Yeah, yes, Dave, please go ahead and pray. I think the others will join us soon. Father, we come before you and we thank you for this wonderful new day that you have given us, Lord Jesus. We are thankful that you have been so wonderful, so gracious, and you have always been so faithful to us, Lord Jesus, no matter how we are, no matter how we worship you, Lord Jesus. But your love and your faithfulness always draws us, Lord Jesus, and we thank you, and we especially pray this day as we go for our classes, Lord Jesus. Let our hearts prepare, Lord Jesus, so that we can receive your word, Lord Jesus. Let our hearts be as a good land that you can bear much, Lord Jesus. Okay, thank you. I pray that you are knowingly with us, Lord Jesus, and let you are knowingly with all the students. Those who are still yet to join, Lord Jesus, help them to join faster and in time, Lord Jesus, and let each one of us come to Him and understand everything that our pastor is teaching today. In your name we pray, amen. Amen, amen. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Yeah, so just give me a moment. There's like a lot of light in my room. I'll just see if I can adjust the light.  No, I was saying I'm not able to do much about the light, so we'll just go ahead and we were in Acts chapter 13 and we saw how, as the leaders in the church of Antioch were praying, God told them to separate for Him Paul and Barnabas for the ministry for which He had called them, and then the church obeyed what the Holy Spirit spoke to them and allowed Paul and Barnabas to move in that specific direction. So we saw that Paul and Barnabas, they chose John Mark from Jerusalem, they chose Him as their assistant and they went on this missionary journey, and this is known as Paul's first missionary journey, basically preaching the gospel, planting churches through the region. And this is very much in line with what the Holy Spirit had spoken earlier in Acts 1-8. Actually, Jesus said, you shall receive power. Excuse me, when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses in all, in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth. So the gospel will spread from Jerusalem to other parts of the world. So that's what we are going to see happen starting from Acts 13. Now that the journey has started, we saw that they start traveling, they stop at a couple of places and finally they come to, okay, I'll tell you Cyprus, Salamis, and then they came to the island of Paphos. And in the island of Paphos, we saw how there was a procuncel or one of the officials who wanted to know about Jesus, he was very interested, but there was a spiritual barrier and the spiritual barrier was created by a sorcerer. So we know that the demonic powers can interfere with the receiving of the gospel. So we have to pray against the demonic powers and even as we do that, that understanding of the gospel will become clearer for the people. So here is a very clear example of a demonic interference. So Paul understands that and then in this situation, Paul had to rebuke this sorcerer by the name of Bar-Jesus or Elimus. So he had to rebuke this person and we know that it was like the judgment that earlier also we've seen in the book of Acts when the grace of God, when the power of God is abundant, we also see God's judgment coming through in a very strict way. So he rebukes this sorcerer and he says something like, you are going, you shall be blind, not seeing the sun for a time. So that was the judgment which was pronounced and it took place. So this person, he could not walk, he had somebody to lead him, but when the demonic power was dealt with, we see that the procuncel, he heard and he believed. So this is a good example of spiritual warfare over the lives of individuals. So why sometimes people are not receiving the gospel, there can be a demonic interference. So we must come in prayer, we must come in faith to break that and then we can actually see an openness. And we know when we've read about revivals, visitations, moves of God, how communities of people gather together and they prayed over an entire region, what happens? We've talked about territorial spirits. This is at a different level. So we go against these opposing spirits and that entire region is kind of opened up for the gospel, actually more of the understanding of the gospel in the hearts of the people and they are able to receive. So in that manner we find here in Paphos, God's power being demonstrated and a leader. An influential person receives the gospel. Now what else happened in Paphos? We don't read here, but it is understood that if there is an influential person who has accepted the gospel, what will happen? He probably would have gone ahead and shared it with others. He would have had good opportunities to minister to people and bring many more people to Christ. So that is the progression of events that could have taken place. Now after Cyprus, Salamis, these places we've seen, Paphos, so you can imagine, it's like when you see the metro track, you see points where you can change your track. You can move from the blue line to the green line. So you see those dots, these are the stations. So you can kind of look at the missionary journey like that. So you have these places, Cyprus, Salamis. Through that he goes, he makes a stop at Paphos, there he ministers to the procuncel, Sergius Paulus and one more beautiful thing is he's an intelligent man. So sometimes people wonder, is the gospel for the poor and needy and those who lack understanding? You see here that there was an intelligent man who was interested in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. So how is it that people come to this conclusion that only those who are in need of food or in need of money or in need of some material blessing, they accept Christ so that they have a better life. Maybe as Paul and Peter and John said, silver and gold we don't have. But some people perceive that, oh look at the church. The church again a very general term and people use that term. The church is well to do and so if we connect to the church, maybe they will give us food, they will give us facilities to help us with a better living and that is the reason people accept Christ. But look at this passage. Sergius Paulus is an intelligent man, he's an intelligent man and yet he's interested in the Gospel, wants the demonic power. And in this case, we said that the demonic influence Calvary at various levels. Now we have an individual who has become a source of a demonic influence in that region of Paphos. We've seen others like Simon the sorcerer who was an influence in where he was an influence in Samaria out of his black magic and witchcraft and sorcery and things like that. So Satan can also, it's not just possession, it's like empowerment. So there can be individuals in regions who are empowered in that way and through their hindrance, an intelligent man was not able to receive the Gospel. But once the power of God was demonstrated and this person was, his influence was taken off of Sergius Paulus, he accepted Christ. So we saw that impact made on Paphos. Then we continued, I noticed verse 13, it says, now Paul and his party set sail from Paphos. Very interesting, isn't it? Till now Paul is not at all in the four. He is one of the apostles. Now he is a learned person, a good teacher obviously, which is why Barnabas needed his help and brought