More Excerpts from Rutherford

Be content, ye are his wheat growing in our Lord's field. And if wheat, ye must go under our Lord's threshing instrument, in his barn-floor, and through his sieve, and through his mill to be bruised, as the Prince of your salvation, Jesus was (Isa. 53:9), that ye may be found good bread in your Lord's house.

Dry wells send us to the fountain.

Now would to God, all cold-blooded, faint-hearted soldiers of Christ would look again to Jesus and to his love; and when they look, I would have them to look again and again, and fill themselves with beholding of Christ's beauty; and I dare say then, that Christ should come in great court and request with many.

No pen, no words, no image can express to you the loveliness of my only, only Lord Jesus.

- Samuel Rutherford, The Loveliness of Christ

Parting, only to Meet Again in Christ

He is not lost to you who is found to Christ. If he hath casten his bloom and flower, the bloom is fallen in heaven in Christ's lap; and as he was lent awhile to time, so is he given now to eternity, which will take yourself; and the difference of your shipping and his to heaven and Christ's shore, the land of life, is only in some few years, which weareth every day shorter, and some short and soon reckoned summers will give you a meeting with him.

Fall down and make a surrender of those that are gone, and these that are yet alive, to him. And for you, let him have all; and wait for himself, for he will come and will not tarry. Live by faith... He cannot die whose ye are.

Passing Pain & Eternal Glory

The sea-sick passenger shall come to land; Christ will be the first that will meet you on the shore.

I pray you learn to be worthy of his pains who correcteth; and let him wring, and be ye washed; for he hath a Father's heart, and a Father's hand, who is training you up, and making you meet for the high hall.

One year's time of heaven shall swallow up all sorrows, even beyond all comparison.

Christ is as full a feast as ye can have to hunger.

- Samuel Rutherford, The Loveliness of Christ

Glimpses of Glory

Our love to him should begin on earth, as it shall be in heaven; for the bride taketh not by a thousand degrees so much delight in her wedding-garment as she doth in her bridegroom; so we, in the life to come, howbeit clothed with glory as with a robe, shall not be so much affected with the glory that goeth about us, as with the Bridegroom's joyful face and presence.

Christ's love, under a veil is love; if ye get Christ, howbeit not the sweet and pleasant way you would have him, it is enough, for the Well-Beloved cometh not our way.

I hope ye are not ignorant, that if peace was left to you in Christ's testament, so the other half of the testament was a legacy of Christ's sufferings (John 16:33).

- Samuel Rutherford, The loveliness of Christ

The Infinite Christ & Eternal Glory

Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love hath neither brim nor bottom.

When we shall come home and enter to the possession of our Brother's fair kingdom, and when our heads shall find the weight of the eternal crown of glory, and when we shall look back to pains and sufferings; then shall we see life and sorrow to be less than one step or stride from prison to glory; and that our little inch of time - suffering is not worthy of our first night's welcome home to heaven.

- Samuel Rutherford, The Loveliness of Christ