Beyond the pale?

Last week, we visited the Buckinghamshire town of Olney. As you approach the town centre, you are greeted by a roadside sign, ‘Welcome to Olney, the home of Amazing Grace’.

The famous hymn, Amazing Grace, was one of the many hymns written by John Newton. In the mid-18th century, together with his close friend William Cowper, Newton wrote many songs. They were compiled for a bestselling volume entitled Olney Hymns.

John Newton is well known as the sea captain who earned his pay from the slave trade. He lived his life in defiance of God despite the fact that he did have some vague understanding about Christianity. A singer of bawdy songs; foul mouthed; a blasphemer and a man who didn’t trouble to curb his many appetites. He was brought up short whilst in a severe storm off the Irish coast. In utter desperation he called upon the mercy of God. The storm abated. From that time forward, Newton was keenly conscious that God was on his case.

He became more and more aware of how God’s grace and mercy towards him worked out in both theory and practice. The bawdy songs gave way to him expressing his musical talents in the praise of God. His coarse storytelling was replaced by a desire to tell others of what he had discovered about the God of grace who had come into his life and about the Bible which expressed in words that which his heart had experienced. His new appetite was to serve God by becoming a Minister in the church and it is in this role he came to Olney. It was here, based in the parish church, that he spent 16 years preaching and teaching about Jesus Christ who is the Gateway into God’s mercy and grace.

So what did John Newton mean when, throughout his remaining years, he told of how he just couldn’t get over the grace of God as he had experienced it? We might ask, ‘What’s so amazing about God’s grace?’.

In terms of the Christian message, as explained to us in the New Testament, grace means the undeserved, unmerited favour that God gives to any and every person who realises their need of it and in simple trust, asks for it. In Newton’s case, his immediate need was deliverance from a storm which looked like it would be the death of him. Having been rescued from that physical plight, he came to see that the same deliverance of God was there for him when the eternal books would be opened and the life that he had been living came up for review.

Like me, you haven’t lived the life of an 18th century sea captain for whom excesses of all kinds were the norm. But, like John Newton, do we live in defiance of the bits we do know about God? John Newton was not beyond the pale and neither are we, but I don’t recommend waiting for a death-threatening storm before we call out for God’s mercy!

‘It was Grace that taught my heart to fear……’ is a phrase from Amazing Grace. Newton discovered that even the unpleasantness of God facing him with his own powerlessness and mortality was actually an act of God’s grace, just as much as was the remedy. The verse continues, ‘…and grace my fears relieved; How precious did that Grace appear, the hour I first believed!’

That roadside sign at Olney is misleading! The Amazing Grace (of God) doesn’t reside in a town, nor in a church building but in the hearts of all who place their faith

in Jesus.