Hello, this is Pastor John. I get to start this episode by talking about another

Pastor John, John Newton. Newton was a key leader in England in the 18th century, as you know,

the author of the incredibly popular hymn, Amazing Grace. Newton was a former captain of

a slave trading ship and was dramatically converted from this life of sin and eventually

helped William Wilberforce and the British slave trade. So I wanted to take a moment to introduce

you to a new book about a part of Newton's life that goes overlooked. His 40 plus years in pastoral

ministry and the amazing ministry of writing letters to people in need. The book is written by Tony

Rankie, the host of this podcast, Tony calls his book Pastoral Synthesis. He wants you to be

pastored by John Newton and so he gathered up all of Newton's many published letters, about a

thousand of them in various collections. Many of them preserved in old, rare, fragile volumes in

libraries around the world. He found them, studied them and then identified Newton's key answers to the

perennial questions of the Christian life and then Tony wrote all his findings into a guided tour

of Newton's thought. It's a kind of Aspastor John Newton. The book releases this week, it's titled

Newton on the Christian life to live as Christ. I commend it very highly.

While it's not easy to find examples of Christians who got the tough and tender balance

just right in the Christian life, Jesus says of course the supreme example of this.

Another example, a fallen example, comes from England in the 18th century in a pastor named John

Newton. John Piper explained in his 2001 message to pastors titled John Newton, the tough roots of his

habitual tenderness. Here's what he said. John Newton was born July 24, 1725 in London,

1725 so picture yourself now, how long ago that was. To a godly mother and an irreligious

seafaring father, she died when he was six, left mainly to himself. He became a debauched

sailor, a miserable outcast on the west coast of Africa for a couple of years. A slave trading

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