32 Stephen Charnock Quotes

Assurance is the fruit that grows out of the root of faith.

All the prayers in the Scripture you will find to be reasoning with God, not a multitude of words heaped together.

It is a sad thing to be Christians at a supper, heathens in our shops, and devils in our closets.

In regard of God, patience is a submission to His sovereignty. To endure a trial, simply because we cannot avoid or resist it, is not Christian patience. But to humbly submit because it is the will of God to inflict the trial, to be silent because the sovereignty of God orders it - is true godly patience.

How comfortable it is to have One, day and night, before the throne to control the charge of our enemy, and the despondencies of our souls.

Without the heart it is not worship; it is a stage play; an acting a part without being that person really a hypocrite. We may truly be said to worship God-though we lack perfection; but we cannot be said to worship Him if we lack sincerity.

Self is the great antichrist and anti-God in the world, that sets up itself above all else.

A proud faith is as much a contradiction as a humble devil.

What a curious workmanship is that of the eye, which is in the body, as the sun in the world; set in the head as in a watch-tower, having the softest nerves for receiving the greater multitude of spirits necessary for the act of vision!

We often learn more of God under the rod that strikes us than under the staff that comforts us.

A man may be theologically knowing and spiritually ignorant.

He [Christ] foresees all the ambushes of Satan, searches into his intention, understands his strategies, and is as ready to speak to the Father for us, as He was to turn back and look Peter into a recovery at the crowing of the cock.

Providence would seem to sleep unless faith and prayer awaken it. The disciples had but little faith in their Master's accounts, yet that little faith awakened him in a storm, and he relieved them. Unbelief doth only discourage God from showing his power in taking our parts.

It is the black work of an ungodly man or an atheist that God is not in all his thoughts. What comfort can be had in the being of God without thinking of him with reverence and delight? A God forgotten is as good as no God to us.

It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God. He that saith God is not holy speaks much worse that he that saith there is no God at all.

This boundless desire had not its original from man itself; nothing would render itself restless; something above the bounds of this world implanted those desires after a higher good, and made him restless in everything else. And since the soul can only rest is something infinite, there is something infinite for it to rest in.

Now what greater comfort is there than this, that there is one presides in the world who is so wise he cannot be mistaken, so faithful he cannot deceive, so pitiful he cannot neglect his people, and so powerful that he can make stones even to be turned into bread if he please!

If every attribute of the Deity were a distinct member, holiness would be the soul to animate them. Without holiness His patience would be an indulgence to sin, His mercy a fondness, His wrath a madness, His power a tyranny, His wisdom an unworthy subtlety. Holiness gives decorum to them all.

Since nothing but God is eternal, nothing but God is worth the loving.

The Devil accuses us when we fall, but he has not so much on his side as we have.

When we believe that we ought to be satisfied, rather than God glorified, we set God below ourselves, imagine that He should submit His own honor to our advantage; we make ourselves more glorious than God, as though we were not made for Him, but He made for us; this is to have a very low esteem of the majesty of God.

Satan has no merit of his own to enter as plea for vengeance.

No man is an unbeliever, but because he will be so; and every man is not an unbeliever, because the grace of God conquers some, changes their wills, and binds them to Christ.

Without faith we are not fit to desire mercy, without humility we are not fit to receive it, without affection we are not fit to value it, without sincerity we are not fit to improve it. Times of extremity contribute to the growth and exercise of these qualifications.

Had it been published by a voice from heaven, that twelve poor men, taken out of boats and creeks, without any help of learning, should conquer the world to the cross, it might have been thought an illusion against all reason of men; yet we know it was undertaken and accomplished by them.

God doth not govern the world only by his will as an absolute monarch, but by his wisdom and goodness as a tender father. It is not his greatest pleasure to show his sovereign power, or his inconceivable wisdom, but his immense goodness, to which he makes the other attributes subservient.

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.

We may be truly said to worship God, though we lack perfection; but we cannot be said to worship Him if we lack sincerity.

Works make not the heart good, but a good heart makes the works good.

To pretend to homage to God, and intend only the advantage of self, is rather to mock Him than worship Him.

This little member can behold the earth, and in a moment view things as high as heaven.

Since therefore all things are ordered in subserviency to the good of man, they are so ordered by Him that made both man and them.