William Barclay Quotes & Sayings

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

The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

Jesus' coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible. — William Barclay

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

Jesus was clear that He had come, not to make life easy, but to make men great. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is never to forget the presence of Christ. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

One of the highest of human duties is the duty of encouragement ... It is easy to laugh at men's ideals; it is easy to pour cold water on their enthusiasm; it is easy to discourage others. The world is full of discouragers. We have a Christian duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word. — William Barclay

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach. — William Barclay

We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away. — William Barclay

Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought. — William Barclay

In the way of Christ the reward of work well done is more work to do. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

Self-defense is a part of the law of nature;
nor can it be denied the community,
even against the king himself. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer. — William Barclay

A saint is someone whose life makes it easier to believe in God. — William Barclay

Real repentance means that a man has come, not only to be sorry for the consequences of his sin, but to hate sin itself. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

Timothy's great value was that he was always willing to go anywhere; and in his hands a message was as safe as if Paul had delivered it himself. Others might be consumed with selfish ambition; but Timothy's one desire was to serve Paul and Jesus Christ. He is the patron saint of all those who are quite content with the second place, so long as they can serve. — William Barclay

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

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. — William Barclay

When we accept Christ we enter into three new relationships: (1) We enter into a new relationship with God. The judge becomes the father; the distant becomes the near; strangeness becomes intimacy and fear becomes love. (2) We enter into a new relationship with our fellow men. Hatred becomes love; selfishness becomes service; and bitterness becomes forgiveness. (3) We enter into a new relationship with ourselves. Weakness becomes strength; frustration becomes achievement; and tension becomes peace. — William Barclay

The awful importance of this life is that it determines eternity. — William Barclay

Faith is not only a commitment to the promises of Christ; faith is also a commitment to the demands of Christ. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

So long as we judge ourselves by human comparisons, there is plenty of room for self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction kills faith, for faith is born of the sense of need. But when we compare ourselves with Jesus Christ, and through Him, with God, we are humbled to the dust, and then faith is born, for there is nothing left to do but to trust to the mercy of God. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more. — William Barclay

A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing. — William Barclay

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

It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so. — William Barclay

True prayer is asking God what He wants. — William Barclay

More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

The simple fact is that the World is too busy to give the Holy Spirit a chance to enter in. — William Barclay

We may not understand how the spirit works; but the effect of the spirit on the lives of men is there for all to see; and the only unanswerable argument for Christianity is a Christian life. No man can disregard a religion and a faith and a power which is able to make bad men good ... — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life. — William Barclay

Not even God can teach a man who comes to the Bible with his mind made up. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

Here is an eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved ... The fact is that God does not need to be invited into certain departments of life, and kept out of others. He is everywhere, all through life and in every activity of life. He hears not only the words that are spoken in his name; he hears all words; and there cannot be any such thing as a form of words which evades bringing God into any transaction. We will regard all promises as sacred if we remember that all promises are made in the presence of God. — William Barclay

For Paul faith is always faith in a person. Faith is not the intellectual acceptance of a body of doctrine; faith is faith in a person. — William Barclay

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

The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

God himself took this human flesh upon him. — William Barclay

We are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way, it is both in the traveling and in the goal, the way of joy. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

Faith in God is the instrument which enables men and women to remove the hills of difficulty which block their path. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

Strict orthodoxy can cost too much if it has to be bought at the price of love. All the orthodoxy in the world will never take the place of love. — William Barclay

It is characteristic of modern outlook that we want quick results. — William Barclay

Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come. — William Barclay

It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced. — William Barclay

The Christian is called upon to be the partner of God in the work of the conversion of men. — William Barclay

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

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. — 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. — William Barclay

Jesus is the yes to every promise of God. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ. — William Barclay

The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

If we find ourselves becoming critical of other people we should stop examining them, and start examining ourselves. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

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. — William Barclay

God tested Abraham. Temptation is not meant to make us fail; it is meant to confront us with a situation out of which we emerge stronger than we were. Temptation is not the penalty of manhood; it is the glory of manhood. — William Barclay

Christianity is unquestionably a personal experience. It is also unquestionably not a private experience. — William Barclay