# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 16 —

...not a little, but the immeasurable and inestimable riches of the
divine Word in right knowledge — it was not earned by us, nor even
deserved in any degree, but given as a gift of free grace. If we may
now boast that His grace toward us has not been in vain, let us at the
same time bear well in mind that this same free grace, which has
drawn us out of our errors and made us so rich, is also there for
those who today still remain stuck in the same misery from which
God's grace has rescued us; and that this is a very earnest word of
the Lord, well worth taking to heart: the first shall be last, and the
last first; God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And
I think that both what we have to boast of concerning God's mercy
toward us, and what we have to lament about ourselves despite His
grace, would together be reason and cause enough to keep us in true
humility.

Secondly, we should also take care not to grow complacent and
secure in the thought that we now have the pure doctrine and that our
Synod has planted the banner of the true Lutheran confession, as
though that alone made everything well. Not everyone who boasts much
of pure doctrine and knows how to talk about it thereby actually has
it, and many a one who holds it in theory does not yet know how to
apply it, for himself and others, in practice. It is not enough that
we have the doctrine in our symbols and confess ourselves to the
symbols, contend for them, and so forth; rather, it must also, in
genuine fashion, reach the pulpit and from there the heart and life.
Blessed, truly blessed, ought we to become through it, and make others
so as well. God grant, in His grace, to keep us all — whether we
belong to the teaching or the hearing part of the church — from
turning the boast of pure doctrine into a pillow on which we stretch
ourselves out self-satisfied and finally sink into the sleep of death!
God keep far from us the time when the reproaches that the holy
apostle, in Romans 2, brings against the Jewish church could rightly
fall upon us as well! My beloved brothers, if by nature we are of the
same sort, or rather the same ill sort, as the churches and their
angels in Revelation, then let us take good heed of the warning finger
raised there for us too, and take it to heart — yet in taking it to
heart, let us look not at our own powerlessness, but at the almighty
power of the eternal love and faithfulness which, even as it warns and
admonishes us through the apostle, "Work out your salvation with fear
and trembling," also adds: "for it is God who works in you both to
will and to do of His good pleasure."

But, beloved brothers, it is not enough that we guard against the
dangers that pure doctrine itself does not bring us, but rather the
flesh, the world, and the devil bring; what matters is that we trade
with the pound entrusted to us. The servant who, for fear of losing
it, wrapped his pound in a napkin found little favor and reward with
his lord; and an army that, for fear of falling into an ambush, would
not take a single step forward, would not only contribute nothing to
victory, but would likely, without any ambush at all, be overcome and
slaughtered on the spot.

God has now put into our hand His sword, that is, His holy eternal
Word, especially His saving Gospel. He has, by leading us to Luther's
writings and through them to the chief