Hello everyone, my name is Katie Comanci and currently I am an ecosystem advocate for the CNCF. I have joined CNCF quite recently and my responsibility within this role is to grow the end user community but more importantly to close the gap between the end user feedback and the projects currently residing within the CNCF landscape. Today I would like to talk about the building blocks of DX, more specifically the Kubernetes evolution from the CLI to GitOps. And to do so, I would like to firstly introduce the cluster CLI known as KIPCTL and how it provides this native way of interacting with Kubernetes. I would like to follow that with the DX enhancement section, which is going to focus on how can we further extend the KIPCTL commands and wrap them through graphical representations such as web and terminal UIs. And lastly, I would like to conclude by introducing how can we automate most of the operations within the clusters, by talking about the application ops, and in this section I'm going to mention the click ops, GitOps, and even sheet ops, which is a way to manage your clusters using Google Spreadsheets. Before I move forward with the topic, I would like to introduce the ecosystem which allowed this evolution all the way from the CLI to GitOps. If we look six years ago, the container orchestrator framework space was very heavily diversified. We had tools such as Docker's firm, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, and all of them provided a viable solution to our containers with scale. However, Kubernetes stood the lead in defining the principles of how to run these containerized workloads. Nowadays, Kubernetes is known for its portability and adaptability, but more importantly for its approach towards declarative configuration and automation. And this can actually be seen in numbers. When you look at the CNCF survey in 2019, more than 50% of the companies are using Kubernetes in production. The other 42% are actually prototyping Kubernetes as a viable solution to move forward. When a transition tour is the contributor community, there are more than 2,000 engineers actively collaborating towards future build-out and bug fixing. And when we're looking to then use the community, more than 23,000 attendees were registered at the KeepCons around the world. Now these were the in-person events which were in Europe, China, and North America. And this flourishing community around Kubernetes has been extremely beneficial because over time, multiple tools were built around it to extend its functionalities. And this created what today we know as the cloud-native landscape, which resides under the CNCF umbrella or cloud-native computing foundation. Now if you look into all of this tooling, some of them are going to provide similar capabilities such as service mesh, networking, storage, runtime, and many more. And a more diverse tooling that means we're going to have a more diverse user base as well. Because engineers with different capabilities will need to interact with the cluster, either to manage the cluster or deploy to the cluster. As such, we can identify free main personas or free main user groups here. The application developers, application operators, and infrastructure operators. The application developers are the engineers which don't necessarily need to interact with the cluster. However, they will need to be aware that the application is going to be containerized. As such, they will focus on the business logic, but at the same time, they will need to be aware to develop endpoints such as liveness and readiness probes. The application operators on the other side are the engineers which will interact with the cluster and deploy the application. They will be aware of all the resources within the cluster and any components that are necessary to make sure that the application is up and running at all time. And infrastructure operators are the engineers which will not only understand all the resources within the cluster, but they will be aware how to create, manage, configure, and delete a cluster from scratch. Now, usually speaking, the application developers and application operator roles sometimes are overlapped. However, it does not always the case in current organizations. Hence, we need to segregate them at the moment. At this stage, we require one set of tooling which will allow us to interact with the cluster based on all of these end user groups. And currently, this is provisioned by cluster CLI known as kubectl, which provides a way to interact and manage given into subjects. We can think about kubectl as a way to close the gap between the end user terminal and a cluster if running locally in a public cloud or on a data center. And to connect to those clusters will require a kubectl file, which will have all the metadata necessary, such as the APA server endpoint and authentication data such as certificates or tokens. Usually the kubectl file can be found in the .cube folder or it can be specified as a flag for the kubectl flag or alternatively it can be consumed as an environmental variable. When we refer to kubectl, we refer to 6CLI, which currently resides under the Kubernetes Community umbrella. Currently, kubectl offers more than 40 operations and these are going to be actions we can perform on top of the resources such as create, delete, run, get and many more. And these operations are associated with more than 70 flags, which will allow this tailored and custom experience. Quite limiting, but still it will provide that. We'll be able to either provide more information on creating a cluster, we'll be able to specify more details when we try to get information from the cluster. But more importantly, with kubectl we have the support for declarative and imperative management techniques. When we refer to the imperative technique, that means that we're going to operate on the live object straight away. So this is going to be an engineer which will either create or delete the resource and this is going to be straight away visible within the cluster. The good thing about this approach is the fact that it can have a very quick upscale for our developers. They'll be able to deploy their application, if it's Dockerite especially, they'll be able to deploy their application to the cluster immediately. However, on the downside of this approach is the fact that it has no source for the configuration. So if you'd like to share this configuration with other teams or with a wider organization, it's going to be difficult for us. And that's why we have the declarative approach which allows the operations on file stored locally. So we have the full representation of our manifest in YAML and we'll be able to apply them to the cluster. The good thing about this approach is the fact that it allows the directory level operations. Usually when we deploy an application, we're going to have a deployment and that's going to be associated with a service account, configuration map. Maybe we're going to have a secret and ingress and that's already more than six components we require. With the imperative approach, we'll have to create all of these resources manually. However, with the declarative approach, we have directory level operations which will allow us to create all of these resources with one command. However, on the downside of this approach is the fact that we have quite a high learning curve because it requires an in-depth understanding of the nested YAML configuration and it can present some challenges while we debug and troubleshoot our manifests. Now cluster Ctl is a cluster. Ctl is a great way to explore the cluster assets. However, it is generally and wrongly assumed that everyone interacting with communities is going to be fluent in Ctl. A clear path was discerned from the community from this point to further enrich and extend the cluster DX to make it available inclusive to engineers of all levels. As such, when we mention DX enhancement, we can refer to four main principles. Simplicity, optimization, transparency and durability. Simplicity means that any changes or any new tooling that we introduced in track to the cluster needs to remove some of the complexity rather than making it more difficult for our engineers to get information from the cluster. Optimization is all about finding patterns and trying to simplify them. For example, if your engineers always need to look for the CPU and memory for an application, instead of grabbing the YAML of a pod and looking for the right files but for the right configuration, we'll be able to write for example a plugin which will date for them with one command. Transparency is a principle which should be true at all times. When we introduce new techniques to interact with the cluster, our engineers should always be aware where the application is deployed and how they can connect to it. It is going to be a major blocker if we don't have the transparency because we're going to become the bottleneck when the application team will require to troubleshoot, for example, during a production incident. And the last principle I would like to mention is durability. Any changes that we introduce, they should just be the building blocks of the interactions in the features. It should be something which is easily extensible, but more importantly, it's something which is going to stick with our developers. It's quite important to introduce these changes frequently but with a good pacing to remove the developer fatigue as well. I want to refer to the DX enhancement with CubeCityl, we can identify two main areas, extensions and wrappers. The extensions are going to be represented by CubeCityl plugins while the wrappers are going to be represented by web and terminal UIs. I would like to dive a bit more into both of these areas. Now, as mentioned, if you'd like to extend your CubeCityl commands, then you're going to write a plugin which will be able to write these custom extensions for your end users to consume. The more important thing about plugins is the fact that they can be written in any language. Underneath, they're just a binary and as long as they have the right file name and are in the right location, they'll be identified by CubeCityl and the end users will be able to utilize that. But the key point about the plugins or the extensions is the fact that we can really provide a custom DX which will focus on our simplicity and optimization principles. Let's look at how CubeCityl plugin could be written. Here I have an extremely simple shell script which is going to have an echo command. However, I'd like to draw your attention towards the path and the file name of this particular plugin. The location of the file should be in one of the binary folders defined in the path environment variable. As such in this example, I have it under slash user local bin. And the file name for a plugin should be always prefixed by CubeCityl followed by the actual command. So here we create a greetings plugin and the file name is obviously going to be CubeCityl greetings. Once the file is in the right path with the right naming, we don't need to do any install. It will be automatically identified by CubeCityl and we can validate that by doing a list of our plugins. And you can see the first result is going to be our greetings followed by any other plugins we have installed in our machine. And to test that our plugin is working is just enough for us to do a CubeCityl greetings and this will go to our shell script. We'll execute that and print our echo command. As simple as that. Now at this stage we could extend or we could share some of these plugins with wider organization. However, over time there are plugins which were found useful across the community and it was required to have a centralized mechanism to collect, index and distribute these plugins. And currently this capability is provisioned by crew. You can think about crew as a service discovery for plugins. Currently it allows the install of more than 90 custom commands for CubeCityl and a cool feature about crew as well is the fact that it has its own version manager. So you can have it's your kind of separate way of managing your plugin for crew rather than to make it very similar to your project versioning. And if you look into the most widely used plugins at the moment, there are plenty of them. But as you can see, Cert Manager has taken quite abruptly, I would say. It has more than 700,000 downloads at the moment. And Cert Manager is a plugin which allows you the management of the TLS for a Kubernetes cluster. Ingress EngineX is another plugin which allows the inspection of your EngineX controller within Kubernetes. Crew, which is our plugin to install other plugins, so we have a slight inception here, has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. So astonishing amount of number. Tail is another plugin which allows the streaming of logs from a collection of pods, while score is another tool