Quote

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
Men
Promise
Wistful
Jesus
Clutching
Often
Drowning
True
Vague
Kind
Promises
Believe
Intensity
Really
Enter
Way
Longing

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God does not choose a person for ease and comfort and selfish joy but for a task that will take all that head and heart and hand can bring to it. God chooses a man in order to use him.
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The terrible importance of this life is that it determines eternity.
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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 essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.
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The only way to get our values right is to see, not the beginning, but the end of the way, to see things not only in the light of time but in the light of Eternity.
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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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We have a duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.
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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.
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Strict orthodoxy can cost too much if it has to be bought at the price of love. All the orthodoxy in the world will never take the place of love.
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Prayer will never do our work for us what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.
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In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.
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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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A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.
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Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.
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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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Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.
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True prayer is asking God what He wants.
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Prayer is not flight, prayer is power. Prayer does not deliver a man from some terrible situation prayer enables a man to face and to master the situation.
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If we find ourselves becoming critical of other people we should stop examining them, and start examining ourselves.
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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.
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