Inspirational Quotes by William Barclay
“Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
“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.”
― William Barclay ,
“Loyalty to Christ may produce a cross on earth, but it brings a crown in eternity.”
“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 ,
“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.”
― 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.”
topics: Apathy
“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.”
topics: Believing
“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.”
topics: Believing
“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.”
topics: Christians
“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.”
topics: Doubt
“Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”
topics: Endurance
“Covetousness is therefore, a sin with a very wide range. If it is the desire for money, it leads to theft. If it is the desire for prestige, it leads to evil ambition. If it is the desire for power, it leads to sadistic tyranny. If it is the desire for a person, it leads to sexual sin.”
topics: Envy
“A reverent agnosticism can be on occasion a better evangelism than a religion which knows all the answers.”
― William Barclay ,
“Grant that the voice of our own desires may not be speaking so insistently that we become deaf to your word.”
― William Barclay ,
from Barclay Prayer Book
“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.”
“Whenever religion becomes a depressing affair of burdens and prohibitions, it ceases to be true religion.”
Group of Brands
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William Barclay was an author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow.
While professor, he decided to dedicate his life to "making the best biblical scholarship available to the average reader". The eventual result was the Daily Study Bible, a set of 17 commentaries on the New Testament, published by Saint Andrew Press, the Church of Scotland's publishing house.
The 17 volumes of the set were all best-sellers and continue to be so to this day. Barclay wrote many other popular books, always drawing on scholarship but written in a highly accessible style.