him to Antioch. But now suddenly Paul has got that limelight. The team is no longer called Barnabas and Paul, it's called Paul and Barnabas. Some people say that Barnabas is like a mentor to Paul. Now if that is the case, it's true Barnabas really invested in Paul's life and Barnabas brought Paul. He searched for him and he brought him to the church of Antioch. Now you just think, how would Barnabas have felt when the team, Luke is calling the team as Paul and party. In Kingdom Builders, we study about this fathers and mothers in the house of God. A true father will be proud that, oh wow, somebody that I have worked with, somebody that I have guided, they have now become a prominent person for the Kingdom of God, for the glory of God. So we don't see Barnabas trying to fight this title, Paul and party. So now Barnabas is not in the picture. Paul is in the picture. So it kind of shows that healthy mentoring relationship where Barnabas is not taking offense from Paul receiving the recognition. So they're traveling again. So now they come to Perga in the region of Pamphalia and that's where John Mark departed and I told you about John Mark going away. Now I gave you some reasons for John Mark going away, but some people also say that maybe John Mark was upset that now the team is called Paul and party because apparently John Mark is also relative of Barnabas. So we don't know if Barnabas was mature enough to handle Paul, getting all the attention, but John Mark may have been a little upset that suddenly Paul is taking charge of the entire mission trip. So yeah, anyway, he departed and so we see from Pamphalia, they go to Pisidia. I told us that there were many Antiochs and this particular Antioch is in Pisidia and over there they start preaching the gospel and we see how Paul actually preaches. He says he talks about David and he talks about the references in the Psalms that say that David is saying he will not see decay. But then obviously David died. So who is this person that David was actually referring to and Paul brings the attention of the people and shows them that David was talking about the Lord Jesus Christ and that they should trust in the Lord Jesus Christ because he is our Savior, that he is our Lord, that he is the one who is our Redeemer. So he brings the attention to the Lord Jesus Christ and when people hear this, the Jews hear it and they're very happy. So at the first instance, it seems like they were kind of open to listening to what is being taught in the synagogue. So in verse 42, we see, so when the Jews went out of the synagogue, the Gentiles begged that these words might be preached to them the next Sabbath and there were some Gentiles who were also interested in the God of the Jews, so they too would kind of come to worship there. Now these Gentiles, they wanted the same preaching to be shared with them. Now one more thing we can notice is you see when you read the sermon of Paul, it sounds very much like the sermon of Peter. So remember early on we said that the believers were committed to the apostles doctrine. You know the way people trusted in the Word of God, they committed themselves to the Word of God was amazing. It's like maybe over a decade since Peter preached his first sermon, but Paul is preaching the same doctrine. There's no error. So today in the mentoring hour, there was a question about the end times. How do we stay strong in the end times? How do we not depart from the faith in the end times and different points were shared? One of the things that Pastor shared towards the end is he said, don't be given to strange doctrines. We are warned about strange doctrines, right? That we should not assuage towards all kinds of teachings that are coming, but we must be strong in what we have already learned about the Lord Jesus. So you notice the commitment of the early church, how they have stuck to the apostles doctrine and Paul is preaching almost the same kind of message that Peter preached. Doctrinationally, they were very strong. So people could not come and mess up their understanding of the gospel and that's a very key thing that we see here in the ministry of the early church. So this was preached and the Jews were receptive and the Gentiles also were very interested. So they told Paul and Barnabas, how about you come again next Sabbath and you preach to the Gentiles. So some of them they were so convinced it says that many of the Jews and devout proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas who speaking to them persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. So there was a ministry taking place there because people accepted the gospel and here are Paul and Barnabas after people accept. What should we do? Should we just leave them? Okay, everybody has given decision card. Wonderful. We had a great crusade in this particular city. Now let's pack our bags. Let's go. What happens to those who sign the decision card? What happens to those who have accepted the Lord Jesus in their lives? What about their journey of faith? We have to be responsible for that. So what do Paul and Barnabas do? They are continuing to speak to them and they are persuading them to continue in the grace of God, meaning they're encouraging them to have a walk with God. So when believers come to know the Lord, we read about many things. We said they are baptized in water, they are baptized in the Holy Spirit but here is another aspect we can add to it. We must encourage them in the Lord. Believers need to be encouraged in the Lord. They need to know the word of God. They need to continue in the grace of God upon their lives. So on the next sabbath, just the way the people had requested, are you fine? Paul and Barnabas, they are ready to preach the gospel but what is the response? Whenever you have a good program, I don't see much of it these days but I remember when I was in school and college, there were different programs that would be organized in a palace ground, some music concerts and some exhibitions and there were also some Christian programs. So attending these programs, I've noticed whenever you go for a program and it's really good, the next or the last date of the program or something like that, there will be so many people. The exhibition is good. You'll find like people are just thronging there, wanting to buy things before they are out of stock. So in the same way, we can see that there is an impact which Paul and Barnabas have made in the city of Antioch, of Pisidia. So on the next sabbath, they were only expecting the Gentiles to come but in verse 44, you read, the whole city came together and Luke is writing and Luke is a physician. We know that he was quite good with the details and we don't expect Luke to exaggerate. So when Luke says, whole city came together to hear the word of God, it's probably that there was a great response, a wonderful response. And who, which minister of God or which preacher would not like it, they would love it. So the whole city has come together and here Paul and Barnabas have a wonderful audience and they minister. But now what's happening? As long as the message is being preached and it is not a threat to the surrounding, to the existing setup, people are comfortable because yeah, it's a good concert, go attend it, you know, be entertained. That's it. People are fine with that. But now that the Jews understand that people are