We turn this morning to an 18th century
figure, and I want to speak to you
on the life of John Newton, who was
born in 1725 and died at the age
of 83 in 1807.
There are two reasons why I choose Newton's
life particularly.
Firstly, because it has its own fascinating interest.
His personal history was charged with drama, and
it is both moving and instructive.
A modern secular writer has said of Newton's
life that it enshrines one of the most
fantastic fairy tales that was ever the true
story of a human being.
Now in the second place, and more important,
Newton became one of the most outstanding writers
on practical experimental Christianity.
William Jay, who was a famous minister in
Bath, said that John Newton was the most
truly Christian man that he ever knew, and
Newton's gift to the was not the same
kind of gift as the Puritans and Reformers
and others had.
It was not his calling primarily to give
mental knowledge and instruction, so much as it
was his gift to apply the truth in
a practical experimental way.
To give you one of his sayings, which
is characteristic of his emphasis, he says a
scholar may know the name of a maid's
broom in 20 different languages, but a maid
may know how to use that broom better
than any scholar, and so with a Christian.
It is not how much we know, but
how we use that knowledge and what we
are as a result of the truth that
we know, and this was John Newton's great
contribution, and will ever remain so through his
writings and through his letters.
Now he was born, as I say, in
July 1725 on the 24th day of that
month.
His mother was a sweet, pious Christian.
His father was a seafaring captain in the
Mediterranean trade, so he certainly knew his father.
At any rate, his father was always to
him a distant and reserved and rather awesome
figure, but his mother was the one who
watched over his early life, who taught him
when he was four years old.
Isaac watched him, who taught him the short
of catechism, and more than anything else taught
him in the scriptures, so that before he
was seven years old, there were considerable portions
of these scriptures and catechism and hymns that
he had committed to memory.
She was a dissenter attending one of the
non-conformist London churches, but then when her
son John, their only son, was only six
years of age coming up for seven, she
was taken seriously ill with consumption, and an
old school friend offered to nurse her in
her home at Chatham in Kent, between Maidstone
and Rochester.
So on account of the severity of his
mother's illness, neighbours took the young child, John,
and his mother was taken to this home
in Chatham, but there, instead of recovering, she
died before Newton was seven years of age.
There followed for him a lonely and difficult
childhood.
His father was generally away.
His father married again.
There were other children born, but Newton was
never really in the centre of a family
life.
He went to school, a boarding school at
Stratford, and then at the age of ten,
left school and joined his father on board
ships.
So from the age of ten to sixteen,
John Newton sailed the high seas with his
father, and he tells us that those years
were years of great struggle for him.
He had imprinted upon his memory the truths
that his mother had taught him, and yet
he was surrounded by the wilderness of an
18th century ship.
It's true that he was often under his
father's eye.
He lived in his father's cabin, but he
also says that when he was out of
his father's sight, he joined often in cursing
and in forgetfulness of God.
I often saw, he says, a necessity of
religion as a means of escaping hell, but
I loved sin and was unwilling to forsake
it.
Then he tells us when he was in
his mid-teens of a day when the
ship that they were on stopped from the
German coast at the time at Middelburg, and
Newton on his own wandered through the town,
quite an old medieval city, and there he
bought something which radically affected the next years
of his life.
It was a book, and if anyone ever
speaks of the evil influence of a bad
book, it's John Newton.
The book was Shaftesbury's characteristics.
Shaftesbury was an 18th century deist, a free
thinker, as they were then called.
They believed that there was a creator, and
that the creator had set the universe in
being, rather like an inventor would set a
machine in motion, and thereafter the course of
events and of the world was to be
governed by man.
There was heaven, and there was no hell.
Morality consisted of very few items, and it
was more or less extraordinarily similar to the
humanism of today, in a somewhat different dress.
But Newton says that that book worked on
his mind like a slow poison, and gradually
there was destroyed within him the conviction of
truth.
Shaftesbury was a very clever writer, and he
wrote beautiful prose.
And he wasn't so much a downright atheist
as a man who suggested that it was
the mark of a brave man to be
prepared to doubt, that the man who had
to know everything for a certainty was a
man of a small mind.
