Let's pray.

So Father in heaven, my heart's desire is for me and these brothers and sisters to go deep with you in understanding the role of prayer in the Christian life, the role of meditation on in your word, the role of fasting, so that we learn

to walk minute by minute and hour by hour in communion with the living God, not treating the faith as a code or a list of rules that we use our own willpower to follow, but a serving in the newness of the spirit, empowered by the spirit, led by the spirit, bearing

the fruit of the spirit, walking by the spirit, filled with the spirit.

Lord, this is a miracle life we're talking about here.

It's a supernatural life, and so there's nothing I can do ultimately to make it happen

It's going to be you in these five hours we have together or it's not going to be

And so I invite you, indeed I plead with you, to come and to give wisdom and

to give life and to give boldness and to give clarity and to give a sweetness and authenticity and intensity and intensity to our fellowship with you in your word by your spirit.

Lord, if there's any in the room who doesn't have spiritual life, who've never been quickened,

I pray that the Spirit would so work upon them that they would find themselves wakening, as it were, for the first time spiritually to reality.

To know you as the living true God, to know you Christ as the risen Savior, to know you Holy Spirit as a distinct person

in the Trinity. So guide me now, help me to speak biblically and to be balanced and to have right affections.

Don't let me say anything that would be false or unhelpful or hurtful or misleading.

Be our portion, guide, and the interaction that we have together, I pray. In Jesus, name, amen.

In view of what I just said there about hour by hour walking and communion with God.

I thought I'd begin with John Newton because I just, I'm still

oozing Newton from the pastors conference.

And so I just wrote down a new way to introduce this seminar.

The last time I taught this I had just lectured on John Patton, so I used him.

In fact, I may use him tomorrow morning as well, but here's Newton.

John Newton wrote Amazing Grace, lived a couple hundred years ago and

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