which allows the static analysis of our YAML manifests. Now, if we'd like to distribute our greetings plugin with crew, we'll be required to write a plugin CRD for customer service definition. Now, this plugin is going to have two main areas of information, and this is a trim output of our CRD. The first section is going to be informative, while the second one is going to be a guide on how to install the plugin on different operating systems. As such, in the informative part, we're going to have the version, the page to our repository along with short description. While in the platform side, we're going to have information on how to install our plugin. So for example, we're going to point to the right binary, we're going to point it to as well to our shell script, and we'll be able to see that in more details during the demo, which follows at the moment. Now, currently, let's see how to distribute our greetings plugin. To do so, I'm just going to list all the plugins I have currently available on my machine. I don't have the greetings plugin, and I can prove it valid at that by doing a crew list, which will list all the plugins which were installed crew. The greetings plugin is not there anymore. Now let's look at our plugins CRD. As mentioned, we're going to have two main areas. This is going to be the informative part. So as mentioned, we're going to have version home page, a short description and a long description which probably can be useful if you have multiple commands for your plugin, and you can actually have this health message described over here. And the second part is going to be how can we install our plugin on particular operating systems. Here we're going to focus on Darwin and Linux operating system, mainly. We're going to point it to our binary. So this is going to be a zip folder of all our files. And we're going to have a check some to make sure that our integrity of the files is going to be kept all times. Because underneath it does an extract operation from our zip, we can specify what we want to extract from that folder, and we can specify course we actually need to specify our exactly binary that's going to be executed for our QCTL command. Now let's install this particular plugin with crew with that. I'm going to do a QCTL crew install. And I'm going to point it to the manifest. That we have seen which is plug in the channel. Cool. And to validate that I'm just going to do a crew list. We see our greetings plugin with its version as well. And of course I can do a plugin list to be identified as well just over here and deferred validate that our plugin works. We're just going to do a QCTL greetings. You will go to our shell script and output our Hello Cloud native message. Now this pretty much concludes the demo for the crew plugin. Before I move forward, I would like to leave a few takeaways about the QCTL plugins. One of the most important fact about QCTL plugins is the fact that we can further extend our CLI and provide this tailored experience for our end users. Another quite widespread practice is to use QCTL plugins in association with Alesis. So we can have sure the commands to interact with the cluster. And another thing worthwhile to mention is the fact that we currently cannot override the existing QCTL commands. So QCTL get pods is always going to perform the same operation will not be able to change that. However, we still have a bunch of plugins which are just one install way of crew. Now when referred to the wrappers, this usually focus on a graphical representation of our cluster state. So the wrappers are how can we visualize some of the resources by using the QCTL commands. And as mentioned, it's all about this operational view of the cluster state. So it's going to be easier for our end users to understand what's happening with our resources. You can think about QCTL wrappers as a point of presence for the clusters. And this is quite important because currently within the team, we're not going to have just one Kubernetes cluster. We're at least going to have three clusters per region. So we're going to have a sandbox staging and production and this is the minimum. And this can be replicated by the amount of regions we'd like to distribute our cluster to. So we easily can have 10 to 15 clusters nowadays with the terminal UIs or web and terminal UIs actually will be able to quickly interchange between these clusters and interact with them. Another cool feature about the wrappers is the fact that they are developer first. Now when you have a UI of your cluster state, you have a finite amount of clicks that you can actually perform within your dashboard. As such, it can really have these developer first experience because our engineers will be able to explore what's happening in the cluster in finite world of actions. But more importantly, QCTL wrappers currently, most of them actually are providing a basic coverage of the QCTL operations. So mainly it's going to focus on the read only commands such as QCTL get. However, it provides some support for operations such as scale, debate and port forward. And we'll look currently into the ecosystem. There are plethora of tools by provisioning the UI capabilities from each octant is one of the most prominent tools. It has been developed by VMware actually by their SRA team. And in addition to the presentation of the cluster state for the developers, they have a sections for the Kubernetes operators as well. So they'll be able to see the nodes and any information associated with that. Canines is another terminal UI actually, which has a wrapper around all the QCTL commands. And lens is another tool, which is a Kubernetes ID, and it can be installed on any operating system as a standalone application. Now at this stage, we can extend and visualize the end user journey within the cluster. However, all the operations we've been performing have been manually. Even if you introduce plugins, you'd have to manually type them to interact with the cluster. And if you'd like to visualize it for a dashboard, you still have to click through different menus to understand what's happening underneath. When we're talking about the application deployment, we need to think about automation and how can we automate most of the operation for applications to be live in the cluster. But for that, the next organic step is to actually introduce templating because as mentioned, we're going to have multiple clusters and will require you to tailor the configuration for those clusters. And currently these capabilities are provisioned by configuration managers such as Hell and Customize. Now these two tools have completely different ways of provisioning the template capabilities. However, Helm at the moment uses a template-driven approach, which means we're going to have the YAML representation with the options to inject values to our templates. Controversial idea here, but Helm tilts slightly towards the imperative approach. And this is because if you think about a chart that actually includes other charts or it has like, you have a Helm umbrella chart, which actually utilizes other charts as well. You're not going to set every single value. And because of that, most of them are going to be set to their defaults, which means that we're going to use the imperative approach. And the good thing about Helm is the fact that we have a collection of upstream charts, which allows the install of many cloud native applications nowadays with just one command. Customize on the other side uses a template-free approach, meaning that we're going to have the full representation of our manifest, and that's why we're going to have a declarative approach. And the way Customize works, if you'd like to tailor your configuration, that's going to be done through the deep merges. Now, to tailor your application or your deployment for through Helm, you'll have to use multiple values files where if customized, you're going to have a base and multiple overlays. And once we have our templating layer introduced, that means that we can automate the configuration moving forward. And these are provisioned by some of the techniques such as click-ups, skate-ups, and even sheet-ups. Click-ups is a technique which is represented by a collection of clicks through a set of menus. The most important feature about the click-ups technique is the fact that it provides a very powerful DX. Our engineers do not need to care what's happening on the infrastructure there. All of this is going to be abstracted for the UI. However, it's very important to keep a balanced abstraction level, because if we provide too much information for our developers to configure, or if you provide too little information for them to configure, that can actually distort their experience of interacting with the cluster. And with the click-ups approach, it's quite important to think about operations such as configuration storage, rollbacks, and roll forwards. For example, if something goes wrong in production, and if you'd like to use a new version, or if you'd like to refer it to an older version, is this going to be represented by a myriad of clicks, or is this going to be something you'll be able to restore from the state stored somewhere? So this is an area to be photographed with this approach. With the GitOps technique, actually, some of these issues are tackled. The GitOps approach is represented by a set of Git repositories, which represent the desired state of our application. The key point about the GitOps technique is the fact that it's PR-based rollout. That means that the delta between our developer terminal and the cluster is just one PR away. And with GitOps technique, we have a more powerful automatic reconciliation. The GitOps model works with pull approach, which means that if it identifies any changes to the Git repositories, it will be able to identify them and apply them to the cluster. But more importantly, we're going to have a version state of our cluster, meaning that we always can revert using Git to a version of the cluster which was up and running and with no issues in production. And currently, the GitOps capabilities are provisioned by tools such as Flux and Argo CD. Flux is a tool provisioned by Weaveworks and currently is a sandbox CNCF project, while Argo CD currently moved to incubation stage. And to end on a lighter note, I would like to introduce quite a controversial technique, which is sheet ops. And sheet ops aims to control the Kubernetes state using Google spreadsheets. It's a very new technique. It hasn't been developed that much, but at the moment if its mission is to replace YAML with spreadsheets. So if you heard or heard of your engineers complain about YAML, you can allow them to manage your Kubernetes state with spreadsheets. And to actually showcase this particular model, I would like to use the sheet ops technique to scale an application currently. So at the moment, I have, let me just move this slightly. I have already my cluster linked to a Google spreadsheet where I can see, as mentioned here, I can see all of my namespaces. And currently in my terminal, you'll be able to visualize all my pods in my Argo CD namespace. And currently, sheet ops actually only allows the scale operations. However, it's something you truly care about. You can further extend it to support other operations and techniques as well. So if I'd like to increase my Argo CD Redis amount of replicas to three instead of one, I'm just changing it to my desired state in my Google spreadsheet. And this, as you can see, is already applied to my cluster. And the same goes with the scale down operation. I can scale it too. And this will be able to be identified. And it will delete a cluster. It will delete a pod straight away. Now, this pretty much concludes the evolution all the way from the CLI to techniques such as GitOps. We started by introducing a native way of interacting with the cluster by using kubectl. But more importantly, we focused on how can we further enrich and extend that with the kubectl plugins and the wrappers represented or translated through web and terminal wise. But more importantly, we see that we have multiple techniques nowadays which really tries to automate most of these operations by introducing techniques such as click ops, GitOps and even sheet ops. And all of this evolution has been possible because Kubernetes has a declarative configuration schema that really advocates for extensibility and the optimization of the end user journey within a cluster. If you have any questions in regards to this talk, please reach out. I'm going to be available on social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn. As well, you'll find a more detailed blog about this particular talk on my meeting account. As well, I'm writing any other blogs on the new tooling that I'm exploring and you'll be able to find them there. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.


