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Let's open the Bible to Mark chapter 8...Mark chapter 8, so blessed to be back in Mark. Been waiting with bated breath to pick up the story where we left it off in chapter 8 verse 10, and we now come to verses 11 to 21.
Now the theme of this section from 11 to 21, I have identified as spiritual blindness...spiritual blindness. There's actually only one reference in the whole text, verse 18, to the issue of being able to see and not see. But that one little phrase sort of casts its shadow over the entire section. And to understand this section is to really understand the issue of spiritual blindness by virtue of two illustrations. The first is an encounter with Jesus and the leaders of Israel, the religious elite. The second is an encounter between Jesus and the disciples. They illustrate to us two kinds of blindness, permanent blindness and temporary blindness.
It has to be said at the very beginning before we look at the text itself that spiritual blindness is a universal malady, it is a universal human condition. Every human being born into this world since the Fall of Adam has been born spiritually blind. And it is not a superficial blindness, it is a profound blindness, it is a total blindness, it is a complete blindness. It is essentially living in the darkness with no light at all. That is the biblical diagnosis of the universal human condition.
And I know that runs contrary to what people think. Why we all are exposed to those who are self-proclaimed very spiritual people, are we not? I'm a very spiritual person, you hear frequently, as if they had some real insight into the spiritual realm. There are even people who are professional spiritualists who can connect people with the spiritual dimension. And there are those great spiritual leaders, those transcendental gurus who have been identified with the eastern part of the world, but there are many of them that come in many shapes and sizes that have found their way across the planet in very different garbs than just Hinduism. Those people who think they can see into the spiritual realm, who think they have ascended to some level of mastery of spiritual reality.
Every religion on the planet, every single religion claims to have the key to the door to the spiritual world. They all do. It's what they sell. They'll lie. They all lie. No religion in the world apart from true Christianity can give anybody sight. Everybody in every religion except the true one is in the dark and it is a black darkness and it is a deep darkness and it is a profound blindness. There are not transcendental masters, there are no elevated souls, there are no spiritualists who know spiritual truth genuinely. That doesn't come within the framework of an unaltered human life.
This is the testimony of Scripture. Turn to John chapter 1...John chapter 1 and verse 5, the Lord Jesus is introduced here as the light in verse 4. "In Him was life and the life was a light of men." Jesus is called the light. He Himself said He was the light. John 8:12, "I am the light of the world, whoever follows Me will not walk in darkness," that's the only way out of the darkness, to follow Christ. There is no other way out of the darkness. There are no elevated spiritual masters, there are only people who follow Christ and He alone leads out of the darkness. He is the light. The light shines in the darkness, verse 5 says, the darkness did not comprehend it.
This universal spiritual blindness has no capacity to comprehend light. The true light came, the darkness didn't comprehend it. There came a man from...from God, sent by God whose name was John, John the Baptist, the forerunner to Christ . He came as a witness to testify about the light. That is to say the light came. Even before the light came a prophet came to tell people the light was coming. And John did that. He testified about the light so that all might believe through him. He was not the light but he came to testify about the light. There was the true light, namely Christ, which coming into the world enlightens every man. He was in the world, the world was made through Him and the world didn't know Him. He came to His own, the Jews, those who were His own, didn't receive Him. Therein is the darkness.
This is the universal human condition. When the light is at its brightest, when the light is standing in front of you, looking you in the eye, when you can reach out and touch the light, when you can hear the voice of the light, when you can see the power of the light displayed in miracle after miracle, day after day after day, there is still no capacity in the darkness of the human heart to grasp the light to comprehend the light, to understand the light.
And this is a condition here described of Israel who were believed to be by themselves, at least, the most enlightened people on the planet. They had the Old Testament Scripture, they had the Law of the prophets. They had the ordinances. They had the Covenants. They had it all. They had the complete revelation of God throughout the whole Old Testament as it had been revealed. As we heard from Tom at the beginning, God spoke in many ways through many means, in many portions and gave them the Scripture and it gave them the light and they didn't understand it and they had an apostate religion framed out of that true revelation. They deviated from it and perverted it to the degree that they had an apostate form of Judaism in Jesus' time. When He came, the light was looking them in the face and they couldn't understand it. That's how deep human blindness is.
In Romans 1 the issue is spread abroad. In John 1 John is talking about the Jews primarily, "Came into His own, His own received Him not." But here it's the Gentiles that are in view in Romans 1. God's wrath is revealed in verse 18, against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. This blindness, this darkness is so profound that even when exposed to the truth, they suppress it. And this is talking about all men.
He goes on to say, "That which is known about God is evident within them." It's inside of them. And how is that realized? Two ways. One, reason...human reason leads you to a cause for every effect and human reason followed will lead you to the primary cause, the ultimate cause, the first cause of all effects. You have to go there, there has to be a first cause, there has to be God...human reason. Chapter 2 he says, "The Law of God is written in their hearts," that's a moral Law, an ethical Law.
So God has displayed Himself in reason and in morality in every human being. That's light. That's light. That's made evident to them. Beyond that, the creation of the world displays, verse 20 says, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature. When we look at the creation, not only as in effect from a first cause, but looking at the effect itself and picking it apart we learn a lot about God, don't we? We learn about it, the vastness of His mind, the massive infinite power that He possesses. The attention to detail that He has given to the minutia of the composite atomic structure of the universe. We learn so much about God's power, about His attributes. We also learn from human life in relationships that God has communicated to us attributes that are true of Him, that we possess. So we know about Him in terms of His power, we know about Him in terms of His personality. So the whole world has this much light.
However, "Even though they knew God," verse 21, "they didn't honor Him as God, or give thanks. They became empty in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened." What happened was, the light they had went out...went out. They turned away from the light.
In Ephesians chapter 4 there's another description of this worthy of our consideration. In Ephesians 4:17, talks about the nations, or the Gentiles, the ethnos, ethnic groups, they walk, it says in verse 17, in the emptiness of their mind. Empty headed, they can't make the conclusion the light in them should lead them to make, following reason to God, following moral Law in the heart to a lawgiver, to a standard of righteousness, a God who is righteous. So in this empty-minded existence, verse 18 says, "They have become darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them because of the hardness of their heart." Hard hearts, ignorant minds, darkened understanding, that's how all human beings are defined.
The psalmist said in Psalm 82:5, "People walk in darkness." The prophet said, "People have eyes but can't see." Isaiah said that and Jeremiah said it. The Proverbs say, "The way of the wicked is darkness." Blindness and darkness characterize human nature. That's just part of being human. The light is there but the capacity to follow that light to a fuller light is not there. And this blindness, as I said, is not a superficial blindness, it is a profound blindness, a profound blindness.
Let me show you a little further from the first chapter of John, look at the third chapter of John. John chapter 3, here our Lord is talking about light. Verse 19, "This is the judgment that the light has come into the world." Now you have light, not only the light of reason and the light of moral Law and the light of creation, but you have the light of Christ coming into the world. And men love the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, doesn't come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. He who practices the truth comes to the light so that his deeds may be manifested that they have been wrought in God.
The blind are profoundly blind by nature. It's human nature. And they are even more profoundly blind because they are not only sinners but they love their sin. And that is the sort of second-degree of their blindness. The first degree is it's their nature to be blind. The second thing is their sin is what they love and that makes their blindness even more compelling, more profound.
It doesn't end there. Look at 2 Corinthians chapter 4. The Apostle Paul is talking about the same issue exactly. Second Corinthians 4:3 and 4, he says, "If the gospel that he preaches concerning Christ, concerning the light, is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. They can't see it. In whose case the God of this world...meaning Satan...has blinded the minds of the unbelieving."
So they are blind by nature. Double blind by sin. They are triple blinded by Satan so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. We're again not talking about a superficial blindness but a deep and profound blindness. Blinded by nature, blinded by sin and the love of it, blinded by Satan and his power over the soul.
And there is another kind of blindness that shows the depth of this. In the nineteenth chapter of Luke we come across, I suppose, what you could call sovereign blindness. Jesus approached Jerusalem in verse 41, saw the city and wept over it. And He said, "If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace, if you only had known that I was here and the peace with God that I came to bring, but now they have been hidden from your eyes." Boy, that's the saddest of all aspects of blindness, when the blindness can't be remedied, it's now hidden. You had your moment. You had your opportunity. You had your time. You didn't respond. It's over. From now on, you can't see what you wouldn't see. "And the days will come when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, surround you, hem you in on every side," talking about the destruction of Jerusalem, "and level you to the ground and your children within you, not leave one stone on another because you didn't recognize the time of your visitation."
You didn't know who it was who had visited you, you didn't embrace the light because you loved the darkness and judgment is going to come and you're going to die and your children are going to die and hundreds of thousands of Jews, of course, died in that horrendous Roman assault in 70 A.D. and they were all catapulted who did not see the light of Christ into hell and hell is described in the Bible repeatedly as outer - what? Darkness. Outer darkness. This is profound blindness, the blindness of nature, human nature...the blindness of sin, the blindness of Satan, the blindness of judgment and the blindness of eternal punishment. This is the condition of all people.
