Encouragement to a sick sister toward loving surrender at the cross.

What this letter is. The third of the letters to Anna Maria Elisabeth Schmitz (see the forty-sixth and fifty-first), and the gentlest. The scruple of the previous letter — that some particular sin had caused her illness, and that she might be lost — is over; here Tersteegen writes to a woman who may be dying, and his whole aim is to loosen her hold on herself so that she can be, in his word, surrendered. The letter is dated 14 April 1744, two days after the fifty-first. The keynote is struck at once, in a line that is nearly the Song of Songs: "Be content and of good cheer in this Savior! You are His, and He is yours." Everything after it is the working-out of that mutual belonging into the act of dying well. She is to "surrender" herself into Christ's hands "just as you are" — not cleaned up first — so that He may "prepare you as an offering through the cross, and present you to His heavenly Father as a whole offering of His good pleasure." The image is sacrificial and, for Tersteegen, tender: self-offering is not self-destruction but being handed over to Love.

The letter's most beautiful figure gathers the whole into one picture: "Loving surrender at the cross rises like a sweet incense up to God into the sanctuary." Suffering accepted in love is not waste; it ascends, like the incense of the temple, and is pleasing. Hence the paradox he can then risk: "the more nakedly you are offered up, the more acceptable it is to the Lord." And hence, too, the calm about death itself: "Should the Lord take you to Himself, you have no cause to trouble yourself… There, I trust, we shall soon meet and greet one another." He ends by turning her fear inside out with a verse — Psalm 118:17 — spoken now as a promise over her: "Be of good cheer: you will not die, but live, and praise the name of the Lord!" Whether she recovered or not, the sentence is true in his mouth in both senses at once, which is exactly the comfort he intends. He greets her "together with all the children here" — the Mülheim awakened who were praying for her — and signs himself, as ever, her "bound and weak brother."

A few words and echoes.

• You are His, and He is yours. Song of Solomon 2:16 — "My beloved is mine, and I am his."
• present you… as a whole offering of His good pleasure. Romans 12:1; Ephesians 5:2 — the body as "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God"; Christ "an offering… for a sweetsmelling savour."
• rises like a sweet incense… into the sanctuary. Revelation 8:3–4; Psalm 141:2 — the incense of the saints' prayers ascending before God; "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense."
• you will not die, but live, and praise the name of the Lord. Psalm 118:17 — "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD" (Tersteegen renders the verse's close as praise the name of the Lord).