Samuel Rutherford (1600 – 1661)
Scottish Presbyterian theologian and author.
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.
My desire is that my Lord would give me broader and deeper thoughts, to feed myself with wondering at His love.
Take Christ in with you under your yoke, and let patience have her perfect work.
I find my Lord Jesus cometh not in the precise way that I lay wait for Him. He hath a manner of His own. Oh, how high are His ways above my ways
Christ, in that place He hath put you, hath intrusted you with a dear pledge, which is His own glory, and hath armed you with His sword to keep the pledge, and make a good account of it to God.
It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us.
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.
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.
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.
Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love hath neither brim nor bottom.
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.
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.
Build your nest upon no tree here, for ye see that God hath sold the forest to death.
Make not Christ a liar in distrusting His promise.
How soon would faith freeze without a cross!
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."
There is nothing that will make you a Christian indeed, but a taste of the sweetness of Christ.
If ye never had a sick night and a pained soul for sin, ye have not yet lighted upon Christ.
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.
Welcome, welcome, cross of Christ, if Christ be with it.