# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 16 —

Scripture; but this plague, weariness of the Word, arises in ourselves
and carries all the more danger the less it can be noticed by us." (IV,
2385.) In another place the same Luther writes, in the year 1525: "When
the heart is weary of God's Word and no longer holds it its best
treasure, then the door stands open front and back, so that the devil
has free entry and may introduce all manner of error." (III, 2567.)
St. Paul therefore quite faithfully admonishes his Corinthians, and in
them all members of orthodox churches, since they, as he himself says,
were still rich through Christ in every respect, in all doctrine and
in all knowledge: "We then, as workers together with him, beseech you
also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain" (2 Cor. 6:1). "But,"
writes Luther in his Church Postil, "to receive the grace of God in
vain can be nothing else than this: that one hears the pure Word of
God, in which God's grace is set forth and offered, and yet does
nothing about it and does not take it to heart, but remains just as
before — thereby we earn that it be taken from us again, as from the
ungrateful, who are not worthy of it." (XII, 585 f.)

But how then? Venerable and beloved fathers and brothers in the Lord,
shall we, or may we, on that account despair of all help and take our
hand from the plow? — Far from it! — For we still have, through God's
faithfulness and mercy, that heavenly medicine which can heal all
sicknesses, even those incurable before men, of which already millions
have died — the pure Word of our God. And the same Luther who so often
proclaimed to his Germany God's heavy visitations of wrath, and said
of this land of blessing that it would one day be said of it, "Fuit!"
that is, "It has been!" for it would become a land of unbelief, of
mockery of religion, and of atheism (V, 1244) — the same Luther, I say,
also testified to this: "As long as the doctrine remains pure, there
is still hope that life too may easily be improved." (VI, 3609.) Let
us therefore not despair! God's pure Word gathered our Synod 31 years
ago; God's pure Word has made it a blessing to many and preserved it
to this day; God's pure Word can also free it from those defects of
life that threaten it with the loss of its treasure. For Paul himself,
as already mentioned, once had to cry out reproachfully to the
Corinthian Church: "Now ye are full" (1 Cor. 4:8), and yet nearly 50
years later Clement of Rome still bore this testimony to the church at
Corinth: "Who that had stayed among you did not acknowledge and praise
your firm and steadfast faith, filled with every virtue?"* But just as
that church was renewed by God's grace to its first love, so the same
door of grace stands open to our Synod also for her renewal.

* See Heinsius' Church History [*Kirchen-Historie*], I, 636.