Amen. Keep your place there in 1 Kings chapter 3. We'll be looking at this story throughout the sermon this evening. We're talking about Solomon's prayer tonight. We've been looking at famous prayers in the Bible and seeing what we can learn from these prayers. So before we talk about the topic of the sermon tonight, let's just look at the beginning of the story here. Look at 1 Kings chapter 3 and look at verse number 5. So here we see Solomon. He's just taken over the kingdom from his father David. And we see Solomon has a dream where the Lord appears to him at night. Look at verse number 5. It says in Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night and God said, Ask what I shall give thee. So here God basically comes to Solomon in a dream and he says, What do you want?    You know, that's what a thought that comes into people's mind. I mean, there was a game that we used to play when we were kids. I don't know if kids these days play it. Maybe I saw too many cartoons or something when I was a kid. But there's a game that we used to play when we were just little kids. It'd be like, What would you do if you had three wishes? You know, what would you ask for? Do you ever play this game with your friends?  You know, you asked for a million dollars. That's the first thing, right? You probably need more than that now, right?  I was like, No, of course, the first thing I would ask for is more wishes. Then you just have as many wishes as you want, you can do whatever you want, right? But look, God actually comes to Solomon and this actually happens to him, right? I mean, he comes to Solomon says, What do you want?  You know, he's playing playing that game with Solomon and we sit there and we say, Well, it must be nice. But guess what? In Matthew chapter seven of verse number seven, God says, Ask what? Ask. He says, He says, Ask and it will be given to you seek and you shall find. He says to us says to us knock and it shall be opened unto you. So God has said the same thing to us before we even begin the sermon that he said to Solomon. Okay, so we're not anything. Solomon's not anything unique. The difference though, is that Solomon was very smart in the way that he talked to the Lord and what he actually asked for. So that's what we're going to look at this evening. But just laying the groundwork there.  You know, this is the problem with us. This is why we're having a sermon series on prayer in the first place. Go back to first Kings chapter three, look at verse number six. So God says to Solomon, he's like, What do you want? Ask what I shall give thee. And Solomon says, look what he says in verse six says thou has showed unto thy servant David my father great mercy. According as he walked before thee in truth and in righteousness and in uprightness of heart with thee, and thou has kept him with this great kindness that thou has given him a son to sit on his throne as it is this day. And now Lord my God, thou has made thy servant king instead of David my father. But I am and I am but a little child. I know not how to go out or come in. And thy servant is in the midst of thy people, which thou has chosen a great people that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude. Has he asked for anything? I just read you three verses in the Bible.  And look what Solomon does. What does he do? What was some of the first things that we learned in this sermon series? Address God with respect. He doesn't just say, Give me this. He goes and he addresses God with respect.  You've been great to my father. And then look what he says in verse number eight. He says it twice. He says it in verse number eight. And he says it in verse number nine. He's the king. Think about this for a second. He's the king of the nation right now. Solomon is the king. And he says in the midst of who? He says in the midst of thy people. He literally addresses the nation that he rules over as God's people. He acknowledges to God, these are your people. And in verse number seven, he's like, I am nothing. He says, I'm just a little kid. I'm just a little child. He's like, How am I supposed to rule your people? He says to God. He's getting great respect to God. He's asked for nothing at this point. Look at verse number 12. Behold, I have done, I'm sorry, verse number nine. Therefore, give thy servant. And how does he address himself? Give this powerful king of this nation. He says, Give thy servant. He's like, Lord, I'm your servant. Just listen to how he speaks to the Lord. Listen to how he comes to God here. Give thy servant an understanding heart to judge who? Again, thy people. He's saying to God, that means your. He's saying, God, help me rule your people. Not my people, not my kingdom. He's not claiming, look, what have we learned from all these men and all these women? You give credit to the Lord. You give credit to where credit is due. Daniel's same thing. He was very good at just giving all glory and all credit to God all the time. And Solomon is doing that here. This is a pretty smart little kid right here. This is a pretty smart young man. He says, Give thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people. Now he asks. He makes the ask in verse number nine. He says, Give thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people. That I may discern between good and bad. For who is able to judge this, thy so great a people? He asks for something that will benefit something that belongs to the Lord. You see that? What he does? He doesn't ask for anything for himself. He asks for something that will help what? What was another philosophy that we learned? How is your prayer? How is the thing that you are going to ask for? How does that benefit God's kingdom on earth? Didn't we learn that a couple of sermons ago? How does it benefit? You should probably try to make that case. And look, if it doesn't, you just can't think of anything. Oh, you know, maybe we have a problem here. But look at what Solomon does. He says, Give me an understanding heart so I can judge.  He's saying, So I can like rule properly is what he's saying. So I can rule fairly. These people look at verse number 10. And the speech please the Lord. That Solomon had asked this thing. And verse number 11, he says, And God said to him, This is this is the school kids playing the wish game right here. God's like, I figured you were going to ask me these things. Because now I'd asked this thing and has asked not for myself. You know, what were the, what were the wishes that the kids play in the playground? They're like, I want to live forever. Right? I want to have a million dollars.  Those are the answers that the school kids gave. And that's what God said he was expecting right here. He said, And has not asked for thyself a long life, neither has asked riches for thyself, nor had asked the life of dine enemies, you know, just this big, to be this big powerful ruler, but has asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment. He literally instead, God was so pleased because he literally just asked for help with God's kingdom on earth. That's what Solomon asked for. So we see, I mean, we see, before we get started here, we see the exact pattern that we've been talking about throughout these prayers. Just the respect given to the Lord. We see that he went and he made a case. He made a case. Not only did he make a case, he just asked directly for something that would directly benefit the Lord. So this is a very good prayer. Look at verse number 12. How does God respond to it? Is God going to grant this? Is he going to say, okay? He's like, you know, what does he do? Look at verse 12. He says, behold, I have done according to thy words. He says, yes, I'm going to give you that. Lo, I've given thee a wise and understanding heart, so that there is none like thee before thee. So, God goes further now. God goes further. He doesn't just say, yes, I'm going to give you good judgment. Have a nice day. Good luck. He says, I've given thee a wise and understanding heart. That's what he asked for. But so that there was none like thee before thee. Neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee. He said, I've given you the wisest judgment that has ever been before or ever will follow after. Look at verse 13. And I also giveeth thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honor, so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee all thy days. Verse 14. And now this is super important right here. Verse 14. And if thou wilt walk in my ways to keep my statutes and my commandments as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy days. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like the covenant with the land with Israel right here. He says in verse number 12, verse number 13. He's like, I'm going to grant you what you asked for plus all this other stuff that you didn't ask for as long as you obey me. Because I mean how long could your days be according to the Lord? What did you know? What did we find out today? Some kids told us today. Our days could be tomorrow. That's it. Your days could be over now. Your days could be over today. So this all had, you know, this was a contract.  So basically he says yes to Solomon's prayer plus all this extra stuff as long as there's obedience that comes with it. So we're going to talk tonight about things that you should pray for. Things that you should pray for that God will answer positively. I mean, don't we want to pray?  You know, when I pray for something, God answers me in a positive way. Who wouldn't want to say that? So we're going to look tonight using Solomon's example, especially the first part of his prayer and then verse number 14 from the Lord. We're going to look, because look, James chapter 4 says, if we ask but we, but it's not answered right, we ask amiss. That's why. So if God doesn't answer our prayers in a positive way, it's because we're asking for the wrong things. So we want to ask for the right things. Look, prayer is very simple. The answers to our prayer are yes, no, or not now, or wait. Okay, so if the prayers, no, if we're asking for something and it's just no, we're not asking for the right things. God's actually doing us a favor by not, you know, by not letting us hurt ourselves. Okay, so let's look at some things that we should pray for tonight. So, I mean, who wants to waste God's time?  