Alyson Howard

MWF 8:30
Professor Looney

Amazing Grace: The Story Behind

“Grace is the free, undeserved goodness and favor of God to mankind.” Said Matthew Henry.
Grace is not what we deserve but what we receive from our gracious God. Published in 1779
Amazing Grace is a song, a story telling of how America as a people were lost and how we were
blind but through God’s amazing grace we could see our fault. America at this time was in the
Revolutionary War, we were infested with slavery and we were on the brink of the beginning of
our great nation. Amazing Grace explains through song and emotion the true importance of life
and what it means to live it through God and his love all the while telling the story of America’s
journey through slavery and the Revolutionary War and how that made us a true country.

Reasonably enough Amazing Grace as a hymn is a great amount of peoples favorite and
rightfully so because the powerful lyrics remind us that with Jesus none of us are loss because
God is our always. We are never truly alone once we believe in Christ and Newton knew that, he
says “…that grace appeared the hour I first believed…” John grew up with a puritan mother who
passed two weeks after his seventh birthday, he is later then said to convert to Christianity
therefore Newton understood that the grace of God would be with him from that moment on. He
later states “…he will be my shield as long as life endures…” knowing that the bond between
man and Christ is stronger than worldly bonds because faith is believing without seeing.
Christianity is a choice to believe in a higher power worthy and capable of saving someone’s
soul it is a choice between life and death, heaven or hell, pain and salvation.

Christianity may be a choice but slavery was not, these people were forced to work
within an inch of their lives and then beaten and treated inhumanely, Amazing Grace is said to
tell the story of a slave and how they might have converted to Christianity to help move through
their struggles of everyday life. Earlier in his life John Newton was a slave trader and after a long
chain of circumstances and fate he ended up a passenger on a slave ship bound for West Africa
and while some say that Amazing Grace is about redeeming its white writer in his trespasses as a
slave trader and the sins that brought forth. But I understand it as a praise and worship song that
slaves would sing while working, the lyrics even show us evidence, “… saved a wretch like me,
… was lost but now I’m found, … was blind but now I see…” These slaves were lost and blind
to work until the day they died but with their new founded faith they could see the end goal, they
were found in Christ and now might have a sliver of hope through the grace that God offers.
Alyson Howard
MWF 8:30
Professor Looney

In the year 1779 when Amazing Grace was released what would become America was in
the middle of the Revolutionary War, fighting for her independence. These men who were once
British or thought they were British now wanted anything but, now these men only desired
freedom from under the thumb that had come to hold them down. Oh, what a sweet sound
freedom must be to them after years of this torment Newton shows this through his words “…
dangers, toils, and snares I have already come, …” The American colonies men, free and slaves
alike had been through the awful experience that is bloody war. The colonies had been treated as
one of three things: less than British, less than high class aristocrats, or less than human. The
British had treated the American colonies as though they were less than, that the King of Britain
was gracious to allow them to live and it shows through the beloved Amazing Grace, “… Grace
taught me to fear, …” The opinion that Britain was better than the colonies made it to where they
feared the King might change his mind and find them no longer worth the effort, the resources or
the time and that was the fear that helped lead to the Revolutionary War.

Amazing Grace explains through its powerful lyrics the true importance of life and what it means
to have God and his love through it all while also telling the story of America’s journey through
slavery and the war to make America a great nation and how that made us an honest country and
not just colonies. Amazing Grace by John Newton is one of the most loved songs of all time and
shows not only true historical context but also ties in with modern issues and everyday struggles
of faith. We now understand that this hymn unlike some relates to the majority of humanity
through the multiple different meanings it holds, for we are a unique people who are not all the
same but this is a song for diversity.