Now, all of us are in that condition but we fall into two categories...those who are permanently blind and those who are temporarily blind....those who are permanently blind and those who are temporarily blind. For some, the blindness is forever. For others, the blindness is only for a time. And you're in either one or the other of those two groups.
The text before us is very instructive in regard to this issue and it presents both permanent and temporary blindness. And we're going to look at that this morning and next time. Let me read the text to you.
Back to Mark chapter 8 verse 11, and let's meet the permanently blind. "The Pharisees came out, began to argue with Him, seeking from Him a sign from heaven to test Him. Sighing deeply in His spirit He said, 'Why does this generation seek for a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation. Leaving them, He again embarked and went away to the other side. And they had forgotten to take bread and didn't have more than one loaf in the boat with them and He was giving orders to them, saying 'Watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.' They began to discuss with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus aware of this said to them, 'Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet see or understand? Do you have a hardened heart? Having eyes, do you not see? Having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember when I broke the five loaves for five thousand how many baskets full of broken pieces you picked up?' They said to Him, 'Twelve.' 'When I broke the seven for the four thousand, how many large baskets full of broken pieces did you pick up?' And they said to Him, 'Seven.' And He was saying to them, "Do you not yet understand?'" And Matthew adds a footnote to that passage at the end of his parallel account, he says, "And they did understand."
The first group are left in darkness. The second group are led to light. The Pharisees, permanent darkness; the disciples, temporary, and for them the light kept expanding every day they spent with Jesus.
Now you have to parallel this passage in its fullness with Matthew 16 if you're going to study it. Matthew 16:1 to 12 covers the same thing and adds a few details here and there that always enrich as the gospel writers look at the same events from two perspectives. But the resolution comes in combining two accounts, as you know. This encounter with the Pharisees includes also the Sadducees. Matthew 16 says the Sadducees were there as well. This is our Lord's final conflict with the leaders of Israel in Galilee. Remember, His Galilee ministry is coming to its end, He's going to go down to Judea for the last months of His life before He goes to the cross. He's wrapping up this extensive more than a year that He has spent in a very small area of Galilee. This is the last encounter with the Pharisees and the Sadducees are there as well. It's a milestone. It really is. It's a milestone because it is the last time these leaders of Israel will face their Messiah and Savior in that area.
This is it. From here on, whenever He relates to them He relates to them as a condemning judge. Up to this point there have been invitations extended to the leaders of Israel to believe. No more. Denunciation now. But it's a milestone then for a second and corollary reason. Since He is through with the leaders of Israel, He is through also with the people who follow the leaders of Israel. And from this point on, our Lord's instruction and His power displays are not for the leaders of Israel, not for the rejecters anymore but for those who believe. So from here on, everything that takes place is driven directly at the disciples.
For example, if you look at chapter 9 verse 30, "He went out again, a final sweep through Galilee, but He didn't want anyone to know about it because He was teaching His disciples." So from on, the disciples are the focus, both of His miracle power and His instruction. He is preparing them for the future ministry. And they're at a critical point, really the high point of the whole book of Mark is in chapter 8 verse 29 where Peter on behalf of all of the followers of Jesus says, "You are the Christ. You're the Christ." They saw the light. They recognized the light. They got it. That's the highpoint, the midpoint of this gospel, what we call the great confession of the followers of Jesus.
Do you understand it is at this point that Jesus is a vilified man, He is discredited openly and publicly. He is denounced by the leaders of Israel. He is rejected by the people who follow the leaders of Israel, all of them in the darkness who love the darkness and love their sin. He's rejected by all of them. Now all they want to do is kill Him, so they're on the hunt to kill Him.
Those who follow Him therefore, know they are making a break with their former religion. They're leaving their rabbis and their priests and their chief priests and their high priests and the Pharisees and the scribes. They're turning their backs on the apostate Judaism that had been their life. They're following the discredited, despised, hated, scorned, mocked, blasphemed leader, Jesus, because they're sure of one thing, and they say it right here finally, "He's the Christ." He is the Messiah, the light has broken on them. The darkness has been dispelled. And the light will get brighter and brighter as He spends day after day with them, right on through the cross outside the other side of the grave and for 40 days with them, instructing them concerning the Kingdom before the ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit when they are ready then to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. This is a great milestone moment when the permanent blindness of the leaders of Israel and those who followed them is fixed. And when the temporary blindness of those who followed Christ is ended and the light begins to shine ever brighter.
We have to start, this morning, with the permanent blindness, verses 11 to 13. Again our Lord is face to face with those who hate Him. They love their sin. They love their self-righteousness which was their chief sin. They love their hypocrisy. They are naturally blind. They are sinfully blind. They are satanically blind. And they are now about to be sovereignly blinded and they will be eternally in the darkness.
Just to set the scene a little bit, it's been a while. At this point in Jesus' ministry, He has just come back from a tour of Gentile areas. Remember back in chapter 7 about verse 24 when it says that He left Galilee and went north up to Tyre and Sidon? That's Gentile territory and He traversed through that for an extended period of time. Went way north of the Sea of Galilee and then swept down to the southeast portion, the southeast portion of the Sea of Galilee to an area called Decapolis, meaning ten cities, they were Gentile cities. And His ministry was among the Gentiles and He was teaching His disciples that this gospel is not just for the Jews, but it's for all. They needed to see that. They needed to learn that.
And in Decapolis, you remember, chapter 8 begins with an amazing miracle that He did there that parallels the miracle He did in Galilee. In Galilee He fed five thousand men plus women and children. In Decapolis, the Gentile area, He feeds four thousand men plus women and children, a very similar feeding miracle. That's where we end in verse 10.
After that miracle which happens on the southeast side of the Sea of Galilee, He goes across in the boat to the northwest, up by Capernaum to a place called Dalmanutha, you notice that in verse 10, or Magadan is another name from that area, just near Capernaum. That was His headquarters.
So back He goes into Jewish territory. As soon as He arrives, verse 11, the Pharisees came out and began to argue with Him. They're just relentless. They are on the attack. He never has to look for them. He never has to find them. They're there. He's just arrived back from the other side, docked their little boat at a place called Dalmanutha, gotten off the boat not far from Capernaum and somewhere immediately on the path wherever it was from the shore to Capernaum, which perhaps was the direction they were headed, they're ready for Him. And as soon as the word goes that He's arrived, and He's been gone a long time, weeks, they're right there in His face wasting no time with their attack. They hate the light. They hate the message of repentance. They hate the message of faith and grace. They love self-righteous sin. They love the sense of achieving their own redemption through their own morality and their own religious ceremony. They're in love with that. They hate the truth. And so they come out again. They want to discredit Him publicly. There's always a crowd around Him.
And so, we see in just this little brief section, 11, 12 and 13, three features that mark the spiritually blind and they come out very readily. Number one, and I've got to hurry on this. They're...people who are spiritually blind are comfortable only with others who are also blind, even if they're enemies. It is amazing how universally the blind hate the light. That is to say, people of all false religions collectively, even though they are antagonist to each other in their religions, will agree to hate the truth. Right? The one thing the multiple false religions of the world will agree on is that they all resent Christianity, they all resent the gospel...on that they agree, even if they are mortal enemies.
"The Pharisees," and Matthew 16:1 adds, "and the Sadducees," without "the" being repeated, "The Pharisees and Sadducees," one article is a Greek way of unifying them. They couldn't be more antagonistic toward each other, it would be impossible. The Pharisees hated the Sadducees and vice-versa, they were severe enemies on a theological level. And yet they become one and are united in a common hatred of the light. That's characteristic of the darkness. The darkness is comfortable with other people in the darkness. The systems may vary. The viewpoints may vary. But the common darkness ties them together.
You have the legalists, that would be the Pharisees, the ritualists, you have the Sadducees who would be the liberals or the rationalists, they are one in hating the Son of God. The Sadducees aren't mentioned a lot in the New Testament, only a few times. They are seen there witnessing the baptizing work of John the Baptist. They appear testing Jesus without the Pharisees during His Passion Week, they confront Him and He confronts them and denounces them. And then you have this incident here recorded in Matthew and in Mark. And our Lord only refers to them in Matthew 16 because they weren't really the theologians of the people. They were the ones that ran the temple operation and the people didn't like them because they extorted money out of them, right? They basically jacked up the prices of animals for sacrifice and they would examine the animals the people had brought and disqualify the animal from being sacrifice and make them buy one of their own animals that was for sale in the temple ground at an exorbitant price. They wouldn't accept the money that the people brought, they would have to exchange their money and they would extort money out of them in the exchange. They ran a racket at the temple. They didn't have a lot of convictions about moral issues because they were liberals. That is, they took a liberal approach, they denied the existence of the resurrection, they denied the existence of angels. In effect, they were skeptics regarding the supernatural.
On the other hand, you had the Pharisees who were fastidious legalists who wanted to read something spiritual into every tiny word of Scripture. They were children of the Ascetic Movement, the Hasidim, meaning the pious, the saintly. They were the Jews who, first of all, were committed to the Law of God and as a secondary reality, they hated Greek culture. They hated Greek culture, they hated Hellenistic things and therefore they hated the presence of the Romans who were a Hellenized group of pagans. The Pharisees were separatists, they hated the pagans, they hated the Romans, they hated the heathen. They separated themselves from Publicans and sinners. They separated themselves from the general Jewish population. They separated themselves from any kind of defilement that they thought would make them ceremonially unclean. They were the literalists and the legalists and the separatists.
