Two Things He Never Forgot

In 1748, a twenty-three-year-old sailor named John Newton clung to the rigging of the Greyhound as waves crashed over the deck in the North Atlantic. Newton was no ordinary sailor — he had spent years trafficking enslaved Africans, had mocked Christianity openly, and by his own account had sunk to depths of cruelty he later could barely speak of. But in that storm, as the ship took on water and the crew prepared to die, Newton found himself crying out to a God he had long rejected.

He survived. And for the next fifty years, he never stopped looking back at that night. The former slave trader became a pastor in the village of Olney, where he wrote the hymn that would become the most recognized in the English language — Amazing Grace. Newton understood in his bones what Moses told Israel at the edge of the Promised Land: has anything like this ever happened? Has any God reached into the wreckage of a human life and pulled someone out?

Near death at eighty-two, his mind failing, Newton told a visitor, "My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior."

Moses commanded Israel to "acknowledge and take to heart" what the Lord had done. Newton did exactly that — he built an entire life on the memory of a rescue so singular, so undeserved, that no other explanation would do but God.