Having recently celebrated back-to-back days that cry for
justice, I summon Bethlehem to be coronary, not adrenal, Christians
in the cause of racial harmony and human life. I have in mind
National Sanctity of Human Life Day (as President Bush
proclaimed Sunday, January 20), and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Day on Monday, January 21.

I am glad for adrenaline; I suspect it gets me through lots of
Sundays. But it doesn't do much for Mondays. I am more thankful for
my heart. It just keeps on serving – during good days and bad
days, happy and sad, high and low, appreciated and unappreciated.
It never lets me down. It never says, "I don't like your attitude,
Piper, I'm taking a day off." It just keeps humbly lubb-dubbing
along.

Coronary Christians are like the heart in the causes they serve.
Adrenal Christians are like adrenaline – a spurt of energy
and then fatigue. What we need in the cause of racial justice and
justice for the unborn is coronary Christians. Marathoners, not
just sprinters. People who find the pace to finish the (life-long)
race.

O, for coronary Christians! Christians committed to great
Causes, not great comforts. I pleaded with you to dream a dream
bigger than you and your families and your churches. I tried to
un-deify the American family and say that our children are
not our cause; they are given to us to train for
the great causes of mercy and justice in a prejudiced, pain-filled,
and perishing world.

My blood was boiling on this issue of rugged, never-say-die,
Christian commitment to great causes because I've been brimming
these days with the life of William Wilberforce. Now there was a
coronary Christian in the cause of racial justice. He was
deeply Christian, vibrantly evangelical, and passionately political
in the House of Commons over the long haul in the fight against the
African Slave Trade. On October 28, 1787 he wrote in his diary at
the age of 28, "God Almighty has set before me two great objects,
the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of
[Morals]." Battle after battle in Parliament he was defeated,
because "The Trade" was so much woven into the financial interests
of the nation. But he never gave up and never sat down. He was
coronary, not adrenal.

On February 24, 1807 at 4:00 AM, twenty years later, the
decisive vote was cast (Ayes, 283, Noes, 16) and the Slave Trade
became illegal. The House rose almost to a man and turned towards
Wilberforce in a burst of parliamentary cheers, while the little
man with the curved spine sat, head bowed, tears streaming down his
face (John Pollock, Wilberforce, p. 211).

The coronary Christian, William Wilberforce, never gave up.
There were keys to his relentlessness. The greatness and the
certainty of the rightness of the cause sustained him. Abolishing
the slave trade was "the grand object of my Parliamentary
existence." "Before this great cause," he wrote in 1796, "all
others dwindle in my eyes, and I must say that the
certainty that I am right here, adds greatly to
the complacency with which I exert myself in asserting it. If it
please God to honor me so far, may I be the instrument of stopping
such a course of wickedness and cruelty as never before disgraced a
Christian country" (Pollock, p. 143).

He saw that adrenal spurts would never prevail: "I daily become
more sensible that my work must be affected by constant and regular
exertions rather than by sudden and violent ones." (Pollock, 116).
He had learned the secret of being strengthened, not stopped, by
opposition. One of his adversaries said, "He is blessed with a very
sufficient quantity of that Enthusiastic spirit, which is so far
from yielding that it grows more vigorous from blows" (Pollock, p.
105). Most of all, the secret of his coronary commitment to the
great Cause was his radical allegiance to Jesus Christ.

He prayed – and may this prayer rouse many coronary lovers
of Christ to fight racism and abortion with unwavering perseverance
– "[May God] enable me to have a single eye and a simple
heart, desiring to please God, to do good to my fellow creatures
and to testify my gratitude to my adorable Redeemer" (Pollock, p.
210).

Testifying to gratitude with persevering faith together,

Pastor John