During his 82 years of life, John Newton was a depraved sailor; a wretched outsatch on the west coast of Africa; a captain of a slave-trafficking ship; a well-paid tide inspector in Liverpool; a pastor who has been loved by two congregations in Olney and London for 43 years; a husband dedicated to Mary for 40 years until her death; personal friends of William Wilberforce, John Wesley and George Whitefield; and finally the author of the most famous English anthem, “Amazing Grace”.
Why am I interested in this man?(Philippians 1. 7), and relentlessly humble, patient, and merciful in their relationships with the people.
- It seems to me that we always fall off the horse on one side or the other in this matter of being firm and tender.
- Resilient and pleasant.
- Brave and compassionate.
- Fearful of truth when we should have the heart of a lion or discuss when We must mourn How rare Christians speak with a tender heart and have a theological backbone of steel.
John Newton has not always found the right balance. But although he has feet of clay, like any hero other than Christ, his greatest strength was? Tell the truth in love? (Ephesians 4. 15). She carried in her heart a tenderness that loved the lost, raised the sacrificed, welcomed children, and prayed for enemies, and her tenderness had roots as firm as those of a redwood.
I begin with a brief account of his life, for for Newton his life was the clearest testimony of God’s touching mercy he had ever seen; the memory of his own salvation was one of the deepest roots of his usual tenderness. marvel at his own rescue by pure and triumphant grace.
John Newton was born on 24 July 1725 in London to a pious mother and an irreligious marine father. His mother died when he was six. Abandoned mainly to himself, Newton became a libertine sailor, pushed into naval service, against his will, at the age of eighteen. His friend and biographer Richard Cecil said, “Did the companions you met here complete the ruin of your principles?(Memories of the Reverend John Newton, 1:9). Newton wrote of himself: “I was capable of everything; Didn’t I have God’s slightest fear before my eyes, or (remember) the slightest sensitivity of conscience?(Memories, 1:12).
When he was twenty years old, he was landed on small islands in southeastern Sierra Leone, West Africa, and for about a year and a half he lived practically as a slave, in almost total homelessness. His master’s wife despised him and treated him. He wrote that even African slaves were trying to smuggle food from their sparse rations. Later, he marveled at the seemingly accidental form of a ship anchored on his island after seeing smoke, and it turns out it was a ship with a captain who met Newton’s father who managed to free him from slavery. It was February 1747. I wasn’t even twenty-one and God was about to approach.
The ship has been at sea for over a year. Then, on 21 March 1748, on a boat trip to England in the North Atlantic, God acted to save the “African blasphemy”.
Newton awoke with a violent storm when his room began to fill with water. He was assigned to the bombs and heard saying, “If it does not end well, does the Lord have mercy on us?(Memories, 1:26). It was the first time in many years that he expressed the need for mercy, worked on the bombs from three in the morning until noon, slept an hour and then took control and steered the ship until midnight. time to reflect on your life and spiritual condition.
At about six o’clock the next day, there seemed to be hope. “I thought I saw the hand of God shown in our favor. I began to pray: I could not say the prayer of faith; I could not approach a reconciled God and call him father . . . The uncomfortable principles of infidelity were deeply ingrained . . . The big question now was: how to obtain faith? (Memoirs, 1:28).
Six years after that period, Newton said he had “no Christian friend or loyal minister to advise me. “He became captain of a slave merchant ship and returned to sea until December 1749. At maturity he felt intense remorse for his involvement in the slave trade and joined William Wilberforce in opposing the trade. Thirty years after leaving the sea, he wrote an essay, Thoughts on the Slave Trade in Africa, which ended with a reference to a trade as perverse, cruel, oppressive and destructive as the African slave trade?(Memories, 6:123).
In 1764 Newton accepted the call to be parish priest of the Church of England in Olney and served there for almost sixteen years, so he accepted the call, at the age of fifty-four, to St. Mary’s Woolnoth in London, where she began her twenty-seven-year ministry on 8 December 1779. He lacked eyes and ears, and his good friend Richard Cecil suggested that he stop preaching in the eighties, to which Newton replied, “What!Should the old African blasphemer stop while he can?(Memories, 1:88).
John and Mary had no children, but they adopted two nieces. When Mary died seventeen years before John, he lived with the family of one of these nieces and she cared for him as if he were her own father. Newton died on December 21. , 1807, at the age of eighty-two.
