Okay. Good morning, everyone. It's good to connect with you. Today we will have our class online. Let's pray and we'll get started. I just want to request someone from the class to please go ahead and lead in prayer. Tandy, unmute and pray please. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for this time, Lord Jesus Father. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for this morning. Lord Jesus Father, thank you for helping us to have this class. Thank you for giving us this opportunity and Lord Jesus Father as we go through this session of Father Lord, Holy Spirit, teachers, leaders and guidance of Father help us to have more faith in you, Lord Jesus and Lord Jesus Father. I pray for Nancy Ma'am also Lord, give her wisdom, give her knowledge and strength. Lord Holy Spirit, speak through us, minister through us. Let this session, Lord Jesus Father, teach us more of Father. In Jesus' mighty name we ask and pray. Amen. Well, thank you. Thank you for that prayer. Okay. Good morning, everyone. I see your message is on the chat. All right. Today we will continue to discuss about faith but before we get into what we have for today, we'll talk about some very key concepts like faith, what is faith and what is hope, what is love. But before that, maybe we can just share a little bit regarding the life of Abraham and how you've learned something from the life of Abraham and his journey of faith, the steps of faith that we discussed in the last class. So if there's anything that has really impacted you from Abraham's journey, maybe you can share that and then I'll get into the subject for today. So Abraham's journey of faith. Okay. Feel free.  You can either unmute your mics and talk or post your comments on the chat. I'll read it out. Any takeaways from the last class? Sister, can I say something about Abraham? Sure, sure. Sister Katruth, please go ahead. Abraham, he got his son Isaac at the age of 100 and when Sarah was beyond the age of childbearing and God wanted to test his faith and asked him to sacrifice his only son. And Abraham did not hesitate. He prepared and he took his servant and Isaac and he went on Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son. But God knew that his heart, that he is very faithful and he provided a lamb instead of his son and that shows that Abraham did not waver in his faith. Okay. So the testimony of Abraham where he was strong in his faith and that he didn't waver, that's something that you have taken away. So thank you for sharing that. Lucy also has a comment here. She says, just obey God. His plans are great. How Abraham moved on obeying God. So obedience to God is something that she has noted. Anything else that stood out for you because when we talk about someone or let's say a truth from God's word, hopefully that has gone registered in our hearts and we can apply that in our own lives because if we don't understand it, we can't apply it. So that's why I'm asking you so that I know what you have understood from the last class. So Sanjay has a comment. He says Abraham wasn't perfect in his faith. We had God was understanding and he continued to guide him even though he went against God's will at times. God will never leave us now forsake us. Yeah, that's true because we saw how there were times when Abraham made mistakes. But there were also times when Abraham was not maybe a little bit of doubt came into his heart, but we know how God called him and reassured him with a vision. He refreshed the vision so that Abraham could hold on to the promise of God. So in that sense, it's true what Sanjay is sharing here that God is so kind and so merciful that we can keep following after him. So he helps us even in our moments of weaknesses. That's good Sanjay. Anything else that others have picked up? Even though Abraham, yeah, Jennifer, just coming to you a moment. I'll read out Paramita's comment here. She says even though Abraham didn't know about celestial bodies, he believed God. Okay, all right. Yeah, I guess we know more now than Abraham did back then. Okay, Jennifer, your turn. Please go ahead. You can unmute and speak. Yeah, ma'am. When God called him, Abraham came out of his comfort zone from his place, land people, from his churches, everything. And he followed God's word and he went out of his nation, travelled him.  Yeah, so when God called, he just stepped out by faith and that has become a blessing for all of us. Yes, Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing that key point. I'll move on to the chat. Okay, Sunny Moses, though Abraham didn't see the results at his present times, yet still he had faith in God and his promises. We also saw certain steps of faith, such as he believed God against all hope he still believed. All right, yeah, that's fine. That's good. Daniel Abraham had full faith that even though God was saying to sacrifice his son, he is faithful to fulfill his promise without Isaac also. Okay, well, we do have an insight of what Abraham thought when he was sacrificing Isaac. So I know Daniel has mentioned that he had the faith in God to move on even without Isaac, but the scriptures tell us that he believed that God could raise up Isaac from the dead. That you know, even if God is asking him to sacrifice Isaac, God is able to resurrect him. So Abraham had faith even for the resurrection of his sacrifice son. Okay, right, let's move on. So the life of Abraham, the journey of Abraham, it's an inspiration for us. That is why Abraham is known as the father of faith. So some very important things that we must remember from Abraham's steps of faith are that God is a promise giver. So in all of our lives, we must hear from God. What is God speaking to me in my journey? Or it could be more specific to the situation that we find ourselves in.  Then after we hear the word of God, the intention or the promise of God, then starts the journey. So in the case of Abraham, we saw that he began, it wasn't perfect, right? It's not like he was so strong in what God called him to do that he did not have doubt or he did not sort of go away from what God had told him to do. These things happened even in Abraham's life. But the fact is that he became stronger and stronger. And that is what the steps of Abraham are all about. We saw those steps, how he believed God. That's the first thing. Okay, God said it, I believe it. Against all hope, he hoped in God. So he had an expectation from God that God would do it. And then we saw how he went on, he thanked God, he gave glory to God. His faith became unwavering or his faith came to a place where it was not shaking anymore. He was firm in his faith. And then he went ahead and he received the promise of God. So it's like stages or steps as we see the fulfillment of God's promises for our lives. So we must be ready and willing to make this journey ourselves. So here's the last comment from Deepu. She says, Abraham believed that who gives life to dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Okay, sure. So this is again, you know, with regard to the scripture