Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.