I'm going to introduce from Google, Aperna Sinha, who is the project lead for Kubernetes. We're really lucky to have her here today. She's going to give a version of what's going to be the keynote at KubeCon now, and a short synopsis of that for you and a couple of demos. So we're going to go right into it. And thank you, and take it away. Thank you, Diane. I feel very fortunate. I've got slides, I think, or head slides. There we go. All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm Aperna Sinha. I'm a product manager at Google for the Kubernetes project. And today, I want to, first of all, welcome all of you, and I am really delighted to talk here a little bit about Google and Red Hat's contributions, as well as hopefully demo two of the new features that are in this release. I was hoping to do a live demo, but we will probably have to look at a recorded version. So I think with this audience, I don't really have to introduce Kubernetes. I think you all know that this is a project that started from the Borg heritage of Google. But really, even though it is based on years of experience at Google, running applications and distributed systems, the goal of this project is not about Google. The goal of this project is to create a platform for the rest of the world to be able to run applications on distributed systems at high efficiency and high utilization. And this platform goal is not something that Google can achieve by itself. And that's one of the primary reasons why, from the start, Kubernetes was started as an open source project on GitHub and then donated to the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. There is a community that we have worked hard to develop and foster around this project that works on and basically shares this goal with us, which is to create this common platform. And this chart shows the evolution of that community. So you can see, whereas in the beginning, Google and Red Hat were, in fact, quite prominent in terms of the contributions and the commits that were made to the project, over time the number of independent contributors that aren't necessarily associated with any company has grown, as well as the number of companies that are part of the community has grown. And this diversity of companies and individuals is extremely important to that platform goal. If you're trying to have a project that is the platform for the rest of the world, then you need the diversity of the different environments that other users work in. And throughout all of this, Google and Red Hat have both learned from the community but also continue to play a formative role in the Kubernetes project. A few of the statistics that point towards or indicate that we are actually achieving some level of success towards that platform goal. First of all, you can see there's a lot of user and customer interest in Kubernetes. And also, there's a lot of interest from contributors. You can sort of see here on Google Trends over the last two years a huge increase in the Kubernetes interest but also 30 plus commercial distributions of Kubernetes to date. These are essentially companies that have taken Kubernetes and adapted it to different environments. And that ranges everywhere from bare metal to VMware. I think we have Wendy from VMware here in the audience. We have Quintin from Huawei. So it ranges everywhere from bare metal to VMware to of course public and private clouds and ranges from China with Huawei to IBM. With this variety, I think Kubernetes has a shot at achieving that goal. I'd just like to give you a flavor of the contributions and the level of depth that Red Hat and OpenShift has had in shaping the Kubernetes project. So this slide shows a current snapshot of all the special interest groups in the project. This is always changing. We are adding and collapsing groups. But the next slide actually shows how many of these special interest groups are led by an engineer from Red Hat. Next slide, please. Each group has multiple leaders but as you can see a lot, this is I think about 40%, the ones that are red have a Red Hat engineer leading that group. Leading the group means that you are helping to shape this specific area. So you're helping to shape storage and scheduling and network and how those things work in Kubernetes. Hopefully to those of you in the audience that are OpenShift users, this gives you a lot of comfort. Your needs and your requirements have a tremendous hand in shaping the direction of the Kubernetes project. And really this is no different in the 1.6 release which is launching this week. Next slide, please. So the Kubernetes 1.6 release, the major theme of this release is multi-workload, multi-team, large clusters. There are many features in this release. Large clusters is of course one of the features. But I want to emphasize two particular standout features and that is role-based access control and storage classes also known as dynamic storage provisioning. These two features are important because they add critical functionality that I think changes the game of what you can do with containers in production. They're also important because Google and Red Hat have had a large hand in driving these two features to stability. So our back is all about fine-grained access control and it is moving to beta in this release. It moves us fundamentally from a single user to a multi-user cluster. It's a huge step forward for the product. Storage classes and the defaults that are associated with them support stateful containerized applications. And as you know, that is also a huge step forward because it expands the market for what containers can do. For many months previously, stateful applications were not considered appropriate to put into containers. And what dynamic storage provisioning does in terms of automating storage is really fundamental for stateful support. So those are the two that I'm going to hopefully demo today. And of course, cool new features are nice, but I think many of you here are users of OpenShift and many, hopefully, enterprise users as well. How many of you care about stability? Yeah, that's everybody. So 1.6 was a release where the entire community banded together and emphasized finishing features. Not launching new features, but finishing them, moving them from alpha to beta to stable. And over 20 features were graduated to either beta or stable. Next slide. Now I'm going to go into the features. So the first one is role-based access control, which is really, now that you have a large cluster or multiple large clusters, how do you schedule multiple teams into those clusters such that they don't interfere with each other? And they have the right set of permissions. Next slide. Yes. This change, one of our founders and lead TLs, Tim Hawken, characterizes the introduction of RBAC beta as it's like we went from DOS, which was single user, where everyone can see everything, to UNIX, where you see only your things and there's the principle of least privilege. So it's that type of big change for us. Next slide. This is what we look like before fine-grained RBAC. You have here a three-node or 5,000-node cluster. You