from Romans chapter 4 verse 17. Now, we can move on. Let's move on to the next topic here. This is regarding faith, hope and love. So we'll discuss what these terms mean. Now, each of them has a separate or a distinct understanding for us. So that's what we want to grasp so that we are able to walk in what these terms mean. So I'll try and explain them to us. And if you have any, you know, questions or clarifications regarding this, we can talk about it. So faith, hope and love, we know that in 1st Corinthians chapter 13, we are encouraged that these are the three things that ultimately remain. And they're so essential for the lives of believers. But what is faith? What is hope? And what is love? You know, that's the question we are asking. So when we talk about faith, we've seen that faith is in the now a few points that we understood. Faith is in the now adding faith. Now, when we talked about faith, we also mentioned that faith is a substance of things which we hope for. So what is this hope? And I will share with us earlier that the word hope in English may not give us an idea of certainty.  You know, it could remain strong or, you know, something could happen to it. But the biblical understanding of the word hope is that when you say I am hoping that God will do something, it is certain it will happen. So my hope is that God will provide for my need. When I'm saying that in a biblical sense, I mean that God will provide or I hope that God will grant me wisdom and understanding. The actual biblical understanding would be that, yes, God will do it for us. So hope is very certain as far as the biblical understanding is concerned. So hope, okay, what else can we understand about hope? I just shared that hope is a certainty. It has an element of certainty. And hope is also an expectation. An expectation or we may want to call that it is a positive expectation from God or a confident expectation from God where we are steady and optimistic that something is going to take place and something good is going to happen.  They have a very positive expectation that, yes, you know, my birthday is going to come. It's going to be a great time.  So hope is that hope is a positive or a confident or an optimistic expectation from God. Now, when we say that we have faith and we lack hope, then there is a disconnect. For example, if I say that, you know, I trust that God will bless my ministry or maybe, you know, I'm called to be a pastor and I've planted a church. And my faith is that, yeah, God will bless my ministry. My work will grow, that I will be blessing to many people. But if I lack hope, what is hope? I just share it's a positive expectation within my heart. So the positive expectation will keep me excited. It will keep me strong. It will keep me, you know, rejoicing in God. Now, it may not necessarily be in my emotions. I may not be all cheerful and bubbly outside, but somewhere in the depths of my heart, I am positive. Okay, I am rejoicing. I know, yeah, it's going to come.  But if I lack that expectation, that's when I'm saying that I'm lacking hope. Okay, so that's how we understand hope. So hope says that, yes, at the right time, God will do it. Someday, I'm going to see a manifestation of this. I'm waiting, but there will be a fulfillment. So it's a joyful expectation of our hearts. When we lack expectation, it can be quite challenging to make our journey that way. Also, the Bible has something more to say about hope. So if someone can turn to Hebrews chapter 6 and verse 19, can somebody read that? You can open up to Hebrews 619. Can unmute and read. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast and which enters the presence behind the evil. Okay, thank you so much. So here we see this term, this hope we have as the anchor of the soul. And I've described earlier about how we are a tripartite being. We have spirit, we have soul, we have body. So in a soulish man, or the place which is the seat of our will, our emotions, our thoughts. That is the soul, that's the soul part of us. Now in my soul, if I lack hope, then I am like a ship which has no anchor. Maybe we might have seen some place, maybe in some pictures or let's say some visuals that a boat which is not anchored at the shore, it can just move with the waves and be so unstable or even be beaten up by the winds and the waves and be destroyed. But when there is an anchor, there is a stability. So even in our lives, when we check our own souls, if we lack hope in God, there's no expectation. God, if you do it's okay, if you don't do it's okay. You know, I will still be faithful, that kind of state of mind. Well, it sounds very godly, but the Bible says the hope is the anchor of the soul. So the soul needs an anchor in God where we have a positive expectation from God. And we are saying, I am expecting God said in his word and he will do it for me. So there is this positive expectation that we maintain in God. So hope is the anchor of the soul and we see that both faith and hope exist together. They can't really exist separately. I can't say that I have faith in God, but I have no expectation. Okay, so that shows a lack of faith because what does the scripture say? That faith is the substance of the things that we hope for. So if I'm hoping for something, then I have faith about it. But if I'm saying that I have faith, but I don't have any hope, I don't have any expectation, then my faith is not really in the manner that it should be. So my soul is lacking the anchor of hope, which is also essential for my journey. So paint a picture of hope in your mind based on the promises of God. So how do we do this? See, we are not talking about some worldly concept because these days we have concepts where people say, imagine yourself, whatever you want, you imagine yourself doing that. So I remember back in our school days, some of the students in my batch days to say, oh, if you expect to get the top ranks in school, then just take a few moments to imagine yourself getting that rank or getting the award, getting the medal. Of course, you have to work hard.  But the difference here that we are talking about today is that when God says something, that's the truth. And so it is okay for us to paint a picture in line with the promise of God. Don't just paint the picture based on imagination and whatever we want and we like. That is not the right kind of hoping. But when we paint a picture in line with God's promise, that is helpful. So in Genesis 15, if you recall, in the journey of Abraham, the steps of Abraham, we said that God showed him the stars and God showed him the sand. What is the picture there? The sand, the stars, these were all pictures to Abraham. So as a desert man, every time he would see the stars, he would hope in God and say, God has promised it will happen. And every time he would touch the sand, he would say, I know it's going to happen. It'll happen. So God gives us these pictures based on his word. And that is something that you and I can take advantage of. So based on the promise of God, we can picture ourselves. So if God has promised a blessing in our lives, as we pray, we can say, God, give me a picture, give me an image in my mind that I can look at and say that, yeah, it's going to be like this. I'm waiting, but God is going to do it. It'll look like this.  