William Barclay
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.Collection: Easter
There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.Collection: Birthday
Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.Collection: Religion
Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.Collection: Strength
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.
God himself took this human flesh upon him.
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.
A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the highest of human duties is the duty of encouragement...It is easy to laugh at men's ideals; it is easy to pour cold water on their enthusiasm; it is easy to discourage others. The world is full of discouragers. We have a Christian 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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Prayer
If we find ourselves becoming critical of other people we should stop examining them, and start examining ourselves.Collection: People
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.Collection: Heart
The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence.Collection: Independence
Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us.Collection: Prayer
A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.Collection: Inspirational Life
More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.Collection: Christian
There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.Collection: Joy
The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.Collection: Spiritual
Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come.Collection: Christian
The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is never to forget the presence of Christ.Collection: Way
Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Temptation
True prayer is asking God what He wants.Collection: Prayer
I thank you for my friends, for those who understand me better than I understand myself. For those who know me at my worst, and still like me. For those who have forgiven me when I had no right to expect to be forgiven. Help me to be as true to my friends as I would wish them to be to me.Collection: Friendship
Faith is not only commitment to the promises of Christ; it is also commitment to his demands.Collection: Commitment
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.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Inspirational
It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Jesus
We are trying not so much to make God listen to us as to make ourselves listen to him; we are trying not to persuade God to do what we want, but to find out what he wants us to do. It so often happens that in prayer we are really saying, 'Thy will be changed,' when we ought to be saying, 'Thy will be done.' The first object of prayer is not so much to speak to God as to listen to him.Collection: Prayer
The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.Collection: Son
To repent means to realize that the kind of life we are living is wrong and that we must adopt a completely new set of values. To that end, it involves two things. It involves sorrow for what we have been and it involves the resolve that by the grace of God we will be changed.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Christian
Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Selfish
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.Collection: Christian
The greatest thing is a life of obedience in the routine things of everyday life. No amount of fine feeling can take the place of faithful doing.Collection: Life
Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.Collection: Jesus
The terrible importance of this life is that it determines eternity.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Appreciation
The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.Collection: Men