Letters · Erster Band · Theil I (1773)

To the same. An exhortation to join in drinking from Jesus' cup of suffering.

Bd I · Th I · Brief 65 · Der fünfundsechzigste Brief

Addressee — "Liebe Schwester!" — the same sister addressed in Brief 64 ("An eben dieselbe"); an intimate letter (du), written to console her in her sufferings.
Date — none explicit (adjacent to Brief 64).
Provenance — Translated from the public-domain 1773 first edition (Theil I, pp. 166–167), in GS 1845 orthography, collated against the 1845 Gesammelte Schriften and Hartman's 1819 reprint. All public-domain.

The Sixty-Fifth Letter.

To the same. An exhortation to join in drinking from Jesus' cup of suffering.

Dear Sister!

With much compassion I now hear of your sufferings. May Jesus strengthen you! May Jesus refresh you! And yet our sufferings too are but a suffering-with Jesus — our wisely measured portion, allotted to us in love, of that wholesome cup which He hath drunk before us and pledged across to us, and which He would still drink daily with us, and we with Him, as we shall and gladly will. Now then, take heart! set to it once more in the name of the Lord! He knoweth how He is to prepare us. Be of good cheer, my sister! be untroubled! Guard yourself against all legal reasonings, all unrest and anxiousness! Shut your eye to yourself, and to everything that can disturb you. Sink yourself down, as a little child, into the sweet grace, and let your trust in the little child Jesus be without bounds and wholly blind. He careth for you; He will enfold you; and this too He will Himself work. Amen!

Sweet and sour, joy and sorrow — all is good that Jesus doth. Only lie still within the cradle, and trust yourself to His keeping.

Yours, a bounden, weak fellow-companion on Golgotha.

❦

German

Der fünfundsechzigste Brief.

An eben dieselbe. Ermahnung, mit aus dem Leidensbecher JEsu, zu trinken.

Liebe Schwester!

Mit vielem Mitleiden höre ich jetzt von deinen Leiden. JEsus stärke!

— 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 short, tender letter to a suffering sister — the companion to Brief 64, written to the same person. Tersteegen meets her pain not by solving it but by consoling: our sufferings, he says, are a suffering-with Jesus, a wisely measured portion of the very cup Christ drank first and now shares with us daily. So she is to set anxious, legalistic self-scrutiny aside, "shut the eye" to herself and to everything that unsettles her, and sink down like a little child into grace, trusting the "little child Jesus" without reserve and without reasoning. It closes with a small cradle-hymn and a signature that places writer and reader side by side — a "fellow-companion on Golgotha."

A few words and echoes.

Suffering-with. The letter turns on a quiet wordplay: compassion (Mit-Leiden) is literally a "suffering-with." Our own trials are not something apart from Christ's — they are a share in them.
The cup. The image of the cup Christ "drank before us and pledged across to us" is a toast turned holy: he drained it first and passes it across to us. It draws on Gethsemane, where Jesus prays over the cup he must drink (the Gospels; echoed in John).
Like a little child. Tersteegen's keynote is childlike trust — to stop reasoning anxiously and simply let oneself be held, as an infant lies still in a cradle. The closing verse makes the same point in song.
Fellow-companion on Golgotha. He signs not as a teacher set above her but as a fellow-sufferer beside her, both standing together at the foot of the cross.

Cite this letter

Gerhard Tersteegen, Geistliche und erbauliche Briefe, Erster Band, I. Theil, Brief 65 (Solingen, 1773–75); trans. Jarred Fenlason, https://gerhardtersteegen.com/letters/bdi-thi-065.html.

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