# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S27
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ninth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1899. 27

how mighty, how invincible we would always feel ourselves to be! A
theologian has said of our time: what the Christians of our age lack
is the living conviction that God's word, as it lies before us in
Scripture, is spirit and life. If the church were vividly convinced
of this and acted accordingly with the word, it would, by God's
grace, experience a new Pentecost. Let us not be thrown into doubt
about the divine power of the word by the fact that human beings can
hinder its saving effect. The Synergists in particular, in earlier
times and in our own, have argued: "How can you speak so flatly of a
divine, almighty power of God's word, when the working of the word
can, after all, be resisted by human beings?" We know that very
well, for Scripture says so and experience confirms it. But it is
foolish to doubt the divine power of God's word on that account. Even
in the realm of nature, man can hinder the life worked by divine
power, when he tears the seed out of the ground and destroys life
already begun. But no reasonable person on that account doubts the
mysterious, truly divine power that lies in the seed and brings about
all growth and natural life. So it is, according to Scripture, with
the seed of God's word as well. God's word is and remains divine
power and divine wisdom, even though man has the sad capacity to
resist this power as far as the blessed final outcome is concerned.

We hold fast, then, to the fact that the word has divine power. From
this follows, for practice, this as well: let us not make unnecessary
difficulties for ourselves in the proclamation of the word. All we
have to do is bring God's word to the people and among the people.
The word is powerful in itself; it does not need to be made powerful
first by human additions. All that is needed for the earthly grain of
seed to sprout is that it be put into the ground. Then it grows.
Human talk about the seed, even scientific treatises on growth, do
not in the least promote the growth. So it is also with the divine
seed of God's word. All we have to do with it is mix it with the
ground — that is, bring it into a person's spirit. More than that we
cannot, and should not, do. Logic and rhetoric have their place in
preaching so long as they are kept in a purely serving position —
that is, so long as they serve only to bring God's word to the minds
of the hearers and to have it received into them. As soon as logic
and rhetoric step out of their merely serving position, wanting to be
something in themselves and to make the word powerful in the first
place, they hinder the effect of the word, by drawing the mind and
heart of the hearer away from the word. Let us also especially
beware of the folly of thinking that God's word could only become
effective once we had first, by means of all sorts of