Amazing Grace For A Messy Past

A slave trader becomes the voice behind “Amazing Grace” and the contrast is meant to stop us in our tracks. We sit with the story of John Newton, not to sanitize his past, but to show what real transformation looks like when the grace of God meets a life that has every reason to be disqualified. If you’ve ever carried a private regret, a public failure, or a season you can’t seem to outgrow, this short morning message is for you.
You’ll hear practical encouragement for overcoming the past, resisting shame, and stepping into the future God is providing, free and alive with purpose. If “Amazing Grace” has ever moved you, this will help you understand why it still matters, and how that same grace can meet you today. Subscribe for more short daily motivation, share this with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review that tells us what part of your story you’re ready to release.

Transcript

Welcome And Daily Five-Minute Start

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Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mack. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and let me help you start your day right. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be back with you again today. And today I want to talk to you about John Newton. Now most of you are aware that he is the author of Amazing Grace, the most famous hymn of all time. And most of you are also aware that before he wrote Amazing Grace and before he became a Christian, he was a slave trader. That was one of the most evil and darkest occupations in the history of the world. He made his living out of buying and selling people, and treating them worse than you would ever treat any animal, packing them in their ships as if they were sardines, and being happy if upon your arrival less than twenty percent of them had actually died. He was an evil and nasty man, who did many, many things that were an abomination before God and before people around him. He was a horrible guy. But then God came along. John Newton became a Christian. His life was changed by the power of God. That means the old John Newton was passed away, and now there was this new John Newton who was alive in Christ and wanted to become everything he could and should be as a Christian. One of the things that John Newton had to get past was his past. He had to get beyond it. He had to be able to put it behind him. It would be very easy for him to see this huge black mark against him for the rest of his life, and being afraid that people would judge him because of it. Well, he found God's amazing grace to move on beyond it. John's experience is not all that unusual in that most of us have something in our past that when, aside from the grace of God, we look at, it could be and maybe even should be held against us. Something that we did wrong, a big mistake that we made, even if it wasn't intentional. We often have things in our personal history that we are not proud of, and we know that God would not be pleased with. So I have a story that I want to share with you this morning from Barbara Johnson. It's about an English fisherman who went to an inn at the end of a long, cold day and he ordered a pot of tea. He was bragging to his friends about his big catch of fish, and as he stretched out his arm with a sweeping motion, he knocked the teapot off the table against the wall. A dark stain splashed across the wallpaper. The fisherman was aghast at what he had done and apologized profusely to the innkeeper. He tried to wipe off the tea, but already it had made an ugly blotch. There was a man seated at the next table who stood up and said, Calm yourself, sir. The stranger then took out a coal pencil and began to sketch around the shape of the stain. In moments he had created a picture of a majestic stag that looked as if it had been designed for that wall. The people around the artist looked at him, and many recognized him then as Sir Edmund Lancier, England's foremost painter of wildlife. What Sir Edmund Lancier did with an ugly tea stain in a fine English inn, our God is doing every day. He's working in the lives of people who wonder how they'll ever recover from the ugly things that have happened to them. He's making masterpieces of our lives that stand as testimonies to his love and his power. And that's why John Newton's song Amazing Grace is so powerful and so beautiful and continues to be so popular. It's because it's the grace of God that allows us to overcome all of the things of our past, and to learn to see ourselves as God sees us, free, strong, alive, here for a purpose and a plan that will give us great joy and a sense of fulfillment, that will help us through everything that we face. That's what God's amazing grace is, his ability to transform what was bad into something wonderful and powerful. John Newton had this ugly blot against his life, yet God was able to turn that around and make something beautiful and powerful come out of his life. No matter the mistakes that you have made, the messes that you think you have created, God is able to take that and to turn it around and make it become something beautiful and powerful in your life. Don't ever let your past that God has forgiven hold you back from experiencing the future that God is providing. Reach out. Embrace what God has for you and know that He is with you, loving you and guiding you every step of the way. Have a great day, my friends. We will talk again tomorrow. Thank you for joining us today, and I invite you to join us every Monday to Friday right here at Starting Right with Danny Mack.