Who wants to waste our own time? Solomon asked for a very smart thing here and we should ask for things that are good for us spiritually and good for God. Okay, and then God will answer in that same positive tone that he answered Solomon, because look, God gave us in Matthew chapter 7, he gave us the same, just ask me, that he gives to Solomon in 1 Kings chapter 3. Okay, so let's have that, that same mentality of what to ask for that Solomon had. So what is the first thing? So, here's the first thing, let's just look at the things that Solomon specifically asked for. Okay, a lot of people think that Solomon asked for wisdom. He didn't ask for wisdom. Okay, let me just give you two things specifically and then I'll kind of give you a methodology of how to ask for right things in your life. The first thing that you should ask for in your life is this, good judgment. You should ask for good judgment in your life. Sometimes I think that this is maybe all the Christian needs right here. It's just good judgment. And Solomon didn't ask for wisdom. You hear people misquote this story all the time. Solomon asked for wisdom, he didn't ask for wisdom, he asked for judgment. He asked for good judgment. You know what he wanted to know? He wanted to know when I'm ruling this people, when I'm ruling, when I'm leading this this nation, I'm going to be put in all these situations and he's like, God I want to know what the right thing to do is in each one of those situations. And then we see an example at the end of First Kings chapter 3 of him putting God's answer in you know into practice with these. I mean because look as a leader, as a leader you get all kinds of weird stuff put in front of you. And I mean you as a leader you want to have good judgment with all these situations. I mean look that's a weird situation that we just read about First Kings chapter 3. Some woman steals another woman's baby and claims it's her own baby and nobody knows whose baby it is. I mean that's weird. That's weird that somebody would do that. And Solomon has good judgment and how to get to the bottom of that situation. Okay so that's the first thing. He asked for good judgment. So take this, we should ask for good judgment. Specifically you should be asking and praying for good judgment in your life all the time. As a Christian, as a Bible-believing Christian you should be asking, Lord help me have good judgment. Help me understand the Bible, how to apply that to my life and make proper decisions in my life. That is a prayer that God will answer positively. Okay but look here's what people do though. You should ask for good judgment. You shouldn't necessarily pray for specific outcomes in your life. Okay does that make sense? I mean it's a much better prayer to ask God to give you discernment and judgment like Solomon did than for you to make prayers in your life like God give me this job. God please you know please Lord just just just give me this one specific job this is what you know look that's what we're that's what we want to do in our lives. But instead you should pray for discernment. You should pray for just the judgment to know you know what the right opportunities are that we should take in our lives. You know I mean that's where we end up saying you know we're like God give me this opportunity or God give me this job or God make this happen or God you know help me this work out like this with this person or whatever that's where God says no and we're like why did he say no? It's like look it says we need to just pray for for judgment. We need to pray for good judgment and then let God you know you know put things in front of us that we can have okay but God show us what the right path is just like he showed Solomon in this first example how Solomon could figure out who's son it was right I mean I'm sure that when Solomon had that idea that very creative idea by the way to figure out who's baby I'm sure that wasn't hard to figure out who son it was I mean he's the king he could execute anybody he can do anything he wants and he says you know divide the child in half and I'm sure he was looking at both of their faces at that moment and I'm sure at that moment it was very easy to see the horror on the the real mother's face in that situation so look a better prayer is to God give us judgment give us a discerning heart as Solomon asked for help me God help me to know what is right I mean you're in a difficult position in your life something's going on there's that you can go this way or you can go that way God help me to discern what's right not God help me go this way because we don't know his way is higher than our ways God use your higher ways to help me discern which way I should go guide me in your wisdom not my own is a prayer that we should use look there's gonna be all kinds of important decisions in all of our lives you know where I mean it's not just where to work it's it's where to live where you know how raising kids just we need we're going to be put in all kinds of weird situations outside of church inside of church we just need to be praying for judgment we need to pray this probably more often like like I said at the beginning of this this topic if we asked humbly for good judgment why would God not say yes to that prayer is what you have to ask yourself okay so look what he did does the Solomon he not only grants him that judgment that discerning heart but he gives him all these extra things okay God was so happy with that ask we need to learn from that example alright this is something I pray for this for myself a lot I pray for this for other people a lot just that people would have good judgment okay because look nobody wants to make wrong decisions nobody wants to make wrong decisions in your life look men men especially men leading families the leader your decisions your decisions they affect other people other than just yourself you know I mean it's been said that that everything rises and falls on leadership that is so true but everybody likes to look at the rises part of that you know everything rises on leadership like whoa you know what a great leader and everybody is going to be you know all this and look if you're a husband and you make the wrong decision look your family falls with you and look you're going to see this okay you're going to see this and it's something that unfortunately you just going to kind of have to get used to that everything rises on leadership there's a good side of that but if wrong decisions are made people fall with the leader as well it's sad to see I don't like seeing it any more than anybody else lights seeing it but look it's just a hard reality of the Christian life I mean you know your your marriage is a thing you know it's like your your marriage is like an entity think of it that way your marriage is like you know you have the husband you have the wife your marriage is it's a thing it's like an entity and decisions can be made they can break that thing you know I remember you know I've heard this many many times from men in the past but you find some man that's that's been divorced and I've even heard this from a saved Christian man many many years ago he had a failed marriage and anytime that the term even close to marriage was brought up this guy just launch off on his ex-wife on how she was you know unsaved and she was a promiscuous woman and all just this strong language against like how everything was wrong with this woman and look all that may have been true I have no idea I never met her but what he was doing and he he would even bring this up to the point where he was diverting all the blame for his failed marriage on this evil wicked demon woman but here's the thing his marriage was a ship it was a thing it was a vessel and he was in charge of that thing and he's in that thing sunk you know this is why the captain he goes down with the ship right I mean it's it's just you're responsible you are responsible as the leader of that entity driving that bus driving that ship the man's responsible you need good judgment men fathers leaders need to be praying for this all the time because a bad decision by you is the leader will hurt way more people than just one of the individuals in that family making a bad decision you know you're you can bring others down with you so judgment judgment that's that's a that's a great prayer to just pray for all the time both you know specifically and just in general you know say you have something specific that you're thinking about in your life that you're facing pray for judgment pray for God to guide you down the right path but guess what you got to be obedient you got to be you know living an obedient life having a good relationship just like verse 14 said you know for God to respond to you the same way he responded to Solomon okay what's the next one here's another example here's another example how about this one what did God grant on top of the judgment here's something that we should pray for wisdom turn to Proverbs chapter 4 Proverbs chapter 4 now obviously the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom as the Bible says in Proverbs 9 10 the fear of the Lord at the beginning of wisdom look at Proverbs chapter 4 Proverbs chapter 4 look at verse number 5 so obviously wisdom you know we have God's wisdom in front of us look at Proverbs 4 in verse number 5 the Bible says get wisdom get understanding forget it not now here we see we see in this proverb we don't see opposites we see something that's reinforcing the first part of the proverb so it says get wisdom get understanding good things to pray for the Bible saying get these things forget it not neither now he's going to tell you how to not forget it okay at the last part of the proverb that's a problem is so brilliant problem is so brilliant look at get wisdom get understanding forget it not neither decline from the words of my mouth so how do you not forget it he's like get wisdom well how well don't forget it how don't don't go away from my word he says you know don't decline from the words of my mouth what do you mean well these are the words of his mouth this is the words of God's mouth that he's preserved for us why would God preserve his word it's so we have the words of his mouth it's so we have those words and that's how we get wisdom we get understanding and we don't forget it because we have it right here okay but we have to do what we have to read it we have to study it we have to look at it we have to learn it okay you can't ask God for wisdom and this is never pick up your Bible look at verse 14 again you have to be obedient in these things I mean that's not something that God is going to respond to well you're like he's saying the wisdom is in the Bible so you know yes it's your great thing to pray for understanding of the Bible if you're reading some things and maybe you're reading something in the Bible and you're like boy that's a really deep passage that's a great prayer God I pray for wisdom that you can just give me understanding of this passage you can just keep reading it and keep studying and God will grant that to you you can just be like God just make me the wisest person in the world you just never touch the Bible he's like you have like he's like you have all my words like right there is like many people in history couldn't even didn't have what you have you know you have everything right there and you don't even look at it I wouldn't expect a positive response in that