater depth brokenness is what prepares you for deep ministry you might want to mark that in your heart if you want to be deep I've said this to you so many times you go through deep things if you want to be a help to people you're able to look back at the things you've gone through and you're able to say this is where God met me in a special way when I was at the end of myself is when I came to him when I was at the end of my strength is when I found my strength is in him when I was hopeless is when I discovered that he is my hope when I had no peace I discovered that it is he who is my peace when I felt alone I discovered that I'm never alone for he's always with me and he never leaves me nor does he forsake me so those are things you learn when you're there at your kitchen table saying I don't have two nickels to rub together the bills are coming and I don't know what I'm going to do and you say but God you have said that you would provide Lord help me give me wisdom direct me do something Lord sometimes I don't know what to do and God has a way of coming through there's one thing that I've discovered that is a benefit to just having a long walk with the Lord is things that at one time at the beginning of my walk with him thought I will never see an answer to this those things have been answered you see that in God's faithfulness his timetable is different than yours he works at a different pace we're young we run ahead of him we say come and catch up and the Lord says no the shepherd walks and you follow his voice I'm not supposed to follow yours so you walk at my pace you learn to walk according to my ways you trust me and I will never let you down you will never be alone you will never be without my presence you need to simply trust me Peter had to learn that Peter was boasting I love you more than these do you really do you really now I say unto you that tonight you'll betray me three times I'll die for you these may these guys I've always had second thoughts about but not me I will never some in this room know exactly what I'm saying when I say I have prayed and said I'll never let you down only to wake up asking myself how'd I get here how did I get here what steps did I take to end up pinging the way that I am I started out so well let him who thinks he stand take heed Paul said lest he should fall be aware that the enemy is there to trip you up and as you're crying out to God I will follow you that is a prayer that God hears and that is something that the enemy works over time to undermine never forget that because as you are wanting to follow the Lord there is one who wants to stop you from doing the same thing that's how you grow in faith Lord increase our faith the Lord says it's not great faith you need it's mustard seed faith just trust me even a little bit because it's not how big your faith is it's how big your God is and that's what we have to learn you see that's a bottom line that's a bottom line and so the Lord honors us trusting him and the apostle Peter is a man who really had a tremendous influence on the other apostles but this is a man who failed but Jesus restored him and has broken his place in a place of leadership to a greater depth so true to his character and true to his gifting Peter has taken the role of leader and in verse 15 there are around 120 disciples that are present at this time and as this is taking place in verses 16 and 17 his knowledge of scripture is revealed to us because he begins to quote scripture here now people thought that because he didn't attend any of the appropriate schools what we today call seminary they would think that this man probably wouldn't know scripture very well later on when we get to chapter 4 you're going to see that because the Lord used him to perform a miracle on a crippled man they were arrested for that and they were spoken to by the religious authorities and after they were speaking to them it says in Acts 4.13 they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived they were uneducated and untrained men the scripture said they marveled and they realized that they had been with Jesus you know uneducated and untrained one of the things that sometimes people will think that is that well I need to I need to go to these particular schools in order to be qualified in order to be a pastor and I'm not one who says you shouldn't go to school by the way I think this school is extremely beneficial and if the Lord places it on your heart and gives you opportunity too and it's the right thing for you of course training is a great thing and we need trained theologians absolutely but also I keep in mind that majority of my friends who are pastoring churches that God is using in the Calvary Ministries they didn't go to seminary they got into the Word and they were with Jesus they spent time praying and they spent time studying and God equipped them he had gifted them and because they have this tremendous love for Christ who is our savior that provokes them to remain faithful to the Lord what makes you faithful to God what has made me as a pastor faithful to to my wife faithful for my children faithful for my grandchildren is it because because if I got caught I'd get killed by Marie no because if I'm deceitful enough to find a way to go out on her I'm probably deceitful enough to be able to hide it from her you know what it's been fear of God fear of God my God will reveal and I'm aware of that I have a healthy fear of God see an unbeliever there is no fear of God in them Romans tells us in chapter 3 there is no fear of God in them the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom fools despise knowledge and instruction no it's the fear of the Lord I want you to remain away from evil because the Lord will deal with those whom he loves and he will chase him I'm aware of that I'm very aware of that and that fear of the Lord is also coupled with a love for the Lord and a fear of the Lord and a love for the Lord has made me the faithful man to my family has made me the faithful man I learned a long time ago that no affair no affair is worth losing everything for no affair is no relationship with somebody else is ever ever, ever worth losing everything for I'll give you one story and then I'll move on and actually teach the Bible I'm trying to illustrate something here I was a young man probably in my 30's or so I had a dream that was so real in my dream I had committed adultery and in my dream I had to tell my wife and in my dream I remember telling Marie I have been unfaithful and I watched her eyes and I saw the tears and the pain