Newton, John

JOHN NEWTON

What do the following hymns have in common?

· Glorious things of thee are spoken

· Good shepherd of Your People

· How sweet the name of Jesus sounds, and

· Amazing Grace

The answer is they were all written by the same author.

His name was John Newton.

Newton started life as an eighteenth century Master Mariner and finished his life as a Vicar.

He first went to sea, at the age of eleven, with his father who was a Master on the Mediterranean trade. Eventually he became Master of his ship involved in the lucrative slave trade.

The triangular route involved taking cheap cotton goods from England to West Africa. These were bartered for slaves, who were then shipped across to America and sold as labour to the plantations. The ship then returned to England with raw cotton, sugar and tobacco, docking either in Bristol or Liverpool.

Slave trade was big business. For instance in 1771, 50,000 were transported in appalling conditions. Consequently, many never lived to see their owners.

It was during one such crossing that Newton was shipwrecked off the coast of Newfoundland. In desperation he turned to God and promised to give him his life if he survived.

He did survive and kept his promise.

First he came ashore to become Tide Surveyor to the Port of Liverpool. There he became associated with some evangelical clergymen. After being turned down by two bishops, he finally persuaded the Bishop of Lincoln to ordain him in 1764.

He was appointed to a curacy in the Buckinghamshire village of Olney on the modest stipend of £50 per annum. There he was to stay for the next 16 years before moving to St Mary’s Woolnorth in the City of London.

Newton was not a good preacher. He fumbled for the right words. He was much happier visiting the homes of the poor of his parish and caring for them, wearing his old blue sailor’s jacket, than preaching from the pulpit.

However, he was gifted at proclaiming the Gospel through writing hymns.

He wrote out of the depths of his own personal experience, as a person who had known sin, both afloat and ashore, and yet who had known the forgiveness and acceptance of God in his life.

The hymn Amazing Grace tells not only the story of his rescue from the physical depths of the ocean but tells also the story of his rescue from the spiritual depths of sin, by God. It is his autobiography.

‘Amazing grace - how sweet the sound - that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found; was blind but now I see.’

And he goes on:

‘Through every danger, trial and shame I have already come:

His grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.’

John Newton knew from personal experience the God who is the “friend of sinners”.

And if we want confirmation of this simple fact, we need look no further than at Jesus, “the image of the invisible God”, in the pages of the New Testament.

When criticised by the respectable religious leaders of his day, he points out “People who are well do not need a doctor, but only those who are sick. I have not come to call respectable people, but outcasts” (Mark 2.27).

Time and time again, he was criticised for being the friend of tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.

Jesus called Matthew who was a despised tax collector; he healed the leper who was regarded as a social outcast; he permitted an unclean woman to touch the hem of his garment; he forgave the paralysed man, and he accepted the woman caught committing adultery.

From start to finish, Jesus revealed in his life a God who is the friend of sinners.

You and I may not be tax collectors, lepers, unclean women or paralysed men, adulterers or even slave traders, like John Newton, but we are only too well aware that we too are sinners.

As St Paul reminds us, “everyone has sinned and is far away from God’s saving presence” (Romans 2. 23.)

We may well feel rejected by those around us. We may well reject ourselves. But we are never rejected by God.

He is our friend. He accepts us as we are and helps us to become what we can be. He accepts our dishonesty, our hypocrisy, our reluctance to forgive, our enjoyment to think the worst of others, our unfaithfulness, our meanness and our uncharitableness.

He accepts us. He does not condone us. But he offers us his forgiveness and his help to become the person, not only the person he has created us to be, but also the person whom, deep down, we really want to be.

It is said that when Oliver Cromwell was having his portrait painted, he said to the artist, “Paint me, warts and all”. And God accepts us, warts and all.

I am reminded of another hymn, written during the latter part of John Newton’s life, by Charlotte Elliott.

“Just as I am, you will receive,

will welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;

because you promise I believe,

O Lamb of God, I come”.

Amen.