“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” It is not difficult for us to see wretches all around us. They are the people who abuse children, who murder family members, who break into people’s homes and stores and rob them. They are the prostitutes, the drunkards, the terrorists, the swindlers. They are all around us, and we see them every evening on the television news reports.

However, Newton saw himself as a wretch, and only because he did so could he understand the sweetness of the grace that saved him. There are many who don’t really think they need grace in a personal way. They will agree that God was gracious to send Christ and give everybody a “chance” to be saved, but they see themselves are actually pretty good. After all, they gave their lives to Christ, and they had to be fairly smart and reasonable to understand the importance of becoming a Christian. They enjoy other people congratulating and complimenting them on their good works and faithfulness to the church. That, regrettably, represents the mindset of many believers.

Such a situation is the epitome of self deception and is the work of the devil, not of God. It flies in the face of all Scripture tells us about the condition of mankind without and before the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Because no one truly and of his/her own seeks God, understands, or does good (See Romans 3:9ff), we all stand under the just condemnation of God and are fit subjects of his wrath. Read Ephesians 2:1ff for an accurate description of mankind: “dead…following the prince of the power of the air…sons of disobedience…(living) in the passions of our flesh…carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Jesus said that there is no one good except the Father alone. Jeremiah said that the heart is desperately wicked and beyond all remedy. God recognized in Genesis that every imagination of mankind was only evil continually from his youth. To suggest that there is inherent goodness in anyone betrays at best a woeful ignorance of the teaching of God’s Word, if not a deliberate rejection of it. Yet much of the Christian world insists that people still have enough basic goodness in them to come to Christ, an act that Jesus himself said twice was impossible without divine enablement (John 6:44, 65).

Only when we see ourselves as complete wretches before God will we hear the true sweetness of the sound of grace!