God Is Here
Forty Readings from the Letters of Gerhard Tersteegen
Available Formats
An Encounter Classics volume: part of the recovered devotional classics of Encounter Press. Explore the imprint →
ISBN: 978-1-971776-23-1 (Paperback) · 978-1-971776-24-8 (Hardcover) · 978-1-971776-25-5 (eBook)
You do not need to climb to God. He is already here.
If you have wanted a closer walk with God and found that the distance would not close, no matter how you prayed, Gerhard Tersteegen has one thing to tell you: God is not far. He is nearer to you than you are to yourself, and He is glad to be found. This book is about living in the presence of God in an ordinary life, by a man who did it for fifty years and taught thousands of others how.
For nearly fifty years, from his room in Mülheim, the ribbon-weaver answered merchants and servants, widows and young preachers, a countess and the dying, with one unhurried counsel: Turn inward. Become like a child. Tell Him everything. When it is dark, go on believing. If prayer has gone dry, if you cannot stop accusing yourself, if your life is too crowded to hear God in, you are exactly the person he wrote to.
"Just tell Jesus simply that you cannot pray, and already you are praying."
Forty readings, each the length of a cup of coffee. Every reading gathers what Tersteegen said on one subject across his letters, with every sentence of counsel his own, drawn from the first complete English translation of all 605 of his letters. Each opens with a line of Scripture he himself reached for and closes with a short poem from his Spiritual Flower Garden. The book runs in an order, the nearness of God first, the cross in the middle, courage at the end, but it was made for returning, not finishing. If you are in grief tonight, go straight to "Sent on Before." If prayer has gone dry, "When the Sweetness Goes" was written for you.
The Protestant who walked the same road as Brother Lawrence. Tersteegen is the man whose hymns John Wesley brought into English, the voice behind "Lo, God is here!" The troubles his correspondents brought him have not aged: a grief that will not close, a self you cannot stop accusing, doubts that will not argue themselves away, a body that fails and a courage that fails with it. What he gave every one of them, he gives you: not a method, but a Friend, nearer than you have dared to believe and easier to reach than you have been told.
A book to keep, and to give. An Encounter Classics Reader's Edition, with a preface on Tersteegen's life, a table naming the letters behind every reading, and a list of the poems and where they come from.
Open anywhere. He is already here.
Read the letters themselves: Jarred Fenlason's complete English translation of all 605 of Tersteegen's letters is free at gerhardtersteegen.com. New to Tersteegen? Start with Who Was Gerhard Tersteegen? or Practicing the Presence of God: What Tersteegen Taught.
About the Translator
Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) was a Reformed Pietist, hymn writer, and spiritual guide who spent his life as a ribbon-weaver in Mülheim. This book was translated and arranged by Jarred Fenlason, D.Min., translator of The Spiritual Flower Garden and editor of Hidden in God. He holds a Doctor of Ministry from United Theological Seminary.
