William Barclay Quotes

There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.

Prayer is not flight, prayer is power. Prayer does not deliver a man from some terrible situation; prayer enables a man to face and to master the situation.

Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.

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

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

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.

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

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.

True prayer is asking God what He wants.

Faith is not only commitment to the promises of Christ; it is also commitment to his demands.

A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.

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.

It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced.

For the Christian, heaven is where Jesus is. We do not need to speculate on what heaven will be like. It is enough to know that we will be for ever with 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 word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.

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

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

...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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The only way to get our values right is to see, not the beginning, but the end of the way, to see things not only in the light of time but in the light of Eternity.

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.

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

We have a 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.

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

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.

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.

God himself took this human flesh upon him.

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

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.

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

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

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.

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

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.

Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.