# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1855_S368
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

368 Exposition of 1 Corinthians etc.

to seek out and calculate who the unfortunate ones are that sit unbelieving at the table of the Lord; so long as your fellow communicants do not persist unrepentant in public sins, so long hold that they come worthily to the Holy Supper, and if you see one who thoughtlessly or carelessly turns again to his old sin and forgets his share in the table of the Lord, then warn him and strive to keep him in the right use of the sacrament. But above all, just as you think only of unworthy guests at the Supper, examine yourselves, prove yourselves first, whether you receive the high gift worthily, whether you walk worthily of the precious possession of the body and blood of Christ. If he who does not believe in the name of the only-begotten Son of God is already judged, and if he who will not let himself be saved by the gospel from sin and its wages, hardened through his own fault — what a terrifying judgment of hardening does he bring upon himself who does not shrink from taking the body and blood of Christ without faith, from belonging without faith to the fellowship that possesses the body and blood of Christ as its noblest good and the most intimate bond of its union. Woe to him who, invited to the marriage feast of the Lord, does not come; a threefold woe to him who comes and partakes with the rest, and is found without a wedding garment, without faith. Though his unbelief may not, during his earthly days, come so plainly to light that the congregation would have to exclude him from partaking of the Holy Supper, he nevertheless turns what, by God's will, should have been the seal of his election into a brand upon his conscience; he applies what should have bound him most intimately to the Christian congregation to this end instead, that he becomes a true child of the devil in the kingdom of the devil; and when at last he comes before the final judgment, then the sacred property in his possession will be taken back from him, unharmed and undefiled, by the Lord who can take as well as give, and he himself will be cast out from fellowship in that property; but this, that he was once a fellow-partaker in the fellowship of the body and blood of Christ, will burn on as an inextinguishable brand within the eternal fire, whose torment awakens the longing for a single drop of water from the finger of the righteous made perfect. It is said that our confession — that the true body and blood of Christ is truly present under the form of the bread and wine in the Supper, and is there distributed and received — makes for lazy Christians. But our confession agrees with the word of God; in it the finger of the law is raised, warning and threatening, and from it the eternal gospel speaks to our hearts, sweetly and lovingly alluring. —