There is a new film making its way to screens, hoping to introduce a fresh generation to a man many have forgotten. His name was William Wilberforce, and more than two hundred years ago he gave the better part of his life to a single cause: the end of the slave trade in the British Empire. What caught my attention was not only the history but the reason the filmmakers keep returning to him. It was his faith. Wilberforce came to a living encounter with Christ as a young man, and that encounter reorganized everything.
What I love about telling his story now is that it reminds us of something we too easily forget in a world of instant results. Wilberforce did not win overnight. He introduced his bill to Parliament, and it was defeated. He introduced it again, and it was defeated again. Year after year after year. The final abolition came only days before his death. That is not a highlight reel. That is a long obedience.
The temptation to grow weary
Most of us know something about laboring toward a good thing that stubbornly refuses to arrive. Maybe you have prayed for a wandering child for a decade. Maybe you have shown up faithfully to a hard marriage, a hard job, a hard diagnosis. Maybe you have served quietly in a ministry no one applauds. And somewhere along the way a whisper starts up in the back of your mind: What is the point? Nothing is changing. Give up.
Paul knew that whisper. He wrote to the churches in Galatia, hat doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up\that sa promise wrapped inside a warning. The harvest is coming. But there is a proper time, and it is usually not our time. In between the sowing and the reaping is the long stretch where weariness does its work.
God works on a farmer's clock
I have lived in West Michigan long enough to watch the farmers around Ravenna go about their year. No one who plants corn in the spring goes stomping through the field in June demanding to know why there is no harvest yet. The waiting is built into the growing. The seed is doing something underground that the eye cannot see.
The Christian life runs on that same clock. James put it plainly: Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord\the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains\the wait was not empty. It was full ull of a work God was doing in him and in a nation, a work that would not be hurried.
The Spirit sustains the long haul
Here is where I want to encourage you, because perseverance is not a matter of gritting your teeth harder. Wilberforce did not grind out forty years on sheer willpower. He was carried. The same Holy Spirit who first opened his heart kept feeding it hrough Scripture, through the friends who prayed with him, through fresh mercies that arrived just when he was ready to quit.
That Spirit is not a relic of the eighteenth century. He is present in this room, in your kitchen, in the car where you cry out on the drive home. I have watched Him do it at Outpouring Worship Center enew a tired saint right in the middle of worship, put steel back in someone\a weary heart. Ask Him. That is not too small a thing to bring to God.
A word for the one still waiting
And if you have prayed long and the answer has not come, hear me gently: your labor is not lost, and God is not disappointed in you. The harvest belongs to Him, and His timing is kinder than it feels. Wilberforce died before he could enjoy the fruit ut the fruit came. Jesus Himself endured the cross \the joy set before Him," trusting the Father with the outcome.
So keep sowing the good seed. Keep showing up. Keep praying the prayer you are tired of praying. The One who began a good work in you is faithful, and He has never once abandoned a field He was tending. The harvest is coming at the proper time.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.