William Barclay Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.

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.

The terrible importance of this life is that it determines eternity.

The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.

We have a 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.

Real repentance means coming not only to be sorry for the consequences of sin but to hate sin itself.

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.

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

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.

Certainly Christianity is an experience, but equally clearly the validity of ane experience has to be tested. There are people in lunatic asylums who have the experience of being the Emperor Napoleon or a poached egg. It is unquestionably an experience, and to them a real experience, but for all that it has no kind of universal validity. It is necessary to go far beyond simply saying that something comes from experience. Before any such thing can be evaluated at all, the source and character of the experience must clearly be investigated.

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

...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.

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.

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