have multiple pods, multiple workloads, in fact, that belong to different teams. But there isn't a good way, through the Kubernetes API, to set up authorization. And so authorization is, by default, at the cluster level. And all pods have the same authorization. It's kind of vanilla. It looks the same. We did have a mechanism called ABAC, but that is more based on a static local file, whereas RBAC is truly dynamic and is through the Kubernetes API. So next slide. With role-based access control, the picture looks something like this. You can isolate into namespaces. Here we are showing the workloads of the blue team in a blue namespace and the workloads of the green team in a green namespace. And what's more important is that on a per namespace, per resource basis, you can set which roles have what actions over what resources and what namespaces. This is actually very powerful. There are many, many use cases for this. Here's just a couple of examples. We have Alice, she is a user. Her role is user, and she can list, which is like view permissions, end services, services are type of resource, and end and HR are namespaces here. So she can view services in the end namespace but not in the HR namespace. You see the level of granularity. It's at the per resource, per namespace level for each role and each user. That's nice. And of course, with this level of granularity, there's a huge world of permutations that are enabled. So we see some other examples. Bob has more admin type rights, so he's not just viewing, he's creating. He can create pods in one namespace, not the other. The scheduler, the third example, is actually a system role. It's not a person, it's a system role, and this role can read pods but not another resource, which is secrets. So now, let's get into the demo. Hopefully, you can play the video, and I'm not sure if it's gonna be as large as I would have liked, but hopefully you can see something. So in order to do this demo, I have created a three node cluster in Google Container Engine in Google Cloud, and yes, can you see the screen? Okay, good. People in the back may be hard, but okay, so now this is proceeding. In order to show this demo, you actually need three users or you need more than one user, so I'm gonna pretend here to be multiple users. In this first tab, I am kind of the super cluster admin, and the other two tabs are actually, I'm going to be a green team and a blue team. The first thing that I'm doing here is as a super cluster admin, I'm going to create a service account for the blue team and fetch those credentials into a local file, and the same thing for the green team. Now I'm going to the blue team tab, and I'm going to configure cube cuddle to use the credentials that I just created for the blue team. This is all set up, so basically, I'm setting up the blue team in the blue tab, and then I'm gonna do the same thing for the green team. So the green team is also going to go ahead and get credentials, and actually, could you pause the demo for a second? I think we have moved ahead. So, yes, here. Let me create a namespace for the blue team. I've gone ahead and created as a cluster admin a namespace for the blue team. But if I go to the blue team at this point, I haven't given them access, which is why you saw the error where the blue team wasn't actually able to access the namespace. So, now I'm gonna give the blue team access to the namespace. This is actually showing you R back. So, one of the defining things in R back is this concept of cluster roles, and these are some of the default user roles, admin, edit, view. There's also system roles, which I'm not showing, I've hidden the system roles. Let's look at what the cluster role admin can do, and there are many things here. This is just looking at a subset of them, but they have a cluster role admin has granular permissions over resources, many resources and sub-resources, and these verbs create, delete, list, watch, these are some of the things that the admin can do. So, now that we know what this role is, what we want to do is to create a role binding. We want to create a role binding to the blue namespace for the blue developer, the blue service account. So, hopefully this will move forward. Yes, this is what a role binding looks like. So, this is a role binding, and what this role binding says is, for the blue namespace, I would like the user blue team developer, which is a service account for this example. I would like that user to have admin role for that namespace. So, that means everything you saw above the blue developer can do, create, delete, watch, et cetera, for the resources in the blue namespace only. Now, we're going to create this role binding object. It's been created. Let's go to the blue service account, the blue team, and see previously he wasn't able to access the namespace, now he is. Cubecuddle get pods for the blue namespace, and we don't get the error. Of course, there are no resources yet, so let's go ahead and create some resources in the blue namespace. We're going to create an nginx deployment. Nginx deployment, now let's see if that's been created, get pods, yes, it's running. So, the blue developer has access and has execution permissions in this namespace, okay? There are no services, but this is all working as intended. Let's now do the same thing for the green user. We're going to create a green namespace, and we are going to create a role binding for the green user, exactly as we did. Now, this is for the green namespace, the green team developer is going to have admin permissions, just like the blue one did, except only in the green namespace. Okay, so we'll go ahead and create the green binding. And let's see, I think, let's go and see if the green user, yes, and the green user is able to get pods, there's no pods, let's create an nginx deployment here. Actually, I think we're going to check that he can't have access to the blue namespace, that's right. So, you see that the green user has access to the green namespace, but not to the blue namespace, this is what we want, right? So, this is great, let's run this forward, and, of course, create an nginx deployment, see services, there's no services, so this is working as intended. The last thing that I want to show you is cross namespace permissions, so we're going to, now, let's say the green user wants to be able to monitor the blue namespace, all the resources in the blue namespace, but not to change them. Actually, going back to the blue namespace, I'm just showing that the blue user does not have any permissions in the green namespace, so cannot get pods, cannot get services, the blue user should not, we did not set that up, right? This is working. But we want to give the green user read access to the blue namespace, read not write. And so, I'm going to show how to do that, of course the blue user cannot do that, the green user cannot do that, only the admin, the super user here can do that because that person can see all the namespaces, so you can see as the admin, hopefully you can see this, admin can see the blue engine X and the green engine X deployment, as well as a bunch of