Amazing Grace

Cody has postponed a school report about a famous person until after its due date. Instead of punishing him, Mrs. Hawkins grants him extra time. Whit identifies her undeserved mercy as grace and suggests that Cody study a man who had committed terrible wrongs before writing one of the best-known expressions of grace.

John Newton had been born in England in 1725, the son of a merchant-fleet captain. He became an experienced sailor while still young, but his heart remained with Mary Catlett. Mary loved him, yet her Christian faith would not allow her to marry an unbeliever. She gave John a small Bible and promised that neither she nor God would give up on him.

John mocked religion and returned to sea. While ashore with other sailors, a press gang seized him and forced him into the British Royal Navy. He served aboard a warship for two years while longing to return to Mary. When the ship docked at Plymouth, he attempted to swim ashore without permission. He was captured, stripped of his rank as a midshipman, and publicly flogged.

John’s anger made him so rebellious that his captain exchanged him to Captain Barbary, who operated a slave ship. Desperate to escape the Navy, John agreed even after learning that the ship would sail to Africa, transport enslaved people across the Atlantic, and sell them in the Americas.

In Africa, John’s defiance led Barbary to chain him and force him to labor in plantation fields. Offered freedom from the chains in exchange for becoming an officer, John chose to learn the cruel work of loading, restraining, transporting, and selling human beings. Having suffered brutality himself, he responded by becoming brutal toward others.

Back in England, Mary rejected every other suitor. Her father feared she would waste her future waiting for an unsuitable sailor who might never return, but Mary continued praying. She asked God to protect John, reveal the emptiness of his life, and do whatever was necessary to capture his attention.

By 1748, twenty-three-year-old John had become captain of his own slave ship. Success and profit did not quiet the barrenness he felt. Restless at night, he remembered his mother’s faith and began reading Christian books, including The Imitation of Christ, while his crew laughed at the famously blasphemous captain’s new interest.

A hurricane overtook the ship. John tied himself to the wheel and struggled for more than a day and night to keep the vessel from capsizing. When the storm passed, the damaged ship was still leaking and required constant pumping, but everyone remained alive. John could no longer dismiss the sense that an invisible hand had held them upright.

He confessed his sin to God and asked for forgiveness. During the long voyage home, the ship nearly sank again near Ireland, but John reached England convinced that Jesus had died for him and that he was now forgiven. He reunited with Mary and asked permission to seek her hand in marriage.

John’s conversion did not instantly correct everything he believed. He completed three more slave-trading voyages before a growing understanding of Scripture and the value of every human life finally led him to abandon the trade. He became a tide surveyor in Liverpool, married Mary, studied the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, and joined her in Christian outreach.

John eventually entered the ministry and became rector of an Anglican church in Olney. His gift for encouraging others through letters expanded into writing poems and hymns. One new hymn began, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” and described a lost, spiritually blind sinner whom grace had found and enabled to see.

Later, Newton pastored a prominent church in London and influenced Christian leaders such as William Wilberforce. After more than thirty years of effort, their work helped end the international slave trade. Newton died in 1807 at the age of eighty-two after nearly six decades of preaching. Cody finally has both a famous musician and a powerful account of undeserved mercy for the report he titles Amazing Grace.