# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1914_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth convention

14. God's Work.
(Eph. 2:10.)

The raw material from which God produces his work is a very brittle one, in fact quite unusable. It is human beings, and they are by nature dead through trespasses and sins. (Eph. 2:1, 5.) There is nothing good to be found in them that could please God and satisfy his holy Law. When a person is spiritually dead, he is indeed dead with respect to holiness, yet very much alive, active and busy in sins. The Apostle writes to the Ephesians that they had formerly walked in sins according to the course of this world and according to the prince who rules in the air, namely according to the spirit that now works in the children of unbelief; "among whom we also formerly had our conduct in the lusts of our flesh and did the will of the flesh and of reason." (Eph. 2:2, 3.) Those who are dead in sins walk in the vanity of their mind; "who have their understanding darkened and are alienated from the life that is of God, through the ignorance that is in them, through the blindness of their heart; who are past feeling and have given themselves over to licentiousness and practice all manner of uncleanness together with covetousness." (Eph. 4:17–19.) God is a pure, a holy God. Therefore to be carnally minded is enmity against God. (Rom. 8:7.) Therefore we also were by nature children of wrath, even as the others. (Eph. 2:3.) For when sin came into the world, death came also through sin; "and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." (Rom. 5:12.) "The wages of sin is death." (Rom. 5:12.) "The soul that sins, it shall die" (Ezek. 18:20), bodily death and eternal death, damnation.

In the condition and form in which God finds the raw material he cannot possibly use it. He must break the whole material into pieces with his Law and crush it. But then he begins his actual work with his Gospel and makes his work out of the broken pieces.

The worker is God himself and no one else. We are God's work and not the work of another. God works without the cooperation of man. God has created us in Christ Jesus. We are his creature, not our own creator. Life comes only from life. Spontaneous generation and autogony do not exist in the realm of natural life; and just as little is there spontaneous generation or self-begetting in the spiritual realm. "It is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast." (Eph. 2:8, 9.) The material in no way cooperates, neither through self-decision nor through abstention from willful resistance and the like, but from beginning to end we are God's work. "He who has begun a good work in you will also