Instruction in suffering, and encouragement to complete surrender.

What this letter is. A short letter of comfort and instruction, written 22 November 1733 to Christiana Maria Griesenbeck — the twelfth in this run of letters to her, and one of several from this autumn on how to bear suffering. She had sent him a small note; he answers it with sympathy and a single, bracing lesson about which "pull" to follow when the soul is under pressure.

Its argument. Tersteegen begins where the Christian life is hardest — with the death of self: "Nature, and one's own life, must be led to death by adverse ways." The very things that go against us are the road by which our self-will is undone. So he counsels her to hand the whole "corrupt part" of herself over to "the lovely justice of God to be consumed" — trusting that God "will keep what is His own unharmed." Then comes the heart of the letter, a contrast between two pulls the suffering soul feels. On one side, "the harsh powers of darkness are forever baiting us to fly up and break out" — to rebel, to react, to escape. On the other, "the sweet drawings of love… entice us to bowing, sinking-down, and remaining under the cross." The whole art is to refuse the first pull and yield to the second: not to struggle upward and outward, but to bow, sink, and stay. "Let yourself go wholly and rightly, after the manner of children!" — remain "ever resigned in Him," and then "let all storm from without and within." He leaves her David's own song to sing in the storm, and a blessing that the Lord would be her hiding-place "in all things and always."

A few words and echoes.

• "Jesus Immanuel be our sole object." The letter's motto. "Object" here (German Vorwurf) means the single thing our thought and love are fixed on — Christ as Immanuel, "God with us." Everything else is to fall away before that one aim.
• "Nature… must be led to death by adverse ways." The dying of self-will (Romans 8:13; Galatians 5:24) — accomplished not by our striving but through the "adverse ways" God allows, which cross and break our own will.
• "The lovely justice of God to be consumed." God's justice pictured not as a threat but as a purifying fire we may love — one that burns away the corrupt self while keeping safe "what is His own" (Hebrews 12:29; Malachi 3:2–3).
• "Bowing, sinking-down, and remaining under the cross." The three motions of surrender, set against darkness's urge to "fly up and break out." Grace draws the soul down — to bow, to sink into God, to stay under the cross rather than escape it (Matthew 16:24; Galatians 6:14).
• "After the manner of children." To be handled by God as a small child is handled — without resistance, without insisting on one's own way (Matthew 18:3).
• "Blessed be the Lord… in a strong city." Psalm 31:21 — David's thanksgiving after distress. The "strong city" is God Himself as refuge; Tersteegen adds the wish that the Lord would "hide us" there, echoing the same psalm's "thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence" (Psalm 31:20).