Yesterday I watched a movie about William Wilberforce, the man who in the early 1800 spent many years trying to get a bill to end the slave trade through the British Parliament.  The force of Wilberforce’s example and lifestyle moved me so deeply that I wept through much of the movie.  (It’s called Amazing Grace.)

Wilberforce was driven by an inner, deeply passionate, yearning force to make a major difference with his life.  Here’s how he described it:

“No one has the right to do nothing.  We all have a great eternal work that we are called to accomplish; eternity demands that we use this short and precarious life as well as we can.  But aside from that, in a world as needy as ours, surely health and leisure and financial wealth should be able to find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress,  some want to supply, some misery to alleviate.  Won’t ambition and greed ever go to sleep in our hearts?  Will we never run out of things to want?  We are so quick to discover new things to desire, so eager to pursue them; why can’t we be as hungry to find use in our lives for a Christlike spirit of love?”

The force that consumed Wilberforce with a Christlike spirit of love was his intimate relationship with the living, resurrected Jesus Christ — his Christimacy.  Wilberforce wrote an amazing book called Real Christianity comparing genuine, all-consuming, lifestyle-transforming Christianity (Christimacy) with the passive acknowledgement of the shallow religion of Christendom.  (Everybody should read his book and/or see the movie Amazing Grace and get a taste of the Wilberforce force.)

So what is your great eternal work?  The specifics may vary from person to person, but the foundation of the work that we are all on earth to perform consists of 3 things:

1) Get to know, follow and obey the living, resurrected Jesus Christ as closely as possible — 24/7/365.

2) Win within.  Surrender every wrongful thought, desire, habit, and deed to God and fight desperately for the rest of your life to overcome them all.

3) Spread passionate love for Christ and the desire and freedom to follow and obey him to every person possible using every means possible.  Live it loudly and courageously and shout it from the housetops, Facebook, social media, and every other platform possible.

Time is short.  We must get on with it or our life will be gone and it will be too late!