Faith & Spirit Quote by Samuel Rutherford

Samuel Rutherford, the 17th-century Scottish pastor and theologian, speaks from a life shaped by exile, controversy, and pastoral care. The counsel is simple and bracing: do not count it harsh when your plans fail or pleasures are withheld, because God aims to teach a truer joy that rests in Him alone. The older phrasing Think it not hard means do not regard it as severe. Rutherford assumes that frustration and loss are not random misfortunes but instruments of providence, prying the heart loose from fragile attachments.

Your will names the impulse to control outcomes; your delights points to comforts, honors, and satisfactions that easily become ultimate. Rutherford does not deny that these are good in their place; he warns that they are unsafe as foundations. God, he suggests, sometimes closes doors and empties hands not out of cruelty but mercy, redirecting desire toward the one good that cannot be taken away. The move is not stoic suppression of feeling but a reordering of love. Joy rooted in God can survive seasons that would otherwise undo us, because its source is not contingent.

Rutherford wrote many of his most searching lines while banished from his congregation, stripped of pulpit and home. That context lights the sentence from within. Exile became an altar where he learned the sufficiency of Christ and taught others to do the same. The pastoral edge cuts against modern habits of self-sovereignty and consumer promise: when life does not yield to our will, the result need not be bitterness. It can become a school of freedom, where earthly gifts are received gratefully yet held lightly. Disappointed desires then serve as diagnosis and cure, exposing misplaced joys and guiding the soul back to the Giver. To rejoice in nothing but God is not to despise the world, but to place it correctly, so that joy is deep, steady, and finally unthreatened.