The Weight of Preaching

By Tony Reinke

Those who lived in the eighteenth century were familiar with sickness and death. For Newton this was especially the case. On his various journeys across the Atlantic Ocean he often witnessed sickness and death along the way. Some sailors washed out to sea during storms, and others died from the sicknesses carried in filthy ships. So many sailors died at sea, in fact, that port cities were often depleted of their men who were required to compensate for the losses at sea. Looking back on his sailing days, Newton estimated that 1,500 British sailors died each year on the seas. The deaths among the slaves who were hauled as cargo were even higher. It really was a miracle that Newton himself survived life on the sea.

But tragedy did strike close to home for Newton. His mother died when he was 7 years old, and his father tragically drowned when he was 25. He later watched his adopted daughter die during a prolonged two-year struggle against tuberculosis. Eventually Newton’s wife—his best friend—passed away, leaving him 17 years of widowed life. He was no stranger to tragedy and sickness.

For Newton, the world was a hospital. “What is the world at large,” he asked, “but a more extensive and diversified scene of wretchedness, where phrenzy and despair, anxiety, pain, want, and death, have their respective wards filled with patients.”* His preaching was intended to prepare people for the harsh realities of sickness, suffering, and death.

But this preemptive care didn’t stop Newton from ministering in the hospitals. As a faithful pastor Newton visited the sick and dying in his community. The hospital became something of a school for him where he could learn the true weightiness of his theology.

In a letter dated March 10, 1774, to his esteemed friend William Legge, the second Earl of Dartmouth, Newton explained that he had recently spent a six-week stretch investing several hours of each day in the hospital caring for souls. In the letter Newton recounted one meeting with a sick young woman. The memory of the hospital encounter was etched so deep into Newton's memory that he recalled it years later.

Permit me, my Lord, to relate, upon this occasion, some things which exceedingly struck me in the conversation I had with a young woman whom I visited in her last illness about two years ago.

She was a sober, prudent person, of plain sense, could read her Bible, but had read little besides. Her knowledge of the world was nearly confined to the parish; for I suppose she was seldom, if ever, twelve miles from home in her life. She had known the gospel about seven years before the Lord visited her with a lingering consumption [tuberculosis], which at length removed her to a better world.

A few days before her death, I had been praying by her bedside, and in my prayer I thanked the Lord that he gave her now to see that she had not followed cunningly-devised fables [Ephesians 4:14]. When I had finished, she repeated that word, “No,” she said “not cunningly-devised fables; these are realities indeed. I feel their truth, I feel their comfort. Oh! tell my friends, tell my acquaintances, tell enquiring souls, tell poor sinners, tell all the daughters of Jerusalem (alluding to Song of Solomon 5:16 from which she had just before desired me to preach at her funeral), what Jesus has done for my soul. Tell them, that now in the time of need I find him my beloved and my friend, and as such I commend him to them.”

She then fixed her eyes steadfastly upon me, and proceeded, as well as I can recollect, as follows. “Sir, you are highly favored in being called to preach the gospel. I have often heard you with pleasure; but [only when] you come into my situation, and have death and eternity full in your view, will it be possible for you to conceive the vast weight and importance of the truths you declare.”

Until we are faced with eternity it is too easy to take preaching for granted, to treat sermons lightly, to so quickly forget them like yesterday’s newspaper.

Yet it was here, beside the bed of a dying young woman in a hospital room and in other situations just like it, that Newton learned the true worth and weight of biblical preaching.

Tony Reinke serves as the editorial and research assistant to C.J. Mahaney. Reading Newton’s Mail is a series of blog posts reflecting on various published letters written by John Newton (1725–1807), the onetime captain of a slave trading ship—a self-described apostate, blasphemer, and infidel, who was eventually converted by grace. Newton is most famous for authoring the hymn “Amazing Grace,” or maybe for helping William Wilberforce put an end to the African slave trade in Britain. Less legendarily, Newton faithfully pastored two churches for 43 years, a fruitful period of his life when a majority of his letters were written. Reading Newton’s Mail is published on Fridays here on the Cheap Seats blog.

Primary sources: The Works of John Newton (London: 1820), 1:479–480. Letters of John Newton (Edinburgh; Banner of Truth: 1869, 2007), 100–101. Secondary source: * Works, 6:164.