Stephen Charnock (1628–27 July 1680), Puritan divine, was an English Puritan Presbyterian clergyman born at the St Katherine Cree parish of London.
Frequently renew settled and holy resolutions. A soldier unresolved to fight may be easily defeated. . . The weakness of our graces, the strength of our temptations, and the diligence of our spiritual enemies, require strong resolutions.
Unbelief was the first sin, and pride was the first-born of it.
Assurance is the fruit that grows out of the root of faith.
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.
All the prayers in the Scripture you will find to be reasoning with God, not a multitude of words heaped together.
Accustom yourself to serious meditation every morning. Fresh airing our souls in heaven will engender in us a purer spirit and nobler thoughts. A morning seasoning will secure us for all the day.
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.
When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us rather than that we had been made for Him.
Adoption gives us the privilege of sons, regeneration the nature of sons.
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.
Our ignorance of God is too great, because our estimations of God are too little.
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.
Power is God's hand or arm, omniscience is God's eye, mercy is God's delight, eternity is God's duration, but holiness is God's 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.
Regeneration is a spiritual change; conversion is a spiritual motion.
Without the heart it’s not worship, it’s a stage play.
A man may be theologically knowing and spiritually ignorant.
Works make not the heart good, but a good heart makes the works good.
Let us not satisfy ourselves with a knowledge of God in the mass; a glance upon a picture never directs you to the discerning the worth and art of it.
We often learn more of God under the rod that strikes us than under the staff that comforts us.