William Barclay Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

True prayer is asking God what He wants.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.

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

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.