The Young Politician Who Almost Walked Away

In 1785, William Wilberforce sat across from the aging John Newton in a London parlor, convinced he needed to leave Parliament and enter the clergy. At twenty-five, Wilberforce had experienced a profound spiritual awakening, and the restlessness in his soul felt unmistakable. Surely God was calling him out of politics and into the pulpit. He had come to Newton — the former slave trader turned hymn writer — expecting confirmation.

Newton gave him the opposite.

The old minister listened carefully, then told the young MP that God might be calling him to something he had not yet imagined. Stay in Parliament, Newton urged. The voice stirring his conscience was not pulling him away from public life but driving him deeper into it. There was work to be done that only someone in his position could accomplish.

Wilberforce almost missed it. He heard the call three times over — in his conversion, in his growing moral conviction, in his anguish over the slave trade — but he kept misidentifying the source. He thought it was guilt. He thought it was piety. He thought it meant ordination. It took a weathered spiritual mentor to say what Eli finally said to Samuel: "It is the Lord. Go back and listen."

Wilberforce returned to his seat in the House of Commons and spent the next forty-six years answering that call, dismantling the British slave trade one vote at a time.

Sometimes we hear God's voice clearly but run to the wrong room. We need an Eli — someone further down the road of faith — to help us recognize who is actually speaking and what He is asking us to do.