and this woman who came to faith in Christ because of me through me through my ministry I watched her in my dream it was so real the tears that began to pour down and then I had to go and speak to my children and I said to my children in my dream your daddy has been unfaithful to your mother and I watched my children's eyes that they were filled with tears and they lost that respect and honor that they used to have for me, I saw it then I had to speak to my friends in my dream my friends and I told my friends I have failed the Lord and then I spoke to my church and I stood up and I spoke to the church and as I said to the church I saw that not only did I affect David Rosales and his walk with God but I affected Marie Rosales I affected four children I affected friends I affected a church I affected a radio ministry that goes out on 40 different stations throughout this nation I affected thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands of people and that put the fear of God in me in a way that was fresh that has remained all of these years nothing is worth violating your relationship with Jesus Christ for nothing, there's nothing out there that is more valuable than your walk with God and the influence that you have on other people for him that is so important to me and that came not because of seminary that came because of the word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit and the desire to be honorable to him and so as they were looking at this man he knew Scripture as a matter of fact he quotes two Psalms of David the Psalms that he quotes are Psalm 69 verse 25 as well Psalm 109 verse 8 and it gives to us some insight and I'll give you one little thing here I want you to see in verse 16 how it says this Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke before by the mouth of David that speaks of inspiration the inspiration of Scripture 2 Peter 121 prophecy never had its origin in the will of man men spoke from God the Holy Spirit so that speaks of the inspiration of Scripture as well as the person of the Spirit because notice with me the person of the Spirit the Holy Spirit spoke now it goes on it had to be fulfilled verse 16 which the Holy Spirit spoke before though Judas was the deceitful guide yet God's word was fulfilled his choice to betray Jesus fulfilled God's word concerning the death of Messiah now sometimes people think of Judas and they say my goodness I feel sorry for him we need to remember that he had incredible opportunities according to verse 17 he was numbered with the apostles he obtained a part of the ministry Judas was outwardly a follower of Jesus Christ but inwardly he never committed himself to the Lord he was somebody that was so well trusted that he was put in charge of the ministry funds as a matter of fact when the Lord Jesus Christ was anointed and he said this was wasted why was this costly perfume wasted we could have sold it for a great sum of money 300 denarii we could have given to the poor he didn't say that because he cared for the poor but John tells us he said that he was a thief and as keeper of the money bag he used to help himself to what was put in it so Judas is a clear picture of a person who has had opportunity but hardens his heart he's an example of what Jesus warned about on the Sermon and the Mount remember in Matthew 7 verses 22 and 23 where Jesus said many will say to me on that day Lord Lord did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons then I will tell them plainly I never knew you away from me you evildoers Judas is one of those I never knew you he had the greatest opportunity to know Jesus but he never truly did think of all his opportunities he traveled with Jesus slept near Jesus ate meals with Jesus he saw miracles even performed them himself the kingdom it has been said was within arms length and still he refused to enter in he had great opportunities but no hunger for the kingdom and instead he betrayed the Lord eternal life was there for him but he chose the things of the world and he chose spiritual death he was one of the 12 but Jesus made it clear he was never truly saved in John 17 12 while I was with them I protected them by the name you gave me none has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so the scripture would be fulfilled now what's it say in verse 18 this man purchased a field with the wages of iniquity the 30 pieces of silver that he sold Jesus for were used to purchase a potter's field now the apparent contradiction and I'm going to give to you something here there's an apparent contradiction sometimes people who read the Bibles may say that because the Bible tells us that he went out and he hanged himself but when you see in verse 18 this man purchased a field with the wages of iniquity and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out and it became known to all those dwelling in Jerusalem so field is called in their own language akaldama the field of blood it's written in the book of psalms let his habitation be desolate let no one live in it and so there are those who say well this seems like a contradiction because on the one hand it says Judas went out and hanged himself but on the other hand it says that he fell into a field and the answer to that is actually very simple he went out and he hanged himself the tree that he hanged himself on would have been over the ravine he was hanging there the rope eventually snaps he falls down he's rotted he hits the ground and his entrails burst out that simple I wouldn't want to be the one who found his body but that's what happened and so we'll close with a couple of thoughts from verses 21 through 26 concluding when it says of these men who have accompanied us they need to choose someone to take his place once more appealing to scripture they decide his office is to be taken by another man now there are requirements they should have participated in Jesus's earthly ministry from John's baptism and they were to be eyewitnesses of the resurrection another earmark by the way of an apostle is that they authored scripture by the inspiration of the spirit the question has been asked are there modern-day apostles there are those today and you can see them sometimes on TV they call themselves by the name of apostle are they apostles not in the biblical sense they may use that title for whatever reason they may have but in the biblical sense it says it very clearly they should be participating in Jesus's earthly ministry they had done so from the baptism of John witnesses of the resurrection they also are those who wrote the