But a truly thinking man, and a man
who was prepared to face the world, was
a man who was ready to encounter doubts,
and he insinuated doubts.
And he did it through his books with
many people.
Such was the afternoon outing which Newton had
in Little Bern.
Now by the time he became 17 years
of age, his father was despairing of him.
He was showing no aptitude as a seaman.
He had become introspective and moody.
He would sit on the deck and brood,
and be absorbed with his imagination.
His father thought he was indolent and unprepared
for work.
So his father made an arrangement that he
would go to a new career on a
plantation in Jamaica.
Although he was 17, there was great need
for Englishmen, and he was offered, through a
friend of his father's, quite a good post
in Jamaica.
Of course Newton was only being directed by
his father, but this was arranged.
He was to sail upon Liverpool in the
month of December in 1742.
There was a coach from London to Warrington
once a week, and it was arranged that
he would catch the coach of the next
week to Warrington.
Then he would complete his journey on foot.
And then something happened.
The people who had entertained his mother when
she was dying were a family called the
Catlets, and they lived, as I told you,
in Chatham.
John Newton had never met them, but he
had heard of them, and he had a
week to fill before he caught his coach
to Warrington.
His father sent him on a message to
make them, and Newton, remembering the Catlets lived
in Chatham, asked permission to visit them, and
so he did.
And this was a great turning point.
In the Catlet home was a young lady
by the name of Mary, nicknamed Polly.
She was 13 years old, and from the
moment that Newton saw her, he fell desperately
in love with her.
He said, I was impressed with an affection
for her which never abated or lost its
influence a single moment in my heart from
that hour.
Now although Newton seemed somewhat indolent to observers,
he was in fact very determined and also
impetuous and quite inventive.
So he did not tell the Catlets that
he was due to catch the Warrington coach,
and the days glided by until he was
quite sure that it was too late to
catch that coach from London.
But then he consoled himself that the ship
wasn't sailing for another fortnight to Jamaica.
He could wait another week and risk his
father's wrath.
But having waited the second week, he decided
Jamaica was impossible.
Four or five years away from Mary, the
thing was unthinkable.
So he actually stayed in Chatham for three
weeks until he was sure the ship had
gone, and then he faced his father's wrath.
His father forgave him although he was extremely
angry with him, and packed him off again
to sea.
So he had a year in the Mediterranean,
in Venice, and other places, and then back
to England.
And then he more or less repeated the
same thing.
This was a year later, December 1743, visited
Chatham.
I won't say he overstayed his time because
apparently he was very welcome in the home.
The mother of the family had been a
great friend of John Newton's mother, but his
father again was intensely angry with him.
That brings us up to February 1744.
Newton was just waiting for another ship, and
as he was sauntering along the waterfront one
day, he was press ganged into the navy.
Now in that year, 1744, war broke out
with France, and as most of you probably
well know, the navy had at that time
power to impress any able-bodied men that
they cared to.
So that you would get these gangs of
men under an officer, and when they saw
anyone who looked like a seaman, or was
wearing a dress which suggested he had been
at sea, they would seize him and take
him on board ship.
And this is what happened to Newton.
In a flash of an eye, he was
taken by these men, put on board a
tender called the Betsy, and then taken out
to sea to a man of war, the
Harwich.
Well, Newton had been a sailor as we've
been saying these many years, but he'd never
been on board a naval vessel, and they
were a rather different proposition.
For one thing, they were very much larger.
The average merchant ship of those days would
have a crew of perhaps 25 or 30
men, whereas a ship, a man of war
of the size of the Harwich, was over
900 tons, and it had a crew of
350 men.
And the lowest of the crew, who were
in the, what they called the cockpit before
the mast, they were crowded in like animals,
and often men were put on board naval
vessels as an alternative to being hung, if
they were criminals.
And all kinds of the riffraff of society
were crowded into the depths of these ships,
and it was indeed a tremendous transition for
Newton.
He wrote at once a note to his
father, thinking that his father could use his
influence to obtain his release, but his father
could do no such thing.
The most that his father could do was
to get him prompt promotion, so he was
elevated from the cockpit to the rank of
a midshipman, and took his place in the
gun room on the Harwich.
