“There is one political maxim which comforts me: “The Lord reigns.’ (Psalm 97:1)
His hand guides the storm.
And He knows them that are His, how to protect, support, and deliver them.
He will take care of His own cause.
Yes, He will extend His kingdom, even by these formidable methods.
Men have one thing in view.
He has another, and His counsel shall stand. (Psalm 2:1-6)”
–John Newton, The Works of John Newton, Volume 2 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1988), 2: 87.
“I heartily sympathize with you in your complaints, but I see you in safe hands. The Lord loves you, and will take care of you.
He who raises the dead can revive your spirits when you are cast down. He who sets bounds to the sea, and says ‘Hither to shalt thou come, and no further,’ can limit and moderate that gloom which sometimes distresses you.
He knows why He permits you to be thus exercised. I cannot assign the reasons, but I am sure they are worthy of His wisdom and love, and that you will hereafter see and say, ‘He has done all things well.’
If I was as wise as your physician, I might say a great deal about your melancholy complexion; but I love not to puzzle myself with second causes, while the First Cause is at hand, which sufficiently accounts for every phenomenon in a believer’s experience. Your constitution, your situation, your temper, your distemper, all that is either comfortable or painful in your lot, is of His appointment.
The hairs of your head are all numbered; the same power which produced the planet Jupiter, is necessary to the production of a single hair; nor can one of them fall to the ground without His notice, any more than the stars can fall from their orbits. In providence, no less than in creation, He is maximus in minimis (‘the greatest in the smallest’).
Therefore, fear not, only believe. Our sea may sometimes be stormy; but we have an infallible Pilot, and shall infallibly gain our port.
I must now end my speech, and begin my supper. We wish you and Mrs. Bull a good night. The Lord be with you, and with your poor friend,
JOHN NEWTON
Olney,
November 2, 1778″
–John Newton, “Letter XIX,” Letters of the Reverend John Newton (London: Hamilton and Adams Co, 1847), 36-37.
“The whole system of my politics is summed up in that one sentence, “The Lord reigneth!”
The times look awfully dark indeed; and as the clouds grow thicker, the stupidity of the nation seems proportionally to increase. If the Lord had not a remnant here, I should have very formidable apprehensions.
But He loves His children; some are sighing and mourning before Him, and I am sure He hears their sighs, and sees their tears. I trust there is mercy in store for us at the bottom; but I expect a shaking time before things get into a right channel, before we are humbled, and are taught to give Him the glory.
The state of the nation, the state of the churches, both are deplorable. They who should be praying, or too many of them, are disputing and fighting among themselves.
Alas! How many professors are more concerned for the mistakes of government, or of the Americans, than for their own sins! When will these things end?
Love me, and pray for me, and come to see me, for I cannot come to you. With my love and Mrs. Newton’s to you and Mrs . Bull,
I remain, your obliged friend,
JOHN NEWTON
Olney, February 24, 1778”
–John Newton, Letters of the Reverend John Newton (London: Hamilton and Adams Co, 1847), 7-8.
“I meddle not with the disputes of party, nor concern myself with any political maxims, but such as are laid down in Scripture. There I read that righteousness exalteth a nation, and that sin is the reproach, and, if persisted in, the ruin of any people.
Some people are startled at the enormous sum of our national debt: they who understand spiritual arithmetic may be well startled if they sit down and compute the debt of national sin.
Imprimis, Infidelity: Item, Contempt of the Gospel: Item, The profligacy of manners: Item, Perjury: Item, The cry of blood, the blood of thousands, perhaps millions, from the East Indies.
It would take sheets, yea quires (i.e. 25 sheets of paper), to draw out the particulars under each of these heads, and then much would remain untold. What can we answer, when the Lord saith, ‘Shall not I visit for these things? Shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this?’
Since we received the news of the first hostilities in America, we have had an additional prayer-meeting. Could I hear that professors in general, instead of wasting their breath in censuring men and measures, were plying the Throne of Grace, I should still hope for a respite.
Poor New England! Once the glory of the earth, now likely to be visited with fire and sword. They have left their first love, and the Lord is sorely contending with them.
Yet surely their sins as a people are not to be compared with ours. I am just so much affected with these things as to know, that I am not affected enough.
