# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S51
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 51 —

should, but the imparting of it is here ascribed to the Gospel. A strict distinction must be made between effecting and imparting power; for the Word of God is a word of the Spirit, which brings forth divine and heavenly effects in us, works in us repentance, faith and sanctification; but it brings us not only the message that all the goods of grace are there and intended for us, but it also brings us the goods themselves. It is not such a message as a prisoner learns through his prison grating from someone who happens to pass, but such as the ambassador authorized by the king brings with his sealed letter of pardon. Such an authorized person is now, after Christ's death and resurrection, since God has sent out the message of pardon into all the world, every believing Christian. If one will not believe him, he takes the Bible and says: Here it stands, just take it out of it: God so loved the world, or: God was in Christ etc. So when a preacher steps before his people and proclaims: God was in Christ etc., that is nothing other than when the authorized person steps before the condemned criminal and says: Be without care, you shall not be put to death; I declare to you herewith in the name of His Majesty, the King: you are pardoned. And when the preacher points to the Word of God and the sacraments, he does as the authorized person does when the criminal will not believe him, who then points to the sealed letter of pardon and says: there it stands, read it yourself. So the preacher says to the anxious and fearful: Here, read God's letter of grace, sealed with Christ's blood and attested by the Holy Spirit, and believe it, and it will also be confirmed by the same Spirit in your heart. So one should distinguish between the power of the means of grace by which they can work faith and everything that must go on in a man so that he remain a child of God, and the power and efficacy by which they also really impart and hand over what the words say and as they read. The former power most of those who still want to be Christians concede; Zwingli indeed did not concede it; he said God needs no wagon, and the sensible has no power at all in the spiritual. Far from all who are in the Reformed Church believing that, it is on the contrary so that all the simple among the sects believe Christ's words, who says: My words are spirit and are life, and do not explain them thus: My words bring the message of spirit and life. But all deny that the Word has the power to impart that of which it speaks. They suppose that the doctrine of conversion would thereby be overturned. Now of course everyone must be converted if he wants to come into heaven, but it is not through conversion that he comes into heaven and into possession of the goods of grace, but through God's giving them to him. To be sure he does not get them if he does not take them, but his taking does not make the goods, but God's grace and the redemption of Jesus Christ.