The Wretch Who Wrote the World's Hymn

In 1772, an Anglican clergyman in the small village of Olney, England, sat down to write a hymn for his New Year's Day sermon. The man was John Newton, and he knew exactly what he had been before the Almighty reached down for him.

Newton had captained a slave ship. He had trafficked human beings across the Atlantic, chaining men and women below deck in conditions so brutal that many did not survive the crossing. He drank heavily, blasphemed freely, and by his own account had sunk lower than the people he enslaved. During a terrifying storm off the coast of Ireland in 1748, Newton cried out to God for the first time — not because he deserved to be heard, but because he had nowhere else to turn.

The hymn he wrote that New Year's week contained a line that has been sung billions of times since: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

Newton was not being poetic. He was being precise. He chose the word "wretch" because he had been one. And the word "amazing" because no other word could carry the weight of what God had done.

Grace is not a reward for the deserving. It is a lifeline thrown to the drowning. Newton spent the rest of his life fighting the slave trade he had once profited from — not to earn what he had already been given, but because grace, once received, changes what your hands are willing to do.

The God who saved a slave trader is the same God who reaches for you this morning.