The Song Of A Human Trafficker

The Song of a Human Trafficker

Johnny was a latchkey kid. His mother had died, and his father was a ship’s captain off at sea. Abandoned and adrift, he roamed the streets as a pickpocket and troublemaker. When Johnny’s sea captain father returned, he took eleven-year-old Johnny aboard his ship, figuring that the rough life of a sailor might knock some sense into his prodigal son. Instead, his boy became even more unruly, creating mayhem in almost every port of call.

His disgusted father finally gave him his walking papers. Johnny signed on to another vessel where he attempted desertion by jumping ship. He was captured by the shore patrol and publicly flogged. When the word got around that the ship captain’s son was incorrigible, no respectable vessel would sign him on. So Johnny became a deckhand aboard a slave ship, hauling human cargo to the Americas.

Just when it seemed that he couldn’t sink any lower, Johnny was enslaved by a man named Amos Clow, whose African mistress took special delight in having a white slave as her personal plaything. After he escaped, he was possessed with an implacable hatred for Africans. When he became the captain of his own slave ship, his brutality knew no bounds.

It took a violent storm to mark the beginning of change in his life. On a return trip to England, when it seemed that his ship was about to sink, Johnny cried out to Jesus for salvation. It took a few more years for this new convert to quit the slave business, yet God was slowly transforming his racist heart.

Eventually, Johnny felt called to the pulpit. The archbishop of York rejected him because his past was too scandalous. Finally, he was given a small parish. But curious crowds came to hear this notorious slave trader turned preacher. He wrote almost three hundred hymns to accompany his sermons. Eight years after he became a pastor, Johnny penned history’s most famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.”

A single line in the first stanza jumps off the page: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” Surely, the Reverend John Newton knew firsthand the power of sin to reduce humans to utter wretchedness. When he later wrote a pamphlet on the slave trade, his exposé on the wretchedness of human trafficking helped bring about the abolition of slavery in the British Empire three decades before America’s Civil War.

Over the past several years many hymnals have replaced the term “wretch” in “Amazing Grace” with words that are less offensive to a culture obsessed with positive self-image. But maybe we lose something of the grandeur of God’s grace when we minimize our own sinful condition. To take the “wretch” out of “Amazing Grace” is to cut the very heart out of a hymn celebrating the immensity of God’s love for us. Old Johnny Newton might even say this:

Take the wretch out of “Amazing Grace,” and you take the amazing out of grace.

But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!)

Ephesians 2:4-5