# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the 24th General, or

into a person's spirit and heart through hearing or sight, it begins
to create and work with mysterious divine power. "The kingdom of
God," says the Lord Christ (Mark 4:26-27), "is as if a man should
scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day,
and the seed sprout and grow, he knows not how." Thus St. Peter
testifies (1 Peter 1:23, 25) that Christians "have been born again,
not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and
abiding word of God," and, he adds, "this is the word that was
preached to you." St. Paul teaches (Ephesians 1:19-20): "according to
the working of his mighty power, which he worked in Christ when he
raised him from the dead." That is the power of the word with which
God has equipped his church. It is not a human power, nor something
midway between human and divine power, but true divine power, divine
omnipotence.

Experience, too, indeed bears this out, both in others and in
ourselves. What strikes down the self-righteous person, who, like all
natural people, trusts in his own uprightness, and casts him into the
dust before God as a poor sinner deserving condemnation? That is the
power of the word, of which God himself says, "Is not my word like a
fire, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (Jeremiah
23:29). What lifts the broken sinner up out of the dust, so that he
finds comfort against the terrors of conscience, death, and hell, and
gains a heartfelt confidence in the grace of God? That is the power
of the divine word, which tells him of the grace of God in Christ.
What makes Christians, in affliction that falls upon them like an
unbearable burden and drives the world to despair, time and again so
confident that they even boast in their afflictions, as St. Paul says
(Romans 5)? That is the power of the divine word. What carries
Christians through death — where all human strength and all human
comfort come to an end — so completely that they do not taste death?
That is the power of the divine word. What enables the church as a
whole to stand against the gates of hell? That is the power of the
divine word, on which the church is founded. "Where God's word
enters the heart with true faith," says Luther, "it makes the heart
like itself — likewise firm and sure, so that it becomes as
steadfast, upright, and hard against every temptation, devil, death,
and whatever else it may be called, that it defiantly and proudly
despises and mocks whatever would doubt, waver, rage, or be angry."*)

That is the power of the word. Oh, that we might always be vividly
convinced of this, and have the confidence in the power of the word
that it deserves and that we ought to have in it. How rich, how
strong,

*) E. A. 37, 8.