From Slave Ship to Sacred Hymn

In 1748, a young sailor named John Newton found himself aboard a ship caught in a violent storm off the coast of Ireland. The vessel was taking on water so fast that the crew had given up hope. Newton, who had spent years captaining slave ships and living in open defiance of the Almighty, did something he hadn't done in years — he prayed.

That desperate prayer in the middle of the Atlantic became the first step in a long journey of transformation. Newton didn't change overnight. He continued in the slave trade for several more years before the full weight of his sins broke through to his conscience. But that night in the storm, grace cracked open a door he thought he had sealed shut forever.

Years later, as an ordained Anglican minister in the small parish of Olney, England, Newton sat down and wrote the words that would become the most recognized hymn in the English-speaking world: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

Newton wasn't being poetic when he called himself a wretch. He meant it. He had trafficked in human lives. And yet the God he had cursed from the deck of a slave ship pursued him through the storm and refused to let him drown.

That is the scandal of redemption — it reaches into the darkest chapters of a human life and writes a new song. No one sits beyond the reach of a grace that amazing.