# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

Son, but himself clothes them with it; who not only offers people a possibility of being saved but himself makes them saved.

How it serves to lay aside completely every claim to one's own merit, all self-glory, all boasting of one's own doing, one's own willing, one's own decision, one's own good conduct, and urges toward the adoring praise of the undeserved grace and mercy of God, to whom one now more willingly gives all honor, to whom one confesses:

That I am now converted, you alone have accomplished;
You have destroyed Satan's kingdom and work in me.
LORD, your goodness and faithfulness, which reaches to the clouds,
Has also broken and softened my stony heart.

To whom one confesses:

Mercy has been shown me, mercy of which I am not worthy;
I count that among the wonders; my proud heart never desired it.
Now I know it and am glad, and I praise the mercy.

How this knowledge, when one perceives one's own faith, however weak, serves to strengthen the joyful confidence that God, who has begun the good work, will also complete it as his own work, in spite of all one's own powerlessness! How it makes one careful in guarding the treasure of faith never to lose it again, to work out salvation with fear and trembling, precisely because it does not lie in one's own power to give oneself faith again once it is lost! How, in the sense of one's own powerlessness, it drives one to fervent prayer: "LORD, I believe; help my unbelief!" "LORD, increase our faith!" How it drives one to earnest, unceasing use of the means of grace, through which God, as he works faith, so alone also sustains it! How careful and cautious the deepened knowledge now makes one in expression, so as not to detract, even by a misleading word, from the grace and honor of our God, and leads to the rejection of all such expressions, old and new!

A closer look at the truth "The faith of believers and of those who are being saved is God's grace alone" has proved a blessing; a closer look at the truth "The unbelief of those who are lost is their own fault" will likewise prove a blessing, when one demonstrates, as far as one can from Scripture, in what acts and omissions this fault consists, and to what extent these involve fault in themselves. To the solution of the question why precisely those are converted and saved who are converted and saved, the treatment of this proposition will of course contribute nothing, and is not meant to. From the demonstration that by these acts, by these omissions the unbelievers brought it about that they did not come to faith, it does not at all follow that the converted owe their conversion to these acts, these omissions. All such