So what is that? It's like Genesis 15, where there is a picture. So like even in the corporate world, I think they have this new concept. It's called as the vision board. So what they tell people to do is you have a board and on that board you put pictures of whatever you want to see happen. Okay, something like, okay, I want to go for a holiday to a certain place. They take a picture and then they put it there. What are they doing? It's somewhat like what we are talking about. But the only difference is that what people do outside of God and outside of the scriptures. We don't know whether those things will happen or not happen because God never said that. But for us, we are sure that if God has promised, he will do it for us. So I hope that you have understood the meaning of hope. We will now move on as we talk about faith, a little bit about faith. So faith, we've explained it. In the now, faith is the substance of things hoped for or in other words, it's like a sixth sense in our spirit, where we have a knowing that this is what God is going to do. Now, while this is what faith is, what about feelings? What about emotions? Now for Abraham, think of Abraham, God promised him a son, but he was so old. His wife was so old. So would there have been days when he felt his feelings in our emotions? In our soulish man, he felt sad or he felt discouraged or he felt like dejected. He felt hopeless. What about all these feelings? How does that affect the faith which is in his heart? So the point we want to make is that our feelings can change. So we have the promise of God, one day we feel happy, one day we feel sad. When things are going good, we feel like, yes, God is doing it. On the days when we're just not able to do it right, we feel that, hey, nothing is happening. I don't feel good. So all kinds of negative emotions, how do we deal with this? We have to understand that faith and emotional feelings, there is an association, yes, but they can be separate. So even on days when we don't feel great that God's promise will be fulfilled, we can still have faith in our hearts. So don't go by feelings. If we go by feelings, we won't do anything, isn't it? So sometimes, let's say even in ministry, we have to minister. We have to go and pray for someone or we have to stand up and preach on Sunday. The fact is sometimes you don't feel like it. Sometimes you feel like, oh, I'm so tired or I'm so this or that and something else is going on. If we go by feelings, we won't do anything, right?  Because God told you to do it, right? So we move by faith, not by feelings. Feelings are like the weather, morning it's cold, afternoon it's hot, evening it's pleasant. We'll keep changing. So don't base your journey of faith on the basis of feelings because it'll never work out. So yes, feelings can change but our faith is not dependent on feelings and God wants us to be beyond it. Sometimes there are good feelings associated with our faith and that's wonderful because it makes our journey easy. But don't depend on it. Do you know anyone in the Bible who wanted to first check the promise of God and feel positive about it and only then believe? So was there anyone who didn't believe first and first wanted to check? Gideon. Gideon. Okay. Yeah, he didn't believe yes, but he didn't really ask for a test to check the promise. But you're right, one part is correct that he didn't believe initially. He was thinking that, you know, maybe I'm not the right person that God called. But thank you Brother Biju for sharing that. Sister, can I say Jonah? Okay, right. Fine. He didn't believe that's true. But he didn't necessarily test. He didn't say, okay, show me. I want to feel and touch. Then I'll confirm he didn't do that. So but yeah, Jonah, you're right. He disobeyed God. He wanted to do his own thing. Okay, I can see a lot of answers here in the chat. Akhil, since you raised your hand, please go ahead. Thomas. Okay, I think Brother Biju answered that. Yeah, Thomas, Thomas of course, because he wanted to put his, he wanted to touch the wounds of Jesus before he could believe. Right? But what did Jesus say after that? Akhil, any idea? Do you want to answer that? What did Jesus say after he touched and then he confirmed? Yeah, yeah, you are. Yeah, sorry. So it was, you know, for the proof or evidence that Thomas was seeking for. And Jesus said, what are the ones who don't see and yet believe? That's right. Yeah. So see Thomas was, he wanted evidence first, then believe. Okay, a little different from Abraham, Abraham. But what did Jesus tell him? Blessed are those who believe, right? Without seeing as even though he has answered here. So faith journey is like that. First God calls us to believe. And then in the right time, we will see the promise of God fulfilled. But blessed are those who believe. You've got to believe first. Don't go by feelings. If we go by feelings, we will not really be able to believe now. I hope that's okay. Is there any follow up questions to that thought? Or are we clear about that? Faith and feelings. Okay, great. So, yeah, and I think it's applicable in everything. You know, we say that I'm the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Some days we just don't feel like it. Or we say, I'm blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. But we don't feel very blessed in our emotions. Don't worry about it. Live by faith, not by feelings. Okay, keep moving ahead because that's what God's word says. And it is true. Now coming to faith versus doubt. What about doubt? We saw faith and feelings, faith and doubt. There are instances in scripture and it's there in our notes also. Times when the disciples doubted and did not take a step. For example, when there was a storm, they feared that the storm would destroy them. And Jesus rebukes them. We saw that. He said, hey, where is your faith? And similarly, when the disciples are not able to cast out a demon, Jesus again rebukes them. He says, how long shall I be with you? Unbelievable perverse generation. So he rebukes them for the lack of faith. And he talks about how it is true faith that many of these miracles are possible or God's intervention is possible. So how do we deal with doubt? You see, doubt is something that we can have in our hearts. But what did Jesus tell us? No doubt interferes with faith. In Mark 11, 23, remember, Jesus taught us. He said, have faith in God. If you say to this mountain, you know, be a prudent cast into the sea. And if you do not doubt in your heart, so when there is doubt, faith cannot operate. So it's either faith or doubt. So when there is doubt, doubt will extinguish faith or doubt will make faith inoperable. So we must not have any place for doubt in our hearts. See, it's like replacement. I can either have faith or I remove that. I can either have doubt. But both of these will bring some results. So when I have faith, it will bring the fulfillment of God's promise. But when I have doubt, what will that bring? It will bring whatever is associated with it or attached to it. Things like fear, things like discouragement, things like lack of peace in our hearts or, you know, it's connected to torment.  