The Sadducees, on the other hand, they were anything but separatists. They were happy the Romans were there. They commiserated with the Romans and made money off of it. They were compromisers, anything but hostile to Greek culture, they were attracted to Greek culture, they were the aristocratic, irrationalistic, skeptical materialist. They were opportunists who denied scriptural data and they got together with their enemies, the Pharisees.
In fact, in Acts 23 there's an account given where the Sadducees and the Pharisees are at each other's throats. They rejected tradition. They rejected the prophets of the Old Testament. They were very, very different than the Pharisees. The point is this, they shouldn't have been together in any common cause. They really wanted nothing to do with each other. But they had this common enemy, truth, the light, Jesus Christ. And so they got together on that basis.
That is the way the darkness works. If you're in the darkness, you're comfortable with other people in the darkness. However they define their darkness, it's still darkness, however they define their blindness, its still blindness. Evil company is better than righteous company even if the evil company is your enemy.
So they begin to argue with him. They just walked up and started a fight. Here's their approach, this is a dispute. The Greek word argues...dispute. They wanted to discredit Him before the people. So this is what they desire. "They seek from Him a sign from heaven to test Him."
As a test, they want Him to do a sign from heaven. Now there's a reason for this. The Jews had a superstition. The superstition of the Jews is that God could do heavenly miracles, but demons could only do earthly miracles. That God could do heavenly miracles but demons could do earthly ones. You know, like the magicians in Pharaoh's court did when they mimicked the miracles of God through Moses and they did their false miracles, this and perhaps the actual supernatural activities of demons through the centuries had created this kind of notion that demons could do earthly miracles, if you will, but only God could do heavenly ones.
And so, they come to Jesus and they say, "Look, do a sign from heaven," literally, "out of heaven." A miracle in the sky, stop the sun, Joshua did. Bring fire down from heaven, Elijah did. Eclipse the moon, rearrange the constellations. Start and stop a storm. And they did it to tempt Him. They really wanted to discredit Him. And, of course, it's supposed to be a rock and a hard place. If He says I'm not going to do that, then the people are going to know He can't. And if He can't, then He's discredited. He's a fake. Maybe He's doing what He does by the power of Satan which is what they had said all along. And if He says I can, and I will, and they don't believe He can, then He'll fail. So in either case, this is the dilemma He can't avoid. If He says He's not going to do it, then the people can assume He can't and all He can do is what Satan does. And if He says He can and tries it, He'll fail because He's not the Messiah, He's not from God, they were sure of that, and He'll be discredited either way.
Did they really need another sign? And it wasn't as if they had signs that weren't from heaven. Do you remember the leading teacher? Do you remember the name of the leading teacher among the Pharisees? His name was Nicodemus, John 3. He came to Jesus, this is his statement, John 3:2, "Rabbi, we know." We...who's we, Nicodemus, who you talking about? "We, my group." Who's your group? The Pharisees. "We know that You have come from God as a teacher for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him."
They didn't need more signs, more evidences. They had plenty.But there was, after all, you know, the notion that in the time of the Messiah's arrival and the establishment of the Kingdom and judgment and all of that, there would be signs in the heaven, didn't Joel chapter 2, didn't the prophet say the sun will be darkened and the moon will turn to blood and there will be signs in the sky? I mean, the prophet did say that. And oh, by the way, that will happen when Jesus returns again to establish His Kingdom and judge the ungodly, read Matthew 24 where Jesus Himself is a sign in the sky and all His holy angels with Him. Read the book of Revelation, they'll come signs in the sky.
But this is so ridiculous, as if they needed any proof when their own leader testifies that they knew He had to come from God because no one could do the signs that He did. This is how deep the darkness is.
The first thing you see about people in the darkness is they're comfortable with other people in the darkness and the second is, that the darkness deepens. They're comfortable with the people who are in the darkness, and they're consigned to deeper darkness. The more evidence you give them, the deeper they go. They get near the surface and they run deep into the darkness the more the light shines. Creating food for masses, creating eyes for blind people, ears for deaf people, vocal chords for people who couldn't speak, legs and arms and organs, raising people from the dead...that's not enough? Jesus said it was. John 5:36, "Believe Me for the work's sake." How can you explain them? Well Nicodemus explained them, you come from God, nobody can do the signs You do unless he comes from God.
But they were no different than Pharaoh. You remember after all the signs and wonders that Moses did, it says, "Pharaoh hardened his heart." That's the second reality that's so tragic. They're comfortable with others in the darkness and they're consigned to a deeper darkness. The more light you shine on them, the deeper the darkness comes.
I remember reading years ago, Voltaire, the French atheist, and some of his skeptical statements. One of them stuck with me, he said this, "Even if a miracle should be wrought in the open marketplace before a thousand sober witnesses, I would rather mistrust my senses than admit a miracle." Well you had a whole generation of Voltaires in Israel. Unbelief will always find a way to reject the truth and drive itself down deeper into darkness. It was that tragic figure Woody Allen who once said, "If God would give me a clear sign, I would believe, like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank," end quote.
The blindness that we'll never see is that which looks only to the darkness for its fellowship and plunges deeper into that darkness when the light appears. Jesus saw this in verse 12, sighing deeply in His spirit. That's such an interesting statement. Only once used in the New Testament, here is that verb, compound form. The simple form is used in chapter 7:34 when He sighed, it's a Greek expression. He sighed over a physical suffering, we read about it in chapter 7, deafness, He sighed. Here it's compound, He's sighing deeply. Stronger emotion over spiritual blindness and over physical suffering. It breaks His heart, that's why He wept when He entered Jerusalem, Luke 19, John 11. He wept at the grave of Lazarus when He saw the power of sin, impact of sin to produce pain. His grief is profound over this hard, hearted, obstinate unbelief in the face of massive evidence, massive signs.
He laments His rejecters' willful ignorance. And He said this, it's a soliloquy, really, speaking to Himself. "Why does this generation seek for a sign? For what reason? What else could possible be done?" And He sees beyond the Pharisees, "This generation," this genea, the people at this time. They were just like their ancestors. Deuteronomy 32:20, they're indicted there. "The Jews, they're a perverse generation, sons in whom is no faithfulness." Psalm 95 adds to that indictment of Israel, "Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation." I'm not doing a sign from heaven. I'm not doing another thing. Strong resolutes, "Truly I say to you," that phrase is used here and in chapter 3 verse 22 by Mark, and it's an unalterable thing that is about to be said, "No sign will be given to this generation." I wish I could show you the Greek construction on that, it's a conditional clause but it's a very unique conditional clause that if you translated it accurately it would sound like this, "If I give a sign to this generation, may I die." That's how strong that statement is. I'm not giving anymore signs.
And this then is the third thing. The first is the blind are comfortable with the other blind. And they are consigned to deeper blindness. And thirdly, they're condemned to terminal blindness. They're condemned to terminal blindness. That's it. No more.
Now if you were to compare Matthew 16, you can read that on your own, Jesus says a few things that Matthew records that Mark doesn't. Jesus said to them, "You can tell the weather but you can't discern the sighs of the times," you remember that statement? You know, you're better meteorologists than you are theologians and you're just primitive at meteorology, but you're really bad at theology. That's why in Matthew 15:14 He called the Pharisees blind leaders of the blind. In Matthew 23 He called them blind guides, fools and hypocrites. He says you can't discern the kairos, the seasons, the epochs, you don't get it. You don't know what season this is, this is the time of the Lord's salvation.
Then He says to them, according to Matthew 16, "You're a wicked and adulterous...and He doesn't just say group...generation." That means all you leaders and all this nation that follow you, scathing statement. You'll have one more sign, according to Matthew 16, Jesus said, on the same occasion and it's the sign of Jonah, remember that? A sign of Jonah is given by our Lord in Matthew 12:39 and 40, He says, "As Jonah was in the whale for three days with a great fish, I'm going to be in the ground for three days." That's the only sign you'll be given. No more signs
And when that sign came and the word got back to the leaders of Israel that He had risen from the dead, according to Matthew 28:11 to 15, they called the soldiers in who were guarding the tomb and bribed them to lie about the resurrection. That's fixed darkness. They would deny it when they knew it happened.
To be in the dark is to be comfortable only with those who are in the dark. To be consigned to deeper darkness, literally to be condemned to everlasting darkness. Verse 13, two words, we'll leave it there, "Leaving them." That was it. Abandoned them. Like Romans 1, Gave them up, gave them up, gave them up… very symbolic action. Last encounter with them in Galilee, leaving them.
That's tragic, isn't it? The whole world is full of people like this who live in the darkness. Oh, they may think they are spiritual and they have transcended and they are mystically aware of the spiritual realm. The truth is, they are in total darkness and they are consigned to even deeper darkness and they are condemned to permanent eternal darkness.
On the other hand, rather than the blind who will never see, there are the blind who will see and we'll look at them next time. That's our group.
