Faith & Spirit Quote by Samuel Rutherford

Rutherford’s sentence is a cold shower delivered as comfort: stop expecting life to cooperate, because the point of your disappointments is to retrain your appetite. The phrasing is telling. “Think it not hard” doesn’t deny pain; it disciplines perception. He’s not offering a technique for getting your “will” later, or a motivational promise that deprivation builds character. He’s issuing a theological reframe where unmet desires are not random misfortune but directed pedagogy.

The subtext is sharper than modern self-help piety. Rutherford treats “delights” with suspicion, as if pleasure is never neutral but always recruiting your loyalty. When he says God “will have you,” it lands with the uncompromising agency of a sovereign: your emotional life is contested territory, and heaven’s aim is exclusivity. “Rejoice in nothing but himself” isn’t a call to joy-plus-God; it’s joy-as-God, a demand that even legitimate consolations become secondary or suspect.

Context matters: Rutherford wrote from within the turbulence of 17th-century Scottish Presbyterian conflict, and he himself knew exile, political loss, and the instability of public life. In that world, the promise of control was fantasy; suffering wasn’t an edge case, it was the weather. The quote works because it refuses to romanticize that weather while still assigning it meaning. It’s spiritual austerity with a pastoral edge: if your delights keep getting taken, maybe they were never meant to be your anchor.