system deployments that are on. Now, I'm going to create a role binding for the green user to have view permissions in the blue namespace, so here you see this role binding, namespace blue, I want view permissions for the green team developer to the blue namespace. And of course, there are many permutations you can do, this is just what we want to demo here, let's create this binding and we'll go back to the green namespace and we will show, let's see what we can do and yes. So now the green user can get deployments in the blue namespace, so you can, she or he can see those, let's try and delete this, let's try and delete something in the blue namespace. Okay, there we go, namespace blue delete deployments and as expected, don't have write permissions, cannot delete anything, so this is great, this is exactly what we wanted to show and that concludes the RBAC demo. If we can switch back to my slides, please. Thank you, I'm not sure if I'm running over time, please let me know, Diane. All right, great, so that is role-based access control, I think for enterprise deployments, where you want to have multiple teams, multiple workloads, this should prove very valuable. It is not yet on by default, it is available though as beta and in future releases it will go and be default. Next slide, so that was the demo, next slide. Okay, the other feature I said I would talk about is dynamic storage provisioning, which enables and is the backing for stateful workloads. Let's see, I think I will present a couple of slides and then move to the demo for this as well. Just quickly, I want to explain what is happening with dynamic storage provisioning. So in dynamic storage provisioning, the idea is actually even in non-dynamic and static storage provisioning, the idea is that there is a cluster admin who creates Kubernetes view of storage. So Kubernetes view of storage is through the persistent volume object, which says, okay, I have a storage of X type in Y cloud and so many gigs and this is what Kubernetes should do with it after my claim to this storage is gone, like either recycle it or keep it around. And then the user, we have kind of, we want to isolate the pod from the actual details of the storage so that the pod is not specific and is actually portable across deployments. And so we have created this concept of a persistent volume claim. The claim is a request, it's a request for resources that says I want X amount of storage of a particular type in case that storage class types are defined. And so the PVC, the persistent volume claim, when it gets created, it binds to any available persistent volume that meets its requests. It's a claim out there saying I need five gigs. If there's any volume out there that has five gigs that's available, I want to bind to that. And once that binding takes place, it's consistent, it stays there. A pod can associate with the claim but the pod is ephemeral. It goes away or it moves between nodes. The persistent volume claim stays bound to the volume and keeps the data for that pod in that volume so that when the pod comes back, it again associates with the claim and it has access to the same volume. This is extremely important for stateful applications. So that's the main mechanism. You can go through the next couple of slides. I just show here's a pod. The pod is associated with the claim and you can delete the pod and you can bring the pod back and everything is there as before. What dynamic storage provisioning does is the changes in the previous slide what we were looking at is the storage exists. It's out there. The claim comes along and it binds to whatever's available. This is wasteful because someone has to provision that storage in advance and the storage has to sit there. That's not what we want if we want efficiency. Dynamic storage enables the concept of abstract storage classes so the cluster admin can still say, yes, I have a storage class that is an SSD or a standard disk or whatever but it doesn't actually need to be provisioned until the pod and the pod claim, the persistent volume claim is created. So that's the essential gist of dynamic storage provisioning and if we have time we can do the demo. Okay, so this is the demo of dynamic storage provisioning. Let's look at, again, this is the three-node cluster in Google Cloud so you are seeing the local disk that is attached to each of the nodes. We haven't created any additional disks. First I'm going to show you the manual method so I'm gonna create a disk here. I'm asking Google Cloud to create a disk of size 10 gigabytes and it's a standard disk, I'm gonna call it manual disk one. Okay, now I see that this manual disk one has been created in US Central A with 10 gigabytes as requested. The old old old way, which is a bad practice, is to inline this storage in the pod manifests. So hopefully you can see the screen. Here's the pod manifest. I've said that the disk that I wanna attach and mount here is the GCE persistent disk. Its name is manual disk one, its file system is X4. This is very, very specific, right? This pod manifest cannot go anywhere and it can only use that disk. So this is bad. What we want the pod manifest to look like is actually very independent from the details of the storage. So here it's gonna call a persistent volume claim. It just has the name of the claim. It doesn't even say what the claim is. Doesn't say how much. Doesn't say what type of disk, nothing. And let's look at the claim. So this is now a very portable pod manifest. It can come and go from cloud to cloud. It can come and go from time to time. Hopefully I will show you the manifest for the PVC. Yes, so here's the PVC manifest and this manifest is also fairly generic. It just says that I want five gigs of storage and it does, it can declare a storage class. I'm gonna come back to explain storage classes. It's a concept in dynamic storage provisioning. But here we've given the empty string which means that I don't wanna use a storage class. I don't want any storage class. Just give me any five gigs that's available. That's what the claim is saying. Okay, I think we're gonna create this claim. Sorry, I should probably have recorded it faster. Oh, okay, yes. And I wanna show you the persistent volume itself. So I have to create the claim, right? But now I also need to create the volume because this is manual provisioning. And the persistent volume manifest is where all of the details are. There I say that it's a five gig storage. It is actually a GCE persistent disk. Here's the name and the reclaim policy. So this is Kubernetes view of that 10 gig disk. I'm saying Kubernetes view can use five gigs of that 10 gig disk and please delete it after you're done. You could also set this to reclaim policy to recycle it or retain the disk. But I'm gonna delete it for easy cleanup. So this is manual provisioning. I have previously provisioned the disk. Then I've told Kubernetes about the persistent volume. Then I've created the claim. It's a portable pod. That's nice, but it's still very manual. Okay, now I've gone ahead and created the persistent volume. So the volume is created. You can see that