Lord, again it's so wonderful to dig in to Your Word and its treasures are inexhaustible. Another day, another experience with our Lord. Thank You for the truth that it conveys that brings to us, we cherish it, we thank You for it. Lord, we thank You that You have promised that whoever comes to me will not walk in darkness, I am the light of the world. Whoever comes to Me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life. Light is life, light is truth. Thank You, Lord, that You still are pleading with us. There are people here who are in the darkness but the darkness is not yet fixed. They may be being exposed to the light, plunging into deeper darkness and headed toward everlasting darkness. But, Lord, we would pray that You would be gracious to them and may they turn and come to the light, the one who is light, the only one who leads out of the darkness, the Lord Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Draw men to Him now and women, young people out of that darkness, rescue them from that outer darkness, that everlasting darkness. We thank You, Lord, for doing that for so many here. Thank You that we were once darkness and now are light. We have been delivered from the kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of Your dear Son. We thank You for that. Thank You for that gift of grace and mercy and may we live lives of gratitude in all that we do, we pray in Christ's name. Amen.
Before you go, just to comment. The prayer room is open for anyone who wants some spiritual counsel or prayer or help in this matter of salvation, church membership, baptism, any spiritual need, you're welcome to come.
Let me just give a benediction and we'll let you go.
Father, we ask even as the psalmist did, how long, O Lord, will Your wrath hide itself? Lord, we pray that Your grace will continue to be extended so that others may come to the light and bless Your name forever and ever. Use us in that, we pray and give You the glory. Amen.
This article is also available and sold as a booklet.
This sermon series includes the following messages:
Please contact the publisher to obtain copies of this resource.Publisher Information


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VERGENNES — Near the back of Vergennes Laundry, the brushed metal walls of the industrial oven flickered orange with the light from the fire inside.
The bakery, which opened on Main Street this month, is full of eclectic combinations — the traditional, two-hearth brick oven with a sleek modern finish is a start. But even more noticeable upon entering the bright, airy space are the two fur-draped folding lawn chairs and the wall-mounted antique caribou head.
"Its name is Benjamin," said owner Julianne Jones last Thursday evening. "He's pretty friendly."

subset: commoncrawl


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[EDIT: 22nd July 2010 10:30am]
Many thanks to all who tuned in to support us during our climb of Mt. Fuji. It all went extremely well on the mountain, and we've received a lot of positive feedback through the networks since returning to Tokyo.
Curated photos and videos will be posted to Tamegoeswild.com in due course.
Over the next 24 hours, a group of 10 intrepid explorers led by @tamegoeswild will be making their way up the slopes of Mt. Fuji. At 3,776m the rim of this dormant volcano crater is the highest point in Japan.
Join them as they push the temporary NTT mobile data network to the limit with live streaming video, Twitter messages and GPS updates.
Take Part!
With them they have the Rinkya iPad of Stamina – this will be displaying all tweets containing @tamegoeswild – so send in your message now and offer them encouragement them as they battle up (and then down) the volcanic slopes. Have a request for a song, dance, Haiku recitation or purchase from one of the vending machined at the top? Send them in – all welcome!
Pocket Wifi and network access kindly provided by NTT DoCoMo. Direct-to-the-net Cerevo Cam kindly provided by the makers.
Thank you to @stevenagata for additional tech support.
Photo by Matsunuma.
See more videos archived throughout the day at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tamegoeswild
Mt. Fuji Climb
Live Stream Schedule
The live event, which will take place right here on Mobile in Japan, is planned as follows:
Tuesday 20th July
- 11:00 JST (02:00 UTC, 03:00 BST) – Live stream starts from minibus en-route to Mt. Fuji from Tokyo
- 12:00 JST (03:00 UTC, 04:00 BST) – We start climbing Mt. Fuji (from station 5 on the Yoshida-Guchi trail)
- 18:00 JST (09:00 UTC, 10:00 BST) – arrive at Mountain hut, station 8 (about an hour below the summit) – provide entertainment, stay the night there.
- 03:00 JST (Wed in Japan, Tue in UK/ US (18:00 UST, 19:00 BST) Wake up, head for the summit
- 04:30 JST (19:30 UTC, 20:30 BST) Sunrise from the summit, party on the roof of Japan, walk around the crater
- 09:00 JST (12:00 UTC, 01:00 BST) Descend to the van, return to Tokyo.


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Pools. Friday , November 03rd , 2017 - 16:24:49 PM
Quote from What You Need to Know before Upgrading to LED Pool Lights :
The LED pool lights are indeed a truly interesting addition to complement your outdoor area. With LED lights, you can experience a whole different living experience with the spectacular LED pool lights color changing for more appealing outdoor space even though it gets dark outside. Even so, before you decide to upgrade to LED pool lights color splash from traditional halogen lights, it's better for you to know these important things first.
While the LED lights can be as bright as, or even brighter than, halogen, there are many factors taking into consideration. However, remember that number of LEDs doesn't mean a brighter light. It's because you just cannot compare the number of LED pool lights or watts or power. The overall brightness will depend on the efficiency of the LEDs themselves—a thing we call luminous efficiency, which measures how the LED uses power efficiently. The more efficient the LED is, the higher the luminous efficiency. This means a 15 watt LED light can have the same brightness as a 30 watt one of the lights are twice as efficient.
The glowing effect produced by LED pool lights is due to how the lights are spread rather than focused like a torch beam, which is what halogen lights produce. And with different beam angles available for the LED lights, you can thus customize the overall lighting effect to complement your outdoor swimming pool area. From a wide beam angle that can spread the light from 150 to 180 degrees perfect to light a large area, you can also decide to highlight a feature item with a narrow beam angled light.
While it's true that there are formulas to find out the number of LED pool lights required, it's not usually as simple as that, though. In general, you must consider the size and shape of your pool, followed by pool surface, color of the light, purpose of the light, and output of the light. In the end, though, a level of expertise is always required when planning for pool lighting. Therefore, it's best to leave the job to the professionals.
With LED pool lights required to be sealed to keep the water from getting in, usually they are sealed with an O-ring or rubber gasket. Today's LEDs, though, are now filled with a resin to seal and cover the electronics inside totally. Even so, resin-filled LED lights are not serviceable—you must replace the entire fitting if something goes wrong with it.
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Sun Splitter – Eye Of Jupiter (BloodLust!)
How these Chicago dudes aren't as well known as Locrian is beyond me. Sun Splitter have just as must genre blending as Locrian, just a different blend. They've got this incredible black industrial psych doom thing with some dark ambient noise/drone and even a little HANL style gloomgaze tossed in. I think III is their first vinyl (limited to 500, white, sexy, etc) and it's monolithic & pure fucking evil. Seriously, this is just monstrous in every way. The riffs are skull crushing, a wall of reverb and distortion sounding like napalm melting your core, drum machines hitting harder than any human could, explosive blasts that level cities, with an abusive assault of rapid-fire fury for the second half of "The Serpent's Golden Death" where the individual hits coalesce into a waterfall of insanity, static vocals that roar their way to the surface, guitars that chug & rattle, at home only in Hell's scorched valley, crusted under the black sun. These guys get in a groove and don't let up until they've reached total devastation, the drum machine locked in a loop, sealing their fate as endless riff demons. If you need some fucking heavy in your life, this is where you should be looking. This is the fucking best and most original metal. And with killer artwork by band member Anthony A. Dunn, you would be doing yourself a major disservice by passing this up.


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Uncle on suspects: 'Losers'
A man who said he's the uncle of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings said the men brought "shame" to the family and the Chechen people, and stressed that their motives had nothing to do with religion.
"They put that shame on the entire ethnicity," said Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of two suspects who were named overnight.
Story Continued Below
One of them, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in clashes with authorities, while as his younger brother, Dzhokhar, still appears to be on the run, sparking a massive manhunt and triggering lock-down in Boston.
( PHOTOS: Search for Boston Marathon bombing suspects)
"Being losers," Tsarni said, when asked why his nephews might have bombed the marathon. "Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine. Anything else to do with religion, with Islam — it's a fraud, it's a fake."
Tsarni, speaking at a televised press news conference, said he had not seen the suspects in years, but said they must have become "radicalized." He called on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to turn himself in.
"If you are alive, turn yourself in and ask forgiveness from the victims, from the injured. … ask forgiveness from these people," he said, when asked whether he had a message for his surviving nephew. He added, "He put a shame, he put a shame on the … family. He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity."
( Also on POLITICO: Full coverage of Boston Marathon bombings, aftermath)
Tsarni, who offered condolences to the victims and expressed his shock, also expounded on his own family's love for America.
"I teach my children, and that's what I feel myself … [I] respect this country, I love this country, this country, which gives the chance to everybody else to be treated like a human being."
"The last time in 2009, maybe, the last time and that was in 2009, when I spoke with Tamerlan," he said, noting that the suspects have been in the country for about a decade. "I was asking what he was doing and he started telling me about the, some that he's been in Islam. I told him, listen. Islam [has] always been there. You just do your business. Work. Go to school. Be useful. Know why you came to America."


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Marketing departments should sell the idea of a marketing technology office (MTO) to CIOs, who would have to relinquish control of certain customer-facing technologies and hand responsibility for the function over to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
This is the opinion of Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal who was speaking today in London at Forrester's EMEA Customer Experience Forum.