scripture so these men calling themselves apostles are not biblical apostles at all for whatever reason they have chosen to use that title for themselves and so it says finally in verse 26 they cast their lots the lot fell on Matthias now the casting of lots was common in the Old Testament to determine the will of God the lot is cast into the lap but it's every decision from the Lord Proverbs 1818 casting the lot settles disputes and keeps strong opponents apart so they would have a form of what is called casting lots to make a determination and whatever the lot fell on is the person that they feel was being pointed out and the lot fell on Matthias the interesting thing and I'll close with a couple thoughts Matthias is mentioned here and you don't see him anymore it's interesting you don't see him anymore so there's a theological debate concerning Matthias did they in using Old Testament procedures remember the Holy Spirit had yet to fall on them and Pentecost hasn't occurred they use Old Testament procedures and actually go around the will of God rather than determining the will of God and that's the argument that theologians have I'm not here prepared to give to you the answer for that but I will say this Paul has been called the 13th apostle but there are those who say that it's very possible that Matthias was not the one who should have been selected whether that's true or not I don't know all I know is that the lot fell on Matthias he fulfilled the number 12 which is the number of government and we conclude the chapter where it simply says he was numbered with the 11 apostles so he became the 12th with Paul later on we'll see him becoming the 13th


Hey everyone, it's a pleasure to be here live in Austin. It's just been amazing to have 23,000 people attending KubeCon this time around. This is truly one of my favorite activities for the conference towards the tail end of this. Let me go share my screen really quick so we can get started with the awards. All righty. So I am absolutely stoked to present these every year. It's been truly an honor to serve this community for the last five years, really, since day zero. As I was talking to everyone through Slack, Twitter, and all these different communication mediums, it really kind of dawned on me that community is truly a precious thing. I saw this tweet from Leia that jokingly, a most valuable foundation project is our community. And I somewhat agree there's so many folks that do an amazing job ensuring that our community is welcome, well above and beyond normal day-to-day responsibilities. So I'm just totally share this sentiment and thank everyone that goes above and beyond in making sure this is a welcome place given especially how much we have grown over the years to encompass different projects, different domains, different countries, and everything. So to kind of kick things off, our first award to hand out is our top ambassador award. Our ambassadors are folks who represent the community in public through giving talks, organizing events, and so on. If you see the previous list of award winners here, we truly have an amazing set of folks from Kelsey being the OG ambassador to Lucas. I think it was maybe like 17 at the time when he won that award to Sarah, Michael, and Lackey, all these fantastic people. For this time around, I'm excited that the top ambassador for 2020 is an amazing person. They have been promoting the, let's call it the art of improving cloud-native security across our ecosystem throughout the last couple of years. So I would like to congratulate Ian Coldwater on winning this award this year. So hopefully we could go pop out and see her really quickly. And she could wave. Hey, Ian. Oh, no. All right, we had a bug. Joy. We will move on. Wonderful Intrado giving us wonderful issues today. So let's keep on rolling with our awards. Thank you, Ian. They have been an amazing ambassador for us all. So let's do it again. Now we're back. All right, thank you, Ian. All right, our next set of awards are dedicated to top committers and maintainers. These are folks who have put forth and done an amazing job in the community in terms of supporting projects that are involved. And we just have a fantastic set of folks that span Kubernetes, Prometheus, and a variety of projects this year. The maintainers, existing maintainers, have nominated a set of folks and decided to award this special honor to Ben Elder from the Kubernetes community. I'm not sure if many of you know Ben is one of the primary authors kind tool that I love and use quite often and is just one of the most helpful people in the community answering a variety of questions. So let's see if we could pop Ben onto our screen. All right, hey, Ben. All right, now we're good. Technical glitches are over. Good to see puppy in head. So thank you, Ben, and thank you for all your contributions. All right, we're gonna get back to our awards. Share, perfect. Awesome, we're back. Thank you, Ben. Our final set of awards, which I think kind of our most important set of awards truly represent one of our values, the most important values in the Kubernetes community. And this is around chopping wood and carrying water. For those of you who are not familiar with the phrase, these are essentially all the things that happen behind the scenes from things like improving, build times, performance, generally not kind of feature-facing work, truly stuff that kind of keeps everything functional. And we just had an amazing set of folks that have contributed over time in this. And this year, I am happy to announce our next slate of folks that have been nominated and voted upon by both the CNCF staff and our wonderful TOC. So for 2020, we have Aaron Boyd, Josh Berkes, Bridget, Matt and Richie, all fantastic human beings, and we'll be sharing them on screen, hopefully with their wonderful chopped wood buckets. And it's good to see every, I love it, Richie's the best. Yeah. So thank you everyone for all your work. And I look forward to when we'll be able to see each other again, face to face, because truly all of you deserve to be on stage with over 20,000 people watching all. So to kind of wrap things up, I look forward to seeing everyone at the next KubeCon. And thank you for everyone who has participated in our communities. We do these awards every year and truly do our best to make sure that folks that are welcome and do amazing things are recognized for their amazing work. So thank you all. And I look forward to seeing everyone next year. I'm gonna go hand it back to Constance and Stephen to take us to the end.


