Wilberforce in Three Hundred and Fifty-Four Words

“For [The Lord] will deliver the needy when he cries for help, the afflicted also, and him who has no helper.” Psalm 72:12
To plead the cause of the oppressed is to honor God (Proverbs 14:13, 17:5, 19:17), and when a Christ-infused perspective transformed William Wilberforce, he could not help but feel the plight of the oppressed as his own. In 1785, 25-year-old William Wilberforce was renewed by the Cross, and from that moment to his death, he devoted his life to upholding the downtrodden. Abolishing the European slave trade stands as his greatest accomplishment and required his tireless devotion for over 40 years.
From Wilberforce’s life we can be encouraged in several ways in our own struggle to follow Christ. First, Wilberforce demonstrated the impact that a life fully yielded to the Cross and to ones convictions can have. He felt his convictions deeply and worked tirelessly to address the problems in his world. His life reminds us to look at this life through the lens of heaven rather than the lens of our own world; he lost friendships, endured public vilification, and bore reproach as a hypocrite for his commitment to honor his conscience, but he stayed the course and accomplished much because of his devotion to a heavenly perspective.
Secondly, we can learn from him to appreciate the brevity of life. Wilberforce wasted the first 24 years of his life and suffered greatly from this misappropriation of time. Upon receiving faith in Christ, he faithfully sought to redeem every day. He understood his responsibility to “live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27) and humbly made this his life’s goal
Wilberforce accomplished much in his time because he was deeply impressed by the transciency of this life and lived grateful for Christ’s mercy. Though he succeeded in ending the British slave trade, the world continues to oppress the powerless and the cry now falls to us to make this one life count – to give our very lives, like Christ and like Wilberforce, to declare to the world that we are citizens of another kingdom (Phil. 3:17-21).