Well, that was a considerable rise in his
fortune, but it was still a great shock,
and the shock was increased when he learned
soon after that the Harwich was bound for
the East Indies, and it might be away
for four or five years.
Newton took the risk, went on shore one
day, borrowed a horse, drove a road to
Chatham, paid his last farewell to Mary Catlett,
and back to the ship.
I don't know, it's not recorded what exactly
happened on the visit, but her parents by
this time were evidently thoroughly alarmed at the
ardor of Newton's affection, considering, I suppose, the
youth still of their daughter, and the meeting
terminated apparently with Mary Catlett's parents informing him
that he was not to visit there again.
At any rate, not until he had his
father's permission to marry, so he went back
to the Harwich.
The Harwich sailed down through the English Channel
to the East Indies, but by the time
she was passing the coast of Devon, there
were certain repairs evidently needed, and unexpectedly she
pulled into Plymouth, and here Newton was overcome
once more with his infatuosity.
The captain had certain things that he wanted
collecting from the shore, so he put so
many sailors in a longboat, and because many
of them were men who had been impressed,
he was determined that none should desert, so
he put Newton in charge of them as
a mixture.
Well, you have anticipated correctly, but John Newton
actually deserted this man of war.
No sooner was the boat in Plymouth than
he found the road to Dartmouth and began
to walk.
His father was in Dartmouth at the time
on another ship, and Newton evidently was persuaded
that if he could reach his father, his
father would be able to do something to
secure his transfer from the Navy, but alas,
he never got to Dartmouth.
He had walked about a day and a
night, and was met by a party of
soldiers on the road.
They recognized him easily enough as a sailor
and probably a deserter.
He was taken back to Plymouth.
They brought me back to Plymouth, he said,
and I walked through the streets guarded like
a felon.
My heart was full of indignation, shame, and
fear.
He had good reason to be afraid.
Naval discipline in those days was particularly brutal.
He was imprisoned, first in Plymouth, then he
was taken back on board the ship in
chains.
The next day, the whole ship's company, 350
men, were assembled on the deck.
The ship's carpenter was appointed to put up
the gratings, as they were called, and upon
these gratings men were tied before they were
flogged with a cap of nine tails.
A man might be given a hundred lashes
on each, a new bosun would give a
dozen, one bosun would give a dozen, and
then another, and we don't know how many
newton had, but he was fearfully flogged, stripped
of all his rank, and then with his
wounds thrown back down into the cockpit before
the mind.
He tells us he was full of despair
and rebellion, and as the English coast disappeared
at last out of sight, he was tempted
to throw himself into the deep and die,
and he says there were only two things
that prevented him, in his own thought.
One was thinking of what Mary Catlett would
feel on hearing such news, and the second
was his rage against the captain.
Though I had well deserved all I met
with, and the captain might have been justified
if he had carried his resentment still further,
yet my pride at that time suggested I
had been grossly injured, and this so far
wrought upon my wicked heart that I actually
formed designs against his life, and this was
one reason that made me willing to prolong
my own.
Well he was exposed now to all the
insults of the crew, his former friends on
the upper decks ignored him completely, and he
was the object of general contempt and ridicule.
He says at this time he had abandoned
all faith in the scriptures.
On the harwich I met with companions who
completed the ruin of my principles.
His conscience was silence and scripture, which he
had learned as a child, he says he
now began to use as a subject of
jokes.
The harwich pulled in at Madeira.
It was quite early in the morning, and
Newton was still in his hammock, when one
of the midshipmen came down and saw him
in his hammock, told him to get up
at once, he was slow in getting up,
and this man cut it down, they cored
down with his sword so that Newton landed
on the deck.
He went up aloft, and as soon as
he got there he saw it was a
little rowing boat alongside, and one of the
men from the harwich was being put down
into the boat, and two men were being
brought up.
Now this was something that often often happened.
A naval boat could stop another merchantman, and
it could demand two seamen, perhaps that were
more able-bodied, or perhaps which had gifts
in carpentry or gunnery or something, and that
is what had happened.
It had requisitioned two seamen from another boat,
and then of course the naval vessel gave
two of its own crew who were less
competent, and this man was being put into
the ship, into the rowing boat.
Newton at once pleaded that he might also
be put off the ship, and it was
granted.
