Over a year ago, I read where a pastor had attended a conference to be their guest speaker. As the crowd was singing the classic hymn, Amazing Grace, he noticed something that shocked him when the 1st line of the famous song was sung: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a ‘SOUL’ like me.” As you can see the word SOUL was substituted for the word WRETCHED. Why would they do this? Simply because the word WRETCH is a lot harder to believe, SOUL is seemingly less demeaning to humans and at the end of the day, it goes right along with what our own hearts tell us about us. We humans do have a gift at creating our own narratives about ourselves!
As I thought about the man who wrote ‘Amazing Grace’, I knew he would not agree with the switcheroo of words. Yes, John Newton, the writer of ‘Amazing Grace’ was a great sinner. He was an immoral slave trader and the captain of slave ships. He invested and made money in the slave trade. Although he was not a religious man, when a ship he was on was nearly engulfed by a violent storm, he began to weep and pray. “God have mercy on me.” Over the coming months, after this encounter with God, Newton not only came to Christ but joined forces with William Wilberforce to put an end to slavery in the British Empire via the Slave Act of 1807. Newton experienced life change.
It was only because he understood his sin so profoundly that he could then understand why God’s grace was so amazing. This singular truth gifted all of us this timeless song.
One of the many amazing things about grace is that it does not minimize or ignore the hideous reality of our sin. Grace has the power to affirm the depths of our sin because it points to the inconceivable and unthinkable price that was paid to buy us back from our sin. Paul tells us that if men were good enough or without sin, “then Christ died for no reason” (Galatians 2:21). The bottom line is that if we fail to honestly come to grips with the truth of our sin, God’s grace to us in Christ will never ever be AMAZING.
The scriptures tell us over and over that Christ died for very unworthy people (Romans 5:7-8). This truth is a display of God’s incomprehensible and unearned love. Yes, it’s hard to wrap my head around a God that would die for WRETCHES like you and me, yet when we downplay our own sinfulness, we often find ourselves no longer describing ourselves as the Bible does. We then are no longer unworthy, undeserving, and powerless to do anything about our condition. So, when we are no longer WRETCHES, grace is no longer grace.
One prosperity preacher I recently heard said, “One thing I can tell you is that 99% of people are not bad people. They may do some bad things, but their hearts are good.” Immediately, Jeremiah 17:9 flew through my mind, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” The New Living Translation makes is clearer: “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked, Who really knows how bad it is?” The reality is, 100% of people are bad people. In Ephesians 2, Paul describes every person as spiritually DEAD, disobedient, living out our many sins like the world, obeying the devil who is the commander of the dark unseen world, following the passionate desires of our sinful nature and under the wrath of God’s justifiable anger.
Read that last sentence again. Then read it again out loud. That precisely and accurately describes ME. That precisely and accurately describes YOU. When we read the truth about the condition of our hearts and really, really, really believe it, we instinctively know that we do not need good advice or some fleshly encouragement. We need good news. We need the greatest news ever. Thank God we get that in the very next verse in Ephesians 2: “But God (maybe the greatest 2 words ever printed) is so rich in mercy and he loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead and he did so in order that the future generations would see the incredible wealth of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ.” Grace, has no cost to us but has an unimaginable cost to God. Bonhoeffer was right: grace is free, but it is not cheap.
What a relief to realize that my salvation and your salvation is completely the result of God’s grace. True grace sees and deals with sin in the most radical and painful way and it is why Jesus said in Matthew 5, “Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor (sinners and in need of God’s grace); the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them.” In doing so, we start seeing sin for what it really is: bondage, not freedom.
So, as we chase the one who changes our lives through His grace over the next year, let’s remind ourselves often that we desperately need a clear picture of who God is, how much he loves us and that being AMAZED by grace first starts with openly seeing ourselves as WRETCHED. It is this kindness that indeed leads us to repentance and repentance leads to life change. Remember what the Puritans said: “Always repenting, Always changing” May our entire church body join in this life changing process…together!