William Barclay Quotes

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.

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

It is characteristic of modern outlook that we want quick results.

So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.

The Christian is a [person] of joy ... A gloomy Christian is a contradiction of terms, and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its connection with black clothes and long faces.

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.

Christianity does not think of man finally submitting to the power of God, it thinks of Him as finally surrendering to the love of God. It is not that man's will is crushed, but that man's heart is broken.

Self-defense is a part of the law of nature;
nor can it be denied the community,
even against the king himself.

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

Jesus promised his disciples three things - that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

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.

His voice might be stern, but in the sternness there was still the accent of yearning love; his eyes might flash fire, but the flame was the flame 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.

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

To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which they can see and know and understand.

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.

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.

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.

Not even God can teach a man who comes to the Bible with his mind made up.

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

If we are to accept the teaching of Jesus at all, then the only test of the reality of a man's religion is his attitude to his fellow men. The only possible proof that a man loves God is the demonstrated fact that he loves his fellow men.

More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.

Even if we are separated from people, and even if there is no other gift which we can give to them, we can surround them with the strength and the defence of our prayers.

Here is an eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved ... The fact is that God does not need to be invited into certain departments of life, and kept out of others. He is everywhere, all through life and in every activity of life. He hears not only the words that are spoken in his name; he hears all words; and there cannot be any such thing as a form of words which evades bringing God into any transaction. We will regard all promises as sacred if we remember that all promises are made in the presence of God.

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

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

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

One of the highest of human duties is the duty of encouragement ... It is easy to laugh at men's ideals; it is easy to pour cold water on their enthusiasm; it is easy to discourage others. The world is full of discouragers. We have a Christian duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.

True prayer is asking God what He wants.

But in one thing I would go beyond strict orthodoxy - I am a convinced universalist. I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God.

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.

God does not choose a person for ease and comfort and selfish joy but for a task that will take all that head and heart and hand can bring to it. God chooses a man in order to use him.

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.

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.

For Paul, the centre of the Christian faith was that we can never earn or deserve the favour of God, nor do we need to. The whole matter is one of grace, and all that we can do is to accept in wondering love and gratitude and trust what God has done for us.

I thank you for my friends, for those who understand me better than I understand myself. For those who know me at my worst, and still like me. For those who have forgiven me when I had no right to expect to be forgiven. Help me to be as true to my friends as I would wish them to be to me.

Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.

Faith in God is the instrument which enables men and women to remove the hills of difficulty which block their path.

The people who get the best out of others are those who insist on seeing them at their best.

Faith is not only a commitment to the promises of Christ; faith is also a commitment to the demands of Christ.

It may well be a sign of the decadence of the Church and the failure of Christianity that gifts have to be coaxed out of people, and that often they will not give at all unless they get something for their money in the way of entertainment or of goods. Giving which is real giving has a certain recklessness in it.

So long as we judge ourselves by human comparisons, there is plenty of room for self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction kills faith, for faith is born of the sense of need. But when we compare ourselves with Jesus Christ, and through Him, with God, we are humbled to the dust, and then faith is born, for there is nothing left to do but to trust to the mercy of God.

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

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.

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

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

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.