These Inward Trials

The life of John Newton reads like a fictional story.  You might not have heard his name before, but I'm willing to bet you know his hymn, the most-recorded song in history, "Amazing Grace."  In the year 1743 when he was young, Newton was on his way to visit some friends when he was captured and forced into naval service.  He lived as a loner with a disregard for authority.  When he attempted to desert the navy, he was captured and as punishment, he was stripped to the waist, tied to the grating, received a flogging of one dozen lashes, and was demoted to the lowest of ranks.  As a result of this, he contemplated suicide for a time.

Eventually, he was released from the military and joined the crew of an Africa-bound slave ship.  After a series of disagreements with the crew of the ship, he was left in Africa where he was enslaved to a slave-trader who brutally mistreated him.  Eventually, he was rescued by a sea captain who had been asked by Newton's father to search for him.  Later in life, he became the captain of a ship, and when the ship was about to sink in the midst of a great storm, he called out to God.  After calling out to God, it seems that the cargo of the ship plugged a hole in the hull, so the ship stopped filling up with water and drifted to safety.  As he sailed home to Britain over the next few months, he devoted his time to reading the Bible.  By the time he had reached home, he had given his allegiance and trust to Christ.

Newton later became an Anglican minister, and in addition to writing a number of hymns, he worked to abolish slavery, and he served as a mentor to William Wilberforce.  Newton died shortly after Wilberforce had succeeded in his campaign to abolish the slave-trade in England, which is an amazing story itself. 

To read more about John Newton, I'd recommend either Newton's own autobiography, entitled Out of the Depths, or Jonathan Aitken's new biography, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace.  Also of interest to some may be William Wilberforce's biography by Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace:  William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery or the movie chronicling this story, Amazing Grace.

One of my favorite of John Newton's lesser-known hymns is "I Asked the Lord, That I Might Grow." It is below.  Enjoy!

I asked the Lord, that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek more earnestly His face.

’Twas He who taught me thus to pray,
And He, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favoured hour
At once He'd answer my request,
And by His love's constraining power
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry powers of hell
Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand He seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

"Lord, why is this?" I trembling cried,
"Wilt thou pursue Thy worm to death?"
"'Tis in this way," the Lord replied,
"I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ
From self and pride to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may'st seek thy all in me."

Praise God for the Furnace

Below is an excerpt from A.W. Tozer's book, The Root of the Righteous. The "Rutherford" Tozer refers to is the great Scottish Presbyterian theologian and author, Samuel Rutherford. Of his Letters, Spurgeon once said, "let the world know that Spurgeon held Rutherfurd's Letters to be the nearest thing to inspiration which can be found in all the writings of men... none penetrated further into the innermost heart of holy fellowship with Jesus." Enjoy!

It was the enraptured Rutherford who could shout in the midst of serious and painful trials, “Praise God for the hammer, the file and the furnace.”

The hammer is a useful tool, but the nail, if it had feeling and intelligence, could present another side of the story. For the nail knows the hammer only as an opponent, a brutal, merciless enemy who lives to pound it into submission, to beat it down out of sight and clinch it into place. That is the nail’s view of the hammer, and it is accurate except for one thing: The nail forgets that both it and the hammer are servants of the same workman. Let the nail but remember that the hammer is held by the workman and all resentment toward it will disappear. The carpenter decides whose head shall be beaten next and what hammer shall be used in the beating. That is his sovereign right. When the nail has surrendered to the will of the workman and has gotten a little glimpse of his benign plans for its future it will yield to the hammer without complaint.

The file is more painful still, for its business is to bite into the soft metal, scraping and eating away the edges till it has shaped the metal to its will. Yet the file has, in truth, no real will in the matter but serves another master as the metal does also. It is the master and not the file that decides how much shall be eaten away, what shape the metal shall take, and how long the painful filing shall continue. Let the metal accept the will of the master and it will not try to dictate when or how it shall be filed.

As for the furnace, it is the worst of all. Ruthless and savage, it leaps at every combustible thing that enters it and never relaxes its fury till it has reduced it all to shapeless ashes. All that refuses to burn is melted to a mass of helpless matter, without will or purpose of its own. When everything is melted that will melt and all is burned that will burn, then and not till then the furnace calms down and rests from its destructive fury.

With all this known to him, how could Rutherford find it in his heart to praise God for the hammer, the file and the furnace? The answer is simply that he loved the Master of the hammer, he adored the Workman who wielded the file, he worshiped the Lord who heated the furnace for the everlasting blessing of His children. He had felt the hammer till its rough beatings no longer hurt; he had endured the file till he had come actually to enjoy its bitings; he had walked with God in the furnace so long that it had become as his natural habitat. That does not overstate the facts. His letters reveal as much.

Such doctrine as this does not find much sympathy among Christians in these soft and carnal days. We tend to think of Christianity as a painless system by which we can escape the penalty of past sins and attain to heaven at last. The flaming desire to be rid of every unholy thing and to put on the likeness of Christ at any cost is not to be found among us. We expect to enter the everlasting kingdom of our Father and to sit down around the table with sages, saints and martyrs; and through the grace of God, maybe we shall; yes, maybe we shall. But for most of us it could prove at first an embarrassing experience. Ours might be the silence of the untried soldier in the presence of the battle-hardened heroes who have fought the fight and won the victory and who have scars to prove that they were present when the battle was joined.

The devil, things and people being what they are, it is necessary for God to use the hammer, the file and the furnace in His holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.

Without doubt we of this generation have become too soft to scale great spiritual heights. Salvation has come to mean deliverance from unpleasant things. Our hymns and sermons create for us a religion of consolation and pleasantness. We overlook the place of the thorns, the cross and the blood. We ignore the function of the hammer and the file.

Strange as it may sound, it is yet true that much of the suffering we are called upon to endure on the highway of holiness is an inward suffering for which scarcely an external cause can be found. For our journey is an inward journey, and our real foes are invisible to the eyes of men. Attacks of darkness, of despondency, of acute self-depreciation may be endured without any change in our outward circumstances. Only the enemy and God and the hard-pressed Christian know what has taken place. The inward suffering has been great and a mighty work of purification has been accomplished, but the heart knoweth its own sorrow and no one else can share it. God has cleansed His child in the only way He can, circumstances being what they are. Thank God for the furnace.