Top 40 Stephen Charnock Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

2. “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!”

— Stephen Charnock

3. “Since nothing but God is eternal, nothing but God is worth the loving.”

— Stephen Charnock

4. “Without the heart it is no worship. It is a stage play. It is an acting of a part without being that person, really. It is playing the hypocrite.”

— Stephen Charnock

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

— Stephen Charnock

6. “God knows all that is done in the most secret caverns of the heart. No place is deprived of his presence.”

— Stephen Charnock

7. “Pride is self contending with God for preeminence.”

— Stephen Charnock

8. “Our ignorance of God is too great, because our estimations of God are too little.”

— Stephen Charnock

9. “Assurance is the fruit that grows out of the root of faith.”

— Stephen Charnock

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

— Stephen Charnock

11. “Unbelief was the first sin, and pride was the first-born of it.”

— Stephen Charnock

12. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

13. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

14. “The little time that remains between this moment and our death, should quicken our diligence to inherit the endless and unchangeable eternity of God.”

— Stephen Charnock

15. “A man may be theologically knowing and spiritually ignorant.”

— Stephen Charnock

16. “Regeneration is a spiritual change; conversion is a spiritual motion.”

— Stephen Charnock

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

— Stephen Charnock

18. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

19. “How worthy it is to remember former benefits when we come to beg for new.”

— Stephen Charnock

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

— Stephen Charnock

21. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

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

— Stephen Charnock

23. “Adoption gives us the privilege of sons, regeneration the nature of sons.”

— Stephen Charnock

24. “Without the heart it’s not worship, it’s a stage play.”

— Stephen Charnock

25. “A proud faith is as much a contradiction as a humble devil.”

— Stephen Charnock

26. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

27. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

28. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

29. “In natures, we see God, as it were, like the sun in a picture; in the law, as the sun in a cloud; in Christ we see Him in His beams; He being ’the brightness of His glory, and the exact image of His person.”

— Stephen Charnock

30. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

31. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

32. “Paul was so much taken with Christ, that nothing sweeter than Jesus could drop from his lips and pen.”

— Stephen Charnock

33. “All the world, every creature. He put no difference between men in this respect, though you meet with them in the likeness of beasts, and devils never so wicked, never so abominable; as long as they are creatures, reach out the cup of salvation to them, if they will drink; open the treasures of grace to them, if they will receive them; agree with them for nothing but faith for justification, and profession of it for their salvation.”

— Stephen Charnock

34. “Antiquity hath, too, too often bewitched the minds of men, and drawn them from the revealed will of God. Men are more willing to imitate the outward actions of their famous ancestors, than conform themselves to the revealed will of their Creator.”

— Stephen Charnock

35. “All worship is shot wrong that is not directed to, and conducted by, the thoughts of the power of God, whose assistance we need.”

— Stephen Charnock

36. “The great objection of a penitent is, I have sinned, and I know not whether God will receive me: consider, God knows your sin better than you do, yet he kindly calls to you, and promises you as good a reception as if you had never sinned.”

— Stephen Charnock

37. “Sin endeavors to subject the blessed God to the humor and lust of every person in the world.”

— Stephen Charnock

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

— Stephen Charnock

39. “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.”

— Stephen Charnock

40. “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!”

— Stephen Charnock

41. “We must first believe that he is, and that he is what he declares himself to be, before we can seek him, adore him, and devote our affections to him.13 We cannot pay God a due and regular homage, unless we understand him in his perfections, what he is; and we can pay him no homage at all, unless we believe that he is.”

— Stephen Charnock