Oh! My spirit is sadly cold and insensible, or I should lay them to heart in a different manner: yet I endeavour to give the alarm as far as I can.
There is one political maxim which comforts me: ‘The Lord reigns.’ His hand guides the storm; and He knows them that are His, how to protect, support, and deliver them.
He will take care of His own cause; yea, He will extend His kingdom, even by these formidable methods.
Men have one thing in view; He has another, and His counsel shall stand.”
–John Newton, The Works of John Newton, Volume 2 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2015), 2: 85-87. This quote is from a letter concerning America written by Newton in August 1775.
“There are sometimes spaces in our lives that seem empty and silent. Things grind to a halt for one reason or another. Not long ago, the ‘music’ in my life seemed to stop because of a rejection, a loss, and what seemed to me at the time a monumental failure.
I was feeling rather desolate when I came across a paragraph written more than a hundred years ago by the artist John Ruskin:
There is no music in a rest, but there is the making of music in it. In our whole life-melody, the music is broken off here and there by ‘rests,’ and we foolishly think we have come to the end of time. God sends a time of forced leisure– sickness, disappointed plans, frustrated efforts– and makes us a sudden pause in the choral hymn of our lives and we lament that our voices must be silent, and our part missing in the music which ever goes up to the ear of the Creator. How does the musician read the rest? See him beat time with unvarying count and catch up the next note true and steady, as if no breaking place had come between. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. But be it ours to learn the time and not be dismayed at the ‘rests.’ They are not to be slurred over, nor to be omitted, not to destroy the melody, not to change the keynote. In the end we will see that in order to have a complete song, we must have the ‘rests’ in between the notes. If we look up, God Himself will beat time for us. With the eye on Him we shall strike the next note full and clear.
So the Lord brought to me precisely the word I needed at the moment: There was ‘the making of music’ in what seemed a hollow emptiness.
It’s His song, not mine, that I’m here to sing. It’s His will, not mine, that I’m here to do. Let me focus my vision unwaveringly on Him who alone knows the complete score, ‘and in the night His song shall be with me,’ (Psalm 42:8).”
–Elisabeth Elliot, Secure in the Everlasting Arms (Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2002), 161-162.
“O what a Shepherd! Let us love, and sing, and wonder.
I hope the good people at Bristol, and everywhere else, are praying for our sinful, distracted land, in this dark day. The Lord is angry, the sword is drawn, and I am afraid nothing but the spirit of wrestling prayer can prevail for the returning it into the scabbard.
Could things have proceeded to these extremities, except the Lord had withdrawn His salutary blessing from both sides? It is a time of prayer.
We see the beginning of trouble, but who can foresee the possible consequences? The fire is kindled; but how far it may spread, those who are above may perhaps know better than we.
I meddle not with the disputes of party, nor concern myself with any political maxims, but such as are laid down in Scripture. There I read that righteousness exalteth a nation, and that sin is the reproach, and, if persisted in, the ruin of any people.
Some people are startled at the enormous sum of our national debt: they who understand spiritual arithmetic may be well startled if they sit down and compute the debt of national sin.
Imprimis, Infidelity: Item, Contempt of the Gospel: Item, The profligacy of manners: Item, Perjury: Item, The cry of blood, the blood of thousands, perhaps millions, from the East Indies.
It would take sheets, yea quires (i.e. 25 sheets of paper), to draw out the particulars under each of these heads, and then much would remain untold. What can we answer, when the Lord saith, ‘Shall not I visit for these things? Shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this?’
Since we received the news of the first hostilities in America, we have had an additional prayer-meeting. Could I hear that professors in general, instead of wasting their breath in censuring men and measures, were plying the Throne of Grace, I should still hope for a respite.
Poor New England! Once the glory of the earth, now likely to be visited with fire and sword. They have left their first love, and the Lord is sorely contending with them.
Yet surely their sins as a people are not to be compared with ours. I am just so much affected with these things as to know, that I am not affected enough.
Oh! My spirit is sadly cold and insensible, or I should lay them to heart in a different manner: yet I endeavour to give the alarm as far as I can.
There is one political maxim which comforts me: ‘The Lord reigns.’ His hand guides the storm; and He knows them that are His, how to protect, support, and deliver them.
He will take care of His own cause; yea, He will extend His kingdom, even by these formidable methods.
