Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace

If the Bible is the most popular book of all time, then Amazing Grace is without a doubt the most popular song of all time. Written in 1773 by John Newton, it has become America's spiritual national anthem for events of any magnitude. Amazing Grace has been heard at the Olympics, at presidential inaugurations and in crisis situations of every kind from the 9/11 tragedy to the more recent Utah coal mine disasters.

John Newton could write about grace because he had experienced it in his life. His mother, was was training her son in the scriptures, died just before his seventh birthday and John was shipped off to boarding school a short time later. Abandoned and abused, he ran away from the boarding school and returned to England living a life far from the values his mother had tried to instill in her son. As a young man, by his own admission, he was "a slave to doing wickedness". Newton made his way to Africa and took up with a Portuguese slave trader journeying across the Atlantic with human cargo. Then grace came raining down on John Newton life:

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

The storm on March 21, 1748 was unlike anything Newton had sailed through as it rocked the ship and began to flood it's holds. The storm was so severe that John began to contemplate death at sea without a Christian burial. When he was sent below by the captain to retrieve something, the man who took his place was immediatley washed overboard and grace-the unmerited favor or kindness shown to one who is totally undeserving-began to work in John Newton's life.

For the rest of his life, Newton believed that that wave had been meant for him and that he was saved for a higher purpose. As it can for each of us, a moment of grace is able to change a lifetime and an eternity. Newton found his way back to the God that his mother had so trusted in and served the Lord faithfully for the rest of his life as both a pastor and noted writer of hymns.

John Newton could say as Paul "I am what I am by the grace of God". Grace-that favor given freely to those who are without hope and without God in the world. Grace-the gift that is greater than all our failures and shortcomings.

Until his death is 1807, Newton observed March 21 as a special day of remembrance, a day he marked with "humility, prayer and praise". In the busyness of life, let's never forget all that God's grace has rescued us from and acknowledge, as we look at others struggling through life, "there go I but for the grace of God". And realize that His grace is still available today to strengthen and enable us for all we face.


God Bless
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church