Christian Testimonies from Around the World

John Newton worked the slave ships as a young man and went on to captain them himself. Late in life he wrote of that trade:

“I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument, in a business at which my heart now shudders.”

A violent storm in 1748 nearly sank the ship he was sailing on, and in his fear he found himself praying — the first real prayer of his life. He survived. The change that began that night took years to finish its work: he left the sea in 1754, was ordained a minister ten years after that, and wrote hundreds of hymns. Near the end of his life he turned publicly against the very trade he had once profited from, and lived just long enough to see Britain outlaw it. His most famous hymn says it plainly: “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”

As a young man in Germany, George Müller stole, lied, and drifted through life with no real faith. That changed in November 1825, when a fellow student took him to a small prayer meeting in a private house. Of that evening he wrote:

“I was happy; though, if I had been asked why I was happy, I could not have clearly explained it.”

He moved to England and, over the following decades, built and ran orphanages in Bristol that housed and fed more than ten thousand children — without ever once asking anyone for money. When funds ran low and mealtime came with empty cupboards, he prayed instead of fundraising, and food arrived anyway, again and again, for more than sixty years. He kept a detailed written record of it the whole time, so that no one would have to take his word for it alone.

Horatio Spafford was a Chicago lawyer who lost nearly everything within a few short years — his young son to illness, his property to the Great Chicago Fire, and then, in 1873, all four of his daughters, when the ship carrying them across the Atlantic collided with another vessel and sank. His wife survived. Her telegram to him carried two words: “Saved alone.” Spafford sailed to join her, and as his own ship crossed near the place where his daughters had died, he wrote the words to a hymn that has comforted grieving people ever since:

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Polycarp was an elderly bishop in the city of Smyrna, one of the last men alive who had known the apostle John personally. When Roman authorities arrested him and ordered him to curse Christ to save his own life, he gave an answer that has been remembered for nearly two thousand years:

“He never once wronged me — how could I curse my King, who has saved me?”

William Tyndale gave his life to translating the Bible into English at a time when doing so was a crime that could get a person killed — and it did. In 1536 he was tied to a stake, strangled, and then burned. His last words were a prayer, not for himself, but for the king who had allowed his death:

“Lord, open the King of England's eyes.”

Within three years, an English Bible resting heavily on Tyndale's own translation work was being read openly in English churches, by the king's own order.

Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake together in Oxford, England, for their Protestant faith. As the fire was lit, Latimer turned to his friend and spoke words that have outlived them both:

“Be of good comfort, Ridley, and play the man. Today, by God's grace, we will light a candle in England that I trust will never be put out.”

John Rogers helped bring one of the first printed English Bibles into being, and was the first Protestant minister put to death under Queen Mary I. Offered a pardon moments before his execution if he would take back what he had taught, he refused it and said instead:

“What I have preached, I will now seal with my blood.”

Onlookers reported that he washed his hands in the flames as though they were cold water, showing no sign of fear, before he died.