Poster's note:
I was unsure as to where to put this.
You won't regret reading it in its entirety. It's not long.
It was written 'way back in the 90's (I think) by Wesley Pruden, who was then an editor at The Washington Times...
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The amazing grace of Christmas morn
Reprinted from an earlier Christmas
By Wesley Pruden
The Washington Times
Thursday, December 22, 2016
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.”
John's new captain liked him, and took him to his home on an island off the African coast, where he had married a beautiful and cruel African princess. She grew jealous of her husbands friendship with John, who fell ill, and was left in her care. HMS Harwich was barely over the horizon when she threw John into a pig sty, blinded him, and left him in delirium to die. He did not die, but kept in chains in a cage and fed swill from her table. Word spread through the district that a black woman was keeping a white slave, and many came to taunt him. They threw limes and stones at him, mocking his misery. He would have starved if slaves waiting to embark on the Middle Passage to the Americas had not shared their meager scraps of food.
Five years passed, and the captain returned. John told how he had been treated and he was mocked as a liar. When he was finally taken aboard HMS Harwich again, he was treated ever harshly, allowed to eat only the entrails of animals butchered for the crews mess. “The voyage quite broke my constitution,” he would recall, “and the effects would always remain with me as a needful memento of the wages of sin.”
Like Job, he became a magnet for adversity. His ship crashed against the rocks, and he despaired that Gods mercy remained after his life of hostile indifference to the Gospel. “During the time I was engaged in the slave trade,” he said, “I never had the least scruple to its lawfulness.”
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