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“Amazing Grace” is one of the most beloved hymns in the world, and for good reason. It tells of the deep and abiding power of our Faith, and it does so with a personal conviction that we cannot help but feel.
That conviction is the result of a man who experienced Grace, a man who was wretched and knew he had no hope of salvation on his own. I am talking about the author of this great hymn: the Englishman John Newton.
Newton was a sailor, and in the worst way possible, for Newton worked on a slave ship. He was deeply involved in the slave trade for much of his life. At one point, he was enslaved himself. As he escaped, he found himself caught in a storm, and in desperation, he cried out to God. He would later point to this as the start of his conversion.
It’s an apt description because that’s all it was: a start. For many years, Newton still maintained ties to the slave trade, even after having experienced it first hand. It took a long time for him to distance himself from his fellow slave traders; it took years for him to tell the horrors committed by the slave trade. Yet all this time God was reaching out until Newton’s soul was converted. He eventually repented of his old ways, became an abolitionist, wrote this beautiful hymn, and even became a priest in the Church of England.
Newton was not a good person. He knew his salvation could never come from himself. He knew that he needed God to help him. He knew he had to lean on God in trust. He knew he needed Grace.
Abraham, or Abram as he was formerly known, goes through a similar journey, as outlined in our readings from Genesis and Romans. Abraham was chosen by God, out of no merit of his own. God called on Abraham to give everything up, to leave his home and his family even, so that God would make out of him a great nation.
Paul points out that this was before God gave the Law. There was nothing for Abraham to follow to make him worth. There’s nothing he could do to be made righteous in God’s eyes. God simply chose him for nothing more than H chose to choose him.
Like Newton, Abraham struggled to do the right thing, though we often overlook it. It’s easy to do since from Abraham’s name, after all, we are all blessed. Though even in our reading, we see Abraham not quite listening to God. He is told to go from his kin and his father’s house, and there he goes with Lot, his nephew, along side him. In his travels to Egypt, Abraham lies that Sarah, formerly Sarai, is his sister out of fear the Egyptians would kill him otherwise. This falsehood almost has disastrous results for the Egyptians. Abraham, when told God will provide him and Sarah a son, doesn’t quite believe this will be the case in their old age and, after prodding from Sarah, has a son Ishmael with Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid, instead. In other words, Abraham is not quite as good a man as we might want to believe.
What saves Abraham isn’t the kind of man he was, though. What saves him is that through all of it, even his own times of doubt and even his inability to follow God’s plan to the letter, he does believe. He has Faith. He trusts, the true meaning of the word “Faith”, in God and God’s plan for him. This is what, as Paul reminds us, counts for him as righteousness.
What saves us aren’t our own actions. What saves us is God’s Grace and willingness to save us. This is at the core of our Faith. This is the power behind the words of John 3:16 that we say today: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Let us not forget our Psalm today either, a response to Abraham’s trusting God to go on his journey. The Psalm reminds us that no matter what we face, no matter the hardships ahead, and no matter what it is that we have done, when we lift up our “eyes to the hills” our “help comes from the Lord.”
Like Newton, like Abraham even, you may struggle with making the right choice. That is okay because it is not our actions that justify us, for then which of us could even stand? We aren’t made righteous by our actions. We are made righteous by Jesus.
It took Newton a lifetime to finally repent and atone for his actions. The same may be true for us. Thankfully, like Newton, we do not do this alone, for we couldn’t anyways. We always have the help of God. We always have the help of Jesus.