case so obedience is a nice prerequisite to any prayer by the way look at James chapter 1 look at James chapter 1 verse number 5 we're looking at wisdom looking at wisdom so we see we should we should ask for judgment we shouldn't ask for specific outcomes in our lives if we're faced at a you know if we're to crossroads in our life we should pray for judgment not for God to send us left okay we should pray for judgment the second thing is we should pray for wisdom and God is telling us in the Bible that my wisdom is right here he's like if you don't want to forget you know the wisdom he's like study my words look James chapter 1 and verse 5 it says if any of you lack wisdom let him ask of God God is literally telling you so with wisdom God literally tells you specifically he says he says ask me for things in Matthew chapter 7 he's like you don't ask me ask seek knock God is saying come to me more God is begging us to pray is what he he's literally begging us to pray and then in James chapter 1 and verse 5 he's literally telling us that we should pray for wisdom I mean so this one thing he's saying you should pray for this specific thing and then it says that you know let him ask of God that give it to all men liberally and upbraid if not and it should be given unto him so God is literally telling us here ask for wisdom specifically and I will give it to you liberally all right but we need to be in the Bible as Proverbs 4 says we need to be in the Bible you know you know making an effort to learn God's word to learn what he's already told us so we see some pretty good examples here from Solomon we see we should ask for judgment we see we should ask for with them now let's just kind of put this into a pattern a methodology in our lives and and just say this you should ask for things that you know God wants for you think about that you say how would I know well if you never read the Bible you won't know so when you read the Bible what you will find in the Bible is you will find things that God wants for you and not only will you find the things that God wants for you he gives you very specific directions on how to obtain those things in the Bible you know I mean just a couple examples I mean like a strong marriage we just talked about that right turn to 1st Peter chapter 3 1st Peter chapter 3 you know I mean but the first thing you need to do you say okay I should pray for a strong marriage but the first thing you have to do is be obedient to what the Bible says you should do to get a strong marriage be obedient verse 14 remember God says if you obey me you know you'll live long in this situation that I'm going to put you in so what you can't be you can't ask just pray for a strong God just help me have a strong marriage and then you know be this guy that just doesn't love your wife that just doesn't you know show sacrificial on real I mean like the real definition of love not what the world tells us okay this sacrificial love that the Bible says we should have for our wives you know you can't be ladies you can't be are you at 1st Peter turn to 1st Peter chapter 3 1st Peter chapter 3 let me turn there myself so ladies you can't ask for a strong marriage and then you know just be like just not submit to your husband does not obey your husband just be like you know I'm not going to do that part it's just it's not going to work obedience must be a prerequisite look at 1st Peter chapter 3 look at verse numbers I mean look at verse number one likewise you wives in subjection to your own husband so you can't be a wife it's like God my marriage is a mess and I want you to fix my marriage and they're just like you're just like running and you refuse to submit to him and you just refuse to let him lead your home and you're not listening to what the Bible says at least it's not going to work out it's not going to work out look at verse number seven men it's really interesting that God actually ties this to prayer with the men look at verse number seven it says likewise he husbands dwell with them according to knowledge giving honor unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel and as being heirs together of the grace of life that what that your prayers not hindered God is literally saying look husbands you better listen to what I'm telling you on how you are to be towards your wife to love your wife as Christ loved the church to sacrifice for her you can just be living this life or is this self-centered selfish leader this is driving over I like I'm in charge I get everything not thinking about anybody else and then just ask God to fix your marriage it's not going to work obedience must be first obedience must be first and what God literally ties it to him answering your prayers in first Peter chapter 3 and verse number seven you know don't use that I mean women could use that against their husbands like you better be nicer to me now I'm just kidding but I mean the point is the point is obedience needs to come first you can't ask for these look God wants you to have a strong marriage God wants you to have a strong marriage but he tells you specifically how to do that so you go and you work towards those things and you pray for God to give you that strong marriage and it's going to work out it's going to work out how about this one strong Christian children I hope you're praying for your children look I hope that you pray for your children because if you're not praying for your children that's a huge tool you left in the toolbox right there but how about this one how about I'm going to pray for my kids and like my kids are going off the deep end and things aren't working out in my family I'm going to pray for my kids but I'm going to listen to nothing that the Bible says about how to raise my kids it's not going to work out it's the same thing it's the same thing as verse 14 in first Kings chapter 3 I mean look he that spare the rod hated his son yet you'll find people you'll find Christian parents that just won't spank their kids just like I'm just not going to do it was not going to do that part it's too mean or whatever no the Bible says you hate your son you don't spank him or her or whatever but you can't not follow God's clear direction and then expect him to answer the pre-me he's like what I mean God's got to be like I told you how to do it you know I mean you first get obedient then you pray and it's going to work out that's how it goes this is that this is what we see with Solomon how about this one how about this one strength against temptation strength against temptation I mean look you can't pray to God to have strength against temptation in your life and then just do nothing that has anything spiritual to do with it in your life just be you're just walking in the flesh you're just doing whatever you want you just don't have any interest in coming to church you know whatever soul winning none of that and then just expect God to answer that prayer like God give me strength against temptation it's not going to work out how about this one you know success at my job how about this one for the men you know you know but you go to work and you're late and you're lazy and you know it just you don't even you know maybe you don't even have a job I mean whatever I mean but Lord make me successful I mean what in the world I mean God's got to be looking just it's not going to work out the obedience comes first the obedience comes first you look you go to work you work hard you put in the effort behave accordingly you be a good testimony you be a good testimony and then you pray for success in that endeavor it's going to work out that's how it goes you don't look here's here's another good one pray for pray for creativity I mean these are good things to do God give me creativity you have a job that requires creativity they requires ideas pray for those things you have to pray specifically for God help me do this one thing you pray for ideas creativity and then put in the effort and work toward what work like you're working for Christ like the Bible says that you're supposed to I don't care who your boss is work like you're working for Christ and then it's going to work out because guess what God wants those things for you God wants you to be successful I mean you're starting a new job maybe you're learning new things pray for understanding look it's maddening starting a new job or learning a new trade or whatever I get it it's you can go to work I went I remember out of college and I started my first job at college I thought I was an idiot for two years my wife can testify this I come home from work I only I don't think I'm smart enough for this I can't get it it's too complicated just when I think I got it it's more complicated there's like another layer of complication it's just super complicated stuff pray for those things pray for understanding these are things like pray for things that you know God wants you to have because it's in his word it's in his word so look we just need to ask for things that are in line with God's will does that make sense and we will get positive results remember how will this affect the kingdom of God how will this affect the kingdom of God I mean Solomon did that here he says help me to lead your people properly I people properly Lord when we ask for these things God will respond positively to us now there's a problem here though there's a problem here because you could say turn to 1st Corinthians chapter 2 let's just look at this there's a problem there's a problem because a lot of people say you know I just don't really want spiritual things so what do we do what do we do there look at 1st Corinthians chapter 2 in verse number 12 so we're talking about asking for spiritual things and God's gonna God's gonna obviously like that you ask for those spiritual things but what if you just like I just don't really want spiritual things look at 1st Corinthians chapter 2 look at verse number 12 I mean you should I mean we'll get to that in a minute look at verse number 12 it says now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit of God which which is of God that we might know the things that are freely given us to us of God which things also we speak not in the words which man's wisdom teaches but which the holy ghost teaches comparing spiritual things with spiritual see these are spiritual things here the difference between this book and any other book that you would ever read is that this is a spiritual book so when you read this book when you read this book it's it's when you sit down and you have bible time it's you and the holy spirit and God's word just working things out together that that's what's happening it's a spiritual book look at verse 14 so but the natural man received it not the things of the spirit of God for their foolishness unto him neither can he know them because they're spiritually discerned ran into a guy just yesterday and he was he was