Trials and rebellion
Torn from a godly mother and thrown early into the brutal world of the sea, Newton repeatedly hardened himself through flogging, humiliation, near-starvation, and brushes with death. Press-ganged into the navy, publicly whipped, and later reduced to “less than a slave” under a slave trader’s African mistress, he responded not with repentance but with deeper blasphemy, sensuality, and sneering unbelief.
Idolatry and moral descent
Love for Mary Catlett became his “precious” idol, driving rash desertion, lies, and the sacrifice of conscience to ambition and romance. Even after his first “conversion” in the storm, he clung to other idols—sex, success in the slave trade, and later even his adoration of Mary—treating God as a distant potentate to be appeased rather than a Lord to be obeyed.
Crises that broke him
Storms at sea, terrifying fevers in Africa, the despairing death of Job Lewis (whom Newton himself had once “de-converted”), and repeated brushes with shipwreck and mutiny forced him to see the wreckage of a life spent fighting God. On a West African shore, between palm trees and surf, and later in the heaving dark of an Atlantic storm, reading the same book that influenced the great evangelist John Wesldy – ‘The Imitation of Christ’ – his defiance finally cracked into desperate, honest prayer for mercy.
From partial to total surrender
Years of slow, stumbling growth followed: he left the sea, took a lowly customs job, drank in evangelical preaching, and fought through a seven-year struggle for ordination while his pride and “respectable” idols were stripped away. At Olney and then in London, the one-time “old African blasphemer” became a pastor of the poor, mentor to reformers like Wilberforce, and a tireless herald of grace, calling himself to the end a ‘wretch’.
“I am not what I ought to be… yet, though I am not what I ought to be… I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan… by the grace of God I am what I am.” John Newton
For more John Newton – Amazingly Graced (Christian History Institute)
by Disicplesplanet