William Barclay Quotes

Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

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.

There are two great days in a person’s life. The day we were born. And the day we discover why. —William Barclay    

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.

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.

Loyalty to Christ may produce a cross on earth, but it brings a crown in eternity.

There are two great days in a person’s life—the day we are born and the day we discover why.” William Barclay I

There are two great days in a person’s life—the day we were born and the day we discover why.” —William Barclay

More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world. —William Barclay

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” —William Barclay

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.

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.

Christianity does not look on this world as one which God very occasionally invades; it looks on it as a world from which he is never absent.

Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy and in constant trouble.

Agape, the Christian word, means unconquerable benevolence. It means that, no matter what people may do to us by way of insult or injury or humiliation, we will never seek anything else but their highest good. It

There is a time when mercy has to be shown. It has to be shown with gracious kindliness, Paul says. It is possible to forgive in such a way that the very forgiveness is an insult. It is possible to forgive and at the same time to demonstrate an attitude of criticism and contempt. If we ever have to forgive a sinner, we must remember that we are fellow sinners. 'There, but for the grace of God, go I,' said the Methodist, George Whitefield, as he saw the criminal walk to the gallows. There is a way of forgiving which pushes people further into the gutter; and there is a way of forgiving them which lifts them out of the mire. Real forgiveness is always based on love and never on superiority.

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.

On the evening of Wednesday, June 22, 1955, there was an official re-election ceremony being held on the open porch behind the Executive Mansion. As usual it was hot and steamy in Monrovia and without air-conditioning the country’s President and several members of his administration were taking in the cooler, but still damp, night air. Without warning, several shots were fired in the direction of the President. In the dark all that could be seen were the bright flashes from a pistol. Two men, William Hutchins, a guard, and Daniel Derrick, a member of the national legislature, fell wounded, but fortunately President Tubman had escaped harm and was hurried back into the building. In the dark no one was certain, but Paul Dunbar was apparently seen by someone in the garden behind the mansion. James Bestman, a presidential security agent, subdued and apprehended the alleged shooter in the Executive Pavilion, best known for its concrete painted animals. It was said that Bestman had used his .38 caliber “Smith and Wesson,” revolver. Members of the opposition party were accused of participating in the assassination plot and a dragnet was immediately cast to round up the alleged perpetrators. It didn’t take long before the son of former President William Coleman, Samuel David Coleman, was indicted, as was his son John. The following day, warrants for the arrest of Former President Barclay, and others in opposition to Tubman, were also issued for allegedly being accomplices. Coleman and his son fled to Clay-Ashland, a township 15 miles north of Monrovia in the St. Paul River District of Montserrado County. Photo Caption: The (former) Liberian Executive Mansion.

An honest assessment of our own capabilities, without conceit and without false modesty, is one of the first essentials of a useful life.

Grant that the voice of our own desires may not be speaking so insistently that we become deaf to your word.

Swete said 278 verses, of a total 404 verses, contain one allusion to an Old Testament passage. William Barclay wrote, "He (John) was so soaked in the Old Testament that it was almost impossible for him to write a paragraph without quoting it." Thus Eugene Peterson declared, "No one has any business reading the last book who has not read the previous sixty-five.

is clear how such a man would feel when news reached him that a child was born who was destined to be king. Herod was troubled, and Jerusalem was troubled, too, for Jerusalem knew well the steps that Herod would take to pin down this story and to eliminate this child. Jerusalem knew Herod, and Jerusalem shivered as it waited for his inevitable reaction. Herod summoned the chief priests and the scribes. The scribes were the experts in Scripture and in the law. The chief priests consisted of two kinds of people. They consisted of ex-high priests. The high priesthood was confined to a very few families. They were the priestly aristocracy, and the members of these select families were called the chief priests.

There is little use in preaching the love of God in words without showing the love of God in action.

face; and the reaper was Martin Luther; and Luther’s friend saw the truth in a flash. ‘I must leave my prayers’, he said, ‘and get to work.’ And so he left his pious solitude and went down to the world to labour in the harvest. It is the dream of Christ that we should all be missionaries and reapers. There are those who cannot do other than pray, because of physical limitations, and their prayers are indeed the strength of the labourers. But that is not the way for most of us, for those of us who have strength of body and health of mind. Not even the giving of our money is enough. If the harvest of men and women is ever to be reaped, then every one of us must be a reaper, for there is someone whom each one of us could – and must – bring to God.