it's created and it's available. Status is available. Now I'm gonna create the PVC, the claim, and I'm gonna bind it, or Kubernetes is automatically going to bind it, right? So the PVC came along and it said I want five gigs. Oh, happens to be a volume already. Five gig volume, let me bind. So now the status of the persistent volume has changed from available to bound. And that completes the manual storage provisioning. What I want to show you is how easy it is to do dynamic storage provisioning. So I think the next step is I'm gonna clean this up. Yep, delete the manual PVC and that should delete everything. And I'm gonna show you that it's deleted. Yep, it should delete the PVC and the PV and also delete the disk. So now there is no disk. With dynamic storage provisioning, like I said, I don't have to pre-provision the storage. All I need to do is create the PVC, the claim. But let me first tell you the concept of storage classes. So the storage admin can still come in and declare that there are multiple types of storage available without provisioning them. Here, the admin has created a fast storage class, which is an SSD. And when we do get storage classes, we see that the fast class is available, as well as the default storage class in 1.6 for Google Cloud is a standard disk. So those two storage classes are available, but no storage has been created. Admin has said what type of storage is available, but nothing has been created. Now the persistent volume claim comes along and it says, yeah, I wanna use that fast class, whatever it is that my admin said. I want 10 gigs of it. And when I create this claim, you will see that everything happens automatically. So I don't need to create a persistent volume. I don't need to provision the storage by itself. The PV has been created. You see this PV with this long numerical number and it has the right delete policy and then it's been bound to the PVC. And if we look at the disks and we get disks, you'll see that the storage has also been provisioned. So this is automation. Nice. No wastage. And then I think I go on and I show you the default and how to do default. But I think for the sake of time, we can skip that. So this is showing dynamic storage provisioning and the automation enabled there. Again, there's a separation of roles. And if the admin wants, they can set policies around the storage classes, but there's no waste associated with things. We can go back to the slides, please. So in 1.6 in this release that's coming out this week, dynamic storage provisioning has moved to stable. So it is fully ready for consumption in enterprises. Sorry, previous slide. Yes, and there are a number of sensible defaults that have been set for the different cloud providers. These are some of them. So we saw in Google Cloud, it's a GCEPD. In Amazon, it's a EBS volume and so forth for OpenStack and others. There are also a number of other storage features. This has been a big release for moving storage forward. So there's support for user-written and user-run dynamic PV provisioners, which is very nice, as well as a number of third-party plugins that have made it into the release. That's it for storage. Just have one more slide on the future of the project and where we are going. So I think, again, we want to be the platform. We're trying to build a platform for the rest of the world to run distributed system applications. And that requires multi-workload, multi-team, efficient scheduling in a cluster, in large clusters or multiple clusters. Some of the roadmap here around security, we're gonna make our back default. There's also network policy, which allows pods to say, okay, I have access to this network or this part of the network, but not be available to take requests from any part of the network. So that's network policy. We will continue adding more features to stateful application support, upgrading stateful applications without downtime. That's on the roadmap. Also, GPU support is extremely important for those of you running machine learning, and there are quite a few running machine learning, including TensorFlow and other types of frameworks. So that's coming soon. In fact, there is an alpha implementation of multiple GPUs in the 1.6 release. And then I mentioned multi-workload scheduling. So there's several features in this release for custom scheduling and advanced scheduling, but we will continue to move forward on that work to make it efficient to schedule multiple different types of workloads in a cluster. In terms of extensibility, there's work, that's alpha work in this release on different cloud providers separating those out and making each of those more powerful. And also the container runtime interface, the CRI for Docker is beta in this release and going forward, we will be adding support for many other runtimes. Just provides flexibility to our users. And then lastly, service catalog, service catalog, SIG service catalog, and the work that they're doing there enables Kubernetes to consume services outside of Kubernetes through a service catalog. And it uses the Open Services Broker API, which has a heritage in the Cloud Foundry Foundation. And so that was actually, I think a couple releases, last release that was made available and there's a longer roadmap there. So with that, next slide. I just wanted to thank everybody and welcome you to Berlin and encourage you to try out 1.6, which should be coming out later today or Tuesday, Pacific Time. Thank you. It's incredibly smooth. Thank you.


Hey, good morning everyone. Welcome to a new session of Covenants to Cross and the Blood. Let's begin this time with the word of prayer. Jafina, would you mind leading us in prayer, please? Sid, would you mind leading us in prayer? Yes, Pastor. Father, we come to the throne of great Lord. Thank you for this day. You have given us, Lord, as we are going to learn from your covenant, Lord, the pain you went through, Lord, whatever you have done for us, Lord, we thank you in Jesus' name, Lord. Lord, we need your wisdom. We need your guidance, Lord. Give us wisdom so that we can understand all the words that's been teaching us, Lord. Lord, thank you, Lord. Bless the pastor, Lord. Bless the sooters, Lord. Whatever we will be learning, Lord, it should be used for the kingdom, expansion and all glory we need to give in you, Lord. In Jesus' name, we pray, Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thanks, Sid. All right. So now we last week, we have completed on the Covenants. I know that there's little more left, but most of it is just to repeat. It's just repeated there. So what we will do is we will move on to section two of this course, which is talking about the cross, right? Now, before we get into that, any questions on the Covenants? Any thoughts, any questions on all that we learned in the topic of the Covenants? Any questions, any thoughts? Everything OK? Should we move on to section two? We'll be talking about the cross, the centrality of the cross, the power of the cross and what Jesus achieved for us through the cross. I'm sure most of us, you know, we know about this. We studied about this, but it's always