There's just disturbance inside our hearts. So doubt is connected to that. When we doubt God and God's promises, we will experience all of these things in our spirit, in our mind, in our emotions. But the opposite of that is faith. So if you replace doubt with faith, you'll experience what is associated with it. Things like peace, joy, hope, all of that will come into our hearts when we have faith. So it's one or the other, right? So get rid of any doubt in our hearts. And how much faith do we need? How much faith do we need? How much faith is God asking us to have? Faith just as a master's team. A little bit, right? So little. And that's enough to actually defeat doubt, which we may be carrying in our hearts. So let me quickly look at the chat here because Deeksha is asking, doubt and lack of hope, can we say it's the same? Doubt and lack of hope. Okay. Doubt and lack of hope. I mean, I would, my answer would be that it's not because see doubt is, doubt is your, there's no faith only. Okay, there's no faith. When you say doubt, doubt is overcome. Then you're saying that the portion that must be occupied by faith is now occupied by doubt. Okay. But when you say that there is no hope, it could be that one has faith, but they are not actively hoping. Okay. So faith can be there, but something within them is, you know, that something needs to be awakened so that they can also start to hope. So lack of hope could be that, you know, there is faith, but we are not, we're not allowing that hope to be alive in us. I really don't know if I explained myself clearly to you, Deeksha. I can only hope that you're not confused and you got something from what I said. Did it make sense? Okay. Sure. Thank you. All right. Coming to Jennifer. Yeah. So Jesus told that if we say to the mountain, move the mountain, it should move. He wants us to have such kind of faith. Okay. Right. So to have strong faith. So when we say faith, the quality in itself, right? When we say I have faith, it already possesses the ability to do what God wants done. So yeah, even if it's a little bit of faith, it has that ability or the quality or the characteristic to do what God wants us to do. And just a little bit of faith must see faith is what God is asking us for. So this is how we, we, you know, consider faith and doubt. And one more thing about doubt is that remember we said faith is of the heart. So we can have faith in our heart, but in the mind, okay, in the mind, we can have questions. Where do these questions come from? Questions in the mind. Where do they come from? With our insecurities and doubts. Okay. Okay. Insecurities and doubts our own. Okay. So they are our own. It's coming from within us. Okay. Great. So doubts come from us. We could say that. Where else do they come from? From Satan. That's right. Very good. So there are two sources, two primary sources from where lies or untruth comes to us. One is our own hearts. Because we are not grounded in the truth of God's word. So what happens? We then start to think untruth. That, you know, the same examples that I gave earlier. Oh, I'm not the righteousness of God or I am not blessed. Why? Because we are not anchored in the word. We don't know the word or we are not, we have not settled the word in our hearts. So where is doubt coming from? From our own heart. It's coming from our own heart. Okay. So then there's work to do within our, in our minds, in our hearts to settle the word of God. That's where Romans 12, where Paul wrote. He said, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The mind is very, very important for a believer. Okay. That's the place where you win the battles, the mind, renewed mind with the word of God. And the second thing that came through right now is that these doubts come from Satan. Remember, how did he deal with Eve? God told them, don't eat from the street, you know, of the knowledge of good and evil. And he comes to Eve and he puts a doubt. Did God really say? Did God really say to do this? Then she was in doubt. Adam was in doubt. They're like, oh, did God really say? Because they were not firm. But where did this thought come from? Just one thought, right? Did God really say? And then he goes on to tell more lies. He says, no, if you eat from this, you will become like God. And they believed who? They didn't believe God. They believed the devil. They believed Satan. So Satan brings lies in our minds. And if, again, I'm not, my mind is not renewed by the word of God, what will happen? I'll agree. Okay, I'll agree. Yeah, whatever Satan is saying. Maybe that is the truth. But if I know the truth, what can I do as a believer? I say, I rebuke you Satan. I reject that in the name of Jesus. So I can battle against every doubt that comes in my mind. But the point that I'm trying to make is, you see, we can have faith in our heart. Okay, we can have 100% faith in our heart. But that doesn't mean that we won't have questions in our minds. Because sometimes through our own thinking, we end up having questions. Or Satan will put doubts. No demons will put doubts in our minds. They'll make us question. But don't worry about it. Because even though there are all these things going on in the mind, faith is still there in the heart. Okay, that doesn't mean we are doubting. Having questions doesn't mean that we are doubting God. We just need to know how to deal with it. If it is a sincere question that we must find answers to, then we've got to know how to study the word of God and find answers in it. But if it's not a sincere question, if it's just the lies of the devil, or if it's just my wrong concept about something, then I have to learn how to demolish that. Remember Paul wrote to the Corinthians and he said taking every thought captive, even one thought which is not of God, we don't want that in our head. We have to demolish that thought and I love the word of God to rule and reign in our hearts. So yes, there can be questions in the mind, but that doesn't take away the faith in our hearts. Now moving on to the last concept here, which is about love. So what is love? Love is a characteristic of God. It comes from God. God is love. The scriptures tell us. So how do we understand this love? There's a lot in our notes, but I'll just touch on the key points and maybe you can go back and study more about what kind of love the Bible is talking about. The Bible teaches us that we must be motivated by love. Whatever we do, it must come from a place of love. Even our faith work, must come from a place of love. Otherwise what happens, we want to show off our faith and all the mighty things that our faith can do, but we don't have sincere love in our hearts, whether