Quotes by 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. 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 Gods 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.”

“The desire is thy prayers; and if thy desire is without ceasing, thy prayer will also be without ceasing. The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are two great days in a persons life -- the day we are born and the day we discover why.”

“When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a fathers hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.”

“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. . . .”

“It has always been fairly safe to talk about God; it is when we start to talk about men that the trouble starts. And yet the fact remains that there is no conceivable way of proving that we love God other than by loving men. And there is no conceivable way of proving that we love men than by doing something for those who most need help.”

“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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

Joy has nothing to do with material things or with a mans outward circumstance ... a man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy.

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.

When we believe that God is Father we also believe that such a fathers hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better but we will not resent life any longer.

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

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.

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