good to remind ourselves, you know, that everything that we're doing is should point us towards the cross. All right. So should we go ahead to begin with the cross? Section two, let me just see page we are on the notes. OK, we are on page 57 on the notes if you are tracking along. So section two, we're going to be talking about the cross of Jesus Christ. Now, when we look at the cross and we look at what Jesus did, it is known in history that the cross, the cross of Jesus Christ is the central point of all humankind, right? Without the cross of Jesus Christ, without his death, his burial, his resurrection, the Christian faith would be just another religion. Yes, it would be just another religion, just like all other religions. But today, from from this topic onwards, we are going to embrace and really dig deep into the true meaning of the cross. The cross has much more to do than just, you know, wearing it around our neck. The cross has much more is much more than just, you know, getting a, you know, a tattoo done on the hand or the cross is much more than just, you know, a red light that we see on churches. It's more than that. It's not about, you know, just going near the cross and looking at it and, you know, trying to worship the cross. All of that doesn't really count. What really matters is, as believers, when we know the centrality, the power and the the authority that God used through his son, Jesus Christ to overcome the work of the devil, right? So let us begin to study on the centrality of the cross. Now, the Apostle Paul is a wonderful man. He before that, let's let's read this whole portion of scriptures, which is important. First Corinthians, chapter one, 17 to 25. Yes, one of us, please read that first Corinthians, chapter one, 17 to 25. First Corinthians one, 17 to 25. First Corinthians one, 17 to 25. For Christ did not send to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words. This, the cross of Christ should be made of no effect. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to us who are safe, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God met foolish the wisdom of this world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God. It pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jewish request assigned and Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified to the Jewish, to the Jewish, a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness. But to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because of the foolishness of God is wiser than man. And the witness of God is stronger than man. Amen. Thank you, Zeddy. Now we read this entire portion and. The Apostle Paul, if we look at his life, he was the most prominent person in the New Testament, right? We see that he was an influential leader. He was a Pharisee trained under Gamaliel. He had this great understanding on Judaism, to a commander of the temple guard and so many things under his belt, right? But after the Lord Jesus, after he met the Lord Jesus, later on, Saul later on came to be known as Paul, he spent many years in silence in Arabia. And then again he went into Tarsus, spent many years in silence. And then later on, we know the story Paul writes to the Galatians and he's writing his testimony three years. I was in the desert and then 14 years away, his silent years and then later on, Barnabas goes finds and brings him to Antioch. Now, the Apostle Paul is known to have written. So many letters, right? He has gone to so many places. He's planted churches in Asia Minor in Europe from Jerusalem to Rome. Planted churches, raised up many leaders, gone through so much of difficulties, written so many letters, you know, two thirds of the New Testament is written by the Apostle Peter, Paul, right? Now, in 1 Corinthians 117 to 25, what we just read, Paul is summing up his entire ministry. And he's saying this, I, as a minister of God, my focus is to preach the cross of Christ, right? He, his focus was not on how many churches he planted. His focus was not on how many leaders he raised up. The focus was not on, you know, how much, how many years he spent in the ministry. His focus was not even on his personal testimonies. The focus that Paul had in his ministry was to preach Christ crucified. Right? That's why he starts off this entire this verse here, he says, for Christ did not send me to baptize. Is baptism good? Yes. But Christ did not send me for that. Christ sent me to preach the gospel, not with words of our own wisdom. Lest the cross of Christ be made no effect. Now, why is Paul saying this? Do we need wisdom in ministry? Yes. But Paul is trying to bring across this whole understanding that the greatest wisdom.  That is the greatest wisdom that God can ever do. Right? The greatest work that God can ever do. So Paul is saying, if I speak in my own intellectual words, if I speak out of my own talents or my own testimonies and all these other things, and if I don't preach Christ crucified, I have failed. Right? In verse 22, it says, for Jews, request a sign and Greeks seek after wisdom. The meaning Jews request a sign, meaning they just, you know, they really need miracles and Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified to the Jews. It's a stumbling block to the Greeks. It's foolishness, right? For the for a Jew to think that the Messiah of this world, their Messiah will come and die on the cross as a convict or as a sinner, is a stumbling block. There's no way that can happen because in their mindset, the Messiah is a king who will come and overthrow the Roman government. And for the Greeks, who are very intellectual, for them, this does not make sense. Why? Because think about it. You've got a person who came 2000 odd years ago, lived in Jerusalem, died on the cross. He rose again from the dead. And now when we believe in him, we have eternal life. We have forgiveness of sins. Doesn't make sense. So the Greeks, it's foolishness. Right? But Paul is saying, it doesn't matter what people think. For the Jews, it's a stumbling block. For the Greeks, it's foolishness. But for those who are saved, it is the power of God under salvation. Right? It says here, because verse 25, because the God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. So what is Paul's focus here? All through when you read about, from his first missionary journey and how we went about this ministry, what was the focus? Focus was the cross. The focus was Jesus. Right? First Corinthians 117, he says, for Christ to not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with words of wisdom, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect. Now, in a time that we are in, you know, a time where there's a lot of eloquence of speech, great oratory skills, intellectual reasoning, brilliant people around us. All of these are good. We have wonderful tools in ministry now.  