it's towards God, towards people, towards God's work and that is problematic because what we are saying is, faith and love are disconnected. I can be a person full of faith, but zero love. But what does the Bible have to say about that? In 1 Corinthians chapter 13, Paul, he wrote, he said that even if I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but I have not love, I have become a sounding brass or a clanging symbol. So later on he goes on to say, I can do great things, like I can have the gift of prophecy, understand mysteries, all knowledge, though I have faith so that I can remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. So I am nothing. If we look at that in the scriptures, in the Greek, when that term nothing is used, it simply means not even one or in other words, that word nothing there which Paul wrote in the Greek means zero. So what Paul was saying is, see we can try to be great ministers of God, we can try to be great believers, we can do many things through our faith, but ultimately everything should be based in love. If there is no love, if there is no sincere love in our hearts which motivates us. Because of the love of God, we love God, we love people. So that's why we do all this. But if that is not there, and we are doing everything else, then what does Paul say? He says we are a big zero. So, faith, hope, and love. Paul ends by saying that the greatest of these is love. So love must be our motivation. Now what kind of love are we talking about? When we study the word love again which is given here in 1st Corinthians 13, like in English, we use the same word love, isn't it? We say things like I love God or we could say I love the weather or you could say I love my food. But we are using the same word love to express our delight in something. But in the Greek language it's not like that. Love has different words and so we have to look at what love Paul is talking about. So when we examine the word love, there are words like stargay. Stargay means love for the family or there is a term known as philia. Philia is love between friends or there's a word called eros. Eros is love between sexual love between husband and wife. So there are different terms for love. Which love is Paul using in 1st Corinthians 13? He is using the word agape. Agape. So he is talking about faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. Love is agape or the meaning of the word agape means God kind of love. So what love do we need to motivate us? What love do we need to be grounded in? It is God kind of love. So what is God's kind of love? We can see the kind of love that God had for us. Jesus had for us. It's a self-sacrificial love. Which means that God put us first and he sacrificed us all. Or in other words, you can also describe it as unconditional love. Which has no conditions. God didn't say you do this, then I'll do this.  That is transactional. Give and take. You do this, I'll do that. That's not God kind of love. Maybe the world preaches that kind of love today. Where people are just trying to meet each other's needs and calling that love. But that's not the God kind of love. The Bible talks about Agape. Agape is the unconditional love of God. Where God did while we were stills in us, Christ Jesus died for us. What manner of love is this that we should be called the children of God. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever should believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. So that is the kind of love that God is talking about and he's asking every believer as much as we talked about faith God is saying have faith but there's something called as love also which should be the foundation. What love are we communicating about again? Agape. God kind of love. Motivated by that kind of love to live our life as a believer to live to do the work of the ministry as a child of God or as a minister of God. So being motivated by Agape or the God kind of love. Now just one last thing I'll say and it's time to sort of close off. But sometimes we may feel that yeah it sounds so good that we must have love for everyone but maybe as a person as a personality we feel like I don't have that kind of love in my heart right? But there is a scripture again Romans 5.5 it says the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit in other words it says the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit and so even if we don't have we feel like we don't have love we can depend on the love of God in our hearts. So you can use his love to love people, you can use his love to be motivated to live for God. So with that I'm going to stop here it's 9.50 we'll take a 10 minute break let's come back I see a question on the chat so we'll talk about that and maybe a few more thoughts about love and continue on into the next chapter ok? So let's go for a break everyone see you all soon in 10 minutes. Thank you


Oh, that's awesome. OK, so I'm going to let you continue with your presentation. Awesome. Yeah, all right. So let's start. So 15 things you should know about Spacey. I'm missing a little bit the crowd interaction here, since usually I would ask about your experience and what you know about Spacey. Yes, just like to get a grasp of the experience. So I'm just assuming there is at least some people who are not like super experts in natural language processing. So let's just like start a little bit about what is natural language processing? Because probably you read a lot about AI, natural language processing, speech assistance, Alexis, and all these things. In the news, the media likely use one of the services on a daily basis. So NLP is natural language processing or abbreviated as NLP is basically there's a lot of data, text-written text, spoken text, whatever. It's a real avalanche of data, especially since we have the internet, there's more and more data. There's not just like books and letters and postcards you write to each other.  So in general, basically, there are two types of data, structured data and unstructured data. And only 20% of the data we have is assumed to be structured. So the vast majority, 80%, you see on the lower side is unstructured and text. Any verbal or sign communications, pictures, movies, x-rays, pink noise, singularities, all this is unstructured data. And this is the vast majority. In fact, we don't really know. It's just like an estimate, the old 80, 20 estimate, which usually works really well. Some applications of natural language processing you are familiar with, like chatbots are really, we're really hyped, so it's called dialogue systems. There's machine translation, which is pretty good for many languages nowadays. Sentiment analysis, so how do people feel when they write? And also like trying to catch sarcasm, speech to text and vice versa. So that dictation or having the computer read a text to you. I think one of the classics is actually spelling and grammar checking. So you probably have this forever in your text editor and there's other things like text complication. So starter sentence