William Barclay Quotes
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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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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.
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Jesus’ coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Faith is not only commitment to the promises of Christ; it is also commitment to his demands.
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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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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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There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.
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The terrible importance of this life is that it determines eternity.
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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.
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Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself.
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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.
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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.
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It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced.
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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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Self-defense is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself.
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A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.
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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.
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Faith in God is the instrument which enables men and women to remove the hills of difficulty which block their path.
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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.
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The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence.
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The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.