Forrester defines a MTO as a centre of excellence that leads technology strategy, develops marketing technologies and evangelises innovations throughout the marketing department.
Vittal used Rubbermaid, a US-based manufacturer, as an example of an enterprise that has decided to create such a function.
"Rubbermaid's MTO has to help its brands make a value shift from thinking about how their customers could fit into the product lines, to putting the customer at the centre of operations and thinking about what products they could design to suit their customer base," said Vittal.
"It also has to help Rubbermaid's brands think about how they share product information in different stages. How do they present content to the consumer when the consumer is researching the product? Or when the consumer is learning to use the product?"
He added: "The third area of responsibility was to identify innovations that happen at the brand level, then take those innovations and wrap them up so other brands can learn from them."
Rubbermaid's MTO function reports to the CMO, not the CIO, and the only relationship the CIO has with the department is to ensure that it is complying with the company's defined IT standards and processes.
Employees in the division include a strategist, database administrators, web developers, application programmers and 'marketing scientists'.
But what does this mean for a CIO and the IT department? Vittal believes that IT, with a bit of persuasion, will be happy to reassign marketing responsibility to someone else.
He said: "Surprisingly, IT is very willing to give up serving the marketing organisation. Why? Because they aren't process aligned, they have very different goals, they speak different languages. You do have a challenge in making IT comfortable with this MTO, but you want to set it up with their blessing.
"You want to sell this to the CIO."
He added: "It's not an easy conversation, but they start to recognise that some of the needs marketing has - the pace of change that the marketing department is trying to achieve - IT in its current form isn't set up to do this. Enlightening your CIO on why this matters and why this can be done in a controlled fashion is important."
Vittal also highlighted that CIOs are becoming increasingly aware of 'rogue efforts' from within the marketing department to use IT that is outside the scope of what is being provided by the IT department - using services from the cloud.
Consequently, CIOs and IT departments should look after the infrastructure and back-end systems, while the MTO and CMOs should look after the front-end technology.
Vittal said: "As a rule of thumb I like to think infrastructure technologies, storage systems, authentication systems - these would all be centrally owned. However, channel and customer facing technologies would be owned by the MTO."


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Cuba has some of the most highly regarded festivals in Latin America, and events like the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano continue to grow in prestige and attract growing numbers of visitors. There are also plenty of lesser-known festivals celebrating Afro-Cuban dance, literature, ballet and other arts, and a whole host of smaller but worthwhile events in other provinces. Catching one of these can make all the difference to a visit to a less-than-dynamic town.
Cuba's main carnival takes place in Santiago de Cuba in July and is an altogether unmissable experience. As well as numerous parades featuring dramatically costumed carnival queens waving from floats, and more down-to-earth neighbourhood percussion bands, several stage areas are set up around the town where live salsa bands play nightly. Also worth checking out are the smaller carnivals held in Havana and other provincial towns, such as Guantánamo in late August, which feature parades and boisterous street parties as well. Here are listings for the main festivals and a selection of smaller events.
Liberation Day (Jan 1). This public holiday celebrates the first day of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution as much as the first day of the year, with street parties and free concerts throughout the country.
Feria Internacional del Libro de La Habana (Havana International Book Fair) Havana (mid/late Feb–early March). You'll find more books on Cuban politics and ideology at this citywide festival than you can shake a stick at, as well as new fiction and poetry, at the Fortaleza San Carlos de la Cabaña in Habana del Este (as well as at several bookshops across the capital). Events include discussions, poetry readings, children's events and concerts. Havana's Casa de las Américas also presents its literary prize during the festival period.
Festival del Habano (Cuban Cigar Festival) Havana and Pinar del Río (late Feb). A commercialized festival promoting the Cuban cigar industry, but still a great event for any cigar enthusiast with visits to cigar factories and tobacco plantations, a trade fair and plenty of tastings.
Festival Internacional de la Trova "Pepe Sánchez" Santiago de Cuba (usually March 19-24). Commemorating the life of the great nineteenth-century Santiaguero trova composer José "Pepe" Sánchez, this festival fills the town's streets, parks and most important music venues with the sounds of acoustic guitars and butter-smooth troubadours.
Festival Internacional del Cine Pobre Gibara (mid-April). Small coastal town Gibara hosts the annual International Low Budget Film Festival. As well as public screenings in the local cinema and on outside projectors, there's a competition for fiction and documentary films as well as an assortment of captivating exhibitions, recitals, seminars and concerts.
International Urban Dance Festival: "Old Havana, City in Motion" Havana (mid-April). Rather than displays of breakdancing and body-popping, this festival, organized by the well-respected Retazos Dance Company, uses sites around Habana Vieja to show off contemporary dance choreography, with accompanying master classes, lectures, workshops and night-time jazz jams.
Bienal de La Habana (April-May). This month-long biennale focuses on Cuban, Latin American, Caribbean, African and Middle Eastern artists. It takes place in dozens of galleries, museums and cultural centres all over the city, such as Pabellón Cuba and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
International Workers' Day (1 May). Known in Cuba simply by its date, Primero de Mayo is vigorously celebrated in this communist country. A crowd of around twenty thousand, waving banners and paper flags, march past dignitaries in front of the José Martí memorial in Havana, with similar parades taking place across the country, in a quintessentially Cuban celebration of national pride and workers' solidarity.
Romerías de Mayo San Isidoro de Holguín (May 2-8). A yearly pilgrimage, Mass and three-day celebration of performing arts in this eastern city.
Feria Internacional Cubadisco Havana (mid to late May). A celebration of the local recording industry, in which Cuban musicians who have released albums in the preceding year compete for the title of best album. The finale is held at Salón Rosado de la Tropical Benny Moré.
Festival Internacional "Boleros de Oro" Havana (late June). The siren song of bolero, a musical genre born in Cuba in the nineteenth century, draws singers from all over Latin America for this week-long Havana festival organized by UNEAC. Concert venues usually include Teatro Mella and Teatro América in Havana as well as venues elsewhere in the country.
Camagüey Carnival Camagüey (mid June to late June). With over thirty outdoor stages and party areas set up throughout the city, and big stars like Adalberto Álvarez and his Orchestra in attendance, this is one of the worthier provincial carnivals.
Fiesta del Caribe Santiago de Cuba (first week of July). Santiago's week-long celebration of Caribbean music and dance culture takes place at the beginning of July, with free concerts and dance displays in Parque Céspedes and throughout the city.
Carnaval de Santiago de Cuba Santiago de Cuba (mid-July). Cuba's most exuberant carnival holds Santiago in its thrall for the last two weeks of July, with costumed parades and congas, salsa bands and late-night parties. Official dates are 18-27 but the week-long run-up is often just as lively.
Carnaval de La Habana Havana (late July to early Aug). Usually lasting a week or so, the Havana carnival is a jubilant affair with many of the country's top bands playing to packed crowds throughout the city, and a weekend parade of floats working its way along the Malecón.
Simposio de Hip Hop Cubano Havana (late Aug). Superseding the former Festival de Rap, this five-day event, whose main venue is the Casa de Cultura de Plaza in Havana's Vedado district, has become a more studied affair with conferences, discussions and workshops but fortunately there are still live performances too, at venues around the city.
Festival Internacional de Ballet de la Habana Havana (late Oct to early Nov). Held in even-numbered years and presided over by Alicia Alonso and the Cuban National Ballet. Recent highlights have included performances by visiting Cubans Carlos Acosta and José Manuel Carreño. Performances take place at the Gran Teatro and Teatro Mella.
Festival de Matamoros Son Santiago (mid to late Oct). This three-day festival, a tribute to the Santiago de Cuba nineteenth-century musician Miguel Matamoros, draws music stars from around the country for concerts, dance competitions, workshops and seminars. While the focus is on son, expect to see many other traditional styles of music, including salsa.
Havana International Theatre Festival Havana (Oct-Nov). Excellent ten-day theatre festival showcasing classics and contemporary Cuban works as well as productions by theatre groups from Latin America, Europe and the US, with plenty of free street theatre in the city's open spaces as well.
Festival de la Habana de Música Contemporánea Havana (late Nov). A festival of classical and chamber music staged in venues around the city, such as the Casa de las Americas and the Convento de San Francisco de Asís.
Baila en Cuba – Encuentro Mundial de Bailadores y Academias de Baile de Casino y Salsa Havana (late Nov). A commercial event consisting of a week of concerts, workshops and classes showcasing and teaching Cuban dance styles. There's usually an impressive line-up of salsa bands too.
Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano Havana (early Dec). One of Cuba's top events, this ten-day film festival combines the newest Cuban, Latin American and Western films with established classics, as well as providing a networking opportunity for leading independent directors and anyone else interested in film. Information, accreditation and programmes are available at the Hotel Nacional, from where the event is managed. It's well worth paying $40CUC accreditation, which gains you access to all screenings, seminars and talks and many after parties.
Havana International Jazz Festival Havana (mid-Dec). Organized by the Cuban Institute of Music and Cuban jazz legend Chucho Valdés, this is the powerhouse event in the local international jazz calendar. It consistently attracts an excellent line-up: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Haden and Max Roach have all played in the past, alongside Cuban luminaries such as Bobby Carcassés, Roberto Fonseca and of course Chucho Valdés himself. Venues across the city include Teatro Mella, Teatro Karl Marx, Teatro Amadeo Roldan, Teatro América and the Casa de la Cultura de Plaza.
