Everyone Needs It…Give It… Encouragement
Pastor Claude Thomas
Author: Pastor Claude Thomas
Everyone needs encouragement and inspiration. In his book In the Arena, former president Richard Nixon described his depression following his resignation from the White House and his undergoing surgery. At one point when he was in the hospital, he told his wife Pat he wanted to die. When he was at about his lowest time a nurse came to the room and opened the drapes. She pointed to a small plane that was flying back and forth overhead. It was pulling a sign that read: God Loves You, and So Do We.
Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth, arranged for the plane to fly by the hospital. That is when Nixon experienced a turning point. One of history’s great inspirations was John Wesley. He wrote a letter to William Wilberforce who was in the midst of fighting against slave trade in Britain.
London, February 26, 1791
Dear Sir:
Unless the divine power has raised you up… I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise, in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But “if God be for you, who can be against you?” Are all of them stronger than God? O “be not weary in well doing!” Go in, in the name of God and the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it…
That He who has guided you from your youth up, may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of,
Your affectionate servant,
J. Wesley
Four days later, Wesley died. But that letter became an inspiration to Wilberforce. He kept up the fight until the slave trade was abolished in 1807. Then several months after Wilberforce’s death, slavery was outlawed in all of the British Empire.
Maybe there is a Wilberforce in your life just waiting to be encouraged by you!
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