You get a whole list of sermons. You can download them off. You can, you know, they're podcasts. Mostly you can download the audio, listen to them. So it's very easy to prepare sermons nowadays, right? It's very easy to have, get a PPT done. Okay, project the PPT for the sermon. We can get it done. There's a lot of material online. There are a lot of tools that we can use. But what does Paul try to say? If I depend on all of this, you know, the tools available and my own wisdom, my own intellectuals, the way my oratory skills, if I depend on my own abilities, it is like we are not depending on the cross of Christ. We as believers need to depend on the raw power of the cross of Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus, remember, the Lord Jesus is not impressed by how well we can speak, how good is our oratory skill? Are we using big words?  Now, that's not really gonna impress the Lord. What is gonna impress, what God is going to do is when we know the power of the cross, when we preach Christ crucified, then we will see miracles, we will see lives transformed. Now, that does not mean that I don't, you know, build on my skills and abilities. I have to do that, right? So if I, for example, if somebody is one of you has been called to be a preacher or pastor, you know that every Sunday you have to prepare sermons. So you need to develop yourself in that skill and ability, but don't depend on that. Okay, I know how to speak English. I know how to just a couple of stories from the Bible. So I'll just use a couple of verses here and there and get over the sermon. If our dependence is on tools, then we have digressed our focus of ministry from God to tools. And Paul is saying, I studied under Gamaliel. I know everything from the Old Testament. I know every law, I know every scripture trained under Gamaliel, a wonderful leader, the Pharisee of the Pharisees. Now, if I depend on all the skills that I have and I preach out of that eloquence that I've learned from, and if I forget to preach Christ crucified, I have failed in my ministry. So Paul is bringing forth the whole ministry and he's saying my focus is the centrality of the cross. The message of the cross is the power of God. First Corinthians 1.18, for the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. It may sound foolish to people. It may sound something that doesn't even make sense, but remember that the message of the cross is the power of God. It brings life into people. It's able to transform lives. Why do we as believers, right? It's very good. It's very important to try and end your sermon focusing on the cross. This is what Jesus did for us. Even when we learned this last semester on lifestyle evangelism, when we are sharing with the gospel with somebody, it's always important to bring in the cross. Now we can sometimes share our testimony and say, this is what happened, this is what happened in my life and this is how God changed my life. But we may forget that the centrality of sharing the gospel is the cross. So it's very important to, you know, even as we share with people, share the testimony, but bring the focus away from us and focus it to the cross. Because without the cross, we looked at all of this in the covenants. Without the cross, we will be lost as sinners, right? Right? It goes on. The cross is surpassing all the wisdom of this world. All of man's brilliance looks pale to the wisdom that God revealed on the cross of Jesus Christ. The great philosophers, the great minds, deep arguments, reasonings, all these kinds of, you know, things that come up all seem petty or all seem very silly when they stand against or compared to the wisdom of God. Now we must remember the beauty of the wisdom of God is revealed to the cross of Jesus Christ and its simplicity, right? Now, when we look at religion, there's a way of making things complicated, right? We make things complicated, but there's simplicity on what God did to the cross. It's simple, right? Though the process of going through it was difficult for our Lord Jesus Christ, but the simplicity of the wisdom of God, it was not, you know, an afterthought, it is not a plan B. The Bible says that Christ was crucified before the foundations of the world. So look at the wisdom of God, surpassing wisdom. Now sometimes we can try and debate and, you know, think of all rational arguments and deep debates and think of these great minds around us. But all of their wisdom comes nowhere close to the wisdom of God. Look at the way the Lord Jesus, God worked in this whole encounter and how God brought about this whole way of salvation. He sent his son to die on the cross, brought him back to life and seated him in the heavenly places. It sounds so simple, but it's the wisdom of God, right? It pleases God when the cross is preached. Every time we share about the cross of Jesus Christ, every time we talk about the cross, it pleases God. Remember the covenants we studied? What is Jesus doing as a high priest? He's taking his own blood and offering it to the Father in heaven, or the blood of rams and goats, but his own blood.  We go through a terrible time and then we pass that time and then we say, hey, don't remind me of that, that season, all of us can say, you know, 2020, don't remind us of 2020, the pandemic hit, deaths and sickness and disease and hospitals and don't remind me of it. Such a painful, tormenting time. But for the Lord Jesus, it's not so. The Lord Jesus is pleased when we talk about the cross. It is not something that he's ashamed of. It is not something that is, you know, a defeat, but it was victory, you know, when we win, for example, when we win, example, right, a running race in school, maybe a 200 meters race. And if you come first, or you make it to the first three, podium finish, you'll be so excited.  But if we come second, last or last, then we tend to just keep quiet, you know, don't talk about it. But that's not the case here. The Lord Jesus is pleased when we preach the cross of Jesus Christ.  It was, it's a place of torment and blood. But the Lord Jesus is saying, that is the wisdom. That is my wisdom, even though it looks like that, but the power of God is in that cross. So remember, it pleases God when we preach the cross. The Lord Jesus begins to release the power of the cross upon our lives. How is it that people are transformed?  How is it that when somebody preaches the gospel, bring in the cross, they're able to transform, their lives change in a moment? How is it? Because there is power in that, because the Lord Jesus begins to release the power of the cross upon their lives. Now here's the interesting thing. The audience can't change the message. The message of the cross is final. Nobody can go back and edit and say, you know, no, this is, this never happened. Of course, people will try and do it.  So some of them say Jesus ran away, went to Kashmir and so then there's other beliefs that Jesus ran away with, you know, to Iran or all kinds of understandings, right? So they will be there. But the audience cannot change the message. The message for the Jews, they may think, hey, it's foolishness. It's a stumbling by, I'm not going to, I'm not even going to think about that. We are still waiting for the Messiah. For the Greeks, they may say, it does not make sense. How can it make sense? Somebody died on the cross. It does not make sense. It becomes, you know, foolishness to them. Whether they believe or no, the message of the cross will remain the same. The power of the cross will remain the same.  