In Jesus there is counsel and remedy for all our sins. Wherein the love of God consists.
The Thirty-Seventh Letter.
In Jesus there is counsel and remedy for all our sins. Wherein the love of God consists.
Beloved friend!
Your little letter has been right welcome to me, for in it I saw your sincere disposition — still gladly willing to follow the Lord Jesus: this God alone has put into your heart; to Him be the honor for it! May He preserve that disposition in you for ever!
You do indeed also make mention of your sins and miseries, which surely make a partition-wall between God and us. But because I know Jesus a little, it fares with me, when I read or hear such a thing, just as it does with practiced physicians when some common illness comes before them: they are untroubled; they have remedies for it that do not fail. See, so I too say: Jesus knows counsel and remedy enough for it; only show Him all your wounds with a weeping heart, entreat Him in humility and trust for His mighty healing, and that He would heal you thoroughly from the ground up — which cannot happen, unless He must sometimes make the wounds quite large, through a deep feeling of all sins, miseries, and darknesses: and yet all this is well meant, and is done out of hearty love, that you might hereafter — yea, in eternity — feel no more distress. Meanwhile, strive only to walk simply in His love; whoever loves much, to him many sins are forgiven. But know that this is not properly love, when one feels something so lovely from God, or when everything in Christianity falls so easy and merry for one. This is indeed good, and a gift of God; but to love is properly this: when one so heartily and gladly wishes to please God in all things, in the best way. Now see, God is so very near to your heart, and would gladly have essential communion with you; do but believe it simply! But that this dear Savior may help you to this communion, He tells you — mediately, and also in your heart — how you must set about it: namely, that you must enter into the ways of self-denial and of the cross, and must ever be praying. Thus, then, the love of God consists in this: that you — with the aim and on the ground that, because you would so gladly please this worthy Savior in all things in the best way, you therefore, for love and praise of Him, deny yourself, and surrender to Him your dearest and your best; that you, to please Him, pray much; that, to please Him, you do and suffer all that comes to you the whole day long; and that, to please Him, you strive to enter into His mind — which, among other places, stands expressed in Phil. 2:5 and 8, and Heb. 12:2. Thus shall be fulfilled in you, in His time, what Jesus says: "Whoever loves me (and no other can do it) will keep my word, and my Father will love him" — (that the soul itself shall also feel and experience it powerfully; yet it will not stop there, but rather) — "we will come to him, and make our dwelling with him."
That the Lord may fulfill such in us — wishes, together with hearty greeting also to your parents,
Your well-disposed friend.
German
Der siebenunddreißigste Brief.
Bei JEsu ist Rath und Mittel für alle unsere Sünden. Worin die Liebe GOttes bestehet.
Geliebte Freundin!
Dein Briefchen ist mir recht angenehm gewesen, weil ich darin gesehen deinen aufrichtigen Sinn, dem HErrn JEsu noch gerne zu wollen nachfolgen: Das hat dir GOtt allein ins Herz gegeben, Ihm sey dafür die Ehre!
— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.
German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).
Translator’s notes
What this letter is. A tender pastoral letter to a woman friend who has written of being troubled by her own "sins and miseries" — which, she feels, "make a partition-wall between God and us." Tersteegen answers with a physician's calm. "Because I know Jesus a little," he says, hearing of such sins is to him what a "common illness" is to "practiced physicians": they are "untroubled; they have remedies for it that do not fail." His counsel is direct and gentle — "only show Him all thy wounds with a weeping heart," and ask Him to "heal thee thoroughly from the ground up," even if that means He must "sometimes make the wounds quite large" through a deeper sense of sin, since "all this is well meant, and is done out of hearty love." From there the letter opens into its great theme: what the love of God actually is. It is not, he insists, the felt sweetness of religion — "when one feels something so lovely from God, or when everything in Christianity falls so easy and merry." That is "a gift of God," but not love itself. To love "is properly this: when one so heartily and gladly wishes to please God in all things." He spells out what that looks like — self-denial, surrender of "thy dearest and thy best," much prayer, bearing "all that comes to thee the whole day long" — and closes by weaving Christ's own promise through his words: "Whoever loves me… will keep my word, and my Father will love him… we will come to him, and make our dwelling with him."
A few words and echoes.
- Jesus the physician of souls. The letter's governing image: Christ as the experienced doctor for whom no spiritual "illness" is alarming, holding "remedies that do not fail." It reframes her fear of her own sin as something the physician has seen a thousand times.
- The wounds made large. His hardest and most striking note — that healing "from the ground up" may require God to deepen the felt wound of sin before curing it — is offered not as severity but as love with a long view: "that thou mightest hereafter… feel no more distress."
- What love really is. The heart of the letter: love for God is not a feeling but a will — "so heartily and gladly to please God in all things." Warm emotion is welcome, "a gift of God," but it is not to be mistaken for love itself.
- The partition-wall. Her image of sin as a wall between the soul and God echoes Paul's language of the "middle wall of partition" (Ephesians 2:14) — which, in the letter's logic, the physician-Saviour is exactly the one to take down.
- "We will make our dwelling with him." The close leans on Christ's promise in John 14:23 — that the one who keeps His word will be indwelt by the Father and the Son — the "essential communion" the whole letter is drawing her toward.
trans. Jarred Fenlason · gerhardtersteegen.com/letters/bdi-thi-037 · all rights reservedEnglish translation © Jarred Fenlason · All rights reserved · gerhardtersteegen.com.