Quotes about Perseverance

We may only imagine the scene, the old man, the rough ex—sea captain who had so loved little Wilberforce as a boy, and who had entertained such hopes for him, only to see them dashed.

if it be a work of grace, it cannot fail.

Wilberforce wrote some years later that it was as if he'd been all those years in a dream from which at last now he had been awakened.

Although I know full well and hear every day that many people think little of me and say that I only write little pamphlets and sermons in German for the uneducated laity, I do not let that stop me. Would to God that in my lifetime I had, to my fullest ability, helped one layman to be better!

All right," he wrote, "if [the devil] devours me he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet? One has to suffer if he wants to possess Christ."

God was interested not in success, but in obedience. If one obeyed God and was willing to suffer defeat and whatever else came one's way, God would show a kind of success that the world couldn't imagine. But this was the narrow path, and few would take it.

Wilberforce's time at Cambridge over two hundred years ago sounds extraordinarily like the experience of many college students today.

Anyone who perseveres in his sin receives judgement. The church cannot loose the penitent from sin without arresting and binding the impenitent in sin.

Wilberforce could put her at ease. Some, he writes to her, "are thrown into public, some have their lot in private life…. It would merit no better name than desertion…if I were thus to fly from the post where Providence has placed me.

The only fight which is lost is that which we give up.

Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.