AMAZING GRACE, THE STORY OF JOHN NEWTON
The stories of men and women’s lives recorded in Scripture are often used in sermons to illustrate truths to help us in our own spiritual pilgrimage. The biographies of Christian leaders in more recent times can also be very interesting and helpful. I read the life of John Newton who died just 200 years ago. He has a fascinating story which is the basis of my address today and I hope it will be as helpful to you as it was to me.
Although the spiritual condition of a nation may be discouraging the situation hasn’t gone unnoticed by our Lord as the Head of the Church. He knows what is required and he raises up his chosen servants as his instruments to revive the Christian Church. This is seen in the Church of the Old Testament through the many prophets of Israel, with their clarion call to repentance and announcing the promised Messiah. It happened 500 years ago in the Reformation led by Martin Luther. In our own lifetime there’s been the Charismatic Renewal. And what of today? All we can say is ‘Lord, do it again!’
The 18th century produced some great men of God. The spiritual life of the Established Church in Britain was at a low ebb and in great need of revival. However, God had not given up and, in the words often found in Scripture in such circumstances, ‘visited his people’ (cf. Ruth 1:6; Luke 1:68). God did this by raising up men of faith for this purpose, such as John and Charles Wesley and their friend and colleague in early Methodism, George Whitefield. Each of them left an enduring legacy to the Christian Church, the Wesleys in the Methodist Societies and eventually the Methodist Church. John Newton’s legacy was rather different. Like John and Charles, Newton was a clergyman of the Established Church and all three had much in common in theology and in fellowship, especially in their early days, but John had quite a different career path, in his background and in God’s service. He made a great contribution to Christian life and witness in society and which remains a blessing to millions all over the world.
John was born in 1725 in London. His father was a respected sea captain and consequently was often away from home which resulted in the father-son relationship being somewhat distant, although he loved his son and was a forgiving parent over the years when John behaved rashly or made mistakes. His mother was a devoted Christian and from a young child taught him to believe in God’s omnipotence, to fear his judgement and to accept the Bible as the Word of God, a foundation which he never forgot although as a teenager he rebelled against these teachings. We must thank God for Christian mothers for their example and patient teaching of their children. The Apostle Paul paid generous tribute to the mother and grandmother of his colleague Timothy. The truths received may appear to be dormant for years but then the Holy Spirit reminds the wayward offspring of what they learned in their youth and is the means of a return to faith.
As a young man of 18 John was something of a dropout. His father found him a job with a friend, a Liverpool merchant. He was to travel to Jamaica where he would be trained as a manager on a sugar plantation but then he received a letter from a cousin and close friend of his late mother, to visit the cousin in Maidstone. When he arrived the door was opened by the eldest daughter, Mary, a beautiful girl, known as Polly. He was quite smitten by her although she was only thirteen years of age, as he later wrote: ‘Almost at the first sight of this girl I felt an affection for her which never abated.’ All he could do was to extend his stay, first by a few hours, then by a few days and eventually to a duration of three weeks as he couldn’t bear parting and then spending four or five years in Jamaica and so he missed the job opportunity. His father was furious but arranged for John to sail under a ship’s master, a family friend. As a common sailor he soon drifted into the bad habits of his shipmates. As he put it: ‘I was making large strides towards a total apostasy from God.’
Several months later he revisited Polly’s home and again failed to turn up for an appointment for an officer’s posting on board a merchant ship and while walking around Chatham was press-ganged into the Royal Navy. He was so upset at not being with Polly that he deserted ship and was flogged for desertion and only his love for the 13-year old girl restrained his desire to commit suicide and murdering his captain! Eventually he was exchanged for sailors on a slave-carrying ship but continued his wild behaviour and had to leave his ship to work for a shore-based slaver in Sierra Leone in West Africa. He fell out with his employer and was himself imprisoned in chains as a slave and was brutally treated.
In the providence of God a letter he had written to his father resulted in a visiting ship finding him and he was rescued by the captain. He returned to England to see Polly, but still as an aggressive atheist and blasphemer, shocking even his shipmates. But God had not abandoned him, for out of boredom on the voyage, he picked up the only available book on board, The Imitation of Christ which made him recall his mother’s Christian teaching. There was a great storm which damaged the ship, so much so that he feared it might sink. To his astonishment he began to pray, ‘Lord have mercy on me.’ The storm subsided and he realised that ‘there is a God who answers prayer.’ He stopped swearing, changed his lifestyle and started to pray and read the Bible.
