John Newton
1725 to 1807
John Newton was an English Anglican clergyman and, in his early life, the captain of a slave ship. After a dramatic conversion he came to hate the trade he had once profited from, became a pastor, and worked with William Wilberforce for the abolition of slavery. He wrote the hymn we know as Amazing Grace out of his own astonishment that mercy had reached a man like him.
Newton never got over his own rescue, and that is the heart of the man. He had captained a slave ship, a trade he came bitterly to hate, and when grace reached someone with a past like that he found it almost too much to take in. Amazing Grace is not a general hymn about mercy in the abstract. It is one particular man, named and guilty, astonished that the mercy had come looking for him.
He spent his later years as a pastor and, alongside William Wilberforce, working to end the trade he had once profited from. Old and failing in memory, he is remembered for holding on to two plain things: that he was a great sinner, and that Christ was a great Saviour. We feature him because that honesty, and the gratitude underneath it, wear well and do a tired conscience good.
Quotes with a reflection
Selected sayings
A few more lines from John Newton, gathered as encouragement, each with a note on where it comes from or what it means.
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“I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once was, and by the grace of God I am what I am.”
The former slave-trader on the slow, real, unfinished work of grace.
John Newton
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“We serve a gracious Master who knows how to overrule even our mistakes to his glory and our own advantage.”
From one of his many letters, on a God who redeems even our failures.
John Newton