William Barclay Quotes

God himself took this human flesh upon him.

There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.

The Christian is called upon to be the partner of God in the work of the conversion of men.

We reverence God and we hallow God's name when our life is such that it brings honor to God and attracts others to Him.

A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.

Every discouraging sermon is a wicked sermon... There could hardly be a more un-Christian way of living than to go about in such a way as to depress and to discourage other people.

When we love anyone with our whole hearts, life begins when we are with that person; it is only in their company that we are really and truly alive.

Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.

Certainly Christianity is an experience, but equally clearly the validity of ane experience has to be tested. There are people in lunatic asylums who have the experience of being the Emperor Napoleon or a poached egg. It is unquestionably an experience, and to them a real experience, but for all that it has no kind of universal validity. It is necessary to go far beyond simply saying that something comes from experience. Before any such thing can be evaluated at all, the source and character of the experience must clearly be investigated.

God tested Abraham. Temptation is not meant to make us fail; it is meant to confront us with a situation out of which we emerge stronger than we were. Temptation is not the penalty of manhood; it is the glory of manhood.

It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God's voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him.

We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.

The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is never to forget the presence of Christ.

To repent means to realize that the kind of life we are living is wrong and that we must adopt a completely new set of values. To that end, it involves two things. It involves sorrow for what we have been and it involves the resolve that by the grace of God we will be changed.

The Christian man must aim at that complete obedience to God in which life finds its highest happiness, its greatest good, its perfect consummation, its peace.

True prayer is asking God what He wants.

If we find ourselves becoming critical of other people we should stop examining them, and start examining ourselves.

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

There are certain things which are lost by being kept and saved by being used. Any individual talent is like that. If it is used, it will develop into something still greater. If someone refuses to use it, in the end that talent will be lost. Supremely so, life is like that.

The terrible importance of this life is that it determines eternity.

The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence.

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.

In the way of Christ the reward of work well done is more work to do.

There is only one way to bring peace to the heart, joy to the mind, and beauty to the life; it is to accept and do the will of God.

We are trying not so much to make God listen to us as to make ourselves listen to him; we are trying not to persuade God to do what we want, but to find out what he wants us to do. It so often happens that in prayer we are really saying, 'Thy will be changed,' when we ought to be saying, 'Thy will be done.' The first object of prayer is not so much to speak to God as to listen to him.

When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.

In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.

Timothy's great value was that he was always willing to go anywhere; and in his hands a message was as safe as if Paul had delivered it himself. Others might be consumed with selfish ambition; but Timothy's one desire was to serve Paul and Jesus Christ. He is the patron saint of all those who are quite content with the second place, so long as they can serve.

There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble, and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger.

Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself.

True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.

But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more

Strict orthodoxy can cost too much if it has to be bought at the price of love. All the orthodoxy in the world will never take the place of love.

When we accept Christ we enter into three new relationships: (1) We enter into a new relationship with God. The judge becomes the father; the distant becomes the near; strangeness becomes intimacy and fear becomes love. (2) We enter into a new relationship with our fellow men. Hatred becomes love; selfishness becomes service; and bitterness becomes forgiveness. (3) We enter into a new relationship with ourselves. Weakness becomes strength; frustration becomes achievement; and tension becomes peace.

...for Paul faith is always faith in a person. Faith is not the intellectual acceptance of a body of doctrine; faith is faith in a person.

Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.

Jesus was clear that He had come, not to make life easy, but to make men great.

It may well be that the world is denied miracle after miracle and triumph after triumph because we will not bring to Christ what we have and what we are. If, just as we are, we would lay ourselves on the altar of service of Jesus Christ, there is no saying what Christ could do with us and through us.

Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come.

A saint is someone whose life makes it easier to believe in God.

Jesus’ coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.

The simple fact is that the World is too busy to give the Holy Spirit a chance to enter in.

The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love. The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by God and in love with God.

The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.

Love always involves responsibility, and love always involves sacrifice. And we do not really love Christ unless we are prepared to face His task and to take up His Cross.

The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.

The greatest thing is a life of obedience in the routine things of everyday life. No amount of fine feeling can take the place of faithful doing.