Hi everybody Looks like we have a presentation So I know the person that was in here earlier said hey the next talk is not till 7 or 5 45, so but I'm next so I'm Kim Baderman I just joined Google Cloud in May If you were at the Santa Clara Summit I was your emcee, so I apologize for whatever I said I'm not gonna give you a vendor pitch This is a gold-sponsored lightning talk for vendors that are in the gold sponsorship level of Cloud Foundry Foundation And I think we talk about Tech of Time, but we don't talk about who when you're trying to Do transformation all these buzzwords you hear all the time digital transformation it matters who's on your team, right? So we are talking about how we're gonna scale this giant mountain. What tools we're gonna use Are we gonna use Kubernetes or we're gonna use something else? I Will tell you this everyone in Silicon Valley thinks they know it all Right, but that's reality Well constantly arguing about what level of abstraction that our customer should be focused on Containers platform serverless functions you name it when really Our customers are just trying and we're running towards the future. Sorry. I forgot about that side When our customers are just trying to get to the cloud a lot of us have been in the cloud space for many years Even when people are not calling They're calling it cloud, but it really wasn't cloud. It was data center virtualization and all these different things. So I Think we should stop arguing about that and let customers pick where they want to go On to how they want to get on the cloud, right? So that's just my opinion. I see this every day I'll work with our biggest customers for Google Cloud platform You know we try to go in and have two ears in one mouth for a reason that's a my grandmother always says And really listen to what their problems are and it really does matter what they're trying to accomplish and who is on their team matters even more We go in and we tell them, you know, this is how we implement Hey, tell us how you do things and so we talk about SRE we talk about CRE, which is a new program It's customer reliability engineering not every application and not every product inside of Google actually has dedicated Sorry, which is a really aha moment that you think I will I just assume sorry They're everywhere inside of Google But that's not true. Just like CRE program is not going to be a perfect fit for every application or every customer We would love for them to use CRE obviously. We think it's a really great way to go But you know they may not be there yet So we try to show them a little bit of how we do things But we fully don't expect everyone to be at Google scale, which I think a lot of people assume that that's how we go in But not really We tell data. We have data because you can't make decisions without data, right? We tell stories because that inspires Emission inspires action inspires Really a community and kind of a revolution happening for lack of a better, you know term Customers really want to hear how other companies got there, right? So we talk about the who and I'm not talking about you need for developers You need this many people over here. No we talk about the mindset of what it's going to take to get where you're going and so for me like Building teams for years and years and consulting and then engineering teams and then eventually advocate teams It's my job to block and tackle and make sure that my team I can keep them as effective and doing the things that give them energy as much as possible That means removing barriers. That means having more meetings in that way. They don't have to have meetings Making sure the collaboration is there and they're getting the data and all the resources tools that they need That they can move faster and they can work the way they'd like to work That's a really key thing knowing what gives you energy and what drains you it's a huge thing and if you've never done that exercise like I encourage you out to go back and and do a little bit of Googling and Kind of try to figure that out for yourself and then make sure that whatever is draining you now on your job You don't make that mistake in the next job that you get promoted to or get recruited away to And that way you find what your strengths are for real So it really comes down to a growth versus fixed mindset and everyone thinks that either you have a growth mindset You have a fixed mindset. You can't change but that's not true a lot of us If you look at the list of different components of various sides We'll have a little bit of this a little bit of that but really as a leader It's up to you to inspire a growth mindset inside of your company and it's really Getting there is not easy This is typically not typically what we see but this is you know, maybe you know older mindsets, right? This is more of a fixed mindset of which challenges ignores criticism Threatened by others gives up, you know sees efforts as fruitless and that is not a component of a bad or a toxic employee That is a component of a toxic culture Because as we know command and control does not work. It is 2017 So if you see people in your team or your groups try to find out why they feel that way because I can guarantee you They're not a bad person. They just don't feel like they have the power to get done what they need to get done This is what should be happening instead and this is what you inspire as a leader Embracing challenges all the things that should be common sense and the I don't know about you But this is the kind of culture I work in now Thank goodness, and I had to always want to work in I'm inspired by everything my colleagues do at Google and I'm learning new things every day as we should So that's why tech is a perfect place for a lot of us that do tend to have that growth mindset, but we're just you know You know don't want to I don't know but you get stuck in those jobs, right? Where you're not necessarily growing as fast as you want to and the opportunities aren't always there So once you get to that point and you're testing out maybe you're trying kubernetes You're trying cloud Foundry inside of your company and you're having some success. You're gonna fail and that's okay take failure and switch it to lead to learning and Just changing your mindset about how you see things Can help you and his personal level go faster and especially as a team When you start having success other teams inside of your company are gonna start noticing and they're gonna ask you to do a Luncheon or they're gonna ask you, you know in the water cooler by the beer cooler or whatever you do for your engineers How did you do that? That's amazing. Can you teach us how to do that or can we come sit with you? Can we pair or whatever it is that your culture is about and so it starts? It starts scaling on its own. It's very organic. We've got customers that we've seen that happen to you And this is just a little plug for the communities that I'm involved in and Where I'm seeing our bigger customers at the tools that they're using primarily to make that transformation Which is open source and then if you want to know more about our open source, that's the link. So thanks


