Encouragement to spiritual dying.

What this letter is. A short, radiant letter of encouragement to spiritual dying — Tersteegen's name for the whole inward journey of self-renunciation — written to a brother of humble station who had sent him a mid-August greeting. It is the fitting close to a batch shadowed by the cross and by Tersteegen's own frailty (the previous letter joked that "the hut cracks"), and it turns that frailty into its keynote. He answers with a phrase both rueful and profound: "I am and remain a candidate of death in more than one sense" — near to bodily death by his chronic illness, and a lifelong candidate of the inner dying to self. (The 1773 printer even added a footnote to translate the Latin: "one who is near death.")

The letter is essentially a meditation on Philippians 3:10, quoted almost entire: "the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death." And its argument is one of divine arithmetic: whatever the cost of dying, it is nothing against the yield. "A ten- or twenty-year dying is richly outweighed by a single moment of the divine life born out of it — and what, then, of an infinite eternity?" Christ has already "won all possibility for it superabundantly" by His own death, and now draws us "through death into the imperishable, pure God-life." So the required disposition is not heroic effort but childlike trust: "stay by Him as good, dear children… say Yes, heartily and will-lessly, to all His love-demands," never fearing that He "does not mean well." Against reason's instinctive dread of loss he sets the paradox at the heart of all his writing: "One loses nothing in the letting-go and the dying; the more exit out of selfhood, the purer the blessedness God imparts."

The close is warmly personal. The brother is evidently discouraged by his lowly "outward estate," and Tersteegen will not let it stand in the way: "your outward estate must not hinder you nor make you disheartened… yield yourself most inwardly to Him who is calling you, and you can yet become a saint." He sends love to the man's wife and household "who gladly wish to become children," asks their prayers "before God," and signs — in a phrase that gathers up the whole letter — "in Him remains, your devoted, weak brother."

A few words and echoes.

• "Candidate of death" (Candidatus mortis). A Latin idiom — literally one dressed in the white toga of a candidatus, here one "standing for" death, awaiting it. The 1773 print glosses it in a footnote ("one who is near death"); Tersteegen means it doubly — of his failing body and of the daily inner dying to self.
• "The power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death." Philippians 3:10 — quoted almost verbatim; the axis of the whole letter. To "die spiritually" is to be shaped into the pattern of Christ's own dying and rising.
• "Richly outweighed by a single moment of the divine life." 2 Corinthians 4:17, "our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" — the years of dying against the instant of divine life, and both against eternity.
• "The imperishable, pure God-life." 1 Peter 1:4, "an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away" — the unverwelklich (unfading) life into which death is the doorway.
• "Stay by Him as good, dear children." Matthew 18:3, "except ye… become as little children"; the will-less "Yes" is faith, not passivity.
• "One loses nothing in the letting-go and the dying." John 12:24–25, "except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die…" and "he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal" — dying as pure gain.
• "Jesus will know how to make the mountains and the valleys a straight way in you." Isaiah 40:4 (Luke 3:5), "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low… the crooked straight" — the leveling, road-making work of grace within.
• "Your outward estate must not hinder you… you can yet become a saint." A word of dignity to a poor man: sanctity is no respecter of social station — cf. James 2:5, "hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith?"