a Mormon and he this guy was like full blown Mormon he was in his 50s full blown Mormon knocked on his door and we were out there and this guy like he was just like really bothered that I was there at his door he was like really like his lips were quivering and he was all like you know he was really bothered that and look I was nice I didn't say goodbye I didn't wish him well because I just I didn't say have a nice day because he's a false prophet so I went to his door I found out he was a Mormon I asked him if he wanted to know the truth from the bible and how the bible is different from what the Mormon church teaches he said no and he wanted to argue with me and I said I didn't come to your door to argue with you and I walked away and he got in a truck and he followed me and he found me walking and he pulls up and rolls down the window and I walk up to him again and I I'm not even sure where I'm going with this story but it's an interesting situation because the guy I'm like I'm like I'm like can I just show you the gospel how do you know that how do you know that that you're interpreting the bible right well the gospel is very simple see it's to the natural man he doesn't understand it and especially somebody that says deep off the deep end is him who's in false prophet land okay look if he would have been like okay could you show me look we could have got him saved but that's not where his heart was he's like well you know I'm like I could explain it to you in in just a few minutes it's it's very simple it's it's even as a young child can understand the gospel and I can clearly point out as I'm explaining the gospel to you I could clearly point out where it's different and the things that it says different about Jesus about how to get to heaven about you know having your own planet then then the Mormon church teaches no interest no interest it is a problem with his heart it's a problem with his heart but you see the thing is he doesn't think that you can understand the bible because he can't understand it this is what first Corinthians chapter 2 is talking about he can't understand it because the natural man can't understand these things he's he's been so twisted up and because it's a spiritual book even the simple thing of the gospel he can't understand it you know he's so far down that path bolivar verse 15 but he did a spiritual judge with all things yet he himself is judged of no man the point is is that we are we are spiritual we have the holy spirit in us this is a spiritual book so we should want spiritual things turn to first Corinthians chapter 14 first Corinthians chapter 14 so look he didn't he didn't I was trying to get a couple words in edgewise since he did take the trouble to get in his vehicle and drive down the street and talk to me again but and look I mean he was generally nice but I could just tell how he was just shaking his lips were quivering and look I have nothing to hide I'm an open I'm an open bible so whoever wants me to explain it to him but he had no desire he wanted to tell his stuff to me okay so I mean he he didn't understand it he didn't understand even the simplest thing in the bible they're like there's complicated things in the bible the gospel is not one of them the gospel is very simple I mean this is why this is why we can get like a seven year old saved or an eight year old saved I mean this is why kids that stay in church and listen to bible preaching they'll get saved when they're six seven years old you know out on the street we'll get kids that they're not even church kids we'll get them saved when they're 10 11 years old easy it's easy to understand but the natural man can't understand what he's reading okay if people let us explain it to them let us preach it to them we can get them saved look at first Corinthians chapter 14 so the bible says that we are spiritual beings if we're saved okay we've gotten that down payment in us we've gotten that seal of the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit's in us that's why the Holy Spirit is grieved when we're not doing what we're supposed to do look at verse number one of first Corinthians chapter 14 it says follow after charity and what and desire spiritual gifts isn't that interesting so God is saying God is saying through the the whole first part of the sermon I'm just like we should ask for spiritual things God is begging us ask me for things talk to me seek knock he's like ask ask for things he's like begging us and then we're seeing examples with Solomon how he asks for this great spiritual thing that benefits the kingdom of God and then God tells us he's like we should also desire those spiritual things we should desire those things but rather that you may prophesy he's like God wants us to desire those things okay but you're just like I don't desire those things though like why why you're like oh I desire you're like but I don't all I desire is like I think about what I want and I want cars and I want houses and I want hundred dollar bills and I want look and you can you can spiritualize those things too you can spiritualize those things too there's many people look there's been many a Christian who has chased money in his life just because wow I mean God wants me to support my family so he's made all these decisions based on money in his life or based on things and stuff you know I mean but they don't desire any spiritual things turn to Galatians chapter 5 so what if we don't desire spiritual things why is that and how do we fix it I'm going to show you that now so you're saying I get it I believe you we should ask for spiritual things and God will answer those things positively I just don't desire spiritual things look at Galatians chapter 5 in verse number 16 the bible says this I say say then walk in the spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh we see a super interesting thing here for the flesh lust is against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh you see that right there in verse 17 you see how these two things are after each other how these two things they don't go together these things are like oil and water so to speak and these are contrary to the other so that you cannot do the things that you would so these things these things of the flesh it's not like it's not like hey you know I'm gonna this is this is what messes people up in the Christian life because it doesn't work like hey I want to have this great life outside of my spiritual life and I also want to have a spiritual life see because one destroys the other the bible is saying one is contrary to the other one eats the other they both eat the other so you say I just you know I really want to just desire this this life you know outside my spiritual life but I also want to have a spiritual life doesn't work that way because that life of the flesh will eat and it will consume the spiritual life so if you don't desire spiritual things this is the problem it depends look what the bible here is saying is if you don't desire spiritual things it's because of how you are living it's because of what you are doing because look it's not about our works to get to heaven it's not about works it's no works no works all this stuff we got it we got salvation down but guess what if you want to start desiring spiritual things that depends on your works it depends on how you're living your life it depends on what you're doing if you are living in the flesh you will literally not want spiritual things that's what the bible is saying here this is super important that you understand Galatians 5, 16 one will kill the other the life of the flesh will kill the spiritual life you're not going to get unsaved it's not going to kill your soul it's going to it's going to destroy your spiritual life and you know it's going to we can go into generational problems after that with the kids and everything but look if you say all I want is cars all I want is stuff all I want is worldly success and worldly things people can make those spiritual too God wants me to be successful you have some success in your life and when God's blessing me look at me people can make these things spiritual as well which is kind of scary but notice notice how humble Solomon was though because you won't look at worldly things as spiritual things if you're a humble person if you're a humble person you know you can take blessings and just be like I don't deserve any of this and I'm glad that you know I have a car that doesn't break every five seconds and I'm thankful for that you know but you won't get puffed up about those things if you stay humble like Solomon's just like I'm just a little kid so don't don't forget the humility you know that's why so many people fail at the Christian life right here so look I mean just think about the things let's look at Galatians chapter 5 and verse 16 think about this contrary contrary thing think about things in your life that can destroy your spiritual life just think about things like we were talking the other day about things that you just I mean things that I mean we're living separated lives but you just can't get away from think about this I was at the dentist I had a root canal hopefully you don't have to have one of those again but I was at the dentist and they play music there what am I going to do they're playing music and I'm getting a root canal and they're playing music and unfortunately these songs are like stuck in my head they're like tattooed in my brain it's like I can remember the words to most of these songs but guess what if you just immerse yourself in that music and you just go that way to that music guess what you know what it's not that you know what I used to say here's what I used to say before I say ah I just like the tune I just like the tune I just like the you know the the harmonies and all that kind of stuff but you know it's much worse than that because not only are you listening to that music but like what are the words of that music when you start listening to the words you're just like ah as a as a Christian it's crazy you know the words in these songs but you know what that'll do it's not just that you're filling your head with that stuff it's not just that you're filling your head with that material you know what it'll do it'll kill your desire to hear hymns it'll kill your desire to hear spiritual songs it's crazy but that's what it'll do because that's what Galatians 516 what Galatians 516 is telling you that's what's going to happen if you listen to all this worldly music it's like it will take away your desire for spiritual music so you can't be like oh I just like to have my worldly music on the side but I also like to sing hymn it doesn't work that way one eats the other one eats the other but you start getting into spiritual hymns and listening to spiritual music and just like it just opens up a joy in your life but if you go down those roads it eats