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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.

William Barclay

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William Barclay
Age: 70 †
Born: 1907
Born: December 5
Died: 1978
Died: January 24
Author
Classical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Wick
Highland
True
Vague
Kind
Promises
Believe
Intensity
Really
Enter
Way
Longing
Men
Promise
Wistful
Jesus
Clutching
Often
Drowning

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Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come.
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There are certain things which are lost by being kept and saved by being used. Any individual talent is like that. If it is used, it will develop into something still greater. If someone refuses to use it, in the end that talent will be lost. Supremely so, life is like that.
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Jesus’ coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.
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True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.
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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.
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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.
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There is only one way to bring peace to the heart, joy to the mind, and beauty to the life it is to accept and do the will of God.
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The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love. The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by God and in love with God.
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Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.
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The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.
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There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.
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It may well be a sign of the decadence of the Church and the failure of Christianity that gifts have to be coaxed out of people, and that often they will not give at all unless they get something for their money in the way of entertainment or of goods. Giving which is real giving has a certain recklessness in it.
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The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.
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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.
William Barclay
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It may well be that the world is denied miracle after miracle and triumph after triumph because we will not bring to Christ what we have and what we are. If, just as we are, we would lay ourselves on the altar of service of Jesus Christ, there is no saying what Christ could do with us and through us.
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Christianity does not think of man finally submitting to the power of God, it thinks of Him as finally surrendering to the love of God. It is not that man's will is crushed, but that man's heart is broken.
William Barclay
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True prayer is asking God what He wants.
William Barclay
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We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.
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It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God's voice to us we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him.
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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.
William Barclay