The audience, people can say a lot of things. People may, you know, say, say that there is no God or there is no, the whole thing of Trinity is, is a fake and all these things may come up. But here's the thing from the passage that we read, Paul considered that the cross is the power of God, which nobody can change. Right. Nobody can change it. You may, as Jews, you may feel it's a stumbling block. As Greeks, you may feel it's foolishness, but the message does not change. We are not, Paul is saying, see, now I'm coming to you and I'm preaching to you. You feel it's a stumbling block? Okay, let me make another message for you. No, he goes to, you know, we studied a bit of that in, you know, in Mars Hill where he goes into Corinth and he begins to preach there in Asia Minor. What does he say there? He stands at the Great Sermon in Aeropagus. He stands there and he begins to preach and he says, the God who you have mentioned as the unknown God, I will make that God known to you. And he begins to preach the cross. He doesn't say this may, so audience, this may, this may sound a little bit foolish, but please believe in me. No, he preached the cross. And what happened after that? The Bible says many believed. Maybe some of the Greeks who were very well learned thousands, hundreds of years, they've been, you know, looking at the stars and the moon and all of that and, you know, the different kinds of thoughts and ideas that they have, gnostic beliefs. All of that went out the door when they heard the Lord Jesus, when they heard the message of Paul about the cross. Right? So the audience can have different opinions, but you and I know the authority and the power of the cross. Right? So even as we are in the ministry, maybe preaching on Sundays, doing other meetings, getting opportunities to evangelize, people, people's opinions may be different, but you and I must not change our opinion on the cross. Cross is the power of God. The message does not change. Right? The whole purpose of incarnation, let's read Philippians chapter 2 verse 5 to 11. Philippians 2, 5 to 11. Yes, any one of us, Philippians 2 verses 5 to 11. Philippians chapter 2 verses 5 to 11. Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ, who being in very nature, God, did not consider equal with God. Some things to be grasped, but made himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant being made him in human likeness and being found in the appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to that, even that on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name above every name. That a name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on the earth, every and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory to be the God, the Father. Pastor, you are on mute. Sorry, thank you. I'll just read even Revelation studying 8. All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose name has not been written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world. 1 Peter 1.20 says he was indeed fordained before the foundations of the world, but was manifest in these last times. 1 Corinthians 2.7 and 8, but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew for had they known they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Now, all of these verses that we read points that the whole message or the whole plan of the cross was done before the foundations of the world. Revelation 138 says whose name have not been written in the book of life of the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world. So, the whole purpose of the incarnation, we also studied that in Christology, the whole purpose of Jesus coming into this world was for the cross. Now, if we look at Jesus' ministry, every now and then he reminded his disciples in a very beautiful way. He reminded his disciples. He reminded the people as well. Let me just take up a few examples. One, you said you destroyed this temple and I will rebuild it in three days. The Pharisees and the people say, hey, our forefathers took hundreds of years to build this temple.  You're not talking in your mind. They thought it was out of his mind. He says, later on he goes on and says, before Abraham was, I am talking about who Jesus was before the foundations of the world and goes on even in places where the book of Hebrews writes and says the rock that was smote was the Lord Jesus. And so, the whole purpose, the Lord Jesus reminded his disciples and he said, I am the resurrection.  And so, everywhere the Lord Jesus reminded his disciples. Many places he says, soon I will be gone. I'm sure the disciples didn't really take those words seriously. Maybe they thought going to another city, going to another town. But Jesus knew exactly what he came for. He came with a purpose.  What an amazing, amazing love, what an amazing wisdom God displayed through this whole aspect.  That's why we look at the Garden of Gethsemane. As a human being, the Lord Jesus is saying, Lord, if it's your will, take this cup away from me. But yet not my will, but your will be done. There, the Lord Jesus showed his human side as well. He said, this cup is too much to bear. But I know that I've come to fulfill your will. And in your wisdom, God, you feel that this is right, that I must be beaten and scourged and die on the cross. In your wisdom, God, you feel this is right. So let it be so. And the Lord Jesus, he fulfilled this whole thing that was written about him before the foundations of the world, we preach Christ crucified. What an amazing, amazing wisdom. Remember that many people around us may have a lot of knowledge. Many people may have a lot of great understandings. Right. But if they don't know the message of the cross, they have lost out on what is the most important or the greatest wisdom of this world.  They know everything. They know how to come up with tools and gadgets and they look at the stars and they come up with solutions and all of these things. Great wisdom. But that wisdom is just a natural wisdom. If they have not received the wisdom of the cross in their lives, they have failed. And so remember this, that you and I, we have received the gospel, we believe in the message of the cross. God has given us the greatest wisdom made available to us.  Why? Because you are greater in God's eyes. Because the wisdom that you have and understanding that you have is greater than that of others. I love what the Lord Jesus says to Apostle Paul.   And the Apostle Paul didn't say, okay, wait, let me just wipe off my dust. Let me make sure that my English or my Greek or my Aramaic is in tune. I hope I'm using the right words. No, no, no. What does he say? He's tied up in chains and he goes in front of Felix. When you see, read the book of Acts, he goes in front of these governors and these kings and he stands there regal and he knows exactly what he's talking about. He says, this is the cross. This is what Jesus did. There was no flinching at all, Apostle Paul. He knew that the wisdom that he had was greater than that of anything else. Jesus foretold his crucifixion several times. Let's read Matthew chapter 16, 21 to 23. Matthew 16, 21 to 23. Yes, anyone? Matthew 16, 21 to 23. Matthew 16, 21, 21 to the Apostle. 