# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S194
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther. 194

...preserve the form of the sentences that I write down from Luther. One does this without any particular instruction, simply of itself, because the form is far too beautiful for us to be able to alter it, unless we should force ourselves to do so. Thus, whenever at all possible, I take the Gospel and Epistle of the following Sunday before my eyes already on Sunday evening, go carefully through the original text, and seek to set the individual parts and members of it vividly before my soul. After that I read slowly, and with continual note-taking, through Luther's sermons — at the moment only one at a time — a task that occupies me for the most part until Thursday. Concerning the excerpts thus made I then seek to gain an overview, in that I consider them individually and in context, and, where it seems necessary, indicate their relation to one another by numbers and letters. In this way the thoughts become so vivid, clear, and fully one's own that, during the rounds required by one's office, one can call the sermon to mind word for word, thinks of it with true joy, and accomplishes the working-out of the sermon itself — which for me at least is at the same time the memorizing of it — with pleasure. I do not mean to say hereby that others must go about it in just the same way; each will, according to his own spiritual character, develop his own manner as well, but let no one omit the writing-down while reading, and whoever has not yet done so, let him try it once: he will find it proven from the very first attempt.

The arrangement of the material for the sermon, which forms the second principal part of the preparation from Luther, is a task just as simple as the appropriation of the thoughts. In the great majority of Luther's sermons, to be sure, no definite division seems to stand out, and particularly in those of the Church Postil one thinks one can make out the several sermons out of which the one now under consideration may have been composed. Yet even in this respect one learns, through careful writing-down and consideration of what has been written down, to find one's bearings; and that at times individual sermons can be distinguished within a single one serves only to increase the number of the different divisions. Luther generally follows the thoughts of the text step by step, uniting the individual thoughts under one main proposition where this can be done without forcing, and otherwise setting the individual thoughts side by side. In this respect too he lets himself be guided entirely by the word of Scripture. His division becomes clear to the reader who reads pen in hand, soon, usually at once; often, too, there appears a particular arrangement of the content of the text in a particular section of a sermon of the Church Postil. Which of these one should choose cannot, of course, be prescribed here; the student of Luther will, however, miss nothing that could give him any guidance for his present need. A short exercise makes one familiar and