William Barclay born in Wick, Scotland was a Scottish author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister, and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow. He wrote a popular set of Bible commentaries on the New Testament that sold 1.5 million copies.
The 17 volumes of the set were all best-sellers and continue to be so to this day. A companion set giving a similar treatment to the Old Testament was endorsed but not written by Barclay. In 2008 Saint Andrew Press began taking the content of the New Daily Study Bibles and producing pocket-sized thematic titles called Insights. The Insights books are introduced by contemporary authors, broadcasters and scholars, including Nick Baines and Diane-Louise Jordan.
Barclay wrote many other popular books, always drawing on scholarship but written in a highly accessible style. In The Mind of Jesus he states that his aim was “to make the figure of Jesus more vividly alive, so that we may know him better and love him more”.
On Life:
The awful importance of this life is that it determines eternity.
We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.
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.
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.
It has always been fairly safe to talk about God; it is when we start to talk about men that the trouble starts. And yet the fact remains that there is no conceivable way of proving that we love God other than by loving men. And there is no conceivable way of proving that we love men than by doing something for those who most need help.
Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.
Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.
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.
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.
On Christianity:
When a man undergoes treatment from a doctor, he does not need to know the way in which the drug works on his body in order to be cured. There is a sense in which Christianity is like that. At the heart of Christianity there is a mystery, but it is not the mystery of intellectual appreciation it, the mystery of redemption.
We may not understand how the spirit works but the effect of the spirit on the lives of men is there for all to see and the only unanswerable argument for Christianity is a Christian life. No man can disregard a religion and a faith and a power which is able to make bad men good. . .
The Christian is called upon to be the partner of God in the work of the conversion of men.
We are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way, it is both in the traveling and in the goal, the way of joy.
Christianity is unquestionably a personal experience. It is also unquestionably not a private experience.
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.
On Jesus Christ:
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.
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.
On Love:
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.