Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: John Newton 1

The following resource is from DesiringGod .org. John Newton was born

July 24, 1725, in London. 1725, so picture yourself now, how long ago that was.

To a godly mother and an irreligious, seafaring father. She died when he was six.

Left mainly to himself, he became a debauched sailor. A miserable outcast on the west coast of Africa for a couple of years.

A slave -trading sea captain until an epileptic seizure ended his sea -going career.

A well -paid surveyor of tides in Liverpool. A devoted and loved pastor of two congregations in Olney and London for a total of 43 years.

A devoted husband to Mary for 40 years until she died in 1790.

And a personal friend to William Wilberforce, Charles Simeon, Henry Martin, William Carey, John Wesley, George Whitefield.

And others, and last of all, the writer of the most famous hymn in the

English language, Amazing Grace, which you heard and sang exactly as he wrote it, not with that wonderful last verse which we love and he did not write.

And he died in 1807 at 82. So why am

I interested in this man? What's my agenda before you this morning?

I'm interested in him because of my great desire to see

Christian pastors be as strong and durable as redwood trees and as tender and fragrant as a field of clover.

I want to see you become rugged in the defense and confirmation of the truth and relentlessly humble and patient and merciful in dealing with people.

Ever since I came to Bethlehem in 1980, I've had this vision of what I want to be and what

I want to be the means of others becoming. Because in the early 1980s,

I read Matthew and Mark in my Greek Testament, writing in the margin,

T -E and T -O, beside every tender thing Jesus said or did and every tough thing

Jesus said or did. And when I got done, the mixture was amazing.

No man ever spoke, no man ever lived like this man spoke and lived.

There's nobody like Jesus pastoring today. And I want to be more like that and I want you to be more like that.

And therefore, as I look at pastors in history and around and I find one who got something that we need, then

I bank on it for a while. And that's what I've been doing since July with Newton. And I know that this drunk peasant who can't stay on the donkey is where we all are.

Everybody in this room is falling off the horse on one side or the other on this matter of toughness and tenderness.

And so it's risky business in this room to say what

I'm going to say. There are a lot of us who are wimping out on truth when we ought to be lion -hearted.

And there are a lot who are wrangling with anger when we ought to be weeping.

And so I know I'm going to say some things that are not what some of you should hear. Some of you need a good, tender kick in the pants to be more courageous with truth.

And some of you need to realize that courage is not what

William Cooper, Newton's good friend, called a furious and abusive zeal.

Oh, how rare are the pastors who speak with a tender heart and have theological backbones of steel.

Oh, how rare it is. And it ought not to be rare.

And I don't want it to be rare. Theological, truth, biblical, backbones of steel.

And as soft as clover. So that children come to you.

And broken people come to you. And homosexuals come to you.

That ought not to be rare. I dream of such pastors.

I want to become one someday. A pastor whose might in the truth is matched by his meekness.

Whose theological acumen is matched by his manifest contrition.

Whose heights of intellect are matched by his depths of humility. And yes, the other way around.

For those of you who think you should measure it the other direction, not that direction. Yes, the other way around too.

A pastor whose relational warmth is matched by his rigor of study.

And whose bent towards mercy is matched by his vigilance of biblical discernment.

And a pastor whose sense of humor is exceeded by the seriousness of his calling.

A dream of great defenders of true doctrine, mainly known for their delight in God.

Great defenders of true doctrine who are mainly known for their delight in God.

And their bringing of delight in God to the people of God. Who enter into controversy when necessary.

Not because they love ideas and arguments, but because they love God and the bride of Christ.

There is a great model for this in Acts 15. I just want to put the biblical model before you before I put

Newton before you. I saw this just this week in reading through the book of Acts in my trek through the

Bible with the discipleship journal Plan. I don't know if you ever noticed this before, but in Acts 15, of course, you know what happens.

A false doctrine arises in Antioch. Quote, unless you are circumcised, you cannot be saved.

Verse 1, now Paul and Barnabas weigh in with Luke calling it not a little dissension and debate.

Stasi Oskite, Zaytese Ous Ouk Oligos. That's some litotities or whatever they call those things.

That understatement of not a little debate and dissension means it was big and it was tough.