listening, multitudes are listening to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now what if these people, Paul, Barnabas and the team, they are trying to establish some form of a government and the people run behind them, you know, what will happen to our authority over them? So all that confusion started among the Jews. So how are the Jews reacting? They are filled with envy and contradicting and blaspheming. They are opposing whatever Paul is speaking because now the reality is before them. They understood, oh, people are responding to these men. It won't take long before they have taken over the city. So we better step up. So they are opposing the ministry of Paul and Barnabas. Is this something new? Not at all. Even Jesus experienced so much of opposition. In fact, he was moving from place to place whenever, when he saw in John, you know, what we are studying in our other course, we saw how Jesus moved away because the Jews were getting upset with him. So instead of kind of contending with him, I also understood that it was at his time, so he just moved to another place. So Paul and Barnabas are in a similar situation, but over here it's like an entire, you know, like a large number of Jews who are against their ministry. What do you expect Paul and Barnabas to do? What would you have done? You're preaching and you find that there are leaders in that town, they are turning against you. What would you do? You could just share your thoughts. It's good to think along. Run away, pack our bags. Yeah, okay. So that says walk away. Yeah, walk away. Makes sense. Yeah, if you say, if you feel that you are not going to accomplish anything much led by the spirit, you can actually move to another place where people are willing to listen to you. True. That's true. Yeah, how about the others? All right. So just think about it. They're facing opposition and similar to what you saw, the believers in the initial, you know, Jerusalem church too, they pray for more boldness, isn't it? So verse 46, we learn that Paul and Barnabas grew bold. So they're giving it one more shot. They don't leave immediately, but they're becoming more bold and they are, you know, wanting to preach the gospel in a stronger way. So they now say that it's necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first, but reject it and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life. Behold, we turn to the Gentiles. For so, God has commanded us. I have set you as a light to the Gentiles. You could be a for salvation to the ends of the earth. Okay. So what we understand here is that they want to persuade the Jews, but they are speaking in a bold way and letting them know that, you know, what you should have listened to our message. So they, they're not trying to mince words or trying to please the Jews by just pacify them, make them feel good. Oh, okay. Okay. If you don't listen, it's fine. It's not like that, but they're being strong and they're saying, you're supposed to listen because Jesus came for the Jews, you know, God's promises are for the Jews first, but you're not willing to listen. And there, you know, they are making their point clear that, okay, if you're not going to listen based on what God's word has spoken now in the Old Testament, they're quoting and they're saying, I've set you as a light to the Gentiles that you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth. So they're saying, okay, fine. If you are not going to listen to us, we will just focus on the Gentiles because who were the troublemakers? Who were the opposers? They were the Jews and the Gentiles were willing to listen. So it was an easy thing to decide. Paul and Barnabas decided, let's focus on those who are willing to listen. Why waste time on those who are not willing to listen, right? So that is the approach which they had taken. So now they continue to minister to the Gentiles and we are told when the Gentiles heard this or they heard the message, they were glad and glorified the Word of the Lord. So, you know, it shows us about how Jesus talked about in, was it Matthew 13? Yeah, he talked about the sower, right? The sower sows the seed and the preparedness of the heart, how some people receive it quickly and then they, you know, it doesn't develop any roots, but then there are those with good ground who receive the Word of God and who let it nurture. Now, at the first instance, we are quite clear here that they had an open heart, not like the Jews, you know, which their hearts were like the rocks themselves, the Word was not going in. So where is the question of the Word growing? But the Gentiles at least had that open heart and they were glad, it says, they heard and were glad. So remember, we talked about the city of Samaria also, the impact, what impact will the gospel have on the cities? The city of Samaria rejoiced, there was joy in the city. Okay, when the works of God are done, when the Word of God is preached, there is joy in the city. So that is the blessing that comes with the gospel over the city. Now, here we see that in Antioch, Pisidia, not among the Jews, but among the Gentiles, because they have a heart that is receiving the gospel, they are glad and they glorify the Word of the Lord, which is being spoken to their hearts and so they received it. And we also see that and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed. Now, we can take this one line and we could say things like, oh, those who were appointed to eternal life, only they were chosen by God. But, you know, we've addressed this issue and maybe you can go back and listen to the mentoring hour. Many a time, we have addressed a free destination. So, you know, God is not the one who decides our decision about salvation. It's a choice we have to make because we, yes, there is a sovereign God, but we have a free will and free will is so clear in scripture. God never interfered with Adam and Eve, the choice which they made. How would he interfere with our decision of salvation? We have to choose. So, it's not that the Gentiles were predestined to salvation and the Jews were not, but the Gentiles made a choice to receive. So, they believed and it made them glad and they were the ones who, you could say, you know, the church in Pisidia, Antioch of Pisidia, this is the church. Who is the church, the body of believer. So, there is a church there now. There's a local church there. Now, we continue to read and the word of the Lord was being spread throughout all the region. Okay. Is there opposition to what Paul and Barnabas are doing? Yes, there is, but still the work is continuing on. Have we seen this earlier? We have seen this very much in every incident where there was a challenge. We saw Peter was imprisoned. He came out, but later on, what do you see? The word is going out everywhere. So, again, what Gamaliel said, right? He said that if this is God, nobody can stop it and we see that happening. Nobody is able to stop it. Is it dependent? Is the work of God dependent only on one person or two people? You know, you don't see a Peter and a John here anymore. The completely different set of people. There is Paul. There is Barnabas. But what is the common denominator, the work of God? The work of God continues and does God work through different people? Yes. New people have come on the scene and they are ministering, but by the grace of God, by the leading of God, but God's work is continuing. So, that's what we see. How beautiful. It's like a revival, right? Where nothing is able to stop, not even opposition is able to stop. So, we see that the word of the Lord was being spread throughout all the region. Okay? When this is happening, you know, the Jews get more and more agitated. They are scared now. Look at these people.  