# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S265
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How are truly Lutheran congregations founded, etc. 265

and better than the papists know how to boast of the pure and only saving — not church, but doctrine — which he, together with his church, believes, confesses, and teaches, he is nevertheless not caught up and entangled in the delusion that outward membership in the Lutheran church and having been baptized make Lutherans into Christians. Just as little does he suppose that a great thing has been achieved when this or that one of his parishioners gives up this or that sin, avoids worldly lusts, performs this or that work for the preservation and spread of the church, follows this or that manner of spiritual exercise, or adopts this or that form of godliness. His aim, both in the conduct of public preaching and in the particular care of souls of each individual of the sheep and lambs of Christ entrusted to him, is directed solely and only toward this: that each of them attain to the justifying and saving faith in Christ, and, by virtue of that faith and of the Holy Spirit received through it, to the beginning of a new obedience, a spiritual life, and genuine evangelical godliness; and as a constant impulse, God willing, toward reaching this final goal of all his labor of love, for each individual one of his parishioners, it stands before his soul, as already noted above, that the Father did not spare his own Son for each individual; that our Lord Christ, the Son of God and of Mary, fulfilled the whole Law for each individual and thereby blotted out its curse, so that he shed his whole holy, precious blood of God for each individual; — that the Holy Spirit has, through holy Baptism and by means of faith, applied Christ and his whole merit to each individual. From this now flows his esteeming and valuing of each individual of the parishioners committed to him by the Lord, whether such a one now comes to meet him, as it were halfway, receptively and trustingly, and accepts with willingness the teaching, discipline, and comfort of the divine Word from his mouth, or stands, as it were, aloof — strange, shy, standoffish, and distrustful — indeed at first almost flees from him; for it is not the personal conduct of his parishioners toward him that determines his conduct toward them, but rather the fatherly heart of his God, the love of Christ, the heartfelt compassion and the ardent rescuing impulse of the Holy Spirit within him, who recognizes the far-strayed soul as all the more dangerously caught in Satan's snares and stakes everything on rescuing it from them; the love that endures all things, that bears all things, that hopes all things, and that never grows weary — this is, as it were, the heart and soul of his care of souls for individuals, and in a faithful Lutheran shepherd it is just as great as his zeal for pure doctrine for the salvation of the whole; for the love of the truth that comes from God, and the truth of the love toward men — but especially toward fellow believers, and still more particularly toward those in his charge in Christ — dwell together in him in harmony and stand with one another in living and lovely fellowship and interaction; for the holier his earnestness and the more ardent his zeal for the witnessing, preserving, and propagating of pure doctrine, the truth unto godliness, is,