Parrandas de Remedios Remedios, Villa Clara (Dec 24). An unusual and exuberant carnivalesque display of floats, fireworks and partying.
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England, predominant constituent unit of the United Kingdom, occupying more than half of the island of Great Britain.
Outside the British Isles, England is often erroneously considered synonymous with the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) and even with the entire United Kingdom. Despite the political, economic, and cultural legacy that has secured the perpetuation of its name, England no longer officially exists as a governmental or political unit—unlike Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, which all have varying degrees of self-government in domestic affairs. It is rare for institutions to operate for England alone. Notable exceptions are the Church of England (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, including Northern Ireland, have separate branches of the Anglican Communion) and sports associations for cricket, rugby, and football (soccer). In many ways England has seemingly been absorbed within the larger mass of Great Britain since the Act of Union of 1707.
Laced by great rivers and small streams, England is a fertile land, and the generosity of its soil has supported a thriving agricultural economy for millennia. In the early 19th century, England became the epicentre of a worldwide Industrial Revolution and soon the world's most industrialized country. Drawing resources from every settled continent, cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool converted raw materials into manufactured goods for a global market, while London, the country's capital, emerged as one of the world's preeminent cities and the hub of a political, economic, and cultural network that extended far beyond England's shores. Today the metropolitan area of London encompasses much of southeastern England and continues to serve as the financial centre of Europe and to be a centre of innovation—particularly in popular culture.
One of the fundamental English characteristics is diversity within a small compass. No place in England is more than 75 miles (120 km) from the sea, and even the farthest points in the country are no more than a day's journey by road or rail from London. Formed of the union of small Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during the early medieval period, England has long comprised several distinct regions, each different in dialect, economy, religion, and disposition; indeed, even today many English people identify themselves by the regions or shires from which they come—e.g., Yorkshire, the West Country, the Midlands—and retain strong ties to those regions even if they live elsewhere. Yet commonalities are more important than these differences, many of which began to disappear in the era after World War II, especially with the transformation of England from a rural into a highly urbanized society. The country's island location has been of critical importance to the development of the English character, which fosters the seemingly contradictory qualities of candour and reserve along with conformity and eccentricity and which values social harmony and, as is true of many island countries, the good manners that ensure orderly relations in a densely populated landscape.
With the loss of Britain's vast overseas empire in the mid 20th century, England suffered an identity crisis, and much energy has been devoted to discussions of "Englishness"—that is, not only of just what it means to be English in a country that now has large immigrant populations from many former colonies and that is much more cosmopolitan than insular but also of what it means to be English as opposed to British. While English culture draws on the cultures of the world, it is quite unlike any other, if difficult to identify and define. Of it, English novelist George Orwell, the "revolutionary patriot" who chronicled politics and society in the 1930s and '40s, remarked in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941):
There is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization.…It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.
For many, Orwell captured as well as anyone the essence of what Shakespeare called "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."
England is bounded on the north by Scotland; on the west by the Irish Sea, Wales, and the Atlantic Ocean; on the south by the English Channel; and on the east by the North Sea.
England's topography is low in elevation but, except in the east, rarely flat. Much of it consists of rolling hillsides, with the highest elevations found in the north, northwest, and southwest. This landscape is based on complex underlying structures that form intricate patterns on England's geologic map. The oldest sedimentary rocks and some igneous rocks (in isolated hills of granite) are in Cornwall and Devon on the southwestern peninsula, ancient volcanic rocks underlie parts of the Cumbrian Mountains, and the most recent alluvial soils cover the Fens of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk. Between these regions lie bands of sandstones and limestones of different geologic periods, many of them relicts of primeval times when large parts of central and southern England were submerged below warm seas. Geologic forces lifted and folded some of these rocks to form the spine of northern England—the Pennines, which rise to 2,930 feet (893 metres) at Cross Fell. The Cumbrian Mountains, which include the famous Lake District, reach 3,210 feet (978 metres) at Scafell Pike, the highest point in England. Slate covers most of the northern portion of the mountains, and thick beds of lava are found in the southern part. Other sedimentary layers have yielded chains of hills ranging from 965 feet (294 metres) in the North Downs to 1,083 feet (330 metres) in the Cotswolds.
The hills known as the Chilterns, the North York Moors, and the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds were rounded into characteristic plateaus with west-facing escarpments during three successive glacial periods of the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago). When the last ice sheet melted, the sea level rose, submerging the land bridge that had connected Great Britain with the European mainland. Deep deposits of sand, gravel, and glacial mud left by the retreating glaciers further altered the landscape. Erosion by rain, river, and tides and subsidence in parts of eastern England subsequently shaped the hills and the coastline. Plateaus of limestone, gritstone, and carboniferous strata are associated with major coalfields, some existing as outcrops on the surface.
The geologic complexity of England is strikingly illustrated in the cliff structure of its shoreline. Along the southern coast from the ancient granite cliffs of Land's End in the extreme southwest is a succession of sandstones of different colours and limestones of different ages, culminating in the white chalk from the Isle of Wight to Dover. A varied panorama of cliffs, bays, and river estuaries distinguishes the English coastline, which, with its many indentations, is some 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long.
The Pennines, the Cotswolds, and the moors and chalk downs of southern England serve as watersheds for most of England's rivers. The Eden, Ribble, and Mersey rise in the Pennines, flow westward, and have a short course to the Atlantic Ocean. The Tyne, Tees, Swale, Aire, Don, and Trent rise in the Pennines, flow eastward, and have a long course to the North Sea. The Welland, Nen, and Great Ouse rise in the northeastern edge of the Cotswolds and empty into the Wash estuary, which forms part of the North Sea. The Welland river valley forms part of the rich agricultural land of Lincolnshire. The Thames, the longest river in England, also rises in the Cotswolds and drains a large part of southeastern England. From the moors and chalk downs of southern England rise the Tamar, Exe, Stour, Avon, Test, Arun, and Ouse. All flow into the English Channel and in some instances help to form a pleasing landscape along the coast. England's largest lake is Windermere, with an area of 6 square miles (16 square km), located in the county of Cumbria.
In journeys of only a few miles it is possible to pass through a succession of different soil structures—such as from chalk down to alluvial river valley, from limestone to sandstone and acid heath, and from clay to sand—each type of soil bearing its own class of vegetation. The Cumbrian Mountains and most of the southwestern peninsula have acid brown soils. The eastern section of the Pennines has soils ranging from brown earths to podzols. Leached brown soils predominate in much of southern England. Acid soils and podzols occur in the southeast. Regional characteristics, however, are important. Black soil covers the Fens in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk; clay soil predominates in the hills of the Weald (in East Sussex and West Sussex); and the chalk downs, especially the North Downs of Kent, are covered by a variety of stiff, brown clay, with sharp angular flints. Fine-grained deposits of alluvium occur in the floodplains, and fine marine silt occurs around the Wash estuary.
Weather in England is as variable as the topography. As in other temperate maritime zones, the averages are moderate, ranging in the Thames river valley from about 35 °F (2 °C) in January to 72 °F (22 °C) in July; but the extremes in England range from below 0 °F (−18 °C) to above 90 °F (32 °C). The Roman historian Tacitus recorded that the climate was "objectionable, with frequent rains and mists, but no extreme cold." Yet snow covers the higher elevations of England about 50 days per year. England is known as a wet country, and this is certainly true in the northwest and southwest. However, the northeastern and central regions receive less than 30 inches (750 mm) of rainfall annually and frequently suffer from drought. In parts of the southeast the annual rainfall averages only 20 inches (500 mm). Charles II thought that the English climate was the best in the world—"a man can enjoy outdoor exercise in all but five days of the year." But no one would dispute that it is unpredictable: hence Dr. Samuel Johnson's observation that "when two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather." This changeability of the weather, not only season by season but day by day and even hour by hour, has had a profound effect on English art and literature. Not for nothing has the bumbershoot been the stereotypical walking stick of the English gentleman.
Plant and animal life
England shares with the rest of Britain a diminished spectrum of vegetation and living creatures, partly because the island was separated from the mainland of Europe soon after much of it had been swept bare by the last glacial period and partly because the land has been so industriously worked by humans. For example, a drastic depletion of mature broad-leaved forests, especially oak, was a result of the overuse of timber in the iron and shipbuilding industries. Today only a small part of the English countryside is woodland. Broad-leaved (oak, beech, ash, birch, and elm) and conifer (pine, fir, spruce, and larch) trees dominate the landscapes of Kent, Surrey, East Sussex, West Sussex, Suffolk, and Hampshire. Important forests include Ashdown in East Sussex, Epping and Hatfield in Essex, Dean in Gloucestershire, Sherwood in Nottinghamshire, Grizedale in Cumbria, and Redesdale, Kielder, and Wark in Northumberland. A substantial amount of England's forestland is privately owned. Vegetation patterns have been further modified through overgrazing, forest clearance, reclamation and drainage of marshlands, and the introduction of exotic plant species. Though there are fewer species of plants than in the European mainland, they nevertheless span a wide range and include some rarities. Certain Mediterranean species exist in the sheltered and almost subtropical valleys of the southwest, while tundra-like vegetation is found in parts of the moorland of the northeast. England has a profusion of summer wildflowers in its fields, lanes, and hedgerows, though in some areas these have been severely reduced by the use of herbicides on farms and roadside verges. Cultivated gardens, which contain many species of trees, shrubs, and flowering plants from around the world, account for much of the varied vegetation of the country.
