Mistress,--Grace, mercy and peace be to you.--I hope ye know what conditions passed betwixt Christ and you, at your first meeting. Ye remember that He said, your summer days would have clouds, and your rose a prickly thorn beside it. Christ is unmixed in heaven, all sweetness and honey. Here we have Him with His thorny and rough cross; yet I know no tree that beareth sweeter fruit than Christ's cross, except I would raise a lying report of it. It is your part to take Christ's cross, as He is to be had in this life. Sufferings are like a wood planted round about His house, over door and window. If we could hold fast our grips of Him, the field were won. Yet a little while, and Christ shall triumph. Give Christ His own short time to spin out these two long threads of heaven and hell to all mankind, for certainly the thread will not break; and when He hath accomplished His work in Mount Zion, and hath refined His silver, He will bring new vessels out of the furnace, and plenish His house, and take up His house again.
I counsel you to free yourself of clogging temptations, by overcoming some and contemning others, and watching over all. Abide true and loyal to Christ, for few now are fast to Him. They give Christ blank paper for a bond of service and attendance, now when Christ hath most ado. To waste a little blood with Christ, and to put our part of this drossy world in pawn over in His hand, as willing to quit it for Him, is the safest cabinet to keep the world in. But those who would take the world and all their flitting on their back, and run away from Christ, shall fall by the way, and leave their burden behind them, and be taken captive themselves. Well were my soul to have put all I have, life and soul over to Christ's hands. Let Him be forthcoming for all.
If any do ask how I do? I answer none but can be but well that are in christ: and if I were not so, my sufferings had melted me away in ashes and smoke. I thank my Lord that He hath something in me that His fire cannot consume. [A letter by Samuel Rutherford]
Labels: Samuel Rutherford
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