John Newton's Mother Prayed Before He Was Lost

In 1733, a devout woman in Wapping, London, held her infant son John Newton and dedicated him to the Lord's service. She taught him scripture, prayed over him daily, and whispered God's promises into his young ears. She died before his seventh birthday.

What followed was a life that seemed to mock every one of those prayers. John Newton became a sailor, a deserter, a prisoner, and eventually a slave trader — brutal, profane, and by his own admission, utterly wretched. He sank so low that he was enslaved himself on the coast of Sierra Leone, starving and desperate. No one looking at that broken man in 1745 would have guessed he had been set apart.

But the God who chooses before the foundation of the world does not forget. A violent storm off the coast of Ireland in 1748 nearly killed Newton, and in that terror, the scriptures his mother had planted decades earlier broke through. He cried out to the Almighty — and was heard.

Newton would become a pastor, an abolitionist, and the author of Amazing Grace. He spent his final years marveling that God's purpose had held firm through every year of rebellion.