Inspirational Quotes by 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.”

“Jesus is to God as we must be to Jesus.”

“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 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.”

“If the word was with God before time began, if God’s word is part of the eternal scheme of things, it means that God . Sometimes we tend to think of God as stern and avenging; and we tend to think that something Jesus did changed God’s anger into love and altered his attitude to human beings. The New Testament knows nothing of that idea. The whole New Testament tells us, this passage of John especially, that God has always been like Jesus. What Jesus did was to open a window in time that we might see the eternal and unchanging love of God. We may well ask, ‘What then about some of the things that we read in the Old Testament? What about the passages which speak about commandments of God to wipe out whole cities and to destroy men, women and children? What of the anger and the destructiveness and the jealousy of God that we sometimes read of in the older parts of Scripture?’ The answer is this – it is not God who has changed; it is our knowledge of him that has changed. These things were written because people did not know any better; that was the stage which their knowledge of God had reached. When children are learning any subject, they have to learn it stage by stage. They do not begin with full knowledge; they begin with what they can grasp and go on to more and more. When we begin music appreciation, we do not start with a Bach Prelude and Fugue; we start with something much more simple, and progress through stage after stage as our knowledge grows. It was that way with human beings and God. They could only grasp and understand God’s nature and his ways in part. It was only when Jesus came that they saw fully and completely what God has been like.”

“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.”

“Here is the death of human pride. Beside the glory of Christ, all human titles are of no importance and all human claims become ridiculous.”

“If all the other noble qualities of life were placed in the balance against it, loyalty would outweigh them all.”

“It is characteristic of modern outlook that we want quick results.”

“His very use of parables shows that it was his conviction that the things of this world can lead a man’s thoughts direct to God, if he will only see.”

“Whenever religion becomes a depressing affair of burdens and prohibitions, it ceases to be true religion.”

“Jesus insisted that the greatest ritual service is the service of human need. It is an odd thing to think that, with the possible exception of that day in the synagogue at Nazareth, we have no evidence that Jesus ever conducted a ‘church’ service in all his life on earth, but we have abundant evidence that he fed the hungry and comforted the sad and cared for the sick. Christian service is not the service of any liturgy or ritual; it is the service of human need. Christian service is not monastic retreat; it is involvement in all the tragedies and problems and demands of the human situation.”

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

“A reverent agnosticism can be on occasion a better evangelism than a religion which knows all the answers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”