Persecution was happening. Now, look at Paul. He was a persecutor. He has become a, you know, a preacher of that same truth and, you know, what is going to happen to our authority? What is going to happen to our position? So, you see here that the Jews started stirring up people in the city. So, you see a list of people that devout prominent women, chief men of the city, and they started raising up persecution against Paul and Barnabas. So, Paul and Barnabas, did they walk away from the city? No. In this situation, immediately they didn't. They just came back and they undressed the matter with the Jews in a very bold way, but they walked away from the Jews. Yes, because they started ministering to those who are willing to listen. Okay? So, that's how they continued their ministry. They did not waste their time on those who were hard-hearted. Now, you find that they are still in the city and the Jews decide, okay, enough is enough. These people are not leaving our city. They are continuing to indoctrinate the Gentiles over here. How about we create an opposition in such a way that we throw them out of the city? So, we read here that they were expelled. They were expelled from the region. So, they no longer could minister there because they have been asked to leave. Okay, please guys, stop, leave right now and they had to leave. So, what do they respond with when they are expelled from the region? No, we read that they shook off the dust from their feet.  If they accept you, well and good, you know, God's power comes. God's truth comes. God's blessings come in that place. It's beautiful. But if they don't, Jesus also said that you shake off the dust from your feet. That's an expression, you know, in the Jewish world and the times that Jesus lived in. It's a way of saying, okay, forget it. You don't want no problem. You know, we will just move on to the next destination that God shows us. And it's also a form of a, it's not really, I don't know, you could say it's somewhat like a judgment sort of a thing also to shake the dust off your feet and say, okay, I give up on you, that kind of a thing. So, it's very unfortunate that that city of Antioch, the Jews brought it upon themselves where ministers of God, they shook the dust off their feet and said, okay, you don't want to listen, don't listen.  We have nothing to do with it because what is the responsibility that the minister has, the responsibility which the minister has is to preach the gospel. Did Paul and Barnabas fulfill their ministry? They did. What will God hold them accountable for? Their part, which is to preach. Now, the people did not listen. They can't do, Paul and Barnabas can't do anything about it.  Hopefully, if they change, that's great for them. But if they don't, they face the consequences. So they left to the next place. So their stop was in Pisidia, Antioch, now they're moving to Iconium. Okay, they're in Iconium.  Okay, so, as Paul and Barnabas are ministering, we find that, you know, people are being filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit. Now, that's very beautiful. Okay, because we as believers today, you know, we are walking with the Lord. And the times that these believers lived in, it was definitely not an easy time. There is opposition. There are struggles. But in the midst of all that, is it possible for a believer to have joy? Is it possible for a believer to be filled with the Holy Spirit? Yes, it is. You could say that circumstances don't determine the joy and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. So we can be in very difficult times. Paul and Barnabas had opposition rising up against them. But as part of the body of believers, they too were filled with joy. They were filled with Holy Spirit. So immaterial of our circumstances as believers at all times, you know, we can be filled. Remember, Paul wrote that in the book of Philippians, he says, rejoice in the Lord always. And again I say, rejoice. So every day we can be joyful in the Lord. Every day we can be filled with the Holy Spirit. Whatever is happening, good things are happening, bad things are happening. Okay, doesn't matter. I still, because Jesus said, right, I'm not of this world. I am from above. So we have a life here which is from above and we can live that life no matter what circumstance. We are in no matter what situation we are in. So this is the journey that we are noticing about Paul and Barnabas as a team. They've gone, they've done quite extensive ministry in Antioch of Pisidia, after Paphos, of course, and now they're going to a place called Iconium. So what are they going to do there? So we see here they went together. So team ministry, is it possible for ministers of God to get along, serve together? Very much. You see that here, Paul and Barnabas. And Barnabas doesn't seem jealous of Paul at all because Paul is preaching and it's being called as Paul and Party. Luke is addressing the team as Paul and Party. And still there is that unity, there is that understanding. So what is the mindset which they carry? Kingdom mindset. Kingdom mindset, we are going to take the gospel out. We are going to touch regions for the gospel sake, for the kingdom sake. They are not thinking Paul's ministry, Paul, awake Paul ministries and hopeful Barnabas ministries, which ministry has to increase? That's not the question. We are going to work together. So Iconium, it says they went together. And then they went to the synagogue of the Jews. And this was a common practice. Where do the preachers have an opportunity to minister? Usually the synagogues. I told you last time that they would give an opportunity to learn with people to come and share there. So they went to the synagogue and there they spoke and a great multitude. Again, both of Jews and of Greeks, they believed. So what is happening? Are there results for the ministry of Paul and Barnabas? Actually, yes, everywhere they are going. It looks different. The results look different. But there are results. People are believing. Is everybody believing? No, even in the ministry of Jesus, there were people who did not believe. They listened. They ate the bread. They ate the fish. They took the healing. They went away. There were some people who followed Jesus for some time, disciples. Later, when he was talking about my body, you will drink my, you will eat my flesh. You will drink my blood. They said, what is he talking about? I quit. I cannot continue with this man. So there were people. When he left him and then Jesus looked at his disciples that will you also leave me? So it's like the response is not, you're not getting, we're not reading the whole city believed and things like that. But definitely there were people among the crowd who believed. We see Jesus say that even if one sinner repents, what is going to happen that is going to be rejoicing in heaven that one person has turned. So God is working in every place. There are people who are believing and here particularly in Iconium, we read great multitude, great multitude of both the Jews and the Greeks believe, not the whole city yet, but a great multitude believe. Again, you have a set of unbelieving Jews. What are they doing? They are continuing with their work of opposition.  