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 in 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 Reinke, 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 Ask Pastor John Newton. The book releases this week. It's titled Newton on the Christian Life to Live as Christ. I commend it very highly. Well, it's not easy to find examples of Christians who got the tough and tender balance just right in the Christian life.

Jesus is of course the supreme example of this. Another example of fallen example comes from England in the 18th century and 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 sea captain until an epileptic seizure ended his sea going career, a well-paid surveyor of tides in Liverpool, a devoted and loved pastor of two congregations in Olney and London for a total of 43 years, a devoted husband to Mary for 40 years until she died in 1790, and last of all, the writer of the most famous hymn in the English language, "Amazing Grace," which you heard and sang exactly as he wrote it, not with that wonderful last verse which we love and he did not write.

And he died in 1807 at 82. So why am I interested in this man? What's my agenda before you this morning? I'm interested in him because of my great desire to see Christian pastors be as strong and durable as redwood trees and as tender and fragrant as a field of clover.

I want to see you become rugged in the defense and confirmation of the truth and relentlessly humble and patient and merciful in dealing with people. Ever since I came to Bethlehem in 1980, I've had this vision of what I want to be and what I want to be the means of others becoming because in the early 1980s, I read Matthew and Mark in my Greek Testament, writing in the margin, T.E.

and T.O. beside every tender thing Jesus said or did and every tough thing Jesus said or did. And when I got done, the mixture was amazing. No man ever spoke, no man ever lived like this man spoke and lived. There's nobody like Jesus pastoring today. And I want to be more like that.

And I want you to be more like that. And therefore, as I look at pastors in history and around and I find one who got something that we need, then I bank on it for a while. And that's what I've been doing since July with Newton. And I know that this drunk peasant who can't stay on the donkey is where we all are.

Everybody in this room is falling off the horse on one side or the other on this matter of toughness and tenderness. And so it's risky business in this room to say what I'm going to say. There are a lot of us who are wimping out on truth when we ought to be lionhearted.

And there are a lot who are wrangling with anger when we ought to be weeping. And so I know I'm going to say some things that are not what some of you should hear. Some of you need a good, tender kick in the pants to be more courageous with truth.

And some of you need to realize that courage is not what William Cooper, Newton's good friend, called a furious and abusive zeal. Oh, how rare are the pastors who speak with a tender heart and have theological backbones of steel. Oh, how rare it is. And not to be rare.

And I don't want it to be rare. Theological truth, biblical backbones of steel and as soft as clover so that children come to you and broken people come to you and homosexuals come to you. Amen. That was from John Piper's 2001 message to pastors titled John Newton, the tough roots of his habitual tenderness.

Special thanks to cellist Patricia White for her rendition of Amazing Grace off her album, Be Still My Soul, which we are using in this episode. And thank you to Pastor John for promoting my new book here and for writing the forward to it. You can read us forward and find more information online at desiringgod.org/newton.

We return tomorrow with Pastor John to answer a perplexing question about how we read our Bibles. I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.