THE WAITING HARVEST Matthew 9:37–8 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is great, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.’ HERE is one of the most characteristic things Jesus ever said. When he and the orthodox religious leaders of his day looked on the crowd of ordinary men and women, they saw them in quite different ways. The Pharisees saw the masses as chaff to be destroyed and burned up; Jesus saw them as a harvest to be reaped and to be saved. The Pharisees in their pride looked for the destruction of sinners; Jesus in love died for the salvation of sinners. But here also is one of the great Christian truths and one of the supreme Christian challenges. That harvest will never be reaped unless there are reapers to reap it. It is one of the blazing truths of Christian faith and life that Jesus Christ needs us. When he was upon this earth, his voice could reach so few. He was never outside Palestine, and there was a world which was waiting. He still wants the world to hear the good news of the gospel; but they will never hear unless others tell them. He wants all men and women to hear the good news; but they will never hear it unless there are those who are prepared to cross the seas and the mountains and bring the good news to them. Nor is prayer enough. Some people might say: ‘I will pray for the coming of Christ’s kingdom every day in life.’ But in this, as in so many things, prayer without

works is dead. Martin Luther had a friend who felt about the Christian faith as he did. The friend was also a monk. They came to an agreement. Luther would go down into the dust and heat of the battle for the Reformation in the world; the friend would stay in the monastery and uphold Luther’s hands in prayer. So they began that way. Then, one night, the friend had a dream. He saw a vast field of corn as big as the world; and one solitary man was seeking to reap it – an impossible and a heartbreaking task. Then he caught a glimpse of the reaper’s

If the word was with God before time began, if God’s word is part of the eternal scheme of things, it means that God was always like Jesus. Sometimes we tend to think of God as stern and avenging; and we tend to think that something Jesus did changed God’s anger into love and altered his attitude to human beings. The New Testament knows nothing of that idea. The whole New Testament tells us, this passage of John especially, that God has always been like Jesus. What Jesus did was to open a window in time that we might see the eternal and unchanging love of God. We may well ask, ‘What then about some of the things that we read in the Old Testament? What about the passages which speak about commandments of God to wipe out whole cities and to destroy men, women and children? What of the anger and the destructiveness and the jealousy of God that we sometimes read of in the older parts of Scripture?’ The answer is this – it is not God who has changed; it is our knowledge of him that has changed. These things were written because people did not know any better; that was the stage which their knowledge of God had reached. When children are learning any subject, they have to learn it stage by stage. They do not begin with full knowledge; they begin with what they can grasp and go on to more and more. When we begin music appreciation, we do not start with a Bach Prelude and Fugue; we start with something much more simple, and progress through stage after stage as our knowledge grows. It was that way with human beings and God. They could only grasp and understand God’s nature and his ways in part. It was only when Jesus came that they saw fully and completely what God has always been like.

It is characteristic of modern outlook that we want quick results.

The commentator William Barclay did a good job giving us the weight of the word. He wrote, “The Greek word for to mourn, used here, is the strongest word for mourning in the Greek language.… It is defined as the kind of grief which takes such a hold that it cannot be hidden. It is not only the sorrow which brings an ache to the heart; it is the sorrow which brings the unrestrainable tears to the eyes.”1 Sure. But where is the blessing in that?

Every Christian must see themselves as the link to the next generation,” writes William Barclay.

Whenever religion becomes a depressing affair of burdens and prohibitions, it ceases to be true religion.

A reverent agnosticism can be on occasion a better evangelism than a religion which knows all the answers.

Jesus is to God as we must be to Jesus.

His voice might be stern, but in the sternness there was still the accent of yearning love; his eyes might flash fire, but the flame was the flame of love.

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.

To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which they can see and know and understand.

Not even God can teach a man who comes to the Bible with his mind made up.

This petition very wisely reminds us of how prayer works. If people prayed this prayer, and then sat back and waited for bread to fall into their hands, they would certainly starve. It reminds us that prayer and work go hand in hand and that when we pray we must go on to work to make our prayers come true. It is true that the living seed comes from God, but it is equally true that it is our task to grow and to cultivate that seed. Dick Sheppard, the famous pacifist and preacher, used to love a certain story. There was a man who had an allotment; he had with great toil reclaimed a piece of ground, clearing away the stones, eradicating the rank growth of weeds, enriching and feeding the ground, until it produced the loveliest flowers and vegetables. One evening he was showing a pious friend around his allotment. The pious friend said: ‘It’s wonderful what God can do with a bit of ground like this, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ said the man who had put in such toil, ‘but you should have seen this bit of ground when God had it to himself!’ God’s bounty and human toil must combine. Prayer, like faith, without works is dead. When we pray this petition, we are recognizing two basic truths – that without God we can do nothing, and that without our effort and co-operation God can do nothing for us.