So they would have told them things like, these people don't believe them. They are after money. They are after power. Do you know Paul? Paul was one of us and I don't think this message is going to last for long. Just wait and watch. He is going to change. This is all a show. These are all sheep, sorry wolves and sheep's clothing. We don't know what are all the things the Jews actually told the Gentiles, but they were instigating, they were poisoning the minds of the Gentiles so that they don't believe what is being preached to them. But then what do Paul and Barnabas do? They continue to stay there. It says that they stayed a long time speaking boldly in the Lord who was bearing witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands. So the same pattern of ministry. Immediately they're not leaving because people have believed. Now people have to be discipled and not just that, we have to continue preaching because there are others. The laborers, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. So still work has to be done in Iconium. What if there is opposition? Okay, let it be there. Let's continue our work. That is the mindset which Paul and Barnabas are carrying right now and they are ministering. They are ministering to the people and their format of ministering. They are staying for a long time, it says. So obviously comparatively, compared to your Antioch of Pisidia, they stayed back longer because discipling has to be done. You remember it was the same Paul, Barnabas team and Antioch for one entire year, one year, they're teaching the believers, they're teaching the believers. So they know the value of equipping the believers because that will bring maturity. So they stay a long time, they talk to them. How do they talk boldly? They talk boldly. They're not afraid. Even if rumors are going around, Jews are spreading rumors. They are poisoning the minds of the people. Paul and Barnabas have nothing to hide. It's the same message. Message is not going to change about Jesus. So boldly, they are speaking the message and the way we read about the Lord Jesus, the power of God was present. And again, at 1038, we see the Lord Jesus of Nazareth went about doing good works. He was anointed by the Holy Spirit. He was anointed by the Holy Spirit. So these two were also doing the supernatural works by the Holy Spirit. So we read about signs and wonders and granting signs and wonders, meaning it's not something that these two were doing, but it is God who is working in and through Paul and Barnabas to release signs and wonders in Iconium.  So when we preach the message, we know that it is God who confirms the word through the work of power that he does.  And people are being equipped to stand strong in the faith for the gospel. All this work is going on and really good ministry is going on. At the same time, there is definitely opposition. So even here in the city of Iconium, people are divided, it says. So we see that one part, they were believing in what the Jews were saying, but the other part were believing the apostles. So it was hard to navigate through this place as well. So in every town, it's like that. Some are believing, some are creating trouble. So finally, the Jews here in Iconium, they decide enough is enough. The way they got expelled, they got expelled from where? From Antioch Pisidia.  So earlier, we don't read about physical harm, but now these people, they decide, it's better to just kill these men. Let's harm them physically. Let's harm them. But when Paul and Barnabas came to know that they're going to be physically harmed, that is when they leave that place. So before that, they're staying there for a long time, but they've heard that they're going to be killed. So just the way Jesus, Jesus said, it's not yet my time. I think Paul and Barnabas had that understanding. This is not our time. We have more work to do. And if this place is not going to listen to us, let's move on to the next place. So we see them fleeing, fleeing means running away. So they ran away to Lystra and Derby, Derby, different ways to pronounce it. So I'll just say Derby, Derby cities of Lyconia and the surrounding regions. And what do they continue to do their job? They are ministers of the gospel. They continue to preach the gospel there. So this is what we have seen so far in the missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas. So we will continue. If you all have any questions, you just stop and ask. I'll just keep moving forward. I hope that's okay. Is that fine? Okay. Yeah, let's continue. So now they are in this place called Lystra. What happens in Lystra? As part of the ministry, obviously, they are preaching the gospel, but they also minister to the needs of the people. So there is a man in Lystra. We are told without strength, he did not have strength in his feet, takes us back to Acts three, you know, where the man at the gate, beautiful, he could not stand. And he was crippled from his mother's womb. Now in Lystra, a similar situation, there is a person crippled from his mother's womb who had never walked. So the people around knew about this man. Now, I don't know how old this person was, it's not mentioned here, but very similar to the man at Gate Beautiful. So this man, he heard Paul speaking. Okay. And then he was observing. Paul was also observing him intently. And he saw that this man had faith to be healed. You see here the working of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Peter in Acts five, when he rebuked Ananias and Sapphira, he said, you have lied to the Holy Spirit. How did he know words of knowledge? Okay, gift of the Holy Spirit was activated. It was working in Peter.  What is that word of knowledge? But now you understand here the discerning, discerning of spirits, discernment within him. We are told that Paul is preaching but he's looking at this man and he senses or he discerns this man has faith to be healed. Okay. And he goes ahead and ministers to this man. And so how does he minister? He says with a loud voice, stand up straight on your feet and he leaped and walked. Okay. Little different from the way Peter ministered. Peter said, silver and gold I don't have, but in the name of Jesus, you know, rise up and walk. I give you what I have in the name of Jesus rise up and walk and by the, and later, you know, they, Peter said that it's through the name of Jesus that he received strength in his feet. What is happening here? Paul is commanding, stand up straight on your feet and in response to the faith which he already had. Okay. This miracle is taking place. So this man also leaps and walks. So another notable miracle in the book of acts takes place. So what happened because of acts three, a lot of people started believing, they started responding. And that's when, you know, they caught, they seized Peter and John. What are you all doing? Why are you preaching about this Jesus? Don't use his name again. Don't preach in that name again. So we will see what happens because this man now in Lister got miraculously healed from his condition. Okay. So it's time right now. Let's go for a break. We will come back and we will continue. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.


