# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 18 —

...heat of the Law, so eagerly drank in, gradually becomes a stale
food. But experience also teaches what a dreadful drought God, in His
righteous judgment, sends upon a land that has failed to heed this
heavenly, living, and fruit-bringing rain of grace. Why should I point
to these terrible judgments, which since the fall of Jerusalem have
struck no people more terribly, or with more justice, than our own? We
at least feel them; we sigh under them in this foreign land. Ah, would
that God let us be made wise, and that we bought, now that God, out of
His exceedingly great mercy, has again set the market before our very
door. Since God does not grow weary of extolling His favor, grace,
friendship, and love to us again and again in His holy Word, and in so
many different ways, and of assuring us of it so often and so
emphatically, we should easily come to the conclusion that it must be
a difficult thing — one possible only for almighty God to bring about —
to bring an awakened sinner's heart to the firm and unshakable
conviction that God is, in truth, in dead earnest about his redemption
and salvation, and that we may and should look to Him, as our dear
Father in Christ, for every good thing for time and eternity. We
should therefore also never grow weary of hearing, of learning, of
weighing what we have learned in our hearts, and of putting it into
right practice — especially since, if we only pay a little attention to
ourselves, we can experience a hundred times a day how even the
slightest breath of temptation that wafts under our nose threatens to
blow out the light of grace. For it truly cannot be expressed in words
how firmly mistrust of God's mercy in Christ is rooted in our hearts.
And yet we are to overcome, in firm faith, the accusations of the
devil, the curse of the Law, the testimony of our own conscience, the
terrors of death and of righteous and eternal judgment, and to boast
of the grace of God in Christ, even when God Himself, in His
unchangeable Law, and our own heart and conscience, feeling and
experience, pronounce against us life and blessedness withheld, and
death and damnation instead! If we do not believe, we do not stand.
And now, God have mercy — how easily and quickly this article is,
by most people, considered learned once and for all, though it can
never be fully learned, and means to keep us all as its lifelong
students.

Now, if this is true for all, it is especially true for us whom God
has placed into the teaching office — this warning of Chemnitz is of
the utmost weight, and God grant that it fall upon our hearts with its
full weight, so that we may at all times, with great earnestness and
without wavering, keep in view what we are called to, what a blessed
yet also how heavy, important, and responsible an office we have taken
on, so that through diligent learning we may make ourselves fit to
teach. For by nature we know nothing at all of God's grace, and
scarcely learn to believe it even under the unceasing instruction of
the Holy Spirit. Could we answer for it if we did not conscientiously
redeem the time? God be praised and glorified, who has opened the eyes
of us all, at least so far, that we see what our office as pastors
involves — who has also, through the very circumstances into which He
has placed us, fatherly provided that the flood of stale, mostly