# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S202
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther. 202

...with its stars, the earth with its flowers, the spring with its young fresh green, the mother's breast in which the frightened little child hides itself, and however many other lovely things must offer him similitudes of the individual graces of the Gospel, that it might nestle sweet and refreshing against our weary heart. God calls us in here into the bridal chamber of faith; there we are alone with Him, no work of our own has any part in it; God there adorns us with Christ's blood and righteousness, in that he offers it to us and grants the power to believe it; now we could die in peace, for we have the righteousness that avails before God; but we are to live yet longer on earth, and must therefore have work to do here, so God now sends us into work in his kingdom among men, and confirms us in our earthly calling: here belong our works, which had to remain outside the bridal chamber of faith. Nowhere that Luther preaches the Gospel does he bring it forth in dry, skeleton-like propositions. The churchly dogma, pure and clear, stands constantly before us, but as a person, in flesh and blood, vivid and winsome, chaste and heavenly fair. So it is in the Easter sermons, when Christ is shown to us at one moment as, on Good Friday, the guilt and punishment of our sin, death and damnation lie upon him, and then, by contrast, on Easter morning that same Christ stands before us in perfected purity, free from that guilt and punishment, which have been taken from him and are not given back to us again either, but are sunk into the depths of the sea; that sounds quite different from when we labor to make it comprehensible that through the resurrection the acceptance of Christ's sacrifice for us is attested. Who among us has not already labored to make John 10:14-15 intelligible, without in the process himself falling into metaphysical-sounding speech, without already seeing on the faces of the hearers, there in the pulpit, that he was not understood? Let us for once follow Luther's manner of preaching this word of the Lord: God the Father knew Christ too, even when he, laden with guilt and punishment, hung upon the cross and no one wished to know him any longer; just so Christ acknowledges his own in their deepest humiliation, when God's chastisements make them an abomination and a disgrace before all the children of men, and no one recognizes in them the children of God. Whoever is in any way weary and burdened understands this — is it not so? Precisely that which, in the most recent times, people so gladly love to emphasize in order to diminish the importance of Christian doctrine — that it does not belong so much to the essence of Christianity to inculcate a system of belief as rather to impart the person of Christ himself — precisely this offering of the Lord Christ in the fullness of his graciousness and the power of eternal life, Dr. Luther understands thoroughly; only he does not do it in the manner of those despisers of pure doctrine. Precisely in their indifference toward doctrine they lead their disciples to receive a Christ whom they themselves, or others, have invented, and to miss the Lord Christ who comes to us in Word and Sacrament; Luther, on the other hand, brings his