السلام عليك يا أبا عبدالله الحسين وعلى الأرواح التي حلقت بفنائك The sons of Karbala Spend their days fasting Doing Ibadah Remembering the thirst of أبا عبدالله عن أبو فطل العباس And after the time of Uftar After Maghrib They come here They gather every night To mourn the mosa'ib Of أبا عبدالله الحسين And of أبو فطل العباس Peace and blessings be upon them We have come now to a Majlis Outside the shrine of أبا عبدالله باب الرجاء The door of Raja Where there is a Majlis being held now And on it for أبا عبدالله الحسين So insha'Allah we will go in Take part in the Majlis And hopefully gain some tawab From the great act that they are doing here Now we are going into the Majlis The sheikh is entering The mosa'ib of أبا عبدالله And most specifically Sayyid Zaynah Peace and Blessings be upon her So insha'Allah we will go in now And take part in the Majlis And hopefully shed some tawab From the mosa'ib of أبو مامل حسين And we are standing with one of the seven أبو أبو عبدالله الحسين مولة عمار الكربلاقي And he'll shed some light As to why they do Majlis Every night during the month of Ramadhan Peace be upon you Peace be upon you So I ask you Why do you do Majlis Day in Ramadhan People ask me Ramadhan There was no suitable for it But why did you choose A day in Ramadhan And why do you choose Majlis أبا عبدالله Of course there is a need For the past ten years It was a period That they don't have Majlis After days in Ramadhan So we chose A group from خدام الحسين The Sheikh Abbas al-Mu'min And Mu'lah Hazem al-Karbala'i To hold a Majlis And hold all the youth of Karbala And hold their traditions And this will be the suitable For the whole month of Ramadhan And we will prepare For the birth of Imam Al-Hassan ليلتين عدنة And the days of Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib Peace be upon him And three or four nights To be in this place And hold all the traditions In every two thousand In addition to the letter There is a reason That we say That it is Karbala The city of Imam Al-Hassan And the neighborhood of Imam Al-Hassan It is the capital Of the Al-Hussain And we will try To do as much as we can I hope it will be God willing To be in the system Of her disease And her greatness God willing Mu'lah was saying That Before they started these Majlis There was no way Together The youth of Karbala The youth would end up Going to cafes During these nights End up going Home straight here Without spending time Remembering the Ahl al-Bayt So they thought Together With the sheikh Abbas Mu'min Al-Hassan The flag bearers of Karbala To bring the youth together Every night During the month of Ramadhan Two nights In remembrance of the Walada Of Imam Al-Hassan And the rest of the month In عزاء And in عباد Of the Ahl al-Bayt Peace And blessings be upon them And insha'Allah We are granted The Shafa'ah Of Fatma Al-Zahra For this act On the day of judgment شكراً جزيلاً


Hey, everybody. How's it going? So, so it's Monday. Okay, so we used to have a mobile showcase back in the day. After the reorg, we created a reading showcase, a discovery had its own showcase, we're like, well, let's merge these two things. And then the questioner was like, well, why don't we have reading, discovery and editing all get together and do a showcase? So, okay, let's give it a shot. So this is our first attempt at doing that. It may or may not go smoothly. Apologies if we have any issues and if it's a bit bumpy. But these showcases are really meant to be informal, people come and show what they've been working on either for their work work, or for their like 10% time where they're doing research projects, which may not apply to media. We're planning to use the etherpad that's attached to the meeting invitation for people to ask questions, so we can actually get through more of this. So if you do a demo, hop in the etherpad after you're done with your demo and respond to questions inside of the etherpad, I don't know if we're going to break etherpad by having 100 people connect to it, but we'll see. Yeah, who knows? So we'll give that a shot. If you are presenting, there is a connection up here, like if you're presenting from the room, there's a connection up here. You'll want to come plug in and speak into this microphone. So I guess I will be the person probably holding the microphone up next to you. If you are speaking from this room, you'll just have to come up and do your demo. If you're on, well, whoever is speaking, that's like who gets recorded and who gets presented to everyone else. I would suggest if you are not presenting that you actually shut down your video right now, just because it results in higher quality video generally speaking. So yeah, again, this is meant to be informal. So you're here with people who are interested to hear what you're talking about. This is not a time to necessarily critique the judge. It's a time to just show off what you've been working on. So with that said, I think Yuri was the first person actually to be doing a demo. Is Yuri on the line? Yes. Okay, I'm going to mute my microphone. Can you guys see me and hear me okay? Yeah, go for it. All right. I'm about to share my entire screen. Okay. Can you see my screen now? I hope you can. I need some feedback. All good? Yes. Okay, excellent. Okay. So I've been working on maps and graphs for a while, and this is the very first little result that I want to share with you. Just two days ago, a mobile team launched their browser, their browser, sorry, browser Android app with the map support in it. And we see a major spike in the blue line. I'm sorry, green line. Green line is what shows how many unique users we have. And as you can see, we're now up to about 1.3 million files a day. Not that much really, but the servers are totally taking about 2% usage. Now, the interesting stuff. I've been working on maps on an interesting maps plugin extension to allow users to insert maps into the pages. So as you can see here, we have a green area with a phone zone, and you see a museum, like exploratorium, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you can even have something more fun like, I don't know, the cats, it's always fun. You can play a video here. It actually plays classical music when you click on it. Next on, this is how it's actually done. It's actually very simple, maps. There's a, oops, nothing is important. I probably shouldn't interrupt. Map tag is inserted. You just specify I want the map of this size at this coordinates, make it interactive, and then here you just write standard GeoJSON with styling it. It's not perfect at this point, but it shows the potential. Also, allow something more interesting like this with hiding everything else out and just showing some useful points of interest for the wiki voyage style. The wiki voyage actually is a big target for this, and because of them, we can allow multiple types of maps. You just define different groups. It says right here group A, group B, and you say here show the full map, here show just the map with group A or these groups, whatever. Now switching to the graphs. Graphs are actually live and have been live for almost a year now. This is this old style graphs. This is what people have been creating. There's a graph chart template that you can use to draw some basic graphs. There's also maps. That's old news, and you can already use it. But now we have new stuff. Well, this is another pie chart. People have been playing with pie charts for different classes. But the fun stuff is something I just did recently. Because of the page view API, you can now draw graphs like this, like usage of the main page, a viewing of the main page or of the current page or whatever. Or you can do interactive graphs, something like click to play. Thanks to Julian and Moise for helping with this and making it much nicer and cleaner interface. And you can say, oh, just zoom in into this area or that area. Or show me the map of the United States and show all the flights, how they connect with the cities. And you can see, oh, this is how this is where all the flights go, like from Ankara. Or something like this. This is my other favorite graph where family size versus productivity rate versus life expectancy. And you can play with it and see how these things are done. And I am done. Thank you very much. So sorry. Thanks, Yuri. It looks like our next demo is on guided path dialogue. Is that in the office or online? That's, can you hear me? Yep. Yeah, so I'm remote. I'll just share my screen with you. I seem to have to add an extension. Can I use your screen sharing? Just a sec. Sorry. Here we go. Can you see my screen? Not yet. Yes. Okay. All right. So, in visual editor, as well as simply editing text, you can edit more exciting things, for example, math equations.  