Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace

Young John just couldn’t seem to get along with anybody. He was a troubled youth who finally resorted to the seas as a sailor. Although he was following in the footsteps of his father, he was really trying to escape his mounting troubles by running away to the seas.

It was on one of these voyages, aboard a slave-trading ship, that he so irritated his captain and shipmates with his profane and obscene songs that they chained and imprisoned him and nearly starved him to death. His troubles followed him, even to the seas.

While on a slave-hunt in Sierra Leone, his shipmates became so weary of him that they actually sold HIM into slavery! He slaved on an African plantation for several months before his father came for him and rescued him.

Perspective is everything and John eventually figured things out. He got his life together and gave himself to God. His circumstances would lead him to denounce the awful life of slave trading and to enter the ministry where he made his mark by preaching about love and compassion.

On New Years Day of 1773, the once profane songwriter introduced a new hymn to illustrate his sermon for the day. The hymn was unique, for the time, in that it spoke about his own former struggles and personal experiences. In an era when ministers wanted to be known for their strength and piety, John’s hymn focused on his own sinfulness and proclaimed God’s sweet grace even to “a wretch like me.”

John Newton was the songwriter. Some say that although the words are original, the music is not. The tune, added later, sounds very much like it could have been one of the negro spirituals that he once heard from the hold of his own slave ship.

The song, telling of God’s amazing grace, written by a repentant slave trader, became so popular across the world that it is now considered the greatest Christian hymn ever written. It is still performed tens of millions of times a year more than two centuries later.