Quotes from William Barclay

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.

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.

The Christian man must aim at that complete obedience to God in which life finds its highest happiness, its greatest good, its perfect consummation, its peace.

Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.

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

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.

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.

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.

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

Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.

But in one thing I would go beyond strict orthodoxy - I am a convinced universalist. I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God.

For Paul, the centre of the Christian faith was that we can never earn or deserve the favour of God, nor do we need to. The whole matter is one of grace, and all that we can do is to accept in wondering love and gratitude and trust what God has done for us.

Even if we are separated from people, and even if there is no other gift which we can give to them, we can surround them with the strength and the defence of our prayers.

Loyalty to Christ may produce a cross on earth, but it brings a crown in eternity.

The glory of God is not that of a despotic tyrant, but the splendour of love before which we fall not in abject terror but lost in wonder, love and praise.

The people who get the best out of others are those who insist on seeing them at their best.

Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy and in constant trouble.

Grant that the voice of our own desires may not be speaking so insistently that we become deaf to your word.

Christianity does not look on this world as one which God very occasionally invades; it looks on it as a world from which he is never absent.

There is little use in preaching the love of God in words without showing the love of God in action.

An honest assessment of our own capabilities, without conceit and without false modesty, is one of the first essentials of a useful life.

To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which they can see and know and understand.

His voice might be stern, but in the sternness there was still the accent of yearning love; his eyes might flash fire, but the flame was the flame of love.

It is one of the strange facts of church life that, in official church gatherings such as sessions and presbyteries and even General Assemblies, a great many hours might be given to the discussion of mundane problems of administration for every one hour given to the discussion of the eternal truths of God.