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios with a CUBE Conversation, talking about data. And we're excited to have our next guest. He's been on a number of times, many times CUBE alum, really at the forefront of helping companies and customers be more data-centric in their activities. So we'd like to welcome on to the show Satyan Sangani, he is the co-founder and CEO of Elation. Satyan, great to see you. Great to see you, Jeff. It's good to see you again in this new world, a new format. It is a new world, a new format. And what's crazy is, you know, in March and April, we were talking about this light switch moment and now we've just turned the calendar to October and it seems like we're going to be doing this thing for a little bit longer. So, you know, it is kind of the new normal. And even I think when it's over, I don't think everything's going to go back to the way it was. So, so here we are. But you guys have some exciting news to announce. Let's just jump to the news and then we'll get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty. So what do you got coming out today, right? What we are announcing today is basically Elation 2020, which is probably one of the biggest releases that I've been with, that we've had since I've been with the company. We, with it, are releasing three things. So in some sense, there's a lot of simplicity to the release. The first thing that we're releasing is a new experience around what we call the business user experience, which will bring in a whole new set of users into the catalog. The second thing that we're announcing is basically around Elation analytics. And the third is around what we would describe as a cloud native architecture.  And you guys have a really simple mission, right?  You know, data-centric, use data more often, you know, and to help people actually make that decision. And you had an interesting quote in another interview you talked about trying to be the yelp for information, which is such a nice kind of humanizing way to think about it, because data isn't necessarily that way. And I think, you know, you mentioned before we turn on the cameras that for a lot of people, maybe it's just easier to ignore the data if I can just get the decision through on gut and intuition and get on to my next decision. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, we live in a time where people talk a lot about fake news and alternative facts. And our vision is to empower a curious and rational world.  Like, how do you get people to be curious and how do you get people to think rationally? But, you know, to us, it's about one, making the data really accessible, just allowing people to find the data they need when and as they want it. And the second is for people to be able to think scientifically, you know, teaching people to take the facts at their disposal and interpret them correctly. And, you know, we think that if those two skills existed, just the ability to find information and interpret it correctly, people could make a lot better decisions. And so the yelp analogy is a perfect one because if you think about it, yelp did that for local businesses just like Amazon did it for really complicated products on the web. And what we're trying to do at Elation is in some sense, very simple, which is to just take information and make it super usable for people who want to use it. Great. But I'm sure there's the critics out there, right? Who say, yeah, we've heard this, you know, before the promise of BI has been around forever. And I think a lot of people's thinking it just didn't work, whether the data was too hard to get access to, whether it was too hard to manipulate, whether it was too hard to pull insights out, whether it's just too much scrubbing and manipulating. So, you know, what is some of the secret sauce to take what is a very complex world? And again, and you got some very large customers with some giant data sets and to, I don't want to say humanize it, but kind of humanize it and make it easier and more accessible for that business analyst, not just generally, but more specifically when I need it to make a decision.  I mean, you know, you look at something from the outside and it looks really, really, really simple, but then you kind of dwell into any problem and that can be CRM, you know, something like Salesforce or it can be something like ServiceNow with, you know, ITSM, but these are all really, really complicated spaces and getting into the depths and the detail of it is really hard. And data is really no different, right? Data is just the sort of exhaust from all of those different systems that exist inside of your company. So the detail around the data in your company is exhaustingly, you know, minute. And so, you know, how do you make something like that simple? You know, I think really the biggest challenge there is progressively revealing complexity, right? Giving people the right amount of information at the right amount of time. So one of the really clever things that we do in this business user experience is we allow people to search for and receive the information that's most relevant to them. And we determined that relevance based upon the other people in the enterprise that happen to be using that data. And we know what other people are using in that company because we look at the logs to understand which data sources are used most often and which reports are used most often. So right off the bat, when you get something, you just see the name of a report and it could be around the revenues of a certain product line. But the first thing that you see is who else uses it? And that's something that people can identify with. You may not necessarily know what the algorithm was or what the formula might be or how the business glossary term relates to some data model or data artifact, but you know the person. And if you know the person, then you can trust the information. And so, you know, a lot of what we do is spend time on design to think about what is it that a person expects to see and how do they verify what's true? And that's what helps us really understand what to serve up to somebody so that they can navigate this really complicated world of data. That's awesome. Because it's really a signal-to-noise problem, right? And I think I've heard you speak before and of course this is not new information, right? There's just so much data, right? The increasing proliferation of data and it's not that there's that much more data. We're just capturing a lot more of it. So your signal-to-noise problem just gets worse and worse and worse. And so what you're talking about is really kind of helping filter that down to get through a lot of that noise so that you can find the piece of information within the giant haystack that is what you're looking for at this particular time in this particular moment. Yeah. And it's a really tough problem. I mean, one of the things that, you know, it's true that we've been talking about this problem for such a long time. And, you know, in some sense, if we're lucky, we're going to be talking