Sometimes God has to increase the volume of his voice and use dramatic means to those he is calling to follow him when the god of this world has deafened ears and blinded eyes. It may be painful at the time but how worthwhile to be saved for all eternity. From that day on until 50 years later he gave thanks for what he called his ‘great turning day’ of conversion. This was only the start of his spiritual pilgrimage for his diaries recorded many instances of his stumbling in the early years after he had found God on the sinking ship. It was only after he had surrendered his will to a completely new set of godly rules that his journey of change began to make real progress.
In order to win the hand of Polly he needed to show that he had good prospects for earning a living so he went back to sea and the slave trade, making four voyages between 1748 and 1754, three of them as a slave ship captain. The European slavers, in collusion with the local population, tricked the unsuspecting native peoples with cheap trinkets and plied them with rum. When incapacitated they woke up to find themselves imprisoned, their destiny as slaves determined and their lives ruined. At the time Newton, like much of the Christian community, had his mind closed to the full horror and immorality of the business of transporting slaves chained in tightly packed conditions, often involving great brutality with floggings and thumb screw torture, although he tried to be a humane captain. It was common for many of these captured men and women to die on the long journey from Africa to the Caribbean islands, being unceremoniously thrown overboard.
At the age of 29 he left slave trading because of a personal health problem, having married Polly who remained the love of his life until her death 40 years later. His former employer obtained him a good position in Liverpool as the city’s Surveyor of Tides, in charge collecting customs’ duty on ships. He came into contact with the Methodist leaders, George Whitefield and John Wesley, and had fellowship and service with the evangelical churches in the area. As he approached his 33rd birthday, Newton felt the call to serve God as an ordained minister in the Church of England and prepared himself by continuing his studies in Latin and Greek in which he showed considerable talent. But to get ordained was not without difficulty because of his evangelical beliefs which were frowned upon by the hierarchy of the Established Church.
He applied for ordination to a number of bishops over a period of six years but they found excuses for rejecting him, stating that he hadn’t been to either Cambridge or Oxford University as normally required by official procedures although they were often ignored. The real reason was that he often had fellowship with Dissenters, Methodist and Baptist ministers and was regarded as an ‘enthusiast’. He often felt discouraged as he believed his call to the ministry to be of God, ‘as if an angel had been sent to him to do so’ but in later years came to understand that the delays in his ordination were planned by God to teach him humility, wisdom and obedience. He learned the valuable lesson that God’s timing isn’t always our timing. It’s a lesson we too may have to learn as well. In the words of a hymn by William Cowper who was befriended by John Newton and worked in his parish as a lay worker, ‘God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.’
Eventually Newton was rescued from ecclesiastical exile by the intervention of the Earl of Dartmouth, an evangelical. Dartmouth controlled the parish living of Olney in Buckinghamshire, and had the ear of the local bishop who was persuaded to ordain the aspiring minister. Newton soon proved himself to be an outstanding and innovative curate, trebling the size of the church’s Sunday congregation to 600, introducing Bible-teaching classes for children and adults and was diligent in pastoral visits. His preaching was attractive and he soon became well known through his autobiography and other writings comprising of correspondence giving spiritual advice. He also developed into hymn writing and was the author of such well-enduring hymns as Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken, How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds, and his most popular hymn, Amazing Grace. The hymn came from his deep emotional feelings and is his spiritual autobiography. It has touched millions of hearts because it came from an individual heart with first-hand experience of God’s mercy.
John Newton, the former slave-ship captain, was so grateful for God’s gracious dealings with him that when the vicarage at Olney was refurbished he had two sentences from Isaiah 43:4 and Deuteronomy 15:15 painted over the fireplace of his study: ‘Since thou wast precious in my sight thou hast been honourable: but thou shalt remember that thou wast a bond-man in the land of Egypt and the Lord thy God redeemed thee.’ We must not live in the past but dare not forget God’s providential provision in life’s experiences and allow our sense of thankfulness to fade. One of the saddest moments in the Gospels is pictured in the words of Jesus when he said, ‘Where are the nine?’ (Luke 17:17). He was asking as to what had happened to the nine men who had known such wonderful release from the misery of leprosy and had forgotten to come back and say, ‘Thank you, Lord.’
