The Breadth and Width of Salvation

I've been reading over this short Christmas—New Years vacation at Hays. One of the books I've been working on is Who Will be Saved? by Will Willimon. He's been making the argument (as I understand it) that God not only desires the salvation of all, but that God will perhaps achieve the salvation of all—"our eternal destiny isn't over until God says it's over, until God gets as much a victory as God wants." (Willimon, 67) I've always struggled with universalism (the proposition that in the end all will be saved), both because I believe that God respects human freedom, including the freedom to say "no" to God's offer of salvation in Jesus Christ, and because the Bible makes so many references to the existence of hell. I once amused a fellow seminarian by bluntly stating that I would like to be a universalist, but that Jesus talks about hell way to often for me to believe that. However, I was really struck by the following from Willimon as a recommended course of action:

To deny universal salvation as implication and possibility, as hope and desire, is to limit and to restrict the power and grace of God. To assert with absolute certainty universal salvation is to restrict the freedom and grace of God. Still, we may, indeed we ought, to hope and pray and to work for what we hope. (Willimon, 66)

I've never believed that everyone will be saved, but I've never doubted that saving all is God's ultimate desire and will, therefore it naturally follows that we should align our hopes with God's will and work for what we hope. As Willimon wrote earlier in the same chapter:

One reason why the church flags in its evangelistic drive is its mediocre soteriology. When God's great 'Yes' degenerates into a constrained 'perhaps,' there is little urgency to tell the world. (Willimon, 60)

As a church and as individuals, we need to regain our sense of urgency.

Update: A clarification, it's not that I don't like the idea universalism, it's that I don't believe in it. I believe that there are people who repeatedly and continually say no to God's will being done in their lives and their selves and that in the end God accepts this no.