The amazing grace of
Christmas morn
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
The malls and the Main Streets fall silent. The
ringing of cash registers fade in ghostly echoes
across silent streets. But the Christ born in a
manger 2,000 years ago lives through the centuries,
liberating the hearts of sinners and transforming
the lives of the wicked.
The authentic story of the redeeming power of the
Christmas message is illustrated in the incredible
life of an English slaver named John Newton, born
300 years ago into a seafaring family in England.
His mother was a godly woman who died when John was
7, and he recalled as the sweetest remembrance of
childhood the soft and tender voice of his mother at
prayer.
His father married again, and John at 11 went to sea
with him. He eagerly adopted the vulgar life of
seamen as he grew older, though the memory of his
mother’s faith remained. “I saw the necessity of
religion as a means of escaping hell,” he recalled
many years later, “but I loved sin.”
On shore leave, he was seized by a press gang and
taken aboard HMS Harwich. Life grew coarser. He ran
away, was captured, put in chains, stripped before
the mast, and flogged. “The Lord had by all
appearances given me up to judicial hardness,” he
recalled. “I was capable of anything. I had not the
least fear of God, nor the least sensibility of
conscience. I was firmly persuaded that after death,
I should merely cease to be.”
The captain of the Harwich traded him to the skipper
of a slaving ship, bound for West Africa to take
aboard wretched human cargo. “At this period of my
life,” he later reflected, “I was big with mischief
and, like one afflicted with a pestilence, was
capable of spreading a taint wherever I went.”
John’s new captain took a liking to him, however,
and took him to his home on an island off the
African coast, where his wife, a beautiful and cruel
African princess, waited for him. She soon grew
jealous of her husband’s friendship with John. John
fell ill, and when the captain sailed he left John
in his wife’s care.
The ship was barely over the horizon when he was
thrown into a pigsty. The jealous wife blinded him,
and left him in delirium to die. He did not die, but
was kept in chains and fed swill from her table.
Word spread through the district that a black woman
was keeping a white slave, and many came to taunt
him. They threw stones at him, mocking his misery.
He would have starved if captured slaves, waiting
for a ship to take them to the Americas, had not
shared their meager scraps of food.
When the captain returned five years later John told
how he had been treated. His old friend scoffed, and
called him a liar and a thief, but agreed to take
him home to England. John was treated ever more
harshly on the voyage, fed only the entrails of
animals butchered for the crew’s mess. “The voyage
quite broke my constitution,” he recalled, “and the
effects would always remain with me as a needful
memento of the service of wages and sin.”
Like Job, he became a magnet for adversity. When his
ship crashed in a storm he despaired that God’s
mercy remained after a life of hostile indifference
to the Gospel. “During the time I was engaged in the
slave trade,” he said, “I never had the least
scruple to its lawfulness.” Yet the wanton sinner,
the arrogant blasphemer, the mocker of the faith was
at last driven to his knees: “My prayer was like the
cry of ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain
to hear.”
Miraculously, he was rescued, and made his way home
to England to reflect on the mercies God had shown
him in his awful life. He fell under the preaching
of George Whitefield and the influence of John
Wesley, and was born again into the new life in
Christ. Two days short of Christmas 1807, he died at
the age of 82, and left a dazzling testimony to the
miracle of Christmas. “I commit my soul to my
gracious God and Savior, who mercifully spared and
preserved me, when I was an apostate, a blasphemer
and an infidel, and delivered me from Africa into
which my obstinate wickedness had plunged me.” He
set down the story of his life, and it became the
most beloved hymn of Christendom.
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.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.