John Newton: The Slave Trader Who Helped End Slavery

The Atlantic had turned black. Wind tore through the rigging. Waves crashed clean over the deck. And a sailor who had spent years mocking the very idea of God was clinging to a rope, certain he would not live to see morning.

His name was John Newton. He was the captain of a slave ship, and by his own confession one of the most brutal men sailing those waters. The vessel was breaking apart beneath his feet. And in that moment, with the cold sea pouring in around him, the hardest man on the ocean opened his mouth and cried out to a God he did not believe in.

Stay with me. You are going to want to hear the rest of the story.

A Storm That Cracked Open a Heart

It was March of 1748. The storm nearly sent the Greyhound to the bottom, and somehow the old ship held together long enough to limp back into port. Newton survived. But something in him had cracked open that night. He marked that date for the rest of his life as the day the Lord first came looking for his soul.

Here is the part most people get wrong. Newton did not change overnight. For years after that storm he kept right on in the slave trade. He even captained slave ships as a man who now called himself a believer, still blind to the evil he was steeped in. Grace was working on him slowly, the way water works on stone.

Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound

Eventually Newton left the sea for good. He studied. He was ordained a minister in a little English town called Olney. And there, the same man who had once cursed God on a sinking deck sat down and wrote words the whole world now knows.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.

He knew exactly which wretch he was writing about.

The Reveal Most People Miss

The song is not the reveal. Here is the reveal.

As an old man, frail and going blind, Newton picked up his pen one last time and wrote out a public confession of everything he had done in the slave trade. He named his own sins in the open. And he poured himself into a young politician who was wrestling with whether to give his life to the fight for abolition. That young man was William Wilberforce. Newton told him to stay and fight.

And Wilberforce stayed. For twenty long years he fought it out in Parliament. In 1807, the year before John Newton died, England outlawed the slave trade. The old captain lived just long enough to hear that the chains were coming off.

For Your Heart

Maybe you carry a part of your past you are sure puts you out of reach. A version of yourself you hope nobody ever finds out about. Hear what God said through Paul:

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.

2 Corinthians 5:17

Not patched up. Not cleaned off. New.

And David, a man who knew his own pit, wrote this:

He brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock.

Psalm 40:2

The same God who reached into a sinking ship for a slave trader is reaching for you right now. There is no one too far gone for grace. That was the whole point of the song.

And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day.

Related Devotionals

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Faith on the Last Ship
• George Müller: The Life That Proved God Answers Prayer
• Horatio Spafford: When the Sea Took Everything
• Fanny Crosby: The Blind Woman Who Wrote 8,000 Hymns

Books by Pastor Rodney Coe

If today story stirred something in you, my books carry the same heartbeat. Practical, grace-soaked encouragement for the seasons life puts you through.