# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 8 —

Just as the very beginning of their life, and all the circumstances
bound up with it and with its continuance, have depended entirely on His
all-knowing providence, so that nothing is so small and nothing so great
that His almighty hand has not prepared it from eternity — so that all
hindrances to their blessedness must be overcome, and all adversities
must be turned into advantages for them — so His eye, which never sets,
watches over the righteous even in their dying. When they themselves can
no longer see anything, when tears of pain and sorrow darken the eyes of
those present, then that bright, shining face looks down upon them from
above, bringing grace and blessedness, and He alone knows the right time
and hour and manner of their departure from the world. "Well done, good
and faithful servant, you have been faithful over a little," says God
of glory to them, "I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your
Lord."

IV.

"But whoever does not have, from him even what he has will be taken
away" — these are the last words of our text, or as they read in the
eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke: "from him will be taken away
even what he thinks he has." "Whoever wants to build a tower, let him
first sit down and count the cost, whether he is able to complete it."
Blessed are those who hear the word of promise and keep it and bring
forth fruit with patience; but "whoever shrinks back, my soul will have
no pleasure in him," says the Lord. Where justifying faith is not
present as the shrine of the Word, through its power, there one also
does not find what is given through the preaching of faith. So ill off
are all those who either want nothing to do with the Gospel at all, or
whose hearts, even while they make use of the means of grace, still
become an unfit field — though they gladly flatter themselves that all
is well with them. Either the holy seed is trampled down through
clinging to error and prejudice and the habit of sinning, consumed by
the prevailing false security of the flesh which the spirits of hell
have prepared like a cup that makes one reel; or a shrinking from the
cross and self-love keep it from taking root, because Christ hangs on
the wood full of disgrace, so that it withers away instead; or the
rampant thorns of vain desires, springing up again for want of
watchfulness, choke the young life of the seedling — which not even the
heat of temptation had been able to destroy — and sink it into ruin; and
it belongs among the horrors of sin's curse that the person held captive
in it is unable to free himself even from what already here, through
the workings of the Law, causes him only tormenting unrest, because it
proves itself to him a foolish, harmful snare of lust and bondage
[Sclaverei].

V.

Every one, my beloved, who has been able to know of divine help, or
knows of it, without the darkness in him steadily yielding to the light
of the world — who consequently also does not, by works and words, in
the strength of the Giver, contribute to the light's gift of grace being