# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 6 —

...spiritual gifts, through temporal means, through doing good and
sharing, through the sacrifice of one's own life, to make and keep
others partakers of the way to salvation. For this, disciples of Christ
are sent into the world; for this, the gift of grace is entrusted to
them, which we are not to bury in a napkin. The general service laid
upon His own without distinction, as Christ's gift for faith, of making
oneself the servant of everyone, applies in a special sense — insofar as
it concerns itself with the Word — to the ordained pastors and teachers,
so that no one besides them should publicly preach and administer the
sacraments in the church, unless necessity requires it; that is why
these ambassadors in Christ's stead are named before others in Holy
Scripture. But the essential thing, which underlies their office and
every calling of the church that flows from it, is the exercise of the
love of Jesus — which one has oneself experienced — toward the neighbor's
body and soul, because in those who have spiritually beheld and received
the Sun of Righteousness, the clarity of the divine image in the Son who
became man is seen as if in a mirror, which lets it fall back into their
own dark hearts and from there onto others. Unblessed is the life which
does not have or know this bright shining of the eternal light with
unveiled face; it is in serving in the newness of the Spirit alone that
faith proves itself — faith which, just as originally the power of the
keys in Word and Sacrament, so also has heaven, power over the world and
hell, in life and in death. From which it also follows at the same time
that to make a higher and better estate than that of a disciple or
Christian is nothing other than to deny Christ Himself, indeed to
pervert and curse Him.

In Christ's form of a servant, then, His own are here clothed; and not
only in this do they carry the precious treasure of the powers of a
world to come, in earthen vessels of the fragile weakness of their
bodily dwelling, but they are also still afflicted, in this vale of
tears, with the misery of sin, which is the cause of all other evil.
Therefore their outward existence appears the same as that of the
children of this world; the life of Christ in believers, unknown to the
world, slandered and mocked by its enemies, has its eternal home in
heaven. The holiness and sweetness of the movements of heavenly desire,
its peace and the joy in the Holy Spirit which it carries with it, are
not always felt by them; in ongoing repentance, struggling daily with
the old man, they often still weep and pray under the oppressive sense,
as it were, of parched and deadened hearts and the power of darkness;
yet there is never a lack of strength for faith to bring forth and
offer its lovely fruits to God; and even at times when, in the evil
hour, Satan surrounds God's children with a mass of spiritual and bodily
snares, and sometimes thinks he has trodden them wholly under his feet
so that they shall not rise again — behold, the gracious Father in
heaven leads them, even if along a rough and narrow, yet right and sure
way, to the appointed goal. The rose grows among thorns, and many a
noble fruit in a hard, bitter shell; so does the Lord deal with His
saints; it is the image of the