# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S167
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 167

upon the state of the person is a preservation against the return of
discord with the conscience. The direction and disposition of the
personal self is, although implanted in the heart from above,
nevertheless that of its own free submission under the highest will,
because Jesus Christ has become its love, its delight, and its life.
Repentance and contrition with regard to the sin that still clings on
every side — which the chastening Spirit of God, grieved and,
according to the degree of unfaithfulness, indignant, uncovers ever
more deeply, little by little, in the conscience, without His mode of
appearance toward the old man being altered — together with the
believing certainty of justification by grace, which is more and more
sealed through the testimony from the Word, are what characterizes a
state in which evil is gradually weakened in its dreadful strength, and
all the fruits of faith — prayer, confession, patience under trials, good
works — begin to sprout forth. — But as for those who have forfeited
such blessedness through willful turning away, as well as adults who
have never yet been partakers of it: for them it remains a sheer
impossibility, unless they are touched by the hand of God, like the
young man of Nain, and, startled awake out of the sleep of chosen sins
of malice, experience in their conscience the blows of the divine wrath
and of the law, which not only leads to the knowledge of sin, but also
sharpens them for repentance and contrition. For this purpose God also
has this same law preached; it cannot kill the sin which is thereby all
the more properly recognized, but it can indeed give it occasion to stir
up all sorts of hateful desire; legal contrition, a contritio passiva, which
is not capable of the least actus elicitus (Smalcald Articles, p. 523ff.;
Latin, p. 319ff.; Apology, p. 293, 188; Latin, p. 175, 66), is living sin;
only in connection with even the weakest looking-up and longing of
evangelical faith does it come to that godly sorrow which works a
repentance unto salvation not to be repented of (Rom. 7, 2 Cor. 7:10).
To believe means, in its most general sense, to give assent to
something known in some way and to find rest of mind therein, from
which confidence an action corresponding to it follows. Insofar as the
word of the cross, to the exclusion of all worthiness of one's own, is to
be its object, it is — when one has in view, besides its first temporal
beginnings, also the whole inward coherence of its essence — one and
the same thing with what the first commandment comprises in itself:
to have God in the heart, to cling to Him, to rely on Him and hope in
Him, to trust Him, to have delight, love, and joy in Him, and to be
ever mindful of Him. Left to himself, man has only the imagining and
striving of the fleshly heart, enmity against the law; through the
preaching of that same law, evil becomes present to him — although he
still loves it and is held captive by it — in its horrifying shape with all
its unhappy consequences; and — a remarkable two-sidedness! — bitter,
servile fear has at the same time also become a consequence of this.
The point on which everything now depends is