Mammal species such as the bear, wolf, and beaver were exterminated in historic times, but others such as the fallow deer, rabbit, and rat have been introduced. More recently birds of prey have suffered at the hands of farmers protecting their stock and their game birds. Protective measures have been implemented, including a law restricting the collecting of birds' eggs, and some of the less common birds have been reestablishing themselves. The bird life is unusually varied, mainly because England lies along the route of bird migrations. Some birds have found town gardens, where they are often fed, to be a favourable environment, and in London about 100 different species are recorded annually. London also is a habitat conducive to foxes, which in small numbers have colonized woods and heaths within a short distance of the city centre. There are few kinds of reptiles and amphibians—about half a dozen species of each—but they are nearly all plentiful where conditions suit them. Freshwater fish are numerous; the char and allied species of the lakes of Cumbria probably represent an ancient group, related to the trout, that migrated to the sea before the tectonic changes that formed these lakes cut off their outlet. The marine fishes are abundant in species and in absolute numbers. The great diversity of shorelines produces habitats for numerous types of invertebrate animals.
Ethnic groups and languages
The English language is polyglot, drawn from a variety of sources, and its vocabulary has been augmented by importations from throughout the world. The English language does not identify the English, for it is the main language of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, many Commonwealth countries, and the United States. The primary source of the language, however, is the main ethnic stem of the English: the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded and colonized England in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their language provides the most commonly used words in the modern English vocabulary.
In the millennia following the last glacial period, the British Isles were peopled by migrant tribes from the continent of Europe and, later, by traders from the Mediterranean area. During the Roman occupation England was inhabited by Celtic-speaking Brythons (or Britons), but the Brythons yielded to the invading Teutonic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (from present northwestern Germany) except in the mountainous areas of western and northern Great Britain. The Anglo-Saxons preserved and absorbed little of the Roman-British culture they found in the 5th century. There are few traces of Celtic or Roman Latin in the early English of the Anglo-Saxons, though some words survive in place-names, such as the Latin castra, for "camp," providing the suffix -cester, and combe and tor, Celtic words for "valley" and "hill." Old Norse, the language of the Danes and Norsemen, left more extensive traces, partly because it had closer affinities to Anglo-Saxon and because the Danish occupation of large tracts of eastern and northern England was for a time deeply rooted, as some place-names show.
The history of England before the Norman Conquest is poorly documented, but what stands out is the tenacity of the Anglo-Saxons in surviving a succession of invasions. They united most of what is now England from the 9th to the mid-11th century, only to be overthrown by the Normans in 1066. For two centuries Norman French became the language of the court and the ruling nobility; yet English prevailed and by 1362 had reestablished itself as an official language. Church Latin, as well as a residue of Norman French, was incorporated into the language during this period. It was subsequently enriched by the Latin and Greek of the educated scholars of the Renaissance. The seafarers, explorers, and empire builders of modern history have imported foreign words, most copiously from Europe but also from Asia. These words have been so completely absorbed into the language that they pass unselfconsciously as English. The English, it might be said, are great Anglicizers.
The English have also absorbed and Anglicized non-English peoples, from Scandinavian pillagers and Norman conquerors to Latin church leaders. Among royalty, a Welsh dynasty of monarchs, the Tudors, was succeeded by the Scottish Stuarts, to be followed by the Dutch William of Orange and the German Hanoverians. English became the main language for the Scots, Welsh, and Irish. England provided a haven for refugees from the time of the Huguenots in the 17th century to the totalitarian persecutions of the 20th century. Many Jews have settled in England. Since World War II there has been large-scale immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, posing seemingly more difficult problems of assimilation, and restrictive immigration regulations have been imposed that are out of step with the open-door policy that had been an English tradition for many generations.
Although the Church of England is formally established as the official church, with the monarch at its head, England is a highly secularized country. The Church of England has some 13,000 parishes and a similar number of clergy, but it solemnizes fewer than one-third of marriages and baptizes only one in four babies. The Nonconformist (non-Anglican Protestant) churches have nominally fewer members, but there is probably greater dedication among them, as with the Roman Catholic church. There is virtually complete religious tolerance in England and no longer any overt prejudice against Catholics. The decline in churchgoing has been thought to be an indicator of decline in religious belief, but opinion polls substantiate the view that belief in God and the central tenets of Christianity survives the flagging fortunes of the churches. Some churches—most notably those associated with the Evangelical movement—have small but growing memberships. There are also large communities of Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and Hindus.
Settlement patterns
The modern landscape of England has been so significantly changed by humans that there is virtually no genuine wilderness left. Only the remotest moorland and mountaintops have been untouched. Even the bleak Pennine moors of the north are crisscrossed by dry stone walls, and their vegetation is modified by the cropping of mountain sheep. The marks of centuries of exploitation and use dominate the contemporary landscape. The oldest traces are the antiquarian survivals, such as the Bronze Age forts studding the chalk downs of the southwest, and the corrugations left by the strip farming of medieval open fields.
More significant is the structure of towns and villages, which was established in Roman-British and Anglo-Saxon times and has persisted as the basic pattern. The English live in scattered high-density groupings, whether in villages or towns or, in modern times, cities. Although the latter sprawled into conurbations during the 19th and early 20th centuries without careful planning, the government has since limited the encroachment of urban development, and England retains extensive tracts of farming countryside between its towns, its smaller villages often engulfed in the vegetation of trees, copses, hedgerows, and fields: in a phrase of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, "the sweet especial rural scene," which is so prominent in English literature and English art.
The visual impact of a mostly green and pleasant land can be seriously misleading. England is primarily an industrial country, built up during the Industrial Revolution by exploitation of the coalfields and cheap labour, especially in the cotton-textile areas of Lancashire, the woolen-textile areas of Yorkshire, and the coal-mining, metalworking, and engineering centres of the Midlands and the North East. England has large tracts of derelict areas, scarred by the spoil heaps of the coal mines, quarries and clay pits, abandoned industrial plants, and rundown slums.
One of the earliest initiatives to maintain the heritage of the past was the establishment in 1895 of the National Trust, a private organization dedicated to the preservation of historic places and natural beauty in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. (There is a separate National Trust for Scotland.) In 1957 the Civic Trust was established to promote interest in and action on issues of the urban environment. Hundreds of local societies dedicated to the protection of the urban environment have been set up, and many other voluntary organizations as well as government agencies are working to protect and improve the English landscape. Greenbelts have been mapped out for London and other conurbations. The quality of town life has been improved by smoke control and checks on river pollution, so effectively that the recorded sunshine in London and other major urban centres has greatly increased and the "pea soup" fogs that once characterized London have become memories of the past. Fish have returned to rivers—such as the Thames, Tyne, and Tees—from which they had been driven by industrial pollution.
Traditional regions
Although England is a small and homogeneous country bound together by law, administration, and a comprehensive transport system, distinctive regional differences have arisen from the country's geography and history. It was natural for different groups of the population to establish themselves in recognizable physical areas. In the north, for example, the east and west are separated by the Pennines, and the estuaries of the Humber, Thames, and Severn rivers form natural barriers. The eight traditional geographic regions—the South West, the South East (Greater London often was separated out as its own region), the West Midlands, the East Midlands, East Anglia, the North West, Yorkshire, and the North East—often were referred to as the standard regions of England, though they never served administrative functions. In the 1990s the government redrew and renamed some regions and established government development agencies for each.
The South West
The South West contains the last Celtic stronghold in England, Cornwall, where a Celtic language was spoken until the 18th century. There is even a small nationalist movement, Mebyon Kernow (Sons of Cornwall), seeking to revive the old language. Although it has no political significance, the movement reflects the disenchantment of a declining area, with the exhaustion of mineral deposits toward the end of the 19th century. Cornwall and the neighbouring county of Devon share a splendid coastline, and Dartmoor and Exmoor national parks are in this part of the region. Farther east are the city of Bristol and the counties of Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Wiltshire. The last is famous for the prehistoric stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury and for associated remains dubbed "woodhenges." Development in the manufacturing sector in the 1970s and '80s and the growth of service activities and tourism in the 1990s contributed to the region's significant population increase.
The South East
The South East, centred on London, has a population and wealth to match many nation-states. This is the dominant area of England and the most rapidly growing one, although planning controls such as greenbelts have restricted the urban sprawl of London since the mid-20th century. While fully one-third of the South East is still devoted to farming or horticulture, the region as a whole also has an extensive range of manufacturing industry. With improvements in the transportation systems, however, nuclear and space research facilities, retailing, advertising, high-technology industries, and some services have moved to areas outside London, including Surrey, Buckinghamshire, and Hertfordshire.