your spiritual life think about other things just think about other influences think about like media and movies think about think about that I mean I don't know what the last numbers I've looked at like some people are watching TV like seven eight hours a day I don't even know how you can fit all that in but people are watching all these movies watching all this media on TV I mean first of all I mean forget the fact that you're just wasting your life but what is the content what is the content that you're filling yourself with you wonder why people are accepting of every unnatural perversion that we could possibly think of today and it's because they're feeding themselves with seven eight hours a day of garbage but you know what you know what it'll also do it will rob you of your desire to read it'll rob you of your desire to because like watching things is lazy washing things you're just receiving you're just like you know it but but reading you gotta actually think you gotta actually put some effort into reading guess what it'll rob your desire to read especially the bible like oh man now it's much more serious because the non-spiritual the flesh will eat your spiritual life that's what Galatians chapter five is talking about so I mean just I mean those are just a couple examples I mean you just have to ask yourself you just have to ask yourself tonight do you enjoy spiritual things in your life you know do you I mean think about it just church I mean you know soul winning look here's the thing I love soul winning I'm not going to tell you that every single time I go out soul winning I'm feeling the greatest everybody gets sick or it doesn't feel well or whatever but in general I love soul winning it is like the best adventure there's always exciting things happening we didn't get it me and my partner didn't get anybody safe today but we ended up just in the best conversation you know and then and then this like adventure happened over across the street with the ladies let me let me just I'll tell you about an adventure right now here's the power of women's soul winning by the way so all the ladies here's the power of you out soul winning we pull up to go soul winning today and immediately there's three kids right on the sidewalk right where we parked the car and these kids are like from 11 to 14 years old at my best guess and I walk up to these kids and I walk up and I give them some church invitations I'm kind of you know feeling out if they'll listen or not and right away they're kind of like alright strange guy talking to me strange and likewise they should be you know so I go up and they don't really want to talk I give them some church invitations but then I walk across the street with my soul winning partner brother Victor and brother Victor says given the gospel in Spanish to this guy and I notice these kids they're just like locked on us and they're watching us for like 10 minutes so I send I send Jacob across the street to like tell the ladies hey make sure that the ladies talk to those those kids because guess what the ladies especially you know young ladies and you know well-dressed ladies walking down the street and a bunch of dresses you know just like that's like the least intimidating thing there are people look at that and they're just like there can be nothing but good here and guess what the ladies end up giving the gospel to like five kids and they wouldn't talk to you know a guy which is which is great but here's the thing this is just a great adventure out soul winning something cool happens all the time and why because it's God working with us that's why it's God working with us we're out there doing things and just these great miracles happen all the time these these divine appointments happen all the time so I mean that's just I mean do you love doing that do you like coming to church these are tests you need to give yourself these tests every now and then you know here's the importance by the way here's an here's an important thing of like Bible daily Bible time daily prayer time daily Bible time it's so important to have that daily time with the Bible with the Lord when you're praying because you know obviously we should learn the Bible we should be reading the Bible I mean so that's the first benefit but the first thing the next thing is this it's kind of like a line of defense it's kind of like a first line of defense in your life all of a sudden something starts happening in your life just like you start skipping Bible time you start skipping that personal time that you have with the Lord you start not doing that as much anymore that should set off red flags in your head something's not right here maybe hey maybe you just got busy maybe there's a a crazy day or two at work or whatever happened and all of a sudden you just kind of maybe got into something else and you start skipping that time it's kind of a first sign of trouble in your life because let me tell you something you don't want to get to the point where like you don't like coming to church you don't want to get to the point where you're like man I got to go to church because pastor says I should go to church three times a week boy I hope that you're never you know nobody gets to that point I mean look I love if you come to church every single time the church doors are open I love that but you shouldn't be coming here for me you shouldn't be coming here you know to make me happy I'm just here to tell you what the Bible says and and you know you should come you know you should go soul winning out of obedience that's the first reason I go soul winning and but look I really enjoy it even when it's 105 degrees on the harder days even the days I've even gotten to the point where even the days where I don't really feel right if I get up and I go and I'm tired or whatever I'm like I still I'm going to go because something good is going to happen and I've noticed that when a lot of when it when when I was being attacked or maybe I wasn't feeling right or something you know it's kind of doubting whether I should go and and I just go anyway those are really really cool things happen and you'll see that in your life as well but here's the thing you got to have that personal time with the Lord because you should be reading the Bible you should be reading God's wisdom so you don't forget it as the Bible says in Proverbs chapter 4 but it's also a good first line of defense that you start skipping that stuff you need to start realizing the minute you get in that mode where you start just even just a little bit start not liking the spiritual things as much you need to figure out what's going on because it's a serious thing look it's a serious thing get to the point where you don't like church there's probably major trouble there if you get to the point where you just like I don't like going to church okay so look you have to actively manage this Christian life yeah that's what you have to realize you know you have to actively manage this Christian life if you're in a place where you don't desire spiritual things start walking in that direction start walking in the spirit and let the spiritual life take over the flesh life and then you will desire those spiritual things and then stay in those spiritual things and guess what pray for them pray for those spiritual things and that'll keep you once you're in the spirit you're in that spiritual life you're walking in that spiritual life and then you're praying you're obedient and then you're praying for that spiritual life it'll lock you in it'll hold you in that spiritual life because guess what there's all kinds of stuff trying to pull you away from this spiritual life there's all kinds of people trying to pull you away there's all kinds of stuff there's all kinds of career things things that could be like pretty tricky stuff like look God just wants to bless my career God just wants to bless me financially. God doesn't want me having all this debt, so I just need to work some more. God's given me this opportunity.  You have to remember that. Anything that goes against your spiritual life is not of the Lord. So get in that spirit. You'll start to want those spiritual things and then you just have to pray for them. That's it. It's as simple as it is. It's something that we get tripped up on in our lives. And God will give you these things. Look what he gave Solomon. He didn't just say, okay, here's some judgment. He'll give to you liberally when you're asking for these things correctly. He will give to you liberally, James says. So look, ask for the right things. So what do we see? Let's just recap this whole sermon series in a couple of minutes here. What do we see from all these people that we saw praying? From Hezekiah, from Hannah, from Nehemiah, from Solomon. What do we see from these people? We saw that they came to the Lord with respect. It was like, hey, God, and I have this now. They came to the Lord with respect. They gave God credit for everything. They never took a blessing that they didn't just dump the credit on the Lord. They gave the Lord glory for everything. They were super thankful, Hannah. They're super thankful for everything that the Lord did in it. And they were always very careful to put in their prayer what was in it for the Lord. What was in it for the Kingdom of God. Because look, I got news for you. Your career doesn't matter. Your success in this life outside of your spiritual life, it doesn't matter. What matters is the Kingdom of God. What matters? Look, you're supposed to do things. You're supposed to support your family. You're supposed to work hard. But you are supposed to live this life for the Kingdom of God. So why would God want to increase anything in your life that didn't further that goal, which is the Kingdom of God on earth? That is what we are after. That's what God's after. We need to be in line with him with those things. And then we ask for those things and everything will be great. And look, that's how you become a prayer warrior right there. You get these things straight and you just start asking for God to help you just plow harder and harder and harder. For the Kingdom of God in this life. And he's just going to, he's going to give to you liberally. He'll give to you, he'll give to you more than you would even have thought to ask for. Just like you gave to Solomon. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer.


In medical school, you don't learn any patient safety. You graduate from medical school, and within a day, you are now a physician. You're an MD, and you're asked to take care of patients on your own. We say safety is the first thing that every professional should be thinking about and ensuring. We start with making sure we do no harm. On a day-to-day basis, our commitment is to patient care. And I think when you tie in patient safety to patient care, that's where the biggest difference would come from.


