Do you ever have doubts about your relationship with Jesus?
Have you ever tried to help someone who does?
Pastor Samuel Rutherford gives some surprising counsel in this letter.
Aberdeen, 1637
Dear Brother,
Ye complain that ye want a mark of the sound work of grace and love in your soul. For answer, consider for your satisfaction (till God send more) I John 3.14. And as for your complaint of deadness and doubting, Christ will, I hope, take your deadness and you together.
They are bodies full of holes, running boils, and broken bones which need mending, that Christ the Physician taketh up; whole vessels are not for the Mediator Christ’s art. Publicans, sinners, whores, harlots, are ready market-wares for Christ. The only thing that will bring sinners within a cast of Christ’s drawing arm is that which ye write of, some feeling of death and sin.
The more pain, and the more night-watching, and the more fevers, the better. A soul bleeding to death, till Christ were sent for, and cried for in all haste, to come and stem the blood, and close up the hole in the wound with His own heart and balm, were a very good disease, when many are dying of a whole heart.
Pray for me, that the Lord would help me to hold a candle to this dark world. — Grace, grace be with you.
Samuel Rutherford