about it for a lot longer. Because, you know, it used to be that the problem was, you know, back when, you know, I was growing up, you know, you were doing research on the topic and you'd go to the card catalog and you'd go to the Dewey Decimal System and in your, you know, elementary school or high school library, you might be lucky if you were to find one, two, or three books that map to the topic that you were looking for. Now you go to Google and you find 10,000 books. Now you go inside of an enterprise and you find 4,000 relational database tables and 200 reports about an artifact that you happen to be looking for. And so really the problem is, what do I trust? And what's correct? And, you know, getting to that level of, you know, accuracy around information, if there's so much information out there is really the big problem of our time. And I think, you know, for me, it's a real privilege to be able to work on it because I think if we can teach people to use information better and better, then they can make better, better decisions and, you know, that can help the world in so many different ways. Right, right. My other favorite example that everybody knows is photographs, right? Back when you only got 24 in a roll and it cost you six bucks to develop it, you know, those were pretty special.  It's a real problem. If you've ever faced something like that, there's kind of a splash of water in the face, like where do I even begin? But the other piece that you talk about a lot, which is slightly different, but related is context.  But if you don't have any context for that number, is it a temperature, is it cold inside the building, is it a speed, is it too slow on I-5, or is it fast because I'm on a bicycle going down a hill? And without context, data is just a number, it doesn't mean anything. So you guys really by adding this metadata around the data are adding a lot more contextual information to help figure out kind of what that signal is from the noise. Yeah, you'll get facts from anywhere, right? Like, you know, you can have the Hitchcock, you can have 55 or 42 and you can figure out like what the meaning of the universe is and apparently the answer is 42 and what does that mean, you know, might mean a million different things. And that, to me, that context is the difference between, you know, suspecting and knowing, and it's the difference between having confidence and basically guessing.  Right, well, I do know why 42 is always the answer because that's Ronnie Law and that's always the answer. So that one I know, that's an easy one. But it is really interesting. And then you guys just came out, I had Aaron Calbonne, one of your co-founders, the other day and we talked about this new report that you guys have sponsored, the data culture report and really, you know, putting some granularity on a data culture index. And I thought it's pretty interesting and I'm psyched that you guys are going to be doing this longitudinally because whether you do or do not necessarily agree with the method, it does give you a number, it does give you a score, it's a relatively simple formula. And at least you can compare yourself over time to see how you're tracking. I wonder if you could share, I mean, the thing that jumps out right off the top of that report is something we were talking about before we turn the cameras on that, you know, people's perception of where they are on this path doesn't necessarily map out when you go bottoms up and add the score versus top down when I'm just making an assessment. Yeah, it's funny, it's kind of the equivalent of everybody thinks they're an above average driver or you know, everybody thinks they're above average in terms of obviously intelligence. And you know, obviously that mathematically is not possible or true, but I think in the world of data management, you know, we all talk about data, we all talk about how important it is to use data and if you're a data management professional, you want people in your company to use more data, but ironically the discipline of data management doesn't actually use a lot of data itself. It tends to be a very, you know, slow, methodical, process driven, gut oriented process to develop things like what data models exist and how do I use my infrastructure and you know, where do I put my data and which data quality is best? Like, you know, all of those things tend to be, you know, somewhat heuristic driven or gut driven and they don't have to be. And a big part of our release actually is around this product called Elation Analytics. And what we do with that product is really quite interesting. We start measuring elements of how your organization uses data by team, by data source, by use case, and we give you transparency into what's going on with the data inside of your landscape and ecosystem. So you can start to actually score yourself both, you know, internally, but also, you know, as we reveal in our customer success methodology against other customers to understand what it is that you're doing well and what it is that you're doing badly. And so, you know, you don't need necessarily to have a gust instinct anymore. You can look at the data of yourselves and others to figure out where you need to improve. And so that's a pretty exciting thing. And I think this notion that says, look, you know, you think you're good, but are you really good? I mean, you know, that's fundamental to improvement in business process and improvement in data management and improvement in data culture fundamentally for every company that we work with. Right, right. And if you don't know there's a problem and if you're not measuring it, then there's no way to improve on it, right? Because you can't, you don't know what you're measuring against. But I'm curious of the three buckets that you guys measured. So you measured data search and discovery was bucket number one, data literacy, you know, what do you do once you find it and then data governance in terms of managing. It feels like that the search and discovery, which is, it sounds like what you're primarily focused on is the biggest gap because you can't get to those other two buckets unless you can find and understand what you're looking for. So that, is that, is that jive or is that really the problem, is it more of the manipulation of the data once you get it? Yeah, I mean we focus really, we focus on all three. And I think, you know, certainly it's the case that it's a virtuous cycle. So if you think about kind of search and discovery of data, if you have very little context, then it's really hard to guide people to the right bit of information. But if I know, for example, that a certain data is used by a certain team and then a new member of that team comes on board, then I can go ahead and serve them with exactly that bit of data because I know that the human relationships are quite tight in the context graph on the back end. And so that comes from basically building more context over time. Now that context can come from a stewardship process, you know, implemented by a data governance framework. It can come from, you know, building better data literacy through having more analytics, but however that context is built and revealed, you know, there tends to be a virtuous cycle, which is you get more people searching for data. Then once they've searched for the data, you know how to necessarily build up the right context. And that's definitely done through data governance and data stewardship. And then once that happens, you're building literacy in the organization. So people then know what data to search for. So that tends to be a cycle. Now, often people don't recognize that cycle. And so they focus on one thing, thinking that you can do one to the exclusion of the others, but of course that's not the case. You have to do all three. Right, and I would presume you're using some good machine, machine learning and artificial intelligence in that process to continue to improve it over time as you get more data, the metadata around the data in terms of the usage. And I think again, I saw in another interview you did talking about, you know, where should people invest? What is the good data?  