There was about, I don't know, ten minutes,
quarter of an hour between the time that
he was sleeping in his hammock and the
time that with his few belongings he was
in a boat bound to the other ship.
He had only one book, he says, with
him.
That was a book of Euclid and geometry,
a few other possessions, and that was all.
Now the new ship was a trading vessel
to the west coast of Africa, to the
Guinea coast, or the slave coast as it
was often called.
There was at that time from London and
Bristol and Liverpool, tremendous trade with Africa, and
mainly in slaves.
There were about 8,000 English seamen employed
on the slave route.
Boats went down to Guinea, then crossed the
Middle Passage over to the West Indies or
Carolina, took across their slaves, and they brought
back from America cotton and other produce.
And it was said of those 8,000
seamen that perhaps as many as 1,500
died every year as a result of the
climate and the rigors of what they were
exposed to.
But of course that was very little compared
to the figure of the deaths among the
slaves.
There was perhaps an annual trade in slaves
of something like 15,000 men.
No, I'm sorry that figure is wrong, let
me give it to you correctly.
John Newton said, writing later, if the English
ships purchased 60,000 slaves annually upon the
whole extent of the coast, the African coast,
the annual loss of lives of slaves cannot
be much less than 15,000 a year.
He tells us of one ship upon which
there was no epidemic.
It sailed across from Africa to Carolina.
It had 218 slaves on board, and of
that figure 62 died.
And when an epidemic came, it was often
far higher.
Now there were some good captains of these
vessels, and some who maintained strict discipline.
There were others who were obviously indifferent and
cruel.
Newton tells the story of one ship in
which a young woman, a young mother was
taken as a slave with a child just
a year old.
The child was crying and obviously terrified, and
it was dealt with by throwing it into
the sea.
And Newton said they would have thrown her
in too except that she was too valuable.
So there were appalling horrors, and these horrors
were practically unknown in England.
It was once men crossed the equator and
reached these foreign parts that some of them
became more like bullets.
And it wasn't until 40 years later that
the slave trade became a matter of common
knowledge, and then action was taken.
Well Newton arrived then on the Guinea coast,
and by this time his character had degenerated
to its almost at the lowest point.
He became a little lower, but he couldn't
have gone much lower.
The admonitions of conscience, the warnings of conscience,
which from successive repulses had grown weaker and
weaker, at length he says entirely ceased.
And for a space of many months, if
not for some years, I cannot recollect that
I had a single check of conscience.
At times I have been visited with sickness,
and have believed myself near to death, but
I had not the least concern about the
consequences.
Now on this small ship with some 25
men, Newton made himself a considerable difficulty of
a captain.
John Newton had a great facility for rhyme
and verse, as we shall later know, but
at this stage he used it for quite
different purposes.
He composed a song about the captain of
the ship, and it was so clever and
humorous that the whole ship's crew was singing
it in a short time.
And that was not the kind of thing
which happened on board ships in the 18th
century.
The captain died suddenly on the west coast
of Africa, and the mate was put in
command, and this mate could see at once
that he and John Newton could not be
on the same ship.
Or at any rate, Newton was desperately afraid
that if a naval vessel drew near, the
mate would immediately make sure he was put
on boarding.
So when they came to the coast, Newton
asked Lee to join an English trader which
they were carrying back as a passenger.
This trader said he would be responsible for
Newton, and Newton then landed on the coast
of Africa, and there he was to stay
for two years.
In later life, Newton said that he believed
that one reason why God allowed him to
land on the coast of Africa was that
in isolation he would be less peril to
other people, because by this time, he says,
he not only sinned with a high hand
myself, but made it my study to tempt
and seduce others upon every occasion.
He was not given too much drink, and
he retained the virtue of honesty.
But apart from those two things, he was
a man who broke the law of God
at apparently almost every point.
He became then the assistant of this English
trader who was a slave collector.
He went up the rivers, made journeys inland.
The further inland you went, the cheaper the
slaves became.
So this man had a kind of depot
on the coast, and then he made his
journeys, and often took Newton with him.
But after Newton had been there just a
little while, he took seriously ill of one
of these fevers that were so common, and
the trader left him at the depot while
he went inland.
