Hello everyone. I’m preparing to preach this weekend and don’t have the time for a new post so I’ve brought this recent one back. It was a little overshadowed due to my suprise on-line birthday party but it’s worthy bringing back to the front. These are some amazing thoughts of God’s ‘radical’ grace. See you on Monday! -Tony

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Amazingly ‘radical’ grace in the life of John Newton

We’ve been talking recently about the Gospel and ‘radical’ depravity. Much of the biblical message is radical. It’s radical that sinners need to be rescued from ourselves. That we cannot save ourselves and that God must invade our lives to save us from our ignorance is radical. We are helpless until He initiates our salvation. That too is radical. Well the most famous song in the world was written by a man who was radically saved from himself. This is his story…

“Although we all sing the hymn ‘Amazing Grace,’ it amazes few. Why? Because grace cannot amaze until we feel the judgment we deserve… This grace amazed John Newton [1725-1807]. This is why he wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace.’ Newton became a Christian in his late twenties. Prior to his conversion, he had been a slave trader in West Africa and was a godless, ruthless man.

For example, he kept a black slave as a mistress. When he caught her in a sexual relationship with a black man, he beat the man to death with his shovel only to find out later that he was her husband.

On the long voyages across the Atlantic, he and his mates raped the women being transported to their North American masters. Though many arrived pregnant with his seed, he was hard and indifferent to the fate of these women and their children.

This is why, after his conversion, Newton looked at the cross with amazement. There he saw grace – Christ suffering the agony of God’s wrath in his place, so that God could reward him with eternal life. The grace of God stunned him, and he never got over it.

Our sins may be different from those of John Newton, but God’s grace works the same way for us. When a Christian choral group changed the words in Newton’s hymn from ‘saved a wretch like me’ to ‘saved a person like me’ I knew that grace had sprouted wings and flown away. Grace appears most perfectly in the knowledge of our sin revealed at the cross. Only cross-centered Christians find grace amazing.”

– Wm. P. Farley, Outrageous Mercy: Rediscover the Radical Nature of Christianity (Baker: Grand Rapids, MI) 2004. Page 52.