If it wasn't written down, I simply would not believe it. These stories we're going to talk about today are, in my personal opinion, the height of hypocrisy. The first round to go over is, unfortunately, an ETF approval. I say unfortunately because this is a leveraged futures Bitcoin ETF. I know people are excited about the potential for a spot Bitcoin ETF, which will come through hopefully with BlackRock or Pidella, or even Grayscale, even though they're going through legal issues between them and the SEC because they would not approve it. We'll see what happens there. But the thing that shocks me and the whole thing about hypocrisy here is the reason that Gary Ginza of the SEC says that he is not going to approve the spot ETF so far is because he's afraid of manipulation. He's trying to protect the consumer. When I take a look at this, I just think to myself, is this really protecting the consumer by doing a leveraged futures ETF? Well, whatever it is, it's going to happen because it has been approved. This is scheduled to launch on the CBOE, BZX exchange, on Tuesday, June 27th. Volatility shares 2x Bitcoin strategy ETF, scheduled to launch on the CBOE next Tuesday, June 27th. The reason I said this twice is because every time I hear about the CBOE and the CME and things like that, I always get a little flashback because the last time we had a nice little futures ETF come through, that was the first one. That was on December 18th when I went live. This is on 2017. If he weren't there when this happened, I was there. I was in the height of FOMO because I could not get enough Bitcoin and we were seeing massive price appreciation. But then on December 18th, everybody was applauding this decision for this futures ETF. Everybody thought it was going to be awesome. Well, what we know now is a little bit different than what we knew then. What you're going to see here on December 5th to December 2017, we were going at 18,491 on the 6th of December. Now, we're coming here to the height, the 16th of December, 19,423. After that, when the 18th came around, for some reason, a little bit of a dip. We said, no, it'll be okay. It'll come right back, but that's not what happened because everybody shorted it like crazy and that was beginning of a massive bear market. Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen. Again, the question I have is, are we really protecting the consumer with a leveraged Bitcoin ETF? Really, what is the difference in terms of this between a spot ETF? Let me just think about that in the comment section and here it gets a little even more interesting. We know about Deutsche Bank, 1.4 trillion banking giant. Deutsche Bank is going to come in with a crypto-custy license. That's fantastic. That is good for mass adoption. We want to see that. Now, we've got another one, Crédit Agricole's Cassee gains crypto-custy registration in France. A traditional finance giant has been rumored to be seeking the status for years, and it looks like they just put it in. It seemed like things are moving along quite quickly. For whatever reason that is, hopefully it leads to mass adoption, but it's just an interesting case. I'll tell you why in a second. Cassee, the asset servicing arm of banking giant Crédit Agricole, is registered by French Railways to provide crypto-custy service. It joins other traditional finance firms such as Société Generale's Forge and AXA Investment Managers for doing this for crypto-custy. Cassee is not some lightweight. It has 4.6 trillion euros, or $5.1 trillion of assets under custody, and was rumored to be seeking the crypto regulatory status since 2021. I said this twice for a reason. The reason for that is, I don't know if you know the CEO of Crédit Agricole. I didn't myself, but his name is Philippe Brossac. He's a French business exec, the CEO of Crédit Agricole, succeeded Jean-Pierre Chiflet to the role in May of 2015. Fantastic stuff, Rob. Who cares? Why are you telling me this? I'm telling you this because of this reason. On 29th of April 2021, Philippe predicted that Bitcoin would be worth less than a dollar by April 2025. There's a nice little article. I linked that in the description. You can check it out. It's in French. If you want to read it, you can translate it with Google Translator. Essentially, that's what he said those years ago. It was going to a dollar, which is very funny because, again, Crédit Agricole, the financial giant was rumored to be seeking the status for at least a couple of years. This is in 2021. Let me do some quick math. Yeah, that's two years. The same time, the CEO was saying it was going to a dollar. It was the same time they wanted to get crypto custody. Again, a little bit of hypocrisy, but it gets even worse into the coup d'etat IMF. IMF, it's amazing how these things just converge in the right times. IMF capitulates on Bitcoin bands, says they are not effective. Now, if you weren't following this, which we really haven't talked too much about this on this channel, but the International Monetary Fund has come on and said that it is a bad idea, especially with Al Salvador, to make Bitcoin legal tender. It will lead to the collapse and will lead to problems, and they should ban it.  Hey, that wasn't a bad idea. So this is what's been going on. The IMF is changing its tune on crypto. IMF economists released report examining cryptocurrencies. In their report, the economists leaned into a position closer to adopting cryptos, but within a well-regulated framework. And they state, while a few countries have completely banned crypto assets given the risk, this approach may not be effective in the long run. And just there, I thought, well, it's not too exciting what they're saying. They're saying, you know, very conservative, but it's these last sentences that got me. The IMF months earlier said in another report that countries should consider banning crypto. Just months ago, V was held by a handful of directors on its board, but the consensus, even though I lean towards better regulations over a ban. So at least it wasn't everybody. And now all of a sudden, this is what they said. IMF economists said that cryptocurrency offered a number of benefits to its adopters. They wrote that crypto offer protection against macroeconomic uncertainty, promoted financial inclusion, and faster payments among other benefits. Let me read that one more time. They wrote that crypto offer protection against macroeconomic uncertainty, maybe when things get inflated out the window like Venezuela and Greece and what we're doing here in America, promoted financial inclusion, helping to bank the unbanked people that can actually use it, bank or get a loan and actually increase their prosperousness on this earth and faster payments among other benefits. It's amazing to me how they did a 180 in such a short amount of time. But again, it doesn't matter to me. I'm just glad that they went on the right side. So let me know what you think about that in the comment section. And lastly, I just want to say congratulations to everybody who has been dollar-cost averaging. That would be myself included as we are daily DCing Bitcoin. This is from Wicked. And I'll link this individual's Twitter accounts in the description below. You can follow them. And he states, nearly every Bitcoin only daily DC errors is now in profit. No matter when they first started dollar-cost averaging, when the entire orange line goes below the dotted line, that's when all daily DC errors are in profit. So no matter when you started to do daily DCA, apparently this is the time. And most or not everybody close to everybody should be in profit as we're DCing moving forward. And of course, the very last one, I'm going to speed this up because I want to see the whole thing. But again, once the orange line goes below the dotted line, that's when all daily DCs are in profit. You can see it right here. So again, fantastic. I know DCing might not be the sexiest thing to do out there, but it is the most effective. And it's one thing I like to talk about. And we talked about this yesterday in NFA Live. I just wanted to, there was something I missed. There's a great website. It's called dca-cc, link in the description. And you can take a look at any kind of crypto in the top 20. And you can put in how much you, this is historically looking back, how much you want to do per week, per month, per day, from whatever date point. And you can see how you would have done if you would have done that in the past. Now moving forward to say anybody's guess, I still think we're the four year cycles. But one thing I like to look at is, is how would you have done a year after the all time highs? So that would be actually in just in 2018, I guess it wouldn't be a year after it'd be the next cycle. If you started DC and Bitcoin, a hundred dollars every week, every seven days, and you wait until the all time high, you'd be up a seven X. So you would have put in $20,000, roughly, and you would have had back 146,000. That's pretty good. What if you had done it and just waited in 2019? You'd had a six and a half X. And like I said, in the four year cycles, the reset years are 2015, 2019, in my opinion, 2023. I think this is the me, my personal opinion, the best year to invest risk versus reward. So you would have done a six and a half X. You would have put in 15,000 and had almost 100,000 in that timeframe, 2019 to 2021, just two years. If you would have got in closer in 2020, you would have had only a four X and 10,000 and 42,000. If you waited in the bull run year, you wouldn't really do too much. Now here's the tricky part. We know that Bitcoin is the safest option.  So the second riskiest crypto would be Ethereum. And you can go all the way down to like number a thousand and it gets super risky, but there is gains to be had. And I'm not saying that's what you need to do or should do because I'm not a financial advisor, not your dad. You can do everything you want to do. But for this one, this is what we'd have historically. So Ethereum, the returns are much better. In 2018, if you invested, you would have put in 20,000, you had 331,000 or 16 X. If you'd have waited to 2019, you would have 17 X, would have been even better. You would have put in 15,000 had $260,000. And again, and everything that I talk about here, there's a link in the description for this, this slideshow and you can take a look at the numbers. 2020, if you would have waited just an 11 X, not too bad. And then 21, you only would have doubled your money, but in a short amount of time. So not too bad. And then of course, the lower you go down, the higher the rewards are, but the higher the risk is. And this is where I made a good amount of money. Cardano, I was investing in 2018. And it was pennies. And from that point to the very top, I could have put in 19,300. I would have 686,000 at the very tippy top. Now that's if you sold at the top. Good luck to you. I didn't do that. But I came kind of close, but not near as I should have. 2019, but at 39 X, you'd have put in $13,900. We had $549,000. 2020, 26 X in 2021, just a measly triple. And again, not all of these will come back over time. Dash assault.  Or for salt, you would still be underwater. And that's where we're at. So again, you can take a look at the website DCA, you can take a look at anything like chain link, for example, $100 a week. If you started on, let's go to 2018, the same thing January 1st to today. And what I like about this, it could show you the returns. So it's a very tippy top. Wow. You would have put in $17,600 and you would have got back a million 74. So again, go ahead and play with this data. Let me know what you think about that in the comment section. And lastly, before we take off, today is Friday. It is June 23rd. And tomorrow is just Saturday at 530 Pacific, 230, no, excuse me, 530 Eastern, 230 Pacific. We'll be doing the loss interview, which I had interviewed the Amp, Ampera flexor founder, Tyler Spalding. And that will be put out. We talk about a litany of different things about regulation and the comparisons between now and the past and the internet and where things are going with flexa and Amp and Ampera and all that good stuff. So I will link that in the description. You can check that out. That is it for today. So look, like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. Everything we talk about is time sensitive, but that's it for today. So thanks so much for stopping by. I do appreciate you. And I'll see you on the next one.