# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S193
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume II. July 1856. No. 7.

(Submitted by Pastor Hoyer.)

Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther.

It is by now time to give an account of the sermon preparation which has of late been recommended by the Reverend Pastor Keyl and carried out by individual preachers of our synod. It consists in such a use of the writings of Luther that one, in reading through them, notes down the leading thoughts and whatever else stands out as weighty, then works through this carefully, and, following Luther's own order, joins the notes together with one another into a coherent and living whole. This method thus proceeds in two principal tasks: first, in the grasping and careful consideration of the individual thoughts; second, in the working-up of the material so gained into a sermon.

As for the appropriation of the thoughts, in the first place, I must, with Pastor Keyl, insist that this requires writing things down. For a long time I resisted this, in the opinion that mere reading, given the excellent memory with which God's grace has equipped me, must fully suffice. Merely as an experiment I once, in reading the Gospel of the Wedding at Cana, more than three years ago now, wrote down notes, but I recognized in this procedure at once so considerable an advantage that I have never again omitted it and intend to keep it up for the rest of my life. Being extremely limited in time, I have since then been able to work through with pen in hand nothing further than Luther's sermons, but I have taken these up year by year, in the manner described, for the growing strengthening of my faith and my understanding. In the first year I read through the sermons in their entirety in the House and Church Postil and set the notes drawn from them side by side, but I recognized even then that the abundance of thoughts was gradually becoming too great for me to hold to that so important law of economy; in the second year the sermons of the House Postil alone gave me plenty to do; in the third, the sermons of the Church Postil; and now I am gathering from a single sermon of the House Postil just as many treasures of doctrine as I formerly gathered from the whole great mass. I hardly need add that I gladly also