Hymns: Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)

In this series, I’m taking a brief glance at some of the newer hymns and worship songs. This one is older in two ways.

• Firstly, it goes all the way back to 2006, which doesn’t seem that far back to me, but it might be to younger people 😄.
• Secondly, the lyrics are based on the original Amazing Grace, which was written by John Newton back in the 18th Century.

But I first heard this current song when I went to see the film Amazing Grace, which was about William Wilberforce’s fight to abolish the British slave trade.

You can view the lyrics in the second video or on genius.com.

Of all the hymns that we sing in evangelical churches, that’s probably the first one that I heard – in its original form back in the early 1970s. Maybe I heard a few at Mass as a child. As Catholics, we were happy to sing Protestant hymns. But Amazing Grace was popular outside church. It reached the pop charts twice in the early 1970s. Judy Collins released it around 1970, and a Scottish pipe band had a big hit with it a year or two later.

Even as a child, I was quite fascinated by the song. Elvis sang it too, as did Joan Baez and many others.

I remember being surprised by Joan Baez not using the term “wretch” when she sang it in Sarajevo in 1993. Maybe she didn’t want to call herself a wretch 😄. You don’t need to call yourself a wretch to be saved, but you do need to repent, and to do that, you need to be aware that you fall well short of God’s standards. I would think that most people would readily admit that they even fall short of their own standards at times. Why should we be surprised that we fall short of God’s standards?

It’s often the case that those who are most aware of their sin, love Jesus the most – as Jesus himself pointed out:

Luke 7:46-52
⁴⁶ You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. ⁴⁷ Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

I never like people changing the lyrics of old hymns. Another change you sometimes here is the number of years in the last verse.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
  Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
  Than when we first begun.

Some people sing “a thousand” and some people sing “ten thousand”. I always thought it was better to sing “ten thousand” 😄, but the whole point is that we’ll want to sing God’s praise for eternity.

Many other folks have covered the original song. These include:

My favourite verse is the second one:

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed

I can totally relate to that. When I was a teenager, I was concerned about ending up in hell. If it was just the Roman Catholic Church that invented hell, I would have rejected it, in the way that I reject the Catholic teaching on Purgatory and Limbo. But Jesus himself spoke about hell more than anyone in the Bible, and I trust his word. But the one who speaks about hell offers a guaranteed way out of it. Here are three verses that remind us that when we trust in Jesus, we can have the joy of knowing that we are safe:

John 5:24
²⁴ “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.

Roman 8:1 
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

1 John 5:13
I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.