# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S201
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther. 201

...the most destructive of all sins, the holiness of works, is laid bare in its whole wide extent. What truly good works are, what freedom means, what love brings about, how labor in one's earthly calling is confirmed and sanctified through God's Word, the nature of patience in affliction and of patience with one's weak neighbor, the right manner of Christian conduct altogether — nowhere outside of Scripture is this set forth with such clarity and fullness as in Luther. If readers would only once work through, pen in hand, the sermons of the House and Church Postil on the Gospel for the second Sunday after Epiphany, they would find in them far more still of deep and lofty preaching of the Law than I can bring forward here, where I must spare the space in order to bring out, at least in a few words, Luther's preaching of the Gospel. He never proclaims the Law so long that thereby the sorrow of the world, which works death, might be aroused; as soon as he has awakened the knowledge of sin and of sinful corruption, he comes at once also with the Gospel — and indeed with the pure Gospel, undimmed by anything of the Law. Since the days of the apostles no one has preached the righteousness of Christ as he has, how it lies ready and prepared for poor sinners and is offered in Word and Sacrament; no one since has held before us, so convincingly and so temptingly, that through Christ's merit the sin of the whole world has been taken away and that the only sin which henceforth condemns is not believing in Christ; no preacher outside the writers of Scripture themselves has ever held out that little word "for you" — for you given, for you shed for the forgiveness of sins — so urgently for acceptance to troubled hearts, and thereby shown the anxious thoughts of the assailed soul so clearly in their nothingness, namely how they must all yield entirely to the thoughts of God's grace, which are mightier than all the accusing of the devil. The preaching of the Gospel for the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity alone can already give us an idea of how Luther is able to follow the paths of the fainthearted and despairing heart. The servant in his terror presumes to want to pay the unpayable debt; the poor sinner, seized by the terrors of conscience, promises to pay off guilt with installments; but just as the lord remits the whole debt, so the Gospel too speaks lovingly — oh, how lovingly: "No, no, my friend, it is not so; it does not help that you torment and terrify yourself so madly; it is not your works that do it, but God's mercy does it, in that he lets your misery move him to pity and sees that you are stuck fast in such terror and are choking in the mire and cannot help yourself out of it; he sees this, that you cannot pay, and therefore he forgives you everything." Undimmed comfort, without any admixture of legalism, without hedging qualifications, is here offered to the poor sinner, so that sin becomes heartily hateful to him precisely through the loving offer of grace, and his heart at the same time leaps for joy and lays hold of a true trust in the kindly Lord. All that is beautiful and lovely in creation — the heaven with