The Man Who Refused to Simply Listen

William Wilberforce sat in the British Parliament for years, hearing impassioned speeches about the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. He knew the statistics — roughly 80,000 Africans shipped across the ocean each year in chains, packed into holds where nearly a quarter perished before reaching shore. He had read the testimonies. He understood the evil.

But in 1787, something shifted. Wilberforce stopped being merely a man who heard and became a man who acted. He introduced his first abolition bill, and Parliament defeated it. He introduced another. Defeated again. For eighteen consecutive years, Wilberforce brought the matter before his colleagues, enduring mockery, death threats, and political isolation. His friends urged him to move on to more winnable causes.

He refused. He had heard the truth about human dignity — that every person bears the image of God — and he could not unhear it without acting upon it. To know and do nothing, he believed, would make him complicit.

In 1807, the Slave Trade Act finally passed. Wilberforce wept on the floor of the House of Commons.

James writes that those who hear the word but do not act are like people who glance in a mirror and immediately forget what they look like. Wilberforce looked into the mirror of God's truth about human worth and refused to walk away unchanged. He became a doer of the word — not once, but eighteen years running. The question for each of us is simple: what truth have we heard that we have yet to act upon?