WILLIAM BARCLAY

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.

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.

When we love anyone with our whole hearts, life begins when we are with that person; it is only in their company that we are really and truly alive.

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.

God himself took this human flesh upon him.

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

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

For the Christian, heaven is where Jesus is. We do not need to speculate on what heaven will be like. It is enough to know that we will be for ever with Him.

We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.

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.

But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more.

A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.

When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.

The awful importance of this life is that it determines eternity.

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

In the way of Christ the reward of work well done is more work to do.

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

Timothy's great value was that he was always willing to go anywhere; and in his hands a message was as safe as if Paul had delivered it himself. Others might be consumed with selfish ambition; but Timothy's one desire was to serve Paul and Jesus Christ. He is the patron saint of all those who are quite content with the second place, so long as they can serve.

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

Every discouraging sermon is a wicked sermon... There could hardly be a more un-Christian way of living than to go about in such a way as to depress and to discourage other people.

Certainly Christianity is an experience, but equally clearly the validity of ane experience has to be tested. There are people in lunatic asylums who have the experience of being the Emperor Napoleon or a poached egg. It is unquestionably an experience, and to them a real experience, but for all that it has no kind of universal validity. It is necessary to go far beyond simply saying that something comes from experience. Before any such thing can be evaluated at all, the source and character of the experience must clearly be investigated.

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.

So long as we judge ourselves by human comparisons, there is plenty of room for self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction kills faith, for faith is born of the sense of need. But when we compare ourselves with Jesus Christ, and through Him, with God, we are humbled to the dust, and then faith is born, for there is nothing left to do but to trust to the mercy of God.

A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.

When we accept Christ we enter into three new relationships: (1) We enter into a new relationship with God. The judge becomes the father; the distant becomes the near; strangeness becomes intimacy and fear becomes love. (2) We enter into a new relationship with our fellow men. Hatred becomes love; selfishness becomes service; and bitterness becomes forgiveness. (3) We enter into a new relationship with ourselves. Weakness becomes strength; frustration becomes achievement; and tension becomes peace.