This day would have been my father’s seventy-seventh birthday. One year ago, he celebrated the day of his birth at our dining room table; now, he has been nine months gone. Much emptiness still remains where he once was.

As far back as I can remember, my father’s favorite hymn was “Amazing Grace.” I do not recall this song ever being sung without it drawing tears from his eyes.

I think my father sensed deeply that he, like John Newton, would never have turned to Jesus in his own strength. It was nothing less than the gracious power of God that brought him to faith and kept him in faith.

It seemed fitting to me this day to read anew the original lyrics of “Amazing Grace” as well as the autobiography of John Newton. The autobiography consists of a series of letters collectively titled An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of Reverend J. Newton—clearly reflecting a time when publishers were not looking for pithy phrases to plaster on book covers.

My afternoon foray into the writings of John Newton led me to a couple of particularly noteworthy rediscoveries: a beautiful declaration of confidence in the sufficiency of the gospel, and two stanzas from “Amazing Grace” that have fallen into disuse over the past two centuries.

:: “Suitableness to Answer All My Needs” ::

Reflecting on God’s choice to save him at a time when he was seeking only his own pleasure, John Newton spoke these words of gratitude:

The gospel exhibits “exact suitableness” for “all my needs”; it fits the lock of the deepest needs of the human heart and satisfies them fully and suitably. When it comes to sin, this is the strongest antidote—a recognition that the establishment of God’s kingdom through the sacrificial death and resurrection triumph of Jesus supplies all that my soul truly needs. If I do not sense the full sufficiency of this good news, it is because I have not recognized my soul’s truest, deepest need. This truth stands at the heart of Christ-centered counseling, but Newton knew it well more than two centuries ago.

:: The Unsung Stanzas of “Amazing Grace” ::

The original words of “Amazing Grace” were not wedded to the tune that is so familiar to us today, and the lyric was known as “Faith’s Review and Expectation” (see this post for more about the original context of the hymn).

Another lesser-known fact about the hymn is that a couple of John Newton’s original stanzas have dropped into relative disuse—though one of them has reappeared recently in Chris Tomlin’s reworking of the hymn—while the familiar verse that begins “When we’ve been there ten thousand years…” wasn’t penned by Newton at all.

The unsung stanzas speak clearly of death and of the dissolution of this present earth. Perhaps their descent into disuse has something to do with our contemporary discomfort when it comes to discussing these topics:

“Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

“The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.”

In the moments when my father grasped for his final gasps of breath, my mother, my wife, and I sang the better-known verses of “Amazing Grace” to him. We did not sing these last stanzas. We did not need to, I suppose, because moments after we sang the first stanzas, he was living the last ones.

Happy birthday, Dad.

We look forward to that day when we see you again, when the sun will “forbear to shine” because the Light of the World has dawned at last.

While doing some research related to the writer of the lyrics now know as the hymn “Amazing Grace,” I ran across another set of lyrics that are equally powerful but far less familiar.

First off, a few little-known facts about “Amazing Grace”:

* The original title wasn’t “Amazing Grace” at all but “Faith’s Review and Expectation.”

* The words weren’t joined to the familiar “New Britain” tune until 1835, more than a half-century after John Newton penned the first version of the lyrics.

* John Newton and William Cowper wrote a new lyric almost every week for the church members who gathered weekly for prayer meeting in the village of Olney; “Faith’s Review and Expectation” was one of these hymns, penned as a poetic reflection on 1 Chronicles 17:16-17.

* “Faith’s Review and Expectation” was first published in 1779 in Olney Hymns, six years or so after Newton wrote the original verses for a New Year’s Day prayer meeting.

* Hymn texts in Olney Hymns were arranged according to the biblical passage on which each hymn was based—an arrangement that, in my opinion, it would be helpful to recover.

Now for the forgotten hymn: Immediately prior to “Faith’s Review and Expectation” in the original Olney Hymns, there is a set of lyrics entitled “More With Us Than With Them.” These verses reflect on 2 Kings 6:16. The words of “More With Us Than With Them” have been long since overshadowed by the words that once succeeded them, but I find this text to be just as powerful—particularly the final stanza with its call for intercessory prayer (perhaps even from saints who have gone before us) and its clear appeal to the cross:

“Alas! Elisha’s servant cried,
When he the Syrian army spied.
But he was soon released from care,
In answer to the prophet’s prayer.

“Straightway, he saw with other eyes
A greater army from the skies;
A fiery guard around the hill,
Thus are the saints preserve’d still.

“When Satan and his host appear,
Like him of old, I faint and fear;
Like him, by faith, with joy I see,
A greater host engaged for me.

“The saints espouse my cause by prayer,
The angels make my soul their care.
Mine is the promise sealed with blood!
And Jesus lives to make it good.”

For more on John Newton’s historical context, see my video on William Wilberforce in Session Nine of this series.

(I have updated the original spellings in “More With Us Than With Them.”)