Men have one thing in view; He has another, and His counsel shall stand.”
–John Newton, The Works of John Newton, Ed. Richard Cecil (vol. 2; London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1824), 2: 85-87. This quote is from a letter concerning America written by Newton in August 1775.
“I may express all my complaints in one short sentence: I am a poor creature.
And all my hopes and comforts may be summed up as briefly by saying: I have a rich and gracious Saviour.
Full as I am in myself of inconsistencies and conflicts, I have in Him a measure of peace.
He found me in a waste howling wilderness. He redeemed me from the house of misery and bondage.
And though I have been ungrateful and perverse, He has not yet forsaken me. I trust He never will.
‘Unsustained by Thee I fall.’ But He is able to hold even me up: to pity, to support, and to supply me to the end of life.
How suitable a Saviour! He is made all things to those who have nothing, and He is engaged to help those who can do nothing.”
–John Newton, The Aged Pilgrim’s Thoughts Over Sin and the Grave, Illustrated in a Series of Letters to Walter Taylor, Never Before Published, by the Rev. John Newton (London: Baker and Fletcher, 2nd Ed., 1825), 6.
“Public affairs look darker still. Expectation is on tiptoe waiting for hourly news from all parts of the world but foreboding that the news, whenever it comes or from whatever quarter, will be distressing.
I am afraid what we next hear from America will not be pleasing. That unhappy country is still likely to be a scene of desolation and our people there likely to sink under the weight of pretended successes.
In the West Indies, Tobago is gone, and perhaps by this time some other of our islands. And the cry of oppression in the East Indies seems at length to have awakened judgment there.
Yet the spirit of the nation seems like that of the thoughtless mariner, asleep on the top of the mast, regardless of the danger every moment increasing.
Yet still I hope there is mercy. The gospel spreads, grace reigns, the number of praying souls is on the increase, and their prayers I trust will be heard.
We are sure that the Lord reigns; that the storm is guided by the hands which were nailed to the cross, and that as He loves His own, He will take care of them.
But they who have not an ark to hide themselves in will probably weep and wail before the indignation be over-past.
Blessed be God for a land of peace where sin and every sorrow will be excluded.”
–John Newton, as quoted in Josiah Bull, Memorials of the Rev. William Bull, of Newport Pagnel: 1738-1814, (London: James Nisbet and Company, 1864), 88-89. This letter was written in April 1781.
“Our longest sorrows have a close, and there is a bottom to the profoundest depths of our misery.
Our winters shall not frown forever; summer shall soon smile.
The tide shall not eternally ebb out; the floods retrace their march.
The night shall not hang its darkness for ever over our souls; the sun shall yet arise with healing beneath his wings.
‘The Lord turned again the captivity of Job.’ (Job 42:10) Our sorrows shall have an end when God has gotten His end in them.”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, “Intercessory Prayer,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Vol. 7 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1861), 7: 449.
Filed under Bible, Charles Spurgeon, Christian Theology, Faith, Hope, Jesus Christ, Perseverance, Providence, Puritanical, Quotable Quotes, Sovereignty, Suffering, The Gospel
“When we pray for increase of faith and grace, and that we may have stronger proofs of our own sincerity, and of the Lord’s faithfulness and care, we do, but in other words, pray for affliction.
He is best known and noticed in the time of trouble, as a present and all-sufficient help. How grand and magnificent is the arch over our heads in a starry night! But if it were always day, the stars could not be seen.
The firmament of Scripture, if I may so speak, is spangled with exceeding great and precious promises, as the sky is with stars, but the value and beauty of many of them are only perceptible to us in the night of affliction…
Oh! For grace to be always ready, always watching, with our loins girded up, and our lamps burning. Then we may cheerfully leave the when, the how, and the where to Him, of whose kind care and attention we have had so many proofs hitherto.
He will be our Guide and our Guard even unto death, and beyond it.
John Newton
25th September 1797″
–John Newton, “Letter LXXIII” in The Aged Pilgrim’s Thoughts Over Sin and the Grave, Illustrated in a Series of Letters to Walter Taylor, Never Before Published, by the Rev. John Newton (London: Baker and Fletcher, 2nd Ed., 1825), 135-136. As quoted in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015), 189.
