The Slave Trader Who Cried Out in the Storm

On March 10, 1748, a violent storm battered the slave ship Greyhound in the North Atlantic. John Newton, a twenty-two-year-old sailor hardened by years of profanity, cruelty, and the slave trade, woke to find his cabin flooding. Waves tore away part of the upper deck. As crew members were swept overboard, Newton found himself lashed to the helm, pumping water for hours in freezing darkness. The sea that had been his livelihood was now swallowing him whole.

Somewhere in those desperate hours, Newton muttered words he barely believed: "Lord, have mercy on us." It was the first prayer he had spoken in years. The storm raged for weeks, but the Greyhound limped into an Irish harbor. Newton later wrote that the very waters that nearly destroyed him carried him toward God.

This is the strange arithmetic of 1 Peter 3. The waters of Noah's flood were both judgment and deliverance — the same flood that condemned a rebellious world lifted the ark to safety. Peter says baptism works the same way. It is not a bath for the body but, as he writes, "the pledge of a clear conscience toward God" — made possible only because Christ, the Righteous One, suffered for the unrighteous.

Newton's guilty conscience haunted him for decades. But the mercy he discovered in that storm never let go. The water that should have drowned him became his passage to grace.