# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S69
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 69]

—you were not willing to be my instruments. As a further illustration, reference was also made to the example of King Saul, who according to God's decree was to be king over his people, but under the condition that he be obedient to him. Hence he lost the kingdom when he was unwilling to be God's instrument in exterminating the Amalekites.

After these preliminary remarks there now follows, as the answer to the question "What must our task be, so that this blessing is not squandered but handed down to our descendants?": "1. In general: that we guard against ingratitude, on account of which the well of grace dries up; against self-satisfied boasting, by which God is provoked to wrath to destroy what has already been built; against complacency, greed, and godless living." This requirement applies to all Lutherans — preachers, teachers, and hearers alike. Ingratitude is in itself already a damnable sin, and the reason God withdraws his grace. Bodily, to be sure, God does good even to the ungrateful, for he gives daily bread even without our asking to all wicked people; but spiritually, God withdraws his grace when a person sinks into ingratitude. In what does ingratitude chiefly consist? The first stage is not recognizing what God has done for one. "Thanking" [*danken*] comes, after all, from "thinking" [*denken*]. Whoever does not even consider what God has done for him will thank him for it far less. That is the first thing. Let us not have this said to us in vain. We who have lived through terrible times would indeed have to be utterly depraved if we no longer wished to think about what God has done for us. "I was," one man declared, "eighteen years old when I left the *Gymnasium* [classical secondary school], and I had not yet heard a single sentence taken from God's Word spoken by a believing mouth. I had never owned a Bible, nor a catechism either, but rather a miserable textbook containing pagan morality. I did not know how the Jewish people had come to Egypt and to Canaan, for biblical history simply was not taught. When I came to the university, God showed me the grace of finding a little band of believing students who longed for the truth. From the professors I learned nothing of which was the way to heaven, for the best among them were Socinians, Arians, and Pelagians, and the others blasphemed. If one wanted to hear a believing sermon in those days, one had to make long journeys for it, and given the great poverty of that time, that was no small matter. So it stood in the days of our youth. And how is it now among us? What an abundance of divine doctrine, of the pure preaching of the Gospel, we have! It would be dreadful if we thought: well, here in America we simply have it, that's all there is to it, it cannot easily slip away from us again. Let us rather keep in mind: we would not have it, had God not given it to us. In particular, our young preachers and students are in great danger of thinking: what more is there, really, to what we are taught here? Our professors—"