John Newton and the Mercy He Could Not Outrun

John Newton spent his early years running hard in the wrong direction. By his twenties, he had worked aboard slave ships off the coast of West Africa, grown coarse with cruelty, and mocked the very idea of God. During a violent storm in March 1748, with the ship taking on water somewhere in the North Atlantic, Newton found himself doing something he hadn't done in years — praying.

That storm didn't make him a saint overnight. The change was slow, halting, full of missteps. Newton continued in the slave trade for several more years before the full weight of his sin pressed upon his conscience. But looking back decades later, he could trace the steady hand of God drawing him forward, step by uncertain step, along paths he never would have chosen.

"Remember not the sins of my youth," David prays in Psalm 25. Newton understood that prayer in his bones. He kept a phrase displayed above the mantle in his study during his later years as a London pastor: "I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great Savior." He never forgot what he had been. But he marveled, until his dying breath, at the mercy that had found him anyway.

All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, the psalmist tells us. Newton's life is proof that those paths can reach into the darkest places and lead even the most wayward soul toward home.