Trials and sufferings God sends for our best in more than one way.

What this letter is. A New-Year letter to a "sister" in trial, written in answer to her letter of December 26th. Its greeting is a motto — "The sweet Name Jesus for the New Year!" (New Year's Day is the feast of the Naming of Jesus, Luke 2:21) — and its gift is not relief from her sufferings but an understanding of them: God, Tersteegen says, sends trials "for our best in more than one way."

Its argument. He "takes part from the heart" in her sufferings, sure that "the Lord has her best in view in them." Their threefold use: first, to "chasten and humble" us in grace for "former sins"; second, to "uncover more closely, and burn out, whatever of misery is still in our hearts"; and — "which is the most important" — "happily to constrain us to forsake our very selves as a corrupt and unworthy thing, in order to let ourselves fall into Jesus, and to be found, living and dying, only in Him." For in Him alone is found what "after a thousandfold looking-about, attempting, and counter-striving, we shall to all eternity never find in the creature or in ourselves." Then the New-Year wish: "a rich imparting of the innocent, simple, unassuming child-mind of Jesus." His picture is the Christ-child's own cradle: "the little children in the cradle look on the world… with quiet eyes; they think and act childlike and without guile, and let things go as they go." So the counsel for the year: "be of good cheer; Jesus will help out. Sink away from all suspicious, fretful nature-being; and what you cannot sink away from, bear as willingly and quietly as possible."

A few words and echoes.

• "The sweet Name Jesus for the New Year." New Year's Day (Jan 1) is, in the old calendar, the eighth day after Christmas — the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus, Luke 2:21 ("his name was called Jesus"). Tersteegen greets the year with the Holy Name.
• "Burn out whatever of misery is still in our hearts." Malachi 3:2–3 (the refiner's fire that purges the dross) and 1 Peter 1:7 ("the trial of your faith… though it be tried with fire").
• "Forsake our very selves… to be found, living and dying, only in Him." Philippians 3:8–9 — "I count all things but loss… that I may… be found in him" — with Galatians 2:20.
• "The unassuming child-mind of Jesus… the little children in the cradle." Matthew 18:3–4 ("become as little children") and 1 Peter 2:2 ("as newborn babes") — the childlike heart, "without guile," that lets things be.
• "Sink away from all suspicious, fretful nature-being." Tersteegen's entsinken — to let oneself sink out of, drop below, the anxious churning of "nature"; where one cannot, to bear it quietly "without looking at it deliberately."