Samuel Rutherford (1600 – 1661)
Scottish Presbyterian theologian and author.
Make not Christ a liar in distrusting His promise.
Ye have lost a child — nay, she is not lost to you, who is found to Christ; she is not sent away, but only sent before; like unto a star, which going out of our sight, doth not die and vanish, but shineth in another hemisphere.
I know that as night and shadows are good for flowers, and moonlight and dews are better than a continual sun, so is Christ's absence of special use, and that it hath some nourishing virtue in it, and giveth sap to humility, and putteth an edge on hunger, and furnisheth a fair field for faith to put forth itself.
In our fluctuations of feeling, it is well to remember that Jesus admits no change in His affections; your heart is not the compass Jesus saileth by.
Be not cast down. If ye saw Him who is standing on the shore, holding out His arms to welcome you to land, ye would wade, not only through a sea of wrongs, but through hell itself to be with Him.
Grow as a palm-tree on God's Mount Zion; howbeit shaken with winds, yet the root is fast.
Welcome, welcome, cross of Christ, if Christ be with it.
I pray God that I may never find my will again. Oh, that Christ would subject my will to His, and trample it under His feet.
If ye never had a sick night and a pained soul for sin, ye have not yet lighted upon Christ.
There is nothing that will make you a Christian indeed, but a taste of the sweetness of Christ.
When ye are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore ot glorious eternity, and look back again to the waters and to your wearisome journey, and shall see in that clear glass of endless glory, nearer to the bottom of God's wisdom, ye shall then be forced to say, " If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoyment of this crown of glory."
How soon would faith freeze without a cross!
Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.
Build your nest upon no tree here, for ye see that God hath sold the forest to death.
Dearest wife, let us go on and faint not; something of ours is in heaven besides the flesh of our exalted Saviour, and we go on after our own.
It is no small comfort that God hath written some Scriptures to you which He hath not to others. Read these, and think God is like a friend who sendeth a letter to a whole house and family, but who speaketh in His letter to some by name that are dearest to Him in the house.
Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love hath neither brim nor bottom.
You must take a house beside the Physician. It will be a miracle if ye be the first sick that Christ hath put away uncured.
There is nothing left to us but to see how we may be approved of Him, and how we may roll the weight of our weak souls in well-doing upon Him, who is God omnipotent.
It is certain that this is not only good which the Almighty has done, but that it is best; He hath reckoned all your steps to heaven.