That's what it means. And so we got to get this settled. Where do we get it settled? Get it settled in Jerusalem. So, let's send the debaters, these high -powered people,

Paul and Barnabas, down to Jerusalem, get it worked out, bring us back the decision.

Now, here's what happens on the way to Jerusalem.

I'll read it to you. And as they were going, they were, among the churches, describing in detail the conversion of the

Gentiles and were bringing great joy to all the brethren.

On their way to the debate, oh, how many people there are today who are telling us that cannot be.

You can't believe in going to a controversial thing in order to fend for the truth of God and bring joy to the people of God.

Controversy kills joy. Controversy kills churches. And here you have the debaters, the great defenders, on their way to the great debate, spreading joy everywhere.

So thrilled with the mercy of God in the gospel, they'll die to defend it and they can't help but explode with it in the churches so that the ordinary lay people are happy that they came.

Don't tell me that can't be. It can be. It must be. We will be blown all over the place and our people will perish if we can't do this, if we can't put this together.

It can't be done. It must be done. And there are others besides those who say you can't have both joy and controversy.

There are others who are on their way to the controversy and feel no joy and spread no joy in the preciousness of our salvation.

And one of the aims of this conference now for 14 years is to say simply over and over and over again, it is possible and it is necessary to bring these two together.

John Newton. I want to let John Newton be my excuse to say it again.

To say it again. Newton would be the first to remind us that he has feet of clay and so you hardly need reminding.

He had his strengths and he had his weaknesses. In fact, some of his strengths were his weaknesses and we'll see that and that will be instructive.

Our theme is the tough roots of John Newton's habitual tenderness.

His great strength was his fulfillment of Ephesians 4 .15.

He spoke the truth in love. He made that the inaugural text in his installation at St.

Mary's Woolnoth in London in 1779. His last pastorate.

16 years in Olney, 27 years in London. And he began it with that text.

It's a great sermon to read in volume four or five, I'm not sure which it is. Now as you listen to me unpack this, my caution is that you listen and ask, which side of the donkey are you falling off on?

Do not listen saying, I wish the pastor across town were here for this, okay?

Just forget the other pastors in the room for right now. Which side are you falling off on?

There are tender ones of you and there are tough ones of you. We're all wired one way or the other.

There are no balanced people in this room. And so as you crawl up on the donkey, figure out how to stay there.

Probably stop drinking would be one way. Just I want it to be personal.

I want you to make some steps. I want you to advance. I want to advance. I'm doing this for me.

You happen to be here to listen. I would have done this with whether you were here or not. I read biography for me.

I want to change. I love that term change agent. And I don't, my biggest frustration in ministry is what to do with people who don't want to change.

I mean, to me, life is change. Life is quest for change. That's all life is is a quest for change.

If you're satisfied, what's the point of living? I mean, you just,

I don't understand people who have settled in. I just don't get it. So I'm on a quest here and I hope you are.

If you didn't come here on a quest to become more tough or more tender or more balanced or more something, I just,

I can't even compute with such a being. Now Newton's life.

I have nine pages and I'm going to try to collapse it into about one because I want to get to the substance of the issue.

And so if I walk you through his life, that'll consume all the time we have. And I don't want to do that. So let me be real brief on his life.

You can read his life in the books and you can read the nine pages in here on his life. His mother was a devout congregationalist and taught her son the whole

Westminster catechism before he was six years old. And then she died and left him to a second, a stepmother who was religious and a father who was irreligious and left him to himself.

And he became a real wretch as he calls himself in amazing grace. Went to school two years out of his entire life and never had any theological education whatsoever.

Zero ages 11 to 18, sailed with his father, five voyages among the horrible conditions as you can imagine, morally on the ships.

Age 18 to 20, a Navy midshipman. He had been arrested and conscripted and forced into the

Navy. And he was a officer until he got so angry. He deserted. They caught him.

They whipped him. They stripped him of his officer's rank and put him in a low level. Finally, they get so fed up with this guy.

They put him off the ship. And for two years he was isolated on the

West Coast of Africa, virtually a slave, worse than the black slaves, which later he was to haul around in the boats to his everlasting shame thereafter.

But he was a slave for two years and through a remarkable providence, smoke going up and a boat stopped and happened to be the boat on which there was a letter from his father.

