William Barclay Quotes
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God himself took this human flesh upon him.
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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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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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Faith is not only commitment to the promises of Christ; it is also commitment to his demands.
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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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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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There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.
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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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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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It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced.
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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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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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Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself.
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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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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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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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The terrible importance of this life is that it determines eternity.
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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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A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.
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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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The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.
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The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence.
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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.