We now turn to the tenderness of John Newton, first manifested in the spontaneous love he felt for almost everyone he knew. According to Cecil, “Couldn’t Mr. Newton live longer than he could love?”(Memories, 1:95). His love for people was the signature of his life. He loved people who perished and loved his own herd of redeemed people.
Whoever . . . who has tasted the love of Christ and has known, from his own experience, the need and value of redemption, has power, yes, and is obliged to love his fellowmen, loved them at first sight. (Memories, 5:132)
Is that the prayer? At first glance, this comes from this quote: Newton’s first reaction was to love the lost people.
Newton also showed a clear mark of Christian tenderness in his love for children: “Let the little ones come to me, do not shame them. “(Mark 10:14) is the symbol of Jesus’ tenderness. When Newton arrived in Olney, one of the first things he did was start a children’s meeting on Thursday afternoon, met with them, commissioned them tasks, and told them about the Bible. At one point, he said, “Do I think I have two hundred children who come often?”(John Newton, 143).
Perhaps we can see the most striking example of Newton’s tenderness, in his care for William Cowper, the poet and hymn writer, who fell mentally ill and came to live in Olney for twelve of the sixteen years Newton was there. house for five months for one season and fourteen months for another, when the poet was so depressed that it was difficult for him to do things alone. In fact, Cecil said that throughout Newton’s life, “your house was an asylum for the perplexed or afflicted?”(Memories, 1:95).
What would most of us do with a depressed person who could barely leave the house?William Jay summarized the answer about Newton: “He had the tenderest disposition; and you’ve always carefully considered your friend’s depression and discouragement as a physical problem. “effect, by the healing of which he prayed, but never argued or argued with him about that?(John Newton, 41).
Now, where does this tenderness come from?
Few things tended to make it more sensitive than being close to the presence of suffering and death. “My line of study,” Newton says, “like a surgeon’s, was it mainly crossing the hospital?(Memories, 1: 100). His biblical assessment of the misery he saw could be suppressed in part, but not much, in this life. He would give his life to bring as much relief and peace as possible for a moment and for eternity, but he would not be insensitive and cynical. in the face of irretrievable miseries such as Cowper’s mental illness.
“I try to go around the world when a doctor passes near Bedlam [the famous asylum]: patients make noise, annoy him with impertinence and hinder him in his business; but are you doing everything you can and it’s happening?(John Newton, 103 In other words, his tender patience and perseverance in caring for difficult people stems in part from a very sober and realistic view of what is expected in this world. Life is difficult and God is good.
This sober realism of what we can expect from this fallen world is a crucial root of the usual tenderness in John Newton’s life.
Newton returns to his own salvation more than anything as a source of tenderness. Until the day of his death, he never ceased to be surprised by the fact that, as he said at the age of seventy-two, “such not only forgiven and forgiven, but reserved for the honor of preaching your gospel, to which he blasphemed and renounced . It’s really wonderful! The more you exalt me, the more I have to humble myself (Memories, 1:86).
Did Newton express this feeling in the most famous way in his anthem?Amazing Grace ?: (Wonderful Grace):
Wonderful grace!? how sweet is the sound This saved a wretch like me, I was lost, but now I was found, I was blind, but now I see.
The effect of this wonder is tenderness towards others, the wretched one, who was saved by grace, believes and feels his own weakness and indignity, and lives on the grace and forgiveness of his Lord’s love, which gives him a usual tenderness and kindness. Humble, with a sense of forgiveness for yourself, is it easy for you to forgive others?(Memories, 1:70).
Good heart, grateful humility, breaking one? Except they were probably the most important root of Newton’s usual tenderness toward people.
To maintain the love and tenderness that think more about the need of the other person than in our own comfort, we must have an unwavering hope that the sadness of our lives will work for our eternal good. He will be deaf to our needs and we will say, “Eat and drink, that tomorrow we will die?”(1 Corinthians 15:32). Newton found this peace and trust in God’s providence that governs all good and evil. your own experience in describing the believer:
“Your faith sustains you in all trials, assuring you that each dispensation is under the guidance of your Lord; that punishments are a sign of his love; that one’s time, measure, and continuity of sufferings are conceived by infinite wisdom and designed to work for one’s eternal good; And what grace and strength will you receive according to your days?(Memories, 1:169)
This unwavering confidence that God’s providence, which governs the whole world, will guide all experiences towards his good Newton, stabilized, fortified and sustained, so that he does not spend his life whispering, but singing:?The grace that has saved us so far, and grace will bring us home?