It's just an amazing thing. One providence after the other in this man's life on this boat, which he got on heading a home indirectly took about 11 months to do it because they went to the

West Indies first March 21, 1748. Mark that day.

He marked it every day with fasting and prayer for the next 59 years till he died.

And it was the day of the storm at sea. And he said,

I endeavor to observe the return of this day with humiliation, prayer and praise.

He said that in 1805, two years before he died and 57 years after it happened, the storm was horrific.

The boat was sinking, could go into a lot of very interesting detail. He writes it all in his authentic narrative, which you can read in the memoirs and God gets a hold of him and wakes him up from his blaspheming life.

But remarkably, I think most of the stories that are told don't get it right.

He did not view this as his conversion. He said, though he was stunned, swearing dropped out of his mouth.

He read the Bible for two weeks till they landed in Ireland. His life changed dramatically.

He became very serious about religious things. He said, I was greatly deficient in many respects.

I acknowledge the Lord's mercy in pardoning what was passed, but depended chiefly upon my own resolution to do better for the time to come.

There's enough to inspire a book called future grace. In that sense. Let me say it again. I acknowledge the

Lord's mercy in pardoning what was passed, but depended chiefly upon my own resolution to do better for the time to come.

I cannot consider myself to have been a believer. Wow. That wipes out half the people in our churches till a considerable time afterwards, probably six years for six years after this time, he said,

I had no Christian friend or faithful minister to advise me.

All those people he befriended later, they didn't come on the scene yet in his life.

He becomes the captain of a slave trading vessel for about six years, which later he wrote.

Read this. If you wonder where he stood on that issue, thoughts upon the African slave trade, which at the end he called a commerce.

So iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive as the African slave trade.

And he joined hands with William Wilberforce to end it. And it did end. So he looks back with great remorse upon that horrific season of his life morally, even though many people say he was a

Christian during that time and he did not see it that way. He was still very much in the, in the dark.

He married Mary. He loved her so passionately. It's an amazing love story that it would be wonderful to go into, but I won't go into it.

She, the memory of her, which was never out of his mind for all those years while he was a teenager from 16 to 23, at least he thought of her every, every hour.

And that memory held him back from many things. Married 1750, same year his father died, drowning in the

Hudson Bay. Um, I'd love to talk about his relationship with his father was, it was not good.

Uh, he said, I, I have reason to believe that my father loved me though. He seemed to make every effort not to show it.

Then came the epileptic seizure in 1754 and he never sailed again.

Ten years surveyor of tides and lay minister in Liverpool has began to study.

He studied Greek. He studied Hebrew, learned them all on his own. He began to read divinity. He began to meet people.

He met George Whitfield. He went to so many George Whitfield's meetings. They called him the little Whitfield and Whitfield is where he took on the spirit, took on the theology.

Um, Hinmarsh says by the early 1760s, Newton's theological formation was complete and there would be few significant realignments of his beliefs afterwards.

He was a five point Calvinist close quote. So that's where he is theologically inside, just same place

Whitfield was, became a pastor in only 16 years,

London, 27 years, um, never had any children of his own. Can't find a word about that in any biography.

That seems so strange that nobody would talk about that. He adopted two of his nieces and they raised them and one of those nieces cared for him for the long years after his wife had died.

So here's my question now. What did this man's tough tenderness look like or the tough roots?

What were they of his habitual tenderness? So I'm going to shift off of a summary of his life onto the habitual tenderness.

So we began with introduction, we looked at his life. Point number three,

Newton's habitual tenderness. I didn't make up the phrase. He used the phrase himself and was writing a letter on, uh, the effects of faith.

And he wrote this, he believer believes and feels his own weakness and unworthiness and lives upon the grace and pardoning love of his

Lord. This gives him an habitual tenderness and gentleness of spirit.

So what I want to do is give you some snapshots, persons and patterns.

Let's not outline first some persons and then some patterns of tenderness. He was tender towards groups and he was tender towards individuals.

The groups I have in mind are first perishing lost people. Here's what he wrote.

Whoever has tasted of the love of Christ and has known by his own experience the need and the worth of redemption is enabled, yea, he is constrained to love his fellow creatures.

