Earlier in this morning’s service we sang one of the most popular and well known hymns ever written, Amazing Grace. The lyrics capture most beautifully the essence of the plight, and God’s solution to that plight, that not only every Christian ever born, but actually every person ever born, has to face. What is that plight you ask? Well, it is that at our birth each of us is destined to grow and fall prey to our inborn sinful nature. We soon fall into the trap that Satan and the ways of the world we live in have set before us. It is inevitable. No one escapes.
That situation would be the ruin of us all if God only sat in judgment of us, as some would like us to believe. They picture God as an old man writing down everything we do in either the “good” column or the “bad” column, just chomping at the bit to bring down the hammer on us. Then when we die He compares the “good” against the “evil” we have done and then doles out the punishment if the good falls short of the bad. Problem is, very little that we do is “good” when compared to a perfectly righteous God. So if that is the system, we are all, each and every one of us, doomed to eternal punishment that we fully deserve!
But praise the Lord that He is not only a righteous God; He is a merciful, loving, and just God! In His perfect wisdom, God has made available to every human being ever born His perfect mercy and His truly amazing grace, should we choose to accept those awesome gifts.
What is the difference between mercy and grace? Although many people use those terms interchangeably, they really are not the same. The best way that I can explain it is like this. Suppose my son, Alex, were to do something that he shouldn’t do and really deserved to be punished. To show him mercy would be for me not to mete out the deserved punishment. I may choose to lessen the punishment or to eliminate it altogether. But a demonstration of grace would be that not only do I not give out the deserved punishment, but I also take Alex out and buy him a strawberry ice-cream cone, even though he truly does not deserve it! So God’s mercy is shown when He does not give us the punishment that we truly deserve. God’s grace is shown when He gives us something good (like a shot at redemption) when we truly do not deserve it.
Such is the case with the author of this morning’s hymn, Amazing Grace. His name is John Newton and I thought we would take a quick look at his life and the history of how this amazing hymn came to be. John Newton was born in England in the year 1725. As a small child his mother, a devout Congregationalist Christian, taught him to read and memorize scripture and hymns. She died when John was seven years old and for the next ten years, John was raised by his father and stepmother. John’s father was a sea captain and John accompanied him on five sea voyages from age 11 until age 17. It was during those voyages that John received a stern and thorough education in seamanship.
During the long periods between the sea trips, John was allowed to run free and managed to get himself into substantial adolescent trouble. After each round of difficulties, John would usually turn to prayer, religious reading, and spiritual diary keeping. John later said that this activity was not to please God, but rather it was an attempt to escape eternal damnation. It is a classic example of the right actions, but the wrong motives and intentions.
In 1742, John’s father arranged for John to go on a voyage to Jamaica aboard a Liverpool ship owner’s vessel dealing in slaves and sugar. John was to be a slave overseer and his father hoped it would be the beginning of a very lucrative career for his son. John, however, had other plans, namely a Miss Mary Catlett. He missed his ship to Jamaica to stay and court her. When John’s father found out, he decided John needed a lesson in obedience and discipline, so he sent John on a several-months-long voyage as a common seaman aboard a ship without his father’s protection from the harshness of a sailor’s life. In the company of the rough seamen John lost any vestige of his religious resolve. It was then that he took up drinking, gambling, smoking, swearing and complete indulgence of his lusts at every chance that came his way. In his own words, John says that he “had become a vile and angry man.” The God he had learned to worship at his mother’s knee seemed to have become, to John, a distant and irrelevant being with no claim on John’s life whatsoever.
