Quotes from 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.

Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Give me a hundred men who fear nothing but God, and who hate nothing but sin, and who know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified, and I will shake the world.

Jesus is to God as we must be to Jesus.