What's the stuff we shouldn't use because nobody ever uses it? Or what's the stuff maybe we need to look and decide whether we want to keep it or not versus, you know, the stuff that's guiding a lot of decisions with Bob, Mary and Joe, that seems to be a good investment. So, you know, it's a great application of applied AI and machine learning to a very specific process to again, get you in this virtual cycle, that sounds awesome. Yeah, no, it is. And it's really helpful to, I mean, it's really helpful to think about this. I mean, one of the big problems with data is that it's so abstract, but it's really helpful to think about it in just terms of use cases. Like if I'm using a customer data set and I want to join that with a transaction data set, just knowing which other transaction data sets people joined with that customer data set can be super helpful if I'm an analyst coming in to try to answer a question or ask a question. And so context can come in different ways, you know, just in the same way that Amazon does people who bought this product also bought this product, you can have all of the same analogies exist. People who use this product also use that product. And so being able to generate all that intelligence from the backend to serve up a simple seeming experience on the front end is the fun part of the problem.   I mean, what is kind of the, oh my goodness, when they see this thing suddenly delivering results that they've never had at their fingertips before? Yeah, you know, it's so funny because you can show Alation as a demo and you can show it to people with data sets that are fake. And so we have this like medical provider data set that you know, we've got in there and we've got a whole bunch of other data sets that are in there and people look at it and you know, interestingly enough, a lot of the time they're like, oh yeah, I can kind of see it work and I can kind of like understand that. And then you turn it on against their own data. The data they've been using every single day and literally their faces change. They look at the data and they say, oh my God, like this is a data set that Steven uses. I didn't even know that Steven thought that this data existed. And oh my God, like people are using this data in this particular way. They shouldn't be using that data at all. Like I thought I deprecated that data set two years ago. And so people, you know, have all of these interesting insights and it's interesting how much more real it gets when you turn it on against the company systems themselves. And so that's been a really fun thing that I just seen over and over again over the course of multiple years where people just turn on the product and all of a sudden it just changes their view of how they've been doing it all along. And that's been really fun and exciting. Great, yeah, because it means something to them, right? It's not numbers on a page. It's actually, it's people, it's customers, it's relationships, it's a lot of things. That's a great story. And I'm curious too, in that process, is it more often that they just didn't know that there were these other buckets of reports and other buckets of data, or was it more that they just didn't have access to it or if they did, they didn't really know how to manipulate it or to integrate it into their own workflow? Yeah, it's kind of funny and it's somewhat role dependent, but it's kind of all of the above. So if you think about it, if you're a data management professional, often you kind of know what data sources might exist in the enterprise, but you don't necessarily know how people are using the data. And so you look at the data and you're like, oh my God, I can't believe this team is using this data for this particular purpose. They shouldn't be doing that. They should be using this other data set. I deprecated that data set like two years ago.  And so now I can use that data and I can process that for building some new machine learning algorithms. In one case, we found a customer where they had the same data set procured five different times. So it was a data set that caused multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were spending $2 million overall on a data set where they could have been spending literally one fifth of that amount. And then you had sort of another case, finally, where you're basically just looking at it and saying, hey, I remember that data set. I knew I have that data set, but I just don't remember exactly where it was. Where did I put that report? And so it's exactly the same way that you would use Google. Sometimes you use it for knowledge discovery, but sometimes you also use it for just remembering the thing you forgot. But the thing, like I remember when people were trying to put Google search in at companies just to find records, not necessarily to support data efforts. And the knock was always, you didn't have enough traffic to drive the algorithm to really have effective search, say across a large enterprise that has a lot of records, but not necessarily a lot of activity. So that's a similar type of problem that you must have. So is it really extracting that extra context of other people's usage that helps you get around kind of that? You just don't have a big numbers. Yeah. I mean, that kind of is fundamentally the special sauce. I mean, I think a lot of data management has been this sort of manual brute force effort where I get a whole bunch of consultants or a whole bunch of people in the room and we do this big documentation session and all of a sudden we hope that we've kind of painted the Golden Gate bridges at work, but knowing that three to six months later, you're going to have to go back and repaint the Golden Gate Bridge all over again, if not immediately, depending on the size and scale of your company. The one thing that Google did to sort of crawl the web was to really understand, oh, if a certain webpage was linked to super often, then that webpage is probably a really useful webpage. And when we crawl the logs, we basically do the exact same thing. And that's really informed getting a really, really