John Newton and the Body No Longer for Sale

John Newton spent years on the West African coast buying and selling human bodies. He knew exactly what it meant to purchase a person — to inspect, to appraise, to claim ownership over flesh and bone. He recorded transactions in his ledger with the cold precision of a man who saw bodies as commodities.

Then grace, as he later described it, broke through. Newton's conversion aboard a storm-battered ship in 1748 did not immediately untangle every sin, but it planted a truth that would grow for decades: he himself had been purchased. Not with silver or trade goods, but with the blood of Christ.

The former slave trader began to understand Paul's words to the Corinthians with a clarity few could match. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." Newton had spent years treating human bodies as property to be used and discarded. Now he grasped that his own body — the same hands that had chained others, the same mouth that had barked orders on the slave deck — belonged to the Almighty. Not to exploit, not to indulge, but to honor.

"I was a wretch," he would write. And wretches, once redeemed, do not return to the auction block.

Paul's message to the Corinthians carries that same weight. Your body is not a commodity to be spent on fleeting pleasure. It is a temple, bought at an extraordinary price, and every choice you make with it either honors or dishonors the One who paid.