And to show you what the old math editor looked like, I'm going to give you an example with hieroglyphics. There are basically automatic editors when you click on a node such as this. And you simply have an input box. And if you know the syntax of the thing you're editing, then you can just type away and edit it. However, if you're not familiar with the syntax, then you're kind of on your own now. So we thought with math, we would try to improve on that. The syntax behind editing a math equation is later. And here is what the new dialogue looks like. All right. So let's say I want to add a new equation or a new formula, let's say, sum of x. That was easy. I knew what to write there. So I just typed just as before. Now let's say, actually, no, I don't want to do sum of x. I want to do sum of log of x. However, I don't know how to write log. Now I have this handy menu down here and I can find the log button. That's how we write log. There we go. Sum of log of x. So basically, this menu has a whole bunch of buttons, different symbols that you can insert. Some of them are simple, like the log one simply inserts the command. Some of them do something a little bit more exciting. What if I wanted to do log base x? Well, then I can highlight the x, click on this one, log base x of y, and so on. So the idea is that someone who either is not very familiar with latex or is familiar with latex but doesn't know every single command that they could possibly need, they won't have to look it up. They can just use this menu. In addition, we also have some amount of error notification. You can see if you've typed something that was incorrect. And we have more exciting layouts down at the bottom. Let's say we want to enter a simple matrix and then we can just set it up or something. There are other things you can do with a math node other than inputting the formula. You can change how it displays and so we have an options tab as well. We can give it an idea as well. And that's the new math dialogue. That pretty much concludes what I have to say. Okay, cool. All right. Next up we have Ron on CrossFit notifications. We only have a Mac up here. So it's the option would probably be to go to another room. You want to give that a shot? You want to wait until after the next presenter? Okay. This is how we do it. I think Ron is sprinting right now. Okay. It looks like we have a Ron. You're muted at the moment, but we do see your video. Oh, yeah. Okay. I was muted there. All right. I'm going to try to share my screen here. Can you guys see my screen now? Yes. Yes. Awesome. Okay. So I'm going to do a quick demo of what we're working on in the collaboration team where we have a redesign of the notification panel almost ready to roll out. And that looks like this. Ignore the Chrome rendering bug. I'm working on that. I swear it's a bug in Chrome. We have some new UI stuff to do with notifications that we're going to be rolling out very soon. But the exciting thing that I wanted to show was that I have a three-weekie setup on this laptop. And if I go over here, it will show me that I have messages from a different wiki. And it will show me notifications about things that happened on other wikis. And if I go and think of myself from a different account on a different wiki, then I will hopefully now see that I think myself from a different account. So that's that. That's cross-week notifications. I should not take credit for any of this. The UI work was done by Moriel. And the backend work was mostly done by Kanal. And this will be coming to wiki near you in the month or so. Awesome. Just a second while we get set up. Installing extension. Never mind. Okay. Okay. We're good to go. All right. Here you go. Hello. So this is something that the discovery team has been investigating a little bit last week. When I go to the portal page, the top 10 wikis order is basically based on the week worth of page views. So sorted by the last week page views or whenever we pull the stats week long of stats of page views. And that's what determines the order. But what we think is this is why this is nice. This is a bit done for most users because everybody is very familiar with English Wikipedia. So it works for all of us. But if you're in a much smaller country or you don't speak English, you might never be interested in going to the English Wikipedia. So the idea is we can read navigator languages, which are the users' preferred languages. And we can try to eventually find that there is a wiki for your preferred language and try to put it more prominent on the page. So based on the navigator languages and here this navigator prefer languages are just English. So it actually doesn't change anything on the page. But on my personal computer since I'm French, I actually have English and French. And so for me, if I go here, see English on the top left and French on the top right. So put some examples. And for example, somebody in Hawaii, if he wants to see first the websites in Hawaii and second in English, and that's how the page could look like for him. And somebody in Catalonia in Spain would eventually see the Catalan wiki and the Spanish wiki before anything else. Same thing for, for example, somebody in Ukraine who would like to see in Ukrainian and Russian or somebody in India. So what we noticed is based on stats that we collect 60% of all that go to that page, don't do anything. And 30% of the people actually search something on that page. And 10% will click on a link. So this is the way actually increase that 10% rate. And yeah, I would like to get feedback from everyone. And eventually this is something that we could, we could write an AB test for a week and, and see if it improves something for the user experience. Right? That's it. Okay. So next, better type ahead on portals. Yep. Can everybody hear me? We can hear you. Oh, you can. Good. Cool. So yeah, I'm on and along with Julian also been working on the addict on the portal. Sorry, Chrome saying I have to add an extension to share my screen. Okay, has been added entire screen. Okay. And as Julian said, we do want to increase engagement on the portal page. And one of the things that Julian is tackling is the languages. We already have a better kind of more prominent search bar, maybe help people, you know, search for stuff. Oh, I gave it away. And today I'll be showing you the better type ahead on the search page, which is similar to the mobile page. So if I type in star wars, you have the thumbnail along with the title and description of the, of the wiki. So this has been on here, the cool, as opposed to what it is right now, which is just, just the title of the thing you're searching for. And this is also very similar to the mobile Wikipedia. You styled it a little bit for consistency as well. And here we go. And hopefully this will go in a AB test and we'll see if it actually does improve the conversion rate of the, of the search as well. That is the better type ahead. And that's the better type ahead. Thanks. Next up geo search over a bounding box. I hear you and see your screen. Excellent. So actually what I'm talking about is not ready to show you how it's working. I'm just telling you that I'm getting close to making a commit on a feature that will allow us to search not around a certain point, but within a bounding box. This could make it easier for apps, for example, to display on points of interest in a shape that's more resembles a phone screen, which is, has one side larger than the other one. So yeah, expect more very soon. Thanks. Tillman section usage data. Okay, trying to screen share. Can you hear me? We hear you. Awesome. Yeah, so I want to briefly show some new type of data on what people are reading on Wikipedia. Small thing, but I think it's pretty interesting. This is a byproduct of work with it on mobile web with John Robson. So on mobile web, as you know, you see the article and the subsequent sections are collapsed. So you have to click on to expand on a section of the index. So this is the World War Two article. And it's pretty long. And so we instrumented this. We have an event for the opening and closing actions. First thing we found out is that only about 40% of readers open a section. 