and the computer suggests how to continue. There are many small things in text data. So a lot of knowledge, thoughts, philosophy, guidelines, laws, regulations, poetry, love letters, everything is text data. And beforehand, we tried to linguist tried more a rule-based approach in the past. So because we have languages, languages do have a grammar and we are building on grammar, you can build rules and a lot of stuff. So like analyzing text or working with text was a lot of handwork because you have to make up all these rules or you have to not really make up, you have to do research, how is the language actually being used because another big challenge for languages, language is changing all the time. There's always like young people inventing new words of developing their own language. In Germany, for example, we adapt many words from the English language into our own language. So language is always changing. And so it's really hard to keep up making all the rules and to do all the research, to put it in form. And there's also an explanatory statistical set which you see like, this is like a field of data with many flowers and blossoms and guess who won? Of course, the dog and one, I didn't find a better picture for this. So I used Ion Oswald's dog and thanks, Ion. So natural language processes, NLP use cases, you probably hear a lot about, yes, you can auto write articles that's like Robo journalism and is Robo journalism a threat? Is Robo a generated text and fake news a threat or an issue? And you will hear about, of course, yeah, you have all these voice assistants and like you will just use them for starter timer, which I did, or you just like do simple stuff. But most of the times our expectations on all natural language systems are a little bit overrated or over-exaggerated or we expect more than we get and of course, there's a lot of hype going on. So, but most natural language process, NLP use cases are not like trying to find a global solution, just think about a little bit more like, okay, you are an enterprise, you have a knowledge base. You want to really see what have you researched in the past and to organize this knowledge. So I would like to introduce you or show you like shortly, like a short small other use case we did in the NLP space at Koenig's week. The task was our client had like many, many text documents from like decades of research and they wanted to know, oh, actually, what do we have at hand? And so we want to understand what we really have and it's too many documents to read and search engine is not good enough because we have to look for specific keywords and probably the language was different. Maybe, yeah, it wasn't really working for them to they could really search into their knowledge. And so we use NLP to cluster the data and reorganize or make the data accessible to them again. So we had automatic keyword generation as we see here on the lower left side, we have like two clusters. So we use the corpus is actually about biodiversity and recycling here in the screenshot. And we also used automatically generated summaries. So it's really easy to go there and see, okay, what's for example, in biodiversity or if you look at this screenshot, it's a little bit, it's more clusters. You see, before we had like these like two clusters, one and two, which were look quite, yeah, but it could be an equal split. I always think you have to consider, this is just like a two dimensional representation of a multi-dimensional space. So let's look a little bit further here. So if we cluster everything we have into five clusters, we see, oh, okay, we have this cluster number three in light green, I hope you can see that. We have another big cluster five red, but then you see there's like tiny clusters in between. And they all have like a major topic. And you probably wanna dive into the topic and see, okay, which other documents are connected. And really understand what you have in your knowledge base and build on that. And you can do also funny things because here it's everything is quite, or many things are quite close to each other. Let me show you an example where you really can see like a huge split and probably a few Germans will probably get what this corpus is actually. And, but you see a very clear split between two things. And actually the one on the left side is actually the contents and the other corporate, the cluster number two, where it's just like editorial and extra stuff. And it was really great to see how we can automatically separate information from other stuff. And because we would only would be interested in looking into cluster number one. So just a little example, how the summaries work. And you can see like this are like on the left-hand side, you see the top keywords. So you see, like this is a cluster but biodiversity, degradation, soil, natural, forest conversation, you see how it makes sense. And we did not really had to do like a lot of tuning for that. So it was pretty amazing to see how natural language processing and the techniques we used could help us to get all the knowledge here. So, okay. So another example here. So if you have natural language processing tasks as I, or you enjoy like working natural face. So hello, I'm Alexander Hendoff. I'm a partner and consultant at Königswick. My domain is AI and data science. I'm a software foundation fellow. I like to organize organizing conferences. Maybe we met at some conference. And if not, I hope we will meet at one of the future conferences once we can meet in person again. So, and Königswick is my company. I'm one of the partners and we do data science AI projects and we love to work with people and also freelancers on projects. For example, let me talk a little bit about our natural language processing alchemy tool set. So as I said, there's a lot of blog posts and natural language processing has been really moving fast. A few years ago, you probably would, this talk would have been about NLTPK, natural language toolkit. So you read about things probably like Elmo bird or GDP2 or free somewhere on Twitter or LinkedIn. And yeah, so, but I would like to tell you a little bit more about Spacey here because Spacey is a great tool for NLP. So what is actually Spacey? Spacey was started in 2014 by Enix and Matthew. Yeah, let me bring along the screen here. This is Enix and Matthew. In 2014, they did a really bold move when they decided to start Spacey, open source it. And because at that time, everybody like the whole type said, oh yes, everything in natural language will be go to the cloud and people really tried to push for, yes, we have these general services, natural language will be solved like you can throw any data at our cloud systems and they will give you the right answers. Turns out natural language needs a lot of fine tuning. So it's really, it's necessary to really work in the domain to stay in a specific corpus because most of the NLP tasks are not really addressing. We want to answer everything or any question in the world. That's something Google wants, but if