The amazing grace of Christmas morn

The malls and the Main Streets will fall silent. The ringing cash registers and the happy cries of children are but ghostly echoes across the silent cities. But the Christ child born in a manger 2,000 years ago lives, liberating the hearts of sinners and transforming the lives of the wicked.

The story of the redeeming power of the Christmas message is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the incredible life of an English slaver named John Newton.

He was born 300 years ago into a seafaring family in Liverpool. His mother was a godly woman whose faith gave her life meaning. She died when John was 7, and as an old man he recalled as the sweetest remembrance of childhood the soft and tender voice of his mother at prayer.

His father married again, and John left school at 11 to go to sea with him. He quickly adopted the vulgar life of seafaring men, though the memory of his mothers faith remained. He reckoned that religious faith was important, he recalled many years later, “but I loved sin.” Once on shore leave, he was seized by a press gang to work on another ship, HMS Harwich, and life grew coarser. He ran away, was captured, put in chains, stripped before the mast and flogged without mercy. “The Lord had by all appearances given me up to judicial hardness. I was capable of anything. I had not the least fear of God, nor the least sensibility of conscience. I was firmly persuaded that after death I should merely cease to be.”

The Harwich traded him to a slaving ship, bound for West Africa to take aboard human cargo. “At this period of my life,” John reflected, “I was big with mischief and, like one afflicted with a pestilence, was capable of spreading a taint wherever I went.”

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