60% are happy with only the least action apparently. Tillman, can I interrupt you for just a second?  Yeah, that's a nice screen. Okay. Okay, I try again. I did not know you need the extension. I'm sorry. So that's installing now. I just keep talking while it's trying to install. Okay, thanks. Okay, so Tillman, are you still there? It looks like we may need to switch to the next presentation while Tillman is reset. Okay. It looks like Eric to the bottom of the list, James, singletown. Just a second. Set up. Hello. Oh, good heavens. Zoom level is a little small. Is there any chance we could get the video feed bump from 400 pixels? I'm sure it's somewhere here. It looks okay. You could just. It's not okay. There's enough content on the screen. No content on the screen. All you're seeing is system preferences. Before there was. That's a bit better. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, Visual Editor has existed for a little while now, and ever since the beginning, we added a hack to MediaWiki to totally disrupt user experience and add a second edit tab, which is incredibly ugly, incredibly ugly. We in fact broke Apple's scraping of our content by adding a second edit tab to sections, which was unfortunate. And it's been played by misery and pain and sadness. And we've always wanted to get rid of it for several reasons, most notably because presenting users with two buttons that do basically the same thing is a bad service to our users and it's assigned to our services. And we now feel we're getting towards the point where it's ready to provide that switch. And so we've now created a single edit tab. So, one wiki with two edit tabs magically becomes one wiki with one edit tab. And so this edit button will do one of two things. It will either take you to Visual Editor or the wiki text editor based on your preferences. So if I click edit, I've got it set up by default for new users to take them to the wiki text editor. And it then prompts you with this dialogue, which is being reworked language-wise.  So if I click edit again, it will just open the wiki editor. But if I switch, it switches into the visual editor. And then if I click edit another time, it will again load the visual editor. And this also applies to section edit links. And if I then click an old version of page and click edit, this will also work. But if I do something that we don't currently support, like I want to undo that edit, we'll go, ugh, we don't know how to fix that. And so we dump it into the wiki text editor. Currently slightly inelegantly, but in the future it'll be pretty promise. And you're still able to do switching back and forth between edits as you go. He says, making a change, you can't actually see switching into visual editor. I changed this thing there, honest. Anyway, that's everything. Thank you very much. Okay. Michael, Michael, for getting the video back up. Okay, ready. Michael, we're only hearing clicks and pops over here. And it's real clean. Okay, do you read me? Yes. Okay. And can you see the emulator? Yes. Okay. And is it clear? It is in the room. Yes. Okay, cool. Yeah. So I wanted to show the pop up integrating Wiktionary content, which is one of the Android teams Q2 goals and what I've been working on the last sprint. So to get right into it, let's say I'm reading about a tetric work, and I want to know what some of the words mean. So I'll highlight the word in addition to where we have the copy and share menu items, there will now be a define menu item in the context menu. I'm just using the creative comments icon as a placeholder for now. Katie's created a define icon that we're going to put in probably this afternoon. And so I'll click on that and I'll get a pop up based on the same component as the link preview. It's a native component. Everything in here is native. No WebView. And it'll just give me a stripped down version of the Wiktionary content. Yeah, so let's say I want to know the meaning of valence. Now I've got all the definitions for the current language. I'm browsing in from Wiktionary for this word.  Some with examples were available. Looks like another group of nouns with a different sense. Just to give you a sense of what's going on on the back end, this is built on the content service. And ultimately what it's doing is the content service is requesting the Parsoid HTML, getting it back, and then stripping a whole lot of stuff away and just sending a really minimal JSON response to the mobile client, which basically only contains what you see here. So it's getting this stuff really efficiently. And that's that. If there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Thanks. Let's take the questions to the etherpad. Okay, Tillman, do you want to give it another try? Okay, looks like Tillman has dropped off. Eric. Sure, we'll set up a screen share here. Is that coming across? Yes. So we, within search, we've been working on replacing or coming up with a replacement for the autocomplete. Currently the autocomplete feature that you see on Wikis in the top right corner here is always a pre strict prefix search, which means if you misspell something or anything like that, you basically just don't get any suggestions. So this Thursday we're shipping out a new beta feature called the completion suggestor. It'll show up on your beta features and you just turn it on with a click. And it basically, it allows you to, so we were to So we were to type in like queen on the left side here, I have the old prefix search. So if you're to do queen, you get a strict list. This is also a, there's not much scoring going on there. It's just putting things up. If we do it with a new completion suggestor, I guess there's two new things with this. One is that it handles a fuzziness, which I'll show in a moment. It also handles scoring a bit better and better in that we can, we can generate scores for all these things. And then we sort them based on those generated scores. The scoring algorithms still going to need a bit of work, but it pulls up things that are quite interesting like Queen Elizabeth, Queen the band, Queen's University, whereas Queen on the prefix search. Also interesting, there's some other ones that, like Quercus rober probably should not be the top result for anything, except unless you really type that some other demos though, if you were to type something wrong, like if you were to type green day, but without a space between the green and the day, it'll still find the green day. Even if you drop a letter out of there and you miss spell it, we're still going to find the things that you're looking for. And so we're hoping this is going to help people to find things a little bit better. This is one of the reasons we haven't done too much with this in the past is that performance is a serious concern for this. We do something like a hundred million prefix searches per day based on this. This is a graph from elastic search for somebody that was working on adjusting this. And we can see the completion suggestor can actually be more performant than prefix search can be. That's because this is based entirely on an in memory algorithm called the finite state transducer. I won't get too much into it, but I'll post a link to a blog post that explains how that all works. If anybody's curious, this is kind of what the data structure looks like internally. It's a directed a graph, but yeah, that's our new completion suggestor. It'll be coming out on Thursday, hopefully. We're fully expecting to anyways, and hopefully it'll help people find things a little bit better. Okay, very cool. Thanks everybody for doing your demos. We will get this out onto YouTube and comments after a bit. If you did do a demo or if you have a question, please add details to the showcase on the etherpad. And I think we can actually wrap early, which it's not something we can always do. Thanks again. Have a good day.


Yeah, I'm good Stay on his act You I have no coverage you need to get that weapon Sorry