you were in a company, you really only want to see what's in our knowledge base and very likely you don't want to even like contaminate it with outside knowledge because you wanna see what's your knowledge and you can always Google. It's this NLP is not the task for that. So they started Spacey. So thanks Enix and Matthew. Matthew is actually from Australia. He was a researcher and he moved to Berlin and they met and they started something great. So their company is called Explosion AI and Spacey is a stable open source library. It supports nowadays more than 55 languages. It comes with many pre-trade language models. So you really have a solid starting ground for natural language tasks. Now it's designed for production usage. So and the key advantages are it's fast, it's intuitive. It has also like a great documentation. So there's examples and really very good explanations for everything on the Spacey website and it also supports the simple deep learning implementations. So there's a lot of out of the box thoughts. So for named entity recognition. So is this a person or a company? Part of speech tagging puzzle, which yeah, labeled dependency pie and so on. I'll actually see a little bit more about that if you don't know the terms yet, don't worry. The building blocks of Spacey is tokenization. So you basically it's just like take each word. Each word here is a token and punctuation is a token. So that's it's kind of part of speech is cat is a noun, scratch is a verb, lemmatization like cats to cats. Like it's just like from plural to singular or scratch to scratch. So to the past tense to just like the verb. Also there's stuff like sentence boundary detection. So something like hello Mrs. Poppins is probably not obvious because the Mrs is not the end the Mrs is not the end of the sentence. It's just an abbreviation. Spacey can also recognize named entities. So Mary Poppins is a person, Apple is a company. This of course depends on the language model you use and basically you know that you can get from there. So to distinguish between Apple the fruit and Apple the company, it actually depends on the context. So you wouldn't say, oh, today I ate Apple. And probably nobody can do that because the company is just like so expensive. So nobody can eat it. So likely it's the fruit. So maybe Apple can eat a startup, but I think that's yeah, anyway. Okay, serialization like it's just like a saving. Yeah, NLP documents, a little bit more about documents later. We have dependency parsons. So actually how do the tokens, the words, everything in the sentence basically depend on each other. How are they linked? You can train and update models on here. You can classify text and you can also add rules. Like for example, if you have like many companies have products or they what we call have company speech. So they use abbreviations for their products. And everybody in the company knows what people are referring to, but outsiders won't understand. And this is something you have to add to when you work with NLP. And it's really easy with our spacey. So this is a very simple rule. You can add more complex rules to actually help understanding the text, the language we're working on better. So we have some built-in rules. So still, although we have used a lot of statistical stuff in spacey, still we have rules. So for many languages, they're still like rule-based. For example, English plural is very simple. It's just like an S at the end. And stuff like that is built in spacey. It's they, the rules are more general. They are depending on the language are not covering every exception there. Because okay, it's open source, somebody has to maintain it. So if you find something new, remember you might also want to contribute back. And of course, not all features are supported for all the languages. So before you jump in, just check before you get disappointed because you'd probably expect it will do everything. Because always keep in mind when you talk NLP and you see great results, they are in the English language. English language is still the most research that is done is in English language and Chinese. So you won't have the same quality in other languages because they might be more complex or they are also not as researched. So there are also built-in models. Here we have a language model for many languages like German, English, French, they are trained on multiple corpuses. So just go to the spacey website and check them out. So you have language models, for example, with word vectors. So for example, this is like the classic example here. When you train on a large corpus and we put this all into vector space and then one great thing here is you will find things in parallel like king and queen is parallel to man and woman. So basically the model is able to pick up these connections and this can help in working with NLP. So you can also start with one of the built-in models. Many of them are trained on Wikipedia and you can start from there and continue training and update your models with NLP update as well if you have a specific corpus you want to train on. And always remember for training these models you likely need a lot of data. So it's not just like a few documents. So you really need a lot. The more the better is unfortunately a rule of thumb here and the latest language models rules like billions of parameters and this is beyond most people's or reaches but it's also beyond actually what we do require to make a successful NLP project in your company. So yeah, we got that already. Another great thing here being at EuroPython, Spacey is very Pythonic. So if you have a good understanding of Python getting into Spacey is quite easy or it's actually if you don't have a good understanding of Python I would really suggest to brush up your Python skills because you really should know about the mechanics of objects, iteration, comprehension, classes, methods because Spacey uses a lot of them. So very often we have some data structures and many different ways on methods to access these structures with, yeah, as we need. So it has a very extensive API for many things. It might be a bit overwhelming at first. It's probably not as overwhelming as the PAMDIS API but we're getting close maybe now, sorry. Yeah, so don't let you scale away. There's like an extensive API. So you have many access points to your NLP documents and to do things and stuff. So there is basically not much you have to program yourself if you are looking for something specific. So the first by suggestion here is like advice is, yeah, first look is there already a method in the AP before you start programming stuff yourself? Likely you will find it somewhere. A great thing about Spacey is also pipelines. So Spacey processes the text and pipeline says a default pipeline. So basically easy to see the text. First it's being tokenized. So take the words, exclamation marks and everything and we tokenize it. Then it's tagged, parsed and entity recognition that's like the standard process we see here. And basically this is what we call