specific day one view of your data without having to have a whole bunch of manual effort. And that's been really just magical. I mean, it's been, it's allowed people to really see their data very quickly in new different ways. And I think a big part of this is just friction reduction, right? We'd all love to have an organized data world. We'd love to organize all the information in a company, but for anybody who has an email inbox, organizing your own inbox, let alone organizing every database in your company just seems like a sysophysian effort. And so being able to focus people on what's the most important thing has been the most important thing. And that's kind of why we've been so successful. I love it. And I love just kind of the human factors kind of overlay that you've done to add the metadata with the knowledge of who is accessing these things and how are they accessing it? And the other thing I think is so important Satya, and as we talk about innovation all the time, everybody wants more innovation and they've got DevOps so they can get software out faster, et cetera, et cetera. But I fundamentally believe in my heart of heart that it's much more foundational than that. That if you just give more people access to more information and then the ability to manipulate and glean knowledge out of that information and then actually take action and have the power and the authority to take action and you have that across everyone in the company or an increasing number of people in the company, now suddenly you're leveraging all those brains. You're leveraging all that insight, you're leveraging all that kind of first line experience to drive kind of a DevOps type of innovation with each individual person as opposed to kind of classic waterfall with the Chief Innovation Officer doing PowerPoints in his office on his own time and then coming down from the mountain and handing it out to everybody to go build. So it's a really kind of paradox that by adding more human factors to the data, you're actually making it so much more usable and so much more accessible and ultimately more valuable. Yeah, it's funny. There's this new term of art called data intelligence. And it's interesting because there's lots of people who are trying to define it and there's this idea and I think IDC has got a definition and you can go look it up. But if you think about the core word of intelligence, it basically devolves down to the ability to acquire information or skills, right? And so if you then apply that to companies and data, data intelligence then stands to reason it's sort of the ability for an organization to acquire information or skills leveraging their data. And that's not just for the company but it's for every individual inside of that company. And we talk a lot about how much change is going on in the world with COVID and with wildfires here in California. And then obviously with the elections and then with new regulations and with preferences because now that COVID's happened, everybody's at home. So what products and what services do you have to deliver to them? And all of this change is basically what every company has to keep up with is truth is to survive.  And so then you're sitting there going, oh my God, how do I deal with all of this? And it used to be the case that you could just build a company off of being really good at one thing. Like you could just be the best like logistics delivery company. But that was great yesterday when you were delivering to restaurants but since there are no restaurants in business, you just had to change your entire business model and be really good at delivering to homes. And how do you go do that? Well, the only way to really go do that is to be really, really intelligent throughout your entire company. And that's a function of data. That's a function of your ability to adapt to a world around you. And that's not just some CEO because literally by the time it gets the CEO it's probably too late. Innovation's got to be occurring on the ground floor and people got to repackage things really quickly. I love it, I love it. And I love the other human factor that we talked about earlier is just people are curious, right? So if you can make it easy for them to fulfill their curiosity, they're going to naturally seek out the information and use it versus if you make it painful like a no-fund lesson, then people's eyes roll and they don't pay attention. So I think that it's such an insightful way to address the problem and really the opportunity. And the other piece I think that's so different when you're going down the card catalog analogy earlier, is there was a day when all the information was in that library. And if you went to the UCLA psych library, every single reference that you could ever find is in that library. I know I've been there, it was awesome. But that's not the way anymore, right? You can't have all the information and it's pulling your own information along with public information and as much information as you can where you start to build that competitive advantage. So I think it's a really great way to kind of frame this thing where information in and of itself is really not that valuable. It's about the context, the usability, the speed of the usability and that democratization is where you really start to get these force multipliers and using data as opposed to just talking about data. Yeah, and I think that that's the big insight, right? Like if you're a CEO and you're kind of looking at your chief data officer or chief data and analytics officer, the real question that you're trying to ask yourself is, how often do my people use data? How measurable is it? Like how much do people, what is the level at which people are making decisions, leveraging data? And that's something that you can talk about in a board room and you can talk about in a management meeting, but that's not where the question gets answered. The question gets really answered in the actual behaviors of individuals and the only way to answer that question if you're a chief data analytics officer or somebody who's responsible for data usage within the company is by measuring it and managing it and training it and making sure it's a part of every process and every decision by building a habit and building those habits are just super hard. And that's I think the thing that we've chosen to be sort of the best in the world at. And it's really hard. I mean, we're still learning about how to do it, but from our customers and taking that knowledge and kind of learning about it over time. Right, well, that's fantastic. And if it wasn't hard, it wouldn't be valuable. So those are always the best problems to solve. So Satya, really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations to you and the team on the new release. I'm sure there's lots of sweat, blood and tears that went into that effort. So congrats on getting that out and really great to catch up. Look forward to our next catch up. You too, Jeff, it's been great to talk. Thank you so much. All right, take care. All right, he's Satya and I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.