As a teenager, Charles Spurgeon was miserable under the weight of his sin and kept visiting churches hoping somebody would show him how to be saved. On Sunday, January 6, 1850, a snowstorm drove him off the main road and into a little Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. Only a handful of people were there, and the regular preacher never showed up. A thin, plain man, Spurgeon thought maybe a shoemaker or tailor, got up and stuck to his text because he had little else to say: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” Spurgeon later said that when he heard the word “Look!” he looked until he could almost have looked his eyes away. The young man who found Christ that day became the Prince of Preachers.
In the summer of 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, the camp leader picked ten men to die by starvation as punishment. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children. A Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place, and to everyone’s shock the commander agreed. Kolbe died in the starvation bunker in August 1941. Gajowniczek survived the war and spent years telling people about the man who died so he could live.
In 2018 an off-duty Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, walked into the wrong apartment and shot and killed Botham Jean, an innocent man sitting in his own home. At her sentencing in October 2019, Botham’s 18-year-old brother Brandt took the stand and told her that if she was truly sorry, he forgave her. He said what he really wanted was for her to give her life to Christ. Then he asked the judge if he could give her a hug, and the two embraced in front of the bench while the courtroom sobbed. Not everyone agreed with him, but nobody who saw it ever forgot it.
John Newton spent his early years working in the slave trade, about as far from God as a man could get. Later he became a preacher, the rector of the parish in Olney, England, and he ended up fighting to abolish slavery. In 1772 he wrote the words to ‘Amazing Grace,’ and it was first printed in the Olney Hymns in 1779. It wasn’t married to the tune we all know until about 60 years later. When we sing that grace saved ‘a wretch like me,’ we’re singing the testimony of a man who knew exactly what he was talking about.