21 to 23. Okay, thank you. For that time, Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised the third day. Then Peter too came aside and began to rebake him saying, Far be it from you, Lord. This shall not happen to you. But he turned and said to Peter, Get behind me, Satan.  For you are not mindful of the things of God but the things of men. Amen. Thank you, Zellie. So we see here Jesus is foretelling his disciples and he says, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer many things from the elders and priests and be killed and raised on the third day. Immediately, the fast speaking Peter, short tempered, Peter says no ways that should not happen. We are 12 of us. We can protect you.  What does Jesus say? Get behind me, Satan, because you are thinking of the worldly things and not the things of God. Because the whole thing of crucifixion was God's plan and Jesus didn't want the work of the enemy through anyone to hinder the plan of God.  But they did not understand the saying and were afraid to ask him. So the Lord Jesus was not mysterious in his whole dealing with what was going to happen. It was not like the Lord Jesus was 30 years old, he started his ministry and then somewhere around 33, there's another five, six months for him to die. He started saying, Okay, listen, in case I just want to make sure that each of you know that one day I will be crucified. No, that was not Jesus' plan or that's not what he did. He foretold right from the beginning, right, whenever maybe whenever there were miracles and where he had many people and he spoke to his disciples and private as well and he told them this is what's going to happen. I'm going to be handed over, I'm going to be killed, but I will rise up on the third day.  So he says everything, he knew what was ahead of him. So Jesus, he purposed to go to the cross, right. Now, there were many opportunities presented to Jesus to avoid death on the cross, many opportunities.  No, no, no. Satan did all he can to try and present opportunities to Jesus to avoid the cross. Just one sin was enough. If this person, Jesus, can fall for one sin of one temptation that I give him, if he can just fall once, then the whole cross will be of no effect. The point of the cross is the sinless Lamb crucifying. But if Satan tried one sin, just one, you see the episode where the Lord Jesus is being tempted after his 40 days, during his 40 days of fasting, only three were recorded. But the Bible says that Satan left him for a while. Satan would have come back, tempted him all through those 40 days on and on and on and on and on, right, because just one sin was enough. Now, when you think of all this, so much of gratitude, all of this he went through for our sake, right. One was Satan's own temptations. Matthew 4, 8 to 10, where the Lord Jesus is in fasting and the devil took him up on an exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.  That's just one of those temptations.  It's going to be a gruesome scene. And Peter comes and says, you know what, Lord, we can avoid this. We'll not let this happen. Imagine if Jesus said, okay, what is the plan? What do we do? Should we go to another place? Should we go to Judea? Everyone like us there?  Oh, let's go to Samaria. We have some followers there as well. We can just go and stay there for a while. No, no, no, no. First thing Jesus said was, away from me Satan, because you have the things of man and not the things of God. So Jesus was not fearful of the cross. He was not getting said, oh, one day I'm going to go to the cross.  I hope that day doesn't come. No, he purposed for it, meaning he looked forward for it. Can you picture that? The Lord Jesus looked forward for the cross. He said, I'm waiting for the day, a time will come when one of you will betray me and they will hand me over to the leaders and I will be beaten and killed. He was looking forward for that day, even in the Last Supper. We don't see any place where the Lord Jesus was fearful at all. His soul was burdened. His soul was sad, but we don't see him fearful at all. He knew, he purposed to go to the cross. As a garden of Gethsemane again, he purposed it. Then 72,000 angels, that whole aspect of Matthew chapter 26 was 51 to 54. Let's read that. Matthew 26, 51 to 54. Matthew 26, 51 to 54. Yes, any one of us? Matthew 26, 51.  But Jesus said to him, put your sword in its place. For all who take this sword, we perish by this sword. Or do you think that I cannot now pray to my father and he provide me with more than 12,000, 12 legions of agents? How then could these creatures be fulfilled that it must be happened? Yes, thank you, Avukare. So here again, the last opportunity was presented where, you know, they are in the garden of Gethsemane and Judas comes with the high priest and a few of the Roman guards.  If we result to this sword, we will die by it. But do you think if I don't pray to the father, if I pray to the father now, he will not send me a legion, 12 legions of angels, that's 72,000 angels, will he not be able to send me that?  He doesn't do that. Verse 54 says, how then could the scripture be fulfilled that it must happen thus? So he's saying, Peter, Peter, if you go about doing this, if you try to stop this, how will the scriptures be fulfilled? If I want it, I can just pray to the father, the father will send a whole legion of angels to protect me. But there's a reason why it's not being done, because scriptures need to be fulfilled. So the Lord Jesus, he purposed to go to the cross. What does it teach us? Teachers are something very important. We must be purposeful in pursuing the Lord Jesus. In good times, in good seasons, in bad seasons, in seasons of pain, in seasons of struggle, seasons of joy, we must purposefully look towards Jesus, look towards growing, look towards knowing Him more, asking God for His presence in our lives, purposefully, because Jesus, he purposefully, he looked forward for the suffering ahead. He knew that he is going to die, right? And how much more we can do this for our Lord? We say, God, help us to be purposeful in knowing you. Sometimes, you know what? In ministry, we get bored. You may end up getting tired. Say, oh, doing the same thing again and again. No. Remember what the Lord Jesus did. The stakes were so high. There's the pain, the struggle, all that He did. And we can purposefully go to Jesus and say, Lord, this is my failure, this is my struggle, this is my challenge. Help me in this. And He will understand. Remember, we studied this in the Covenants. He's our mediator, a mediator who sympathizes with us, right? How the Lord Jesus purposefully looked at the cross. We had to purposefully look forward to growing, maturing, and growing in the Lord in our lives, right? So, it's wonderful. Cross is a beautiful, beautiful place. That's a place where we can be as we are and know that we are accepted. Amen. So, let's take a break. We'll come back at 11 and continue on the cross.