Newton believed in networking. In 1783 he founded a regular discussion group of evangelical leaders and influential laymen, mostly of younger men, which became know as the Eclectic Society. It met fortnightly for serious spiritual discussions on a variety of themes linked with the cause of the gospel and practical problems met in ministry. On one occasion Newton told the group a story of how a member of the congregation had praised him for one of his services saying to him as he came down from the pulpit: ‘A most excellent discourse sir.’ To which Newton replied, ‘The devil told me that, sir, before you!’
Five years after becoming rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the heart of the City of London, Newton suddenly became a close friend and spiritual mentor to a young Member of Parliament, who was destined to become one of the most influential figures in British political history – William Wilberforce. In 1785 Newton received a strange letter from Wilberforce asking for a confidential meeting which led to his finest hour as a figure of influence. Wilberforce had visited Newton in Olney as a young boy but now as the 24-year-old MP for Hull was in a state of emotional turmoil, thinking he should cut short his promising career in order to enter the Church. Newton firmly advised his young friend not to withdraw from politics but to stay in the House of Commons and to serve God as a Christian statesman and to arouse the nation’s conscience in the abolition of slavery. He became Wilberforce’s spiritual director and gave him invaluable expertise in his long parliamentary struggle to end the slave trade. Newton gave public testimony on the slave trade to the Privy Council and to a Select Committee of the House of Commons of first hand evidence of its horrors.
Newton’s ministry at St Mary Woolnoth attracted large congregations and he regularly made journeys to towns and cities where there was a hunger for Gospel preaching, encouraging the evangelical incumbents. He became a patriarchal figure in the evangelical movement, helping to found the Church Missionary Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. At the heart of his public ministry were two private strengths: a happy marriage and a close relationship with God. The marriage with Polly was a union of romance, prayer, service and joy. Although they were not blessed with children, the Newtons created a strong family life by adopting two orphaned nieces as their own daughters who were a great consolation to John when Polly died of cancer in 1790. John Newton wasn’t immune from the trials of life but the secret of his relationship with God was his prayer life. His diaries record that he often prayed for at least five hours a day. He shared the same passion as the Apostle Paul when he wrote: ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings’ (Phil 3:10).
He continued his ministry into his old age, turning a deaf ear to friends who urged him to accept retirement as by the time he reached 80 he was almost blind and partially deaf. ‘I cannot stop,’ he replied. ‘What! Shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can speak?’ But in December 1806 the end was coming. His diary recorded his prayer asking God to help him meet his end with a faithful spirit: ‘Oh for grace to meet the approach of death with a humble, thankful, resigned spirit becoming my profession. That I may not stain my character by impatience, jealousy or any hateful temper but may be prepared and permitted to depart in peace and hope and be enabled, if I can speak, to bear my testimony to thy faithfulness and goodness with my last breath. Amen.’ That’s the prayer that I would make my own and perhaps you as well.
Newton’s friend wrote: ‘I saw Mr Newton near the closing scene. He was hardly able to talk; and all I find I noted down upon my leaving him was thus: “My memory is nearly gone but I remember two things: That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour.”’ Newton would not have been pleased by the eulogistic reference in The Times report of his death to his ‘unblemished life’, for he never forgot that he owed his redemption from a life of sin to a life in Christ entirely to divine mercy. He made this clear in the epitaph he wrote for himself. It was to be the inscription on his tomb at Olney and on a commemorative tablet to him at St Mary Woolnoth:
‘Once an Infidel and Libertine,
A Servant of Slaves in Africa,
Was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour JESUS CHRIST,
Preserved, restored and pardoned,
And appointed to preach the faith
He had long laboured to destroy.’
This self-description, taken in conjunction with what were almost his last words: ‘I am a great sinner but Christ is a great Saviour’, clearly demonstrated the depth of John Newton’s gratitude to God for rescuing him from disgrace and redeeming him was ‘amazing grace’. The outstanding features of his private character were faith, humility and gratitude. The faith was his certainly of God’s faithfulness. The humility was his genuine sense of a sinner’s unworthiness. The gratitude was the overflowing thankfulness of his heart to God for his ‘amazing grace’ which, in the lines of his immortal hymn, ‘saved a wretch like me’. His was truly a journey ’From Disgrace to Amazing Grace’. If a person thinks he or she deserves to go to heaven they are clearly deluded in assuming they’re a Christian! No, we’re all sinners. The basic message of Scripture is that we all stand condemned but much loved by God. The good news is that he has made provision for our redemption in Jesus. Our salvation is all of God’s grace – sheer unmerited favour, and that’s the story of John Newton and can be ours too.
(The message is based on ‘John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace’: Jonathan Aitken, Continuum, 2007)