The person in charge of the depot was
the trader's mistress, a black woman who lived
with him as though she were his wife,
and as soon as the trader was gone,
she turned all her hatred upon Newton.
For some reason she disliked him bitterly.
Then Newton's illness grew worse.
She saw that he had no comfort.
He slept on a mat with a bit
of wood for a pillow.
The only food he got was by coming
to her plate at the end of meals,
and taking whatever scraps she cared to leave.
And on one occasion he says that she
handed the scraps of her plate to him,
and he was so desperately weak he was
unable to hold the plate, and the contents
were spilled amongst the dirt on the floor
to her great merriment.
And at night he would crawl out of
his little covering to wash his shirt.
He had only one shirt.
He washed it and let it dry on
his back.
He would scrape around digging up roots like
raw potatoes to eat.
And in this way he was indeed a
prodigal reduced to the very death.
The trader returned.
Newton complained of his treatment, and the trader
did not heed it.
In fact Newton became himself a kind of
white slave.
When he went on a journey with this
man, if the man left him he would
chain him to the deck without food.
He would just have a bit of a
fishing rod, and he would live perhaps for
a day or two days or more on
simply the fish which he could catch out
of the sea.
After this had gone on for about a
year, another English trader arrived, and the man
who was treating Newton so badly was no
doubt alarmed at Newton's condition, and allowed him
to go into the service of this other
man.
And this was considerably better.
Newton's great hope was that he could make
a lot of money quickly, and with that
money he could go back and marry Mary
Catlett.
Suddenly one day a ship arrived at the
shore where they were, and it was a
ship belonging to Joseph Manistee, who was a
merchant of Liverpool, and a friend of Newton's
father.
And the captain had been instructed to find
Newton, and by this providence, for it was
a remarkable providence on that great coastline, the
ship had pulled in at the spot where
Newton was.
Newton now was very doubtful about returning.
He had no money, he didn't know what
he would face on arriving home, but the
captain of the ship by a succession of
lies told Newton that relatives had died and
left him money and so on.
Newton was enticed back on board the and
taken back to England.
Not at first to England, the ship, the
Greyhound, was recrossed the Atlantic, it had a
cargo of wood and beeswax, and then from
America it recrossed to England.
And then in March 1748 a great event
occurred.
On the night of the 20th of March,
Newton went to bed as usual, and in
the early morning of the 21st, he awoke
to a tremendous noise, and to find that
the cabin was awash with water.
A shout had gone up that the ship
was sinking, and he and his companion in
this cabin rushed to the deck.
Newton was first up the ladder, but just
as he was going through the hatch, the
captain shouted to him to go back and
bring a knife.
So he turned round, his companion rushed on
before him, and was immediately swept right over
the side and drowned.
Newton came back up, and there followed a
tremendous battle to keep this ship afloat.
For nine hours Newton worked on the pumps,
for 11 hours he stood roped to the
helm.
And if it had not been for the
fact that the ship was carrying a cargo
of wood and beeswax, it would certainly have
gone to the bottom.
The side was ripped open, the waters flooded
the deck, and yet amazingly it kept afloat.
When this storm was still at its height
in the early hours of the morning, John
Newton said to his companion who was with
him on the pumps, he said, this will
give us something to talk about over a
glass of wine in a few days.
But his companion replied with tears, no, he
said, it is too late now.
At nine o'clock in the morning when
the storm was still at its height, Newton
was speaking to the captain of what they
had done, and he added, if this will
not do, the Lord have mercy upon us.
And it was the first expression, he says,
of any desire for mercy, uttered, he says
unconsciously, the first expression for many years.
And as he went back to the helm
of the ship, the words that he had
spoken, so as it were, without thought, came
with power to his conscience, what mercy can
there be for me?
I expected that every time the vessel descended
into the sea, she would rise no more.
Well the ship survived, and on that 21st
day of March 1748, John Newton's great deliverance
came.
When he stood at the helm of that
boat, as it went up and down into
the ocean, he says, I now began to
think of that Jesus, whom I had so
often derided.
I remembered the particulars of his life and
death.
A death was sin, not his own.
But I remembered for the sake of those
who in their distress should put their trust
in him.
And now, he says, I chiefly wanted evidence.
