A Wretch Like Me

In the parish church of Olney, Buckinghamshire, on New Year's Day 1773, curate John Newton introduced a new hymn to his congregation. The words carried the weight of a man who knew exactly what he had been saved from.

Decades earlier, Newton had captained slave ships across the Atlantic, packing human beings into suffocating holds for profit. On March 10, 1748, a violent storm nearly sank the merchant ship Greyhound off the coast of Ireland. As water rushed in and the crew despaired, Newton — a man who had mocked God for years — found himself crying out for mercy.

That storm did not make him an instant saint. He continued in the slave trade for several more years before leaving the sea in 1754. But grace worked slowly in him, the way dawn enters a room — not all at once, but irresistibly. By the time Newton stood in that Olney pulpit, ordained as an Anglican minister and shepherding souls, the hymn he offered named the only force powerful enough to turn a slave trader into a pastor: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

Paul wrote to the Ephesians, "For by grace you have been saved through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast." Newton understood this in his bones. No amount of good works could balance those ledgers. Grace alone reached into the wreckage of his life and made something new. That same grace reaches for you — not because of who you are, but because of who God is.