# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_2019_S87
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Who Were They in Your Life?
HEBREWS 13:7–16

LCMS First Vice-President-Elect Rev. Peter K. Lange
67th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod • July 24, 2019
Commemoration of the Faithful Departed
In the name of Jesus, —who is the same —yesterday
and today and forever.
Who were they in your life?
For me they included Herbert Weiser, a 1927 River
Forest grad, who “spoke the Word of God to me” as my
first grade teacher at Tomball Lutheran School in
Tomball, Texas. He seemed ancient at the time, when I
was six years old, but now I realize that he wasn’t much
older then than I am now! At recess, he could run with
the best of us and kept himself in great shape. More
importantly though, he was a pious man who expertly
taught us so many things and kept God’s Word at the
center of it all.
Then there was Pastor Edgar Lams who spoke the
Word of God to me in confirmation class every
Saturday morning at Christ Lutheran Church in Oak
Park, Illinois.
And there were others, in addition to my parents,
whom God gifted to me as my primary teachers of the
faith, and who still open the Word of God to me every
time I visit them.

Christ, to the end! They looked intently and ultimately
only to Him, the Author and Perfecter of their faith. By
God’s grace, they were preserved through the trials and
temptations of this wilderness sojourn. No one was
able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. They
finished the race. They kept the faith.
As I think of Teacher Weiser, or Pastor Lams, or the
departed saints that we’ll see onscreen in a moment, I
think of the transitory nature of this life and of those
who speak the Word of God to us — transitory, and
maybe even disappointing sometimes, in the case of
our leaders, as the better we know them the more we
see that the good they were permitted to do for us was
mixed with sin and significant faults. And we see
something similar in the churches, and schools, and
institutions that they served — and the ups and downs,
the good times and bad times for those institutions, in
part resulting from the very leadership of “those who
spoke the Word of God to us.”

Who were they in your life?
Who were those who “spoke the Word of God to you?”
And why should we “consider the outcome of their way of
life, and imitate their faith?”
It’s not that they never sinned, is it? That’s not why
we’re called to imitate their faith. It isn’t hero worship
that’s being urged here. Pastors’ wives, and father
confessors, and the spouses and children of all church
workers know better than most that our church leaders
too sin daily in thought, word and deed.
No, the “outcome of their way of life” that we’re called to
consider isn’t the record of their conduct, “for if you, O
Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?”
Rather, the “outcome” — the ἔκβασις — is that by
God’s pure grace they clung to their Savior, Jesus
Convention Sermons

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2019 (67TH) LCMS CONVENTION | 87