AMAZING GRACE: ...AND GRACE WILL LEAD ME HOME

   It was on a Monday, on the twenty-first day of the month of December, in the year of our Lord 1807 that John Henry Newton went home to be with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
   His mother, Elizabeth Newton, was a Nonconformist Christian.  She died of tuberculosis in July, 1732, just two weeks shy of John's seventh birthday.  John Newton would spend most of his young adult life at sea and lost to the things of Christ.  He would eventually would become the captain of the Duke of Argyle (1750) and the African (1752-53 and 1753-54), both were English slave ships.
   In was in the midst of a storm aboard the merchant ship Greyhound, on a Sunday, on the tenth day of the month of March, in the year of our Lord 1748, that John Newton came to know Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.  Newton did not renounce the slave trade in England until later in his life.
   He would later become a clergyman in the Church of England.  He would also later influence a young member of the British Parliament named William Wilberforce.  Wilberforce, as an Evangelical Christian, would become the driving force behind the abolition of the African slave trade in the British Empire.
   Newton would go on to write many Christian hymns in his life, but none of them are so familiar to the world and so loved and cherished by the church of Jesus Christ as Amazing Grace.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me.
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

When we've been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we've first begun.