t would be hard to imagine a more remarkable journey to grace than the one John Newton took. A hard-living, reckless, profligate young sailor in the 18th-century British slave trade, Newton openly blasphemed God and actively influenced others to abandon their faith. His life led steadily downward until he wound up enslaved and abused by the slaves themselves in Africa. Certainly, he would never have made anyone’s list of “Most likely to become a minister and a hymn writer.” Maybe that’s one reason he began his best-known hymn with the words, “Amazing Grace!”
Newton’s autobiography is a treasure well worth reading in full; no summary (especially the kind you get in books like 534 Stories of Great Hymns) can really do justice to all its subtle and amazing twists and turns. Today, though, instead of recapping his life story or studying his hymns, I want to bask in a lesser-known selection from his writing.
As a writer, Newton was full of humility, home-spun insight, the vigor of old-fashioned English prose, and a sublime consciousness of his dependence on God's grace. I can't read him without coming away more inspired. To Newton, the idea that his redemption was none of his own doing was not a mere theological dogma but a matter of practical experience. God's amazing grace, as Newton recognized, is not just for saving us--"'Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home."
So here's a letter John Newton wrote to Lord Dartmouth about living by grace.
--Eric Pazdziora
February 23, 1775My Lord,
I assent to our Lord's declaration, "Without me you can do nothing," not only upon the authority of the speaker, but from the same irresistible and experimental evidence, as if he had told me that I cannot make the sun to shine, or change the course of the seasons. Though my pen and my tongue sometimes move freely, yet the total incapacity and stagnation of thought I labor under at other times convinces me that, in myself, I have not sufficiency to think a good thought; and I believe the case would be the same, if that little measure of knowledge and abilities, which I am too prone to look upon as my own, were a thousand times greater than it is.
For every new service, I stand in need of a new supply, and can bring forth nothing of my supposed store into actual exercise, but by his immediate assistance. His gracious influence is that to those who are best furnished with gifts, which the water is to the mill, or the wind to the ship, without which the whole apparatus is motionless and useless.
I apprehend that we lose much of the comfort which might arise from a sense of our continual dependence upon him, and, of course, fall short of acknowledging as we ought what we receive from him, by mistaking the manner of his operation. Perhaps we take it too much for granted, that communications from himself must bear some kind of sensible impression that they are his, and therefore are ready to give our own industry or ingenuity credit for those performances in which we can perceive no such impression. Yet it is very possible that we may be under his influence when we are least aware of it; and though what we say, or write, or do, may seem no way extraordinary, yet that we should be led to such a particular turn of thought at one time rather than at another, has, in my own concerns, often appeared to me remarkable, from the circumstances which have attended, or the consequences which have followed.
How often, in the choice of a text, or in the course of a sermon, or in a letter to a friend, have I been led to speak a word in season! and what I have expressed at large, and in general, has been so exactly suited to some case which I was utterly unacquainted with, that I could hardly have hit it so well, had I been previously informed of it. Some instances of this kind have been so striking as hardly to admit a doubt of divine agency. And indeed, if believers in Jesus, however unworthy in themselves, are the temples of the Holy Ghost; if the Lord lives, dwells, and walks in them; if he is their life and their light; if he has promised to guide them with his eye, and to work in them to will and to do of his own good pleasure, --methinks what I have mentioned, and more, may be reasonably expected.
