William Barclay Quotes
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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.
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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.
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A saint is someone whose life makes it easier to believe in God.
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A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.
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The simple fact is that the World is too busy to give the Holy Spirit a chance to enter in.
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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.
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True prayer is asking God what He wants.
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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.
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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.
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True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.
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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.
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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.
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We are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way, it is both in the traveling and in the goal, the way of joy.
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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.
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There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.
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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.
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More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.
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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.