William Barclay Quotes
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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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Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come.
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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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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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Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself.
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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.
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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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Faith is not only commitment to the promises of Christ; it is also commitment to his demands.
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Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.
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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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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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It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced.
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Jesus’ coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.
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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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In the way of Christ the reward of work well done is more work to do.
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A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.