Read: Jeremiah 18

Amazing grace!

A few weeks ago I stood in a field in Olney, Buckinghamshire, where I live. On one side was the parish church of St Peter and St Paul. Opposite was the former vicarage, home to the town’s most famous resident, John Newton, who’s buried in the churchyard. I wasn’t alone. Around me were over 500 primary-school children, teachers and volunteers at a Scripture Union Lifepath event. We were exploring the Christian faith through the life of the man who penned arguably the world’s most famous hymn, ‘Amazing grace’.

His is a most remarkable story. A sailor by trade he became a captain of a slave ship, and was responsible for appalling atrocities in taking slaves from Sierra Leone to the Americas. One day in 1748, his ship, The Greyhound, was caught in a storm. Newton called out in prayer to a God he’d once loosely known, asking that if his life could be spared, he would commit his life to God’s service. In 1764 he came to Olney where he spent 16 years preaching to the parishioners of the town who were, for the most part, poor and uneducated. To help them remember his sermons, each week he’d write a new hymn reinforcing his message.

In later life Newton moved to London and was a keen supporter of Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish the slave trade. He died in December 1807, aged 82, just a few months after Parliament had passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.

Most of the children who gathered in that Olney field last month weren’t connected to a church. And yet there was real power as they sang the words of Newton’s hymn:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

These words in Jeremiah 18 come as a stark reminder of how righteous and how gracious God is. Here the people are, as Newton the slave-trader was, rebellious, living life in complete disregard of God. He isn’t pleased and reminds them of how they deserve to be treated: ‘I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you.’ He warns of the consequences of continuing on their chosen path: ‘I will scatter them before their enemies; I will show them my back … in the day of their disaster.’

And yet, ‘if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned…’ God is a God of second chances, and third, and fourth… Newton learnt this first-hand and as we invited the children to come and build a cairn in the middle of the Olney field, they reflected on God’s grace to them – as available today as it was for Newton as it was to the Israelites.