William Wilberforce and the Long Campaign

For twenty years, William Wilberforce stood before the British Parliament and lost. Year after year, from 1787 onward, he introduced bills to abolish the slave trade. Year after year, wealthy merchants, indifferent politicians, and entrenched interests voted him down. His health deteriorated. Friends urged him to quit. Critics mocked his persistence as naive idealism.

But Wilberforce had planted his seed in the soil of conviction, and he refused to pull it up simply because the harvest was delayed. He wrote letters. He gathered evidence. He built alliances one conversation at a time. When Parliament rejected his bill in 1791 by a vote of 163 to 88, he told a friend, "We shall press on." When it failed again in 1793, and again in 1797, he returned to his desk and kept working.

James writes, "Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord's coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains." He then points to the prophets as models — those who spoke in the name of the Lord and endured.

Wilberforce was such a man. In 1807, after two decades of faithful labor, Parliament finally passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by an overwhelming margin.

The Almighty does not waste a single season of patient obedience. The harvest comes — not on our schedule, but on His.