Quotes from Eric Metaxas

in his mercy, had allowed Wilberforce to see himself as he truly was, and it was crushing. But Wilberforce knew God didn't mean to end there. On the other side of the worst of who he was, if he dared face that worst, was a God who would help him overcome his faults and do great things, the very things for which he had created him. It was not too late.

One cannot demand "the truth" at any cost, and for this girl to admit in front of the class that her father is a drunkard is to dishonor him. How one tells the truth depends on circumstances.

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

That too seems unnecessarily severe, but we mustn't judge too harshly, for those who have gone through anything like a dramatic conversion usually stagger a bit too far in one direction before they correct their course and learn where the best forward path lies.

But since logic dictates that God could have saved the Israelites from Pharaoh's army in an infinity of ways, and in ways infinitely subtler than parting the Red Sea, it is obvious that he didn't part the Red Sea to save the Israelites as much as he parted the Red Sea to communicate himself to the Israelites.

It is hoped and believed," he famously wrote, "that the Lord has raised you up for the good of His church and for the good of the nation.

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's decision to remain in politics made the transfer of Christian ideas into the previously "secular" realm of society possible for generations of Christians to follow.

They understood that freedom was not merely the freedom to be left alone; it was the freedom to do what was right.

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.

History comprises the subjective accounts of human beings; and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an "objective" truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective.

The suppression of the Slave Trade and the reformation of manners.