# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 19 —

...poisoned waters, which flow ceaselessly from the swamp of
modern-believing scholarship, and has instead led us back to the
ever-fresh wellspring of the Reformation! Let us now, as students
hungry for grace and eager to learn, sit at the feet of our fathers,
and especially of him who worked this article as no one has since the
apostles. And as we listen to how his mouth overflows with all manner
of godly wisdom, let us pay particular attention to and learn from him
how everything in his preaching is aimed at, and how he goes about,
making the heart of a poor sinner firm and certain, through the divine
comfort of the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit, that in Christ
Jesus our only Savior it has a gracious God and a reconciled Father in
heaven, and before Him an everlasting, fully valid righteousness
through faith. For that is everything, and that alone. And should the
devil gladly tempt others to imagine that they have now mastered this
art and can well move on to something else, let such a one be
instructed by Luther's saying: "Those who fancy that they now know
and understand this article very well have certainly never yet truly
begun to learn it." — But a terrified heart and a humbled spirit are
the only workshops for this labor of the Holy Spirit, who is and is
called a Comforter, in that He glorifies Christ. If we wish to make
right use of the treasure God has entrusted to us, we must join
diligent learning with right teaching, so that this great treasure may
also come among the people, for whom it is intended. I can be brief on
this point, since we still have a special Referat [paper] to expect on
it at the pastors' conference. Only this: let us not forget, my
beloved brothers in office, that it is preaching through which the
world is to be called out of the devil's tyranny into the kingdom of
God, and kept therein — namely, the preaching of the Gospel.

So we too carry out the office of the New Testament, not of the
letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives
life. We often find in ourselves the fear, and reproach ourselves,
that we have not preached "sharply" enough; and we have reason to. For
the Lord will pay to all dumb dogs, who do not earnestly hold up to
the people their transgressions, their wages in hell upon their own
heads. But one seems to worry less about not preaching evangelically
enough — for otherwise those strange people, especially in our old
fatherland nowadays, would surely not be so quick to have their thin
sermons printed, in which either Law and Gospel are crudely brewed
together, or the Gospel is woven in so thinly and sparingly that in an
entire volume one cannot find as much nourishment as would suffice to
satisfy even a modest hunger. And yet, my dear brothers — and let us
well consider this — with what fiery zeal of wrath will the Lord burn
against the slack and slothful messengers of the Gospel, He whom the
fiery zeal of His love for the rescue of His people consumed upon the
altar of the cross!

For we are indeed appointed to step, with the heavenly, joyful, and
blessed message of grace and peace, into the very midst of a