He loves them at first sight. And if the providence of God commits a dispensation of the gospel and a care of souls to him, he will feel the warmest emotions of friendship and tenderness while he beseeches them by the tender mercies of God and even while he warns them by his terrors.

And the line in that quote that I strike under is he loves them at first sight.

It's one thing to get to know somebody and have your heart knit together through some endearing relationship.

It's another thing to look at a person and at first sight to have your first response not be disgust or criticism or assessment, but love.

Don't you want to be that way? If you're sitting here and don't want to change in that direction, you may be dismissed because you just, you're not interested in what

I'm about here. I want to be that way. Another group is children.

We heard it already. The signature of the tenderness of Jesus is, suffer the little children to come to me.

When he went to Olney, Thursday afternoon, one of the first things he did was start children's meetings, 200 squirrely kids, and he'd have one stand up and read a text and then he would teach them from the text, children, dissenters, kids, church of England kids.

He said, you know, sometimes 269. He said, I suppose I have 200 that will constantly attend.

Third group I have in mind is his two flocks, the Olney flock and the London St. Mary's flock.

And oh, how he tenderly loved these flocks. They weren't big flocks, 170 people at the beginning and Olney didn't get more than twice that size in 16 years.

You know, most of the famous Puritans ministered to little churches. We read these guys, they feel like they're big names.

They ministered to little churches all their lives. They just thought big thoughts about a great

God. And some of them wrote them down. Most of them died unheard of, unheralded, and they're just as great.

They didn't happen to be passionate to write. Some did, some didn't. He said, the believer, he possessed,

I mean, it was said of him, he possessed so much affection for his people and so much zeal for their best interests that the defect of his manner, he was not an effective preacher in terms of eloquence or demeanor, that the defect of his manner was of little consideration with his constant hearers.

They just knew themselves so cared for and loved by this man.

And then there were individuals. So those are the three groups. And now he touches tenderly individuals.

And you can imagine who I'm going to mention first, and that is William Cooper. I gave a whole message on Cooper and talked a little bit about Newton.

And now I give a whole message on Newton and talk a little bit about Cooper. Cooper is the mentally ill, famous English poet who came to only precisely to be under the care and interest of John Newton.

And for 12 years, they lived together five months. One time he was in the house and 14 months.

Another time he lived in the house when he could scarcely function on his own. Cooper never married and lived in that parish.

One person, when they saw this, as well as other things in Newton's life, they said his house was an asylum for perplexed and afflicted people.

Newton says of Cooper, for nearly 12 years, we were seldom separated for seven hours at a time when we were awake and at home.

The first six passed daily admiring and aiming to imitate him.

During the second six, I walked pensively with him in the valley of the shadow of death.

Now you got to feel what's behind this. On January, don't have the date, but January 1773,

Cooper wrote in the evening, God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.

He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. The next morning, the darkness fell.

He never went to church again till he died for six years.

And for six of those seven years, Newton cared for him.

Newton was removed from Oley in 1779. He did Cooper's funeral in 1780.

So virtually from the time the last darkness fell until he did his funeral,

Cooper lived in the shadow of the church and never went there.

He pointed to it. He said, you know, the comfort, he's saying this to Newton who visits him regularly.

You know, the comfort I have felt there, how I have seen the glory of the

Lord in his house until I go there, I will not go anywhere else.

And he never went again. He was as black as black could be.

William J summed up Newton's response to this sickness like this. He had the tenderest disposition and always judiciously regarded his friend's depression and despondency as a physical effect for the removal of which he prayed, but never reasoned or argued with him concerning it.

He did one other thing in the meantime to help his brother. He was thinking creatively.

He knew this man was a poet. And so in 1770, he resolved when

Cooper's brother died and he was threatening to go into another one of those horrible dark seasons. He asked him to collaborate with him in writing hymns, one a week for the people of God.

He said, you write one and I'll write one to get him to write. And after 67 hymns,

Cooper stopped. Newton kept going until there were 300 only hymns.

And today we have them. Amazing Grace is one.

There is a fountain filled with blood, Cooper. God moves in a mysterious way and others.

But it worked for a while and then it stopped working and the poetic juices stopped flowing for hymns.

And you read horrible, horrible poems. Some of them like the outcasts that he wrote about his own darkness.