The comfortless principles of unbelief were deeply riveted.
And he says he rather wished than believed
that the gospel record was a fact.
And then speaking of a few days later,
one of the first helps I received was
in reading the New Testament from Luke chapter
11.
I was conscious that to profess faith in
Jesus Christ, when in reality I did not
believe his history, was no better than a
mockery of the heart-searching God.
But here I found a spirit spoken of,
who was to be given to those who
ask it.
Upon this, I reasoned in this way.
If this book is true, the promise in
this passage must be true.
I have need of that very spirit, by
which the whole was written, in order to
understand it aright.
God has promised here to give that spirit
to those that ask.
I must therefore pray.
And if this book is of God, he
will make good his own word.
If what I am writing should be read
by our modern infidels, they would say, for
I too well know their manner of argument.
But I was very desirous to persuade myself
into this opinion.
I confess I was.
And so would they be, if the Lord
would show them, as he was pleased to
show me at that time, the absolute necessity
of some expedient to stand between a righteous
God and a sinful soul.
Upon the gospel scheme, I saw at least
a poor adventure of hope.
But on every other side, I was surrounded
with blank, unfathomable despair.
He wrote his testimony in many of his
later hymns.
In evil long I took delight, unlawed by
sin or shame, till a new object met
my sight, and stopped my wild career.
I saw one hanging on a tree, in
agonies of blood, he seemed to charge me
with his death, though not a word he
spoke.
Or again, amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me.
And so on.
And this day, the 21st of March, was
a day which Newton remembered until his death.
In his age of 83, he never forgot
this day.
Well, after great difficulties, the ship arrived in
Ireland.
It was a battered wreck, came into Londonderry.
He worshipped in church the next Lord's Day.
A week or so later, he was in
Liverpool.
And now, of course, the hope of Mary
Catlett was everything in his eyes.
Ah.
He had not heard from her for four
years.
And so he had no idea what to
expect.
But he had one encouragement.
His father had just sailed for Canada.
But before his father left, he had heard
of Newton's return to Ireland.
It had come to him as a great
surprise.
Like a voice from the dead, he thought
Newton had died long ago.
And out of affection for his son, he
had gone to the Catlett's home in Chatham.
And he had given his permission for marriage.
So that difficulty was over.
But Newton's greatest difficulty now was in getting
his marriage proposition conveyed to Mary Catlett.
The trouble was that when he thought about
what he would say to her, and even
when he made notes about it, he was
very eloquent.
But when he actually met her, he was
completely tongue-tied.
He says he went down to Chatham.
But having got there, he left without accomplishing
what he had set out to do.
So as soon as he got back to
Liverpool, he determined that he would do it
by letter.
And this is what he wrote.
I soon set off for London to see
you.
That's Mary.
See you I did, but little more.
I was tongue-tied as formerly.
When I had just feasted my eyes, I
returned to Liverpool at almost as great an
uncertainty as before.
I cannot say quite.
For I saw so much generosity in your
behaviour as encouraged me to hope on.
And I ventured afterwards to put it to
a final issue to yourself by letter.
When I received your answer, I kept it
some time before I dare open it.
When I did, I was transported to find
you kind.
For though you wrote in the most cautious
terms, I knew it was much in my
favour that you would write at all, and
that you desired, designed, I should understand it
to be so.
Well, Newton was age 23, and he had
really lived the life of most people.
At the age of 23, he was offered
the captaincy of his own vessel.
Becoming wise, he declined it.
He went back to the west coast on
a voyage as mate, returned in 1750, married
Mary Catholic, and then went to sea as
captain himself.
In 1751 then, 1754, he was a Christian
slave captain.
You may wonder how that was possible, and
perhaps you should have opportunity to return to
it.
But here he was as a young Christian,
with no other Christians on board.
Indeed, Newton at this time had scarcely met
an evangelical Christian.
He went to a church in Charlestown in
Carolina, where the gospel was preached, but he
was so uninstructed in the scriptures, he said
he couldn't even understand the sermon.
But he gradually grew in knowledge, and on
his last voyage, his third voyage, as captain,
he met a trotsman by the name of
Cluny, who was another captain, and this man
was an earnest Christian.
They would meet in their cabin and pray
together.