On March 1, 1744, John Newton fell prey to a naval “press gang”. These were sailors who would go about “recruiting” men by any means possible, including smashing them over the head to knock them out, or getting them so drunk that they would pass out. When the unfortunate victims woke up, they were aboard a Royal Navy ship in the service of the King. John found himself a lowly sailor aboard a man-of-war ship called the Harwich. He was half-starved, driven and broken from sunup to sundown. He did manage to strike up a friendship with the Captain’s clerk, a man by the name of Mitchell. Problem was that this man believed God to be an illusion created by killjoy religious types, bent on eliminating anything and everything that brought fun or pleasure into the humdrum everyday life. Mitchell’s philosophy was, “Eat, drink and make merry for soon we die and pass into oblivion.”
At Christmastime 1744, John had had enough and deserted. Unfortunately, he was caught the next day, returned to ship, flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails and returned to duty. Soon he managed to get a transfer to another ship, a slave trader and John thought his luck had changed. He was wrong and this too soon proved to be disaster. John lost the trust of the ship owner and rather than being an overseer of slaves, John found himself to be a servant to the slaves! It didn’t seem possible, but John was actually lower in status than the slaves he was transporting!
Not surprisingly, aboard that slave ship John sank deeper and deeper into immorality and impiety. His blaspheming had gotten to such a degree that even the hardened older sailors were shocked. John seemed to be totally lost to his once-upon-a-time faith. But God had other plans for him. One day aboard ship John picked up, for lack of other available reading material, a copy of Thomas Kempis’ devotional guide, Imitation Of Christ. Another who was influenced greatly by that guide was John Wesley. In the beginning, the words of that book meant very little to John Newton. Soon though, there came a pivotal point in John’s life. On March 21, 1748, the ship that John was serving aboard found itself in the midst of a very violent storm. The ship began to rip apart and take on water. John awoke from sleep to find that the first mate had been washed overboard into the raging sea. John tied himself to the ship to prevent being swept over the side himself. He bailed and pumped all night long.
All the while he was doing this, John said later, his life passed before his eyes and he was at first convinced that he had sunk too low, had been far too bad to hope that he could be forgiven by God for his past sins. The storm kept on raging and John became convinced that he would very soon “meet his maker”. He finally decided to turn back to the scriptures he had learned as a child that taught him about God’s grace toward all sinners. It was then that John Newton said his first prayer in years. John said later that it was “the hour I first believed”.
John Newton developed a consistent regimen of prayer and after a series of miraculous rescues from death by storm, starvation, mutiny plots and slave-uprisings, John’s sense of God’s grace grew sharper and sharper. He had at last come to know and understand God’s will for his life. John Newton, ex-sailor, ex-slave trader, ex-vile and blasphemous man, became a truly great preacher, minister and hymn writer. Through all the years of his ministry and fame, John Newton never forgot how far he had come. The epitaph on his gravestone still reads to this day, “John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.”
Scripture tells us that all of the angels in Heaven rejoice along with Almighty God Himself whenever even one of His lost children is found and returns to Him. I am sure there was great rejoicing indeed when John Newton, a lost sheep, was found and returned to the fold. But you know what? The angels and Almighty God rejoice just as much when I, you, or anyone turns back to Him, confesses our sin and accepts Jesus Christ as our very own personal Savior – a Savior who suffered, died and paid our sin-debt to God the Father. Many people, when they have been “born again” say that they have “found God”. Friends, it is not God who is lost. It is us. He is where He has always been. It is us who stray.
If you are still lost, God is looking for you. He wants you back in His fold. So if you have not done it yet, if you have not confessed your sin to Jesus Christ and asked Him for the forgiveness that only He can offer, what are you waiting for? Are you afraid that He will reject you? Then hear this. If God forgave John Newton (and He did), if God forgave Saul, the murderer of Christians who became Paul the Evangelist, then God’s mercy and grace are abundant enough to forgive me, and to forgive you.
God Almighty created the universe with only His spoken Word. He created humans, me and you, to be His adopted children. We strayed from His grace, but He has provided a way back. His Son, Jesus Christ, died on that cross to give us a chance to be redeemed. He did it because He loves each one of us. I look forward to that day when all Christians will stand before God Almighty and sing, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” Amen.