With its theatres, concert halls, museums, and art galleries, London is the cultural capital of the country. It is the administrative headquarters of not only government but also many of Britain's industrial, financial, and commercial undertakings. Moreover, it is the focus of the national transport system, acting as a hub for the United Kingdom's international and domestic air traffic and its mainline railway network. At Tilbury, 26 miles (42 km) downstream from London proper, the Port of London Authority oversees the largest and commercially most important port facilities in Britain. Whether the people of the South East feel a regional identity is questionable. Sussex and Bedfordshire or Oxfordshire, Hampshire, and Kent have nothing much in common apart from being within the magnetic pull of London. Loyalties are more specifically to towns, such as St. Albans or Brighton, and within London there is a sense of belonging more to localities—such as Chelsea or Hampstead, which acquire something of the character of urban villages—than to the metropolis as a whole.
The West Midlands
Regional characteristics are stronger outside the South East. The West Midlands region, comprising the historic counties of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire, has given its name to the metropolitan county of West Midlands, which includes the cities of Birmingham and Coventry and the Black Country (an urban area whose name reflects the coating of grime and soot afflicting the buildings of the region). With a history dating to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the West Midland towns gained a reputation for being ugly but prosperous. However, the decline of heavy industry during the late 20th century took its toll on employment and prosperity in the region. Not exclusively an industrial area, the West Midlands includes Shakespeare country around Stratford-upon-Avon, the fruit orchards of the Vale of Evesham, and the hill country on the Welsh border.
The East Midlands
The East Midlands are less coherent as a region, taking in the manufacturing centres of Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham, and Derby. In broad swathes between the industrial centres lies much of England's best farmland. Several canals in the region, including the Grand Junction and the Trent and Mersey, were used for commerce primarily from the late 18th to the early 20th century. They are now being revived, mainly for recreational use.
East Anglia
East Anglia retains an air of remoteness that belongs to its history. With the North Sea on its northern and eastern flanks, it was at one time almost cut off by fenland to the west (now drained) and forests (cleared long ago) to the south. In medieval times it was one of the richest wool regions and, in some parts, was depopulated to make way for sheep. It is now the centre of some of the most mechanized farming in England. Compared with other regions, East Anglia has a low population density; with rapid industrialization in cities such as Norwich and Bacton, however, this pattern is changing. Cambridge is home to one of the world's foremost universities; Newmarket, in Suffolk, is a world-famous centre for horse racing.
The North West
Regions become more distinctive the farther they are from London. The North West, chronically wet and murky, comprises the geographic counties of Cumbria, Lancashire, and Cheshire and the metropolitan counties of Greater Manchester and Merseyside (including Liverpool). This region's declining cotton-textile industry is rapidly being replaced by diversified manufacturing. The North West expresses itself in an accent of its own, with a tradition of variety-hall humour (from the classic work of George Formby and Gracie Fields to the more recent efforts of Alexie Sayle); it has also earned global renown for giving birth to British rock music, with the Beatles and other groups in Liverpool, and for football (soccer), notably with the Liverpool FC and Manchester United football clubs. However, these advantages could not hide Liverpool's economic decline in the late 20th century. Much of the city's prosperity was built on its port, which served transatlantic and imperial trade, but, as trade switched increasingly to Europe, Liverpool found itself on the wrong side of the country and increasingly lost business to ports in the south and east. Overall, the North West is still breaking into the new territories of modern industry, its old cotton towns symbolically overshadowed by the grim gritrock Pennine escarpments that have been stripped of their trees by two centuries of industrial smoke. Nonetheless, Manchester remains an important financial and commercial centre. Several canals traverse the region, including the Manchester Ship Canal and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The Lake District in the Cumbrian Mountains, the Solway coast, the northern Pennines, Hadrian's Wall, and part of Yorkshire Dales National Park contribute to the scenic landscape of Cumbria.
On the east side of the Pennines watershed, the metropolitan county of West Yorkshire, including the cities of Leeds and Bradford, has a character similar to that of the industrial North West. Its prosperity formerly was based on coal and textile manufacture, and, though manufacturing remains important, West Yorkshire has diversified its economy. Indeed, Leeds has become England's most important financial centre outside London. This region also shows a rugged independence of character expressed in a tough style of humour. Farther south, steel is concentrated at Sheffield, world-famous for its cutlery and silver plate (known as Sheffield plate). Sheffield is the cultural and service centre of the industrial metropolitan county of South Yorkshire. The region also has extensive areas of farming in North Yorkshire and East Riding of Yorkshire, a deep-sea fishing industry operating from Hull, and tourist country along a fine coast in the east (North York Moors National Park) and in the beautiful valleys of the west (Yorkshire Dales National Park).
The North East
The North East extends to the Scottish border, taking in the geographic counties of Northumberland and Durham. It also includes the metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear and the Teesside metropolitan area (centred on Middlesbrough) and is therefore unusually diverse. Teesside was heavily industrialized (iron and steel and shipbuilding) during the 19th century, but it has more recently become an important tourist destination along the North Sea at the edge of North York Moors National Park. Teesside also has one of the largest petrochemical complexes in Europe, and oil from the Ekofisk field in the North Sea is piped ashore there. Coal mining was formerly the biggest industry in the county of Durham, but the last mine closed by the end of the 20th century, and the emphasis is now on engineering, the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, and service industries. The local flavour of life can be found in the dialect known as Geordie and in the folk songs of Tyne and Wear and the former coal-mining villages. The city of Newcastle upon Tyne is an important industrial and commercial centre. The region also contains some of the most desolate land in England, in the Cheviot Hills along the Scottish border.
Demographic trends
England comprises more than four-fifths of the total population of the United Kingdom. Although during the 1970s and '80s the overall birth rate remained constant, the number of births per thousand women between the ages of 20 and 24 fell by two-fifths, the drop reflecting a trend among women to delay both marriage and childbirth. The overall death rate remained constant, but the mortality rate among young children and young adults decreased. Over the last half of the 20th century the number of people aged 65 and older almost doubled. During that same period the populations of the larger metropolitan areas, especially Greater London and Merseyside, decreased somewhat as people moved to distant outlying suburbs and rural areas. The standard regions of East Anglia, the East Midlands, the South West, and the South East (excluding Greater London) gained population, while the other standard regions all lost population. However, in the late 1990s the population of London started to climb once more, especially in the former port areas (the Docklands), where economic regeneration led to the creation of new jobs and homes.


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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Oil futures settled lower Friday, easing back from gains seen in the previous session as traders gauged signs of demand from China. February crude oil CLG23, -50.75% fell 26 cents, or 0.3%, to settle at $93.56 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices, which had briefly climbed past $94 on Friday, ended last week at $93.09. Traders worried that "reports of lower Saudi production might offer a glimpse of what Saudi Arabia knows -- that demand is worse than the consensus perception," said Matthew Parry, senior oil-market analyst at the International Energy Agency. There are also concerns that "today's heightened Chinese inflationary figure limits the scope for too much additional government support," which is likely what's driving the strong recent pace of Chinese oil demand growth, he said.
Oil futures slip, but gain for the week
Quote References
-53.27 -50.75%


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Climbing the ladder in "Ka 'oia' i' o ma loko" Season 4 Episode 3
A conspiracy theorist helps Five-0 when a missing artifact is the key to solving a double murder, on HAWAII FIVE-0, Friday, Oct. 11 (9:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Jorge Garcia ("Lost") guest stars as the conspiracy theorist. Pictured (L-R) Scott Caan Danny "Danno" Williams and Jorge Garcia as Jerry Ortega Photo: Best Possibe Screen Grab/CBS ©2013 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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The Raymond Lions Club, formed in 1995, is an active group of service minded men and women who want to make Raymond a better place to live by serving the community in a variety of ways. It is a part of the world's largest, and most active service club organization, Lions Club International. Along with the more than 1.4 million members, they work with their fellow Lions in more than 170 countries and geographical areas to seek out and help the needy in their own communities, their country, and the world.
The club meets at the Raymond Public Safety Building on Route 302 in Raymond, on the first and third Thursdays of each month except July and August. The meeting starts at 6:30 PM.
If you would like more information about Lions and what we do, please contact:
King Lion Gil Brown, at 207-655-7221 or Lion Laurie Wallace at 207-655-2222
King Lion Gil Brown by email at email@example.com
or send a letter to Raymond Lions at P.O. Box 1057, Raymond, Maine 04071


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Xiaolin Showdown - Game cheats, tips and tricks for XBox
Play as Chase:--------------Defeat Mala Mala Jong in the last level of Adventure mode to unlock Chase.
Play as Jack:-------------Get at least halfway through the game to fight the Jack Spicer Robot. Defeat it to unlock Jack.
Alternate costumes:-------------------To unlock new costumes, level up the rank from Grass Hopper in Training mode to Wudai. For some ranks it will unlock new costumes:
Monk costume Showdown costume Robot costume Street costume


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Te Reo Māori Mihi
We are learning to:
- Introduce ourselves in Te Reo Māori.
- Communicate personal information, such as our name, parents' and grandparents' names and home town in Te Reo Māori.
To be successful we need to:
- Speak clearly and fluently.
- Use short simple sentences of Te Reo Māori to communicate personal information.