Jesus was wise: Jesus knew the human heart; and Jesus knew well that if the man did not follow him at that precise moment, he never would. Again and again, there come to us moments of impulse when we are moved to the higher things; and again and again, we let them pass without acting upon them. The tragedy of life is so often the tragedy of the unseized moment. We are moved to some fine action, we are moved to the abandoning of some weakness or habit, we are moved to say something to someone, some word of sympathy, or warning, or encouragement; but the moment passes, and the thing is never done, the evil thing is never conquered, the word is never spoken. In the best of us, there is a certain lethargy and inertia; there is a certain habit of procrastination, there is a certain fear and indecision; and often the moment of fine impulse is never turned into action and into fact. Jesus was saying to this man: ‘You are feeling at the moment that you must get out of that dead society in which you move; you say you will get out when the years have passed and your father has died; get out now – or you will never get out at all.

But the Mountain of Transfiguration is given to us only to provide strength for the daily ministry and to enable us to walk the way of the cross. Susanna Wesley, the mother of John and Charles Wesley, had a prayer: ‘Help me, Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I am in thy presence.’ The moment of glory does not exist for its own sake; it exists to clothe the common things with a radiance they never had before.

what Jesus is saying is: ‘I am setting you a hard task, and I am sending you out on a very difficult engagement. But I am going to send you someone, the paraklētos, who will guide you as to what to do and enable you to do it.

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

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.

Here is the death of human pride. Beside the glory of Christ, all human titles are of no importance and all human claims become ridiculous.

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

The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man. and the limitless kindness of God. WILLIAM BARCLAY

His point was, just because something was embraced in large numbers did not necessarily make it lowbrow. Barclay, Linwood. A Noise Downstairs: A Novel (Kindle Locations 409-410). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

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” William Barclay

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.

The anthropocentric version of the God of Christianity will not avail. . . . Instead emerges a new hero, a new messiah, a new superman. He will seek to weld all together in a terrible act of unbelievable affirmation beyond the limits of common human desire, beyond common hope. He will free himself through the ancient acts of violation — fornication, incest, rape. . . . His name is the Rev. Dr. Arthur Barclay.

He will be the cause whereby many will rise. Long ago Seneca said that what people needed above all was a hand let down to lift them up. It is the hand of Jesus which lifts us out of the old life and into the new, out of the sin into the goodness, out of the shame into the glory.

The first servant owed his master 10,000 talents – and a talent was the equivalent of fifteen years’ wages. That is an incredible debt. It was more than the total budget of the ordinary province. The total revenue of the province which contained Idumaea, Judaea and Samaria was only 600 talents; the total revenue of even a wealthy province like Galilee was only 300 talents. Against that background, this debt is staggering. It was this that the servant was forgiven. The debt which a fellow servant owed him was a trifling thing; it was 100 denarii, and a denarius was the usual day’s wage for a working man. It was therefore a mere fraction of his own debt. The biblical scholar A. R. S. Kennedy drew this vivid picture to contrast the debts. Suppose they were paid in small coins (he suggested sixpences; we might think in terms of 5-pence pieces or dimes). The 100-denarii debt could be carried in one pocket. The 10,000-talent debt would take an army of about 8,600 carriers to carry it, each carrying a sack of coins 60 lb in weight; and they would form, at a distance of a yard apart, a line five miles long! The contrast between the debts is staggering. The point is that nothing that others can do to us can in any way compare with what we have done to God; and if God has forgiven us the debt we owe to him, we must forgive our neighbours the debts they owe to us. Nothing that we have to forgive can even faintly or remotely compare with what we have been forgiven. As A. M. Toplady’s great hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ has it: Not the labours of my hands Can fulfil thy law’s demands; Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow, All for sin could not atone.

We may take it into the sphere of the home. One of the earliest interpretations of this saying of Jesus was that the two or three are father, mother and child, and that it means that Jesus is there, the unseen guest in every home. There are those who never give of their best except on the so-called great occasion; but, for Jesus Christ, every occasion where even two or three are gathered in his name is a great occasion.