Cluny would exhort Newton to make an open
procession, to begin to witness to the men
of his ship, and this man Cluny had
a great influence on Newton.
And Cluny began to tell Newton what was
happening in the churches.
Newton had no idea.
Cluny told him of a man by the
name of George Whitfield, who God had raised
up to revive the church.
He heard of others such as the Wesley,
and of what was happening in different parts
of the world.
And as a result, when Newton came back
to London in 1754, he began to attend
upon the ministry of George Whitfield.
There are accounts in Newton of his visits
to the tabernacle, which are enthralling.
How he met Whitfield for the first time,
how he wept under the preaching of the
gospel, how at five o'clock in the
morning he would hurry to the tabernacle for
those early morning sermons, sit with those dense
throngs of people under the gospel.
Oh it was heaven on earth for John
Newton in London in those days.
Just as he was to return on his
fourth voyage, he collapsed, and the doctors strongly
advised against him going back to Sydney.
So instead he went to Liverpool, and at
Liverpool he was there for eight years as
the times master.
A kind of role of watching the river
Mersey and taking some customs responsibilities.
A general role that he was fitted for
as a seaman.
And there he remained as I say for
eight years.
He found Liverpool spiritually a very dark place.
There was a small Wesleyan witness.
There was no reformed church.
He begged Whitfield to come and preach in
Liverpool, and Whitfield I think did on one
occasion.
But spiritually it was very neat.
John Newton joined the Baptists.
He was not a Baptist, but he found
his spiritual warmth amongst the Baptists.
And then came the day when he made
a journey with his wife Polly, Mary, to
Yorkshire.
And in Yorkshire he came across the great
revival.
William Brimshaw of Howard, and Henry Benn of
Huddersfield.
And this to Newton was like as he
had seen in London, but in Yorkshire at
that time hundreds upon hundreds were entering into
the kingdom of God.
Now Newton was busily studying the scriptures.
But for some time he was convinced that
he was not called to the ministry.
But now the thought began to increase within
his conscience that it may be that that
was his calling.
It began by his concern for the lost
around him.
We read in his diary of the prayer
that he offered to God for Liverpool, for
Lancashire.
How increasingly they developed in his soul a
love for people.
This led in the year 1764 to his
becoming the Curate of Alney in Buckinghamshire.
Now I'm cutting the story short.
He applied to many bishops for ordination.
First of all to the Archbishop of York.
In every case they refused him.
Then he wrote in longhand an account of
his conversion, his authentic narrative.
And it came into the hands of Lord
Dartmouth, who was an evangelical nobleman.
Dartmouth was very struck with it.
And he was the patron of Alney Church.
And as a result of Dartmouth's intervention, Newton
became the Curate of Alney in Buckinghamshire.
And so John Newton from the year 1764
to his death in 1807 was a preacher
of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I will conclude now this part of Newton's
life with one or two lessons drawn from
it.
Let us first remind ourselves of the utter
wretchedness and power of sin as exemplified in
his life.
And how sin gains its power from unbelief
and from infidelity.
I gradually, he says, deviated from the principles
in which I was educated till I became
profligate and abandoned.
The way of transgressors will always be hard.
He speaks of being poisoned with infidelity.
Then he says, that became worse.
I forsook God and he left me for
a time to follow the way of my
own heart.
And he says how afflictions did not change
him.
When he was starved and ill on the
coast of Africa, he said he was like
a tiger emaciated for want of food.
But if food had been given him, he
would have become as he did, as wild
as ever.
We learn from this record the power and
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I can see no reason why the Lord
singled me out for mercy but this, that
it seemed good to him.
His reason, unless it was his reason to
show by one astonishing instance that with him
nothing is impossible.
I stood in need of an almighty savior
and such a one I found described in
the New Testament.
He says on that March day in 1748,
Christ met with him and I have reason
to praise him for that storm.
For the apprehension I had, first of sinking
under the weight of all my sins into
the ocean and then into eternity.
All the evil that I suffered was the
immediate result of my own folly and willfulness.
But the good I have experienced was wholly
unmerited and for a long time unhoped for.
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds, he
wrote, in a believer's ear.
Soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds and drives
away his fear.
Amen.