Quotes from Samuel Rutherford

Your rock doth not ebb and flow, but your sea.

The thorn is one of the most cursed and angry and crabbed weeds that the earth yields, and yet out of it springs the rose, one of the sweetest smelled flowers, and most delightful to the eye.

Christ hath come, and run away to heaven with my heart and my love, so that neither heart nor love is mine.

T]hose who can take that crabbed tree handsomely upon their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship.

do not faint; the wicked may hold the bitter cup to your head, but God mixeth it, and there is no poison in it. They strike, but God moves the rod; Shimei curseth, but it is because the Lord bids him.

Go on, and faint not, something of yours is in heaven, beside the flesh of your exalted Saviour, and ye go on after your own.

When I look over beyond the line and beyond death, to the laughing side of the world, I triumph, and ride upon the high places of Jacob: howbeit, otherways I am a faint, deadhearted, cowardly man, oft borne down and hungry in waiting for the marriage supper of the Lamb. Nevertheless, I think it the Lord's wise love that feeds us with hunger, and makes us fat with wants and desertion.

urge upon you . . . a nearer communion with Christ and a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn by in Christ that we never saw, and new foldings of love in Him. I despair that ever I shall win to the far end of that love, there are so many plies in it; therefore dig deep, and sweat, and labour, and take pains for Him, and set by so much time in the day for Him as you can: He will be won with labour.

I find my Lord Jesus cometh not in that precise way that I lay wait for him; he hath a gate [road] of his own.

Dry wells send us to the fountain.

the import of the book was that even the king must obey the law, because the king is also under the law.

We love to carry heaven to heaven with us, and would have two summers in one year, and no less than two heavens; but this will not be for us: one, and such an one, may suffice us well enough. The Man Christ got but one only, and shall we have two?

However matters go, it is our happiness to win new ground daily in Christ's love, and to purchase a new piece of it daily, and to add conquest to conquest, till our Lord Jesus and we be so near each other, that Satan shall not draw a straw or a thread betwixt us.

Rutherford held that the people were the "fountain-power" of political authority, and that they were the ones who delegated this authority to the magistrates. He also demonstrated that when such authority was abused, the people had the authority to rescind that delegation.

How soon will some few years pass away, and then when the day is ended, and this life's lease expired, what have men of the world's glory, but dreams and thoughts? O happy soul for evermore, who can rightly compare this life with that long-lasting life to come, and can balance the weighty glory of the one with the light golden vanity of the other.

As our dear Husband, in wooing his [church], received many a black stroke, so his bride, in wooing him, gets many blows, and in this wooing there are strokes upon both sides

You will not be carried to Heaven lying at ease upon a feather bed.

My desire is that my Lord would give me broader and deeper thoughts, to feed myself with wondering at His love.

Build your nest in no tree here...for the Lord of the forest has condemned the whole woods to be demolished.

Grace will ever speak for itself and be fruitful in well-doing; the sanctified, cross is a fruitful tree.

Grow as a palm-tree on God's Mount Zion; howbeit shaken with winds, yet the root is fast.

Those who can take that crabbed tree handsomely upon their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship.

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

We are as near to heaven as we are far from self, and far from the love of a sinful world.