John Newton and biblical counseling on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson and you're listening to Truth in Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified

Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face. Today on the podcast, I am delighted to have with me. One of my dear friends,

Keith Palmer, he's a board member with ACBC. He is one of the pastors at Grace Bible in Granbury,

Texas, and he and several churches in the area actually cooperate together.

He's the director of a center for biblical counseling there in North Texas, and they do such a

wonderful job of training, of discipling, of leading churches in soul care.

And I'm so grateful for Keith and his friendship to me. And I'm

really looking forward to our discussion today as we talk about looking backward into history to

see how people can be helpful to us and thinking about the scriptures and ministering the scripture

personally. And so Keith has been doing some work on a man named John Newton. And some

of you are probably listening, thinking, well, who in the world is John Newton? And so, Keith,

what I want you to do is just to introduce us to John Newton. Who in the world is this guy? And how did

he engage in biblical counseling, especially in a way that's helpful to us in 2020.

Well, thanks, Dale. It's always a joy to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity today.

So John Newton was an 18th century hymn writer and pastor, and probably he is best known for

authoring the hymn Amazing Grace. So everybody knows Amazing Grace. John Newton was the guy that wrote that.

What you may not know is that he spent 43 years as a pastor in two different churches.

He was the mentor of William Wilberforce, who, as you know, worked in Parliament to

ban slavery. And so that's John Newton. The reason we want to talk about him today in terms of

biblical counseling is that he wrote over a thousand letters. In addition to all the hymns that

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