the NLP document. And you see here on the right-hand side before dock. This is not the last thing, so you can add custom. You can customize your pipelines. You can turn stuff on, off, add custom elements to your pipeline. It's super flexible and also Spacey is nice in scaling things. But that's probably you need a little bit more experience in Spacey to scale if you have a lot to do. So yeah, helpful is also the visualization in Spacey. They are used to, it used to be a separate package also high as an explosion. It's called this Spacey and it now comes with Spacey and you can visualize dependencies and entities. For example, like this. Here we see the astronaut walked through the spaceships corridor to shop off hall, help. So we see astronaut is a noun, walk is a verb. So the astronaut worked through and you see here the spans. The sentence was analyzed and we see these spans how the things basically belong to each other. And Spacey has that built in and you can visualize it. It's also good for to see actually Spacey is interpreting everything correctly because this is not, sometimes this is also not what a human would, how a human would solve this or sometimes, also computer make mistakes, don't forget that. Or another nice thing here is like here you can also of course do stuff like this. So we can see, okay, Dr. David Bowman looking for his Apple iPhone on Tuesday. So he's walking the corridor and looking for his iPhone here. So you see, without any extra training, this is everything you see here, it's just like Spacey built in from scratch without any customization. We already see David Bowman is identified as a person, Apple as an organization and Tuesday as a date. And of course this is helpful if you want to extract knowledge from documents or if you, for example, want to analyze maybe, for example, court rulings, you could say, okay, you could even get from person, okay, this is not only a person, the person is also a judge, something like that. Or you can, yeah, and so on and so on. A little time here, yeah. So serialization is built in Spacey. So you can save the documents, the vocabulary and the model. Think you have, these are like separate things you need to save. So it's not just one document to save. You're always set to consider what was the model you worked with, the vocabulary space it's built in. But remember, larger project might, you've made require different strategies like including a database because you can not always process everything from start to end. There's some danger zones, of course, you have always to consider not only the Spacey, also of course, everything you do in data science and NIP, like privacy, bias, always keep in mind, data is always bias, just try to minimize it and learn how to work with the bias and do not just say, hey, data is the truth. There might be some legal things you have to consider and always consider language is never perfect. It's always dynamic, these are the danger zones. So Spacey, the only thing you need or it says everything, well, everything can be rule, NLP can rule all the languages. No, I pointed out earlier strong NLP is really strong in English, Chinese. Of course, it's not bad in Germany, especially like translation is solved for many languages nowadays or at a very high quality level, but the tasks might be different. Spacey has a whole universe of extensions I would recommend to look into. For example, like there's some, like an extension from Huggingface, Huggingface is also a company who puts a lot of stuff on open source handy tools. For example, this is an example of the Norocoreference. So what is Norocoreference? So if you say Angela Merkel just announced a big, tax package, tax relief package, the Chancellor. So in this, the co-references would translate that to Angela Merkel, blah, blah, blah, and replace the Chancellor for Angela Merkel again. So we can do stuff like this. And of course, if we want to analyze text, we have to know who is actually the reference for Chancellor and Angela Merkel should be, of course, the same reference here because it's a reference to the same person. So what about bugs? Yeah, spacey is well-maintained. There's a good restance time on bug reports and it's constantly well-documented updates. When you work with extensions, yeah, it might be harder to integrate. You maybe want to stick to a specific spacey version when you work with specific extensions because they are all not moving at the same speed and the updates and everything. So you probably need a little different strategy here. So you can, it's probably not only one environment you need for all the tasks, you have to probably split them up and build a little bit more advanced architecture around it. And the development stages and our comparison to other tools I mentioned before, like NLP, there's also Gancing Textbook Pattern. NLP is actually, I think they're classic for NLP. But likely you have also heard about Gancing. All these have some strong suits and maybe a focus on some things. For example, patterns has also offers simple web scraper. But spacey, one of the strong suits is spacey is usually very close to the state of the art. So for example, if there's a new language model it's like transformers because before we also, everything was about RNNs, LSTMs and all these architectures like in deep learning. And then oh, two years ago, no, let's use transformers. They do way better and spacey is really good and fast in getting state of the art implemented into spacey that you can actually use it. It's flexible, it's extendable and it's fast because there's a lot of Python under the hood as well. Sometimes if you have a very special case, for example, if you want to build a contextual assistant or a shared boot, you probably are happy just using Raza. And but Raza is also using some stuff from spacey. So yeah, everything is connected as an open space. But last but not least, I just love spacey. So it's great. So thank you and stay healthy, more like that. And yeah, I'm not sure if we have time for questions. Yeah, I think we don't have time for questions right now. I'm sorry. Thank you for that amazing talk. I think we can take the questions to the breakout room. Yeah, sure. Sure, I'll be in the break room for a bit. So feel free to ping me with questions. So thank you very much and enjoy your Python and thanks everybody organizing the conference.


The entries regarding the public sector category were deliberated in great detail by the jury. A lot of thought and deliberations and detailed discussions went into all the entries and we had a really tough time in deciding the winner and we had to take into account so many different aspects of the campaigns by all the public sector companies. The type of thought involved behind the strategy, the media mix adopted. The results which their campaigns got and over the overall public relations strategy of the public sector unit had to be analyzed and based upon that we have decided to award a gold medal to the winner which the jury felt were the best this year.