# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S56
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

56 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

bear witness of our Savior and his salvation, which saves our soul. The more deeply we recognize this, the more believingly and trustfully we then also turn in his strength to him who forgives all our sin and heals all our infirmities, so much the dearer and more precious will the Gospel become to us, so much the more will lukewarmness and satiety be resisted. Then through such daily repentance and contrition, in which our whole Christian life consists, the Gospel becomes more and more a power in us, the real life of our life. All the more capable, zealous fighters shall we be against the Pope and his soul-destroying doctrines. Let us not forget, also at the approaching jubilee festival, to humble ourselves before God on account of our ingratitude, to ask him from the heart for forgiveness! This is the first thing that belongs to the right struggle against the papacy by means of the Gospel, that we strive to remain believing Christians ourselves and to become so more and more, that we, even if in weakness, yet with a sincere heart learn to repeat after the great apostle the words: "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God." (Gal. 2:20, 21.)

But let us not forget Luther's second counsel here either! It refers to prayer. Prayer is a mighty weapon against the Antichrist, not some other weapon alongside the Gospel, different from it, but at bottom the same weapon. In prayer, if it is a right prayer, we really and truly put the Gospel into use. In prayer we hold before God his eternal promises and hold them before our own soul. Precisely in prayer we occupy ourselves quite intensively with the Gospel and its eternal promises. In prayer we cast all our troubles and cares, our weakness, our sin, the power and strength of the enemy with his temptations and assaults upon God and his grace and faithfulness and hold fast to God's promise. Thus our faith, our trust in God and his promise, is mightily strengthened, thus we receive confident courage for the fight against our enemies. Precisely through his believing prayer Luther became so undaunted a fighter against the Pope in a struggle compared with which our struggle against the same enemy appears only as child's play. Luther was a diligent, a mighty man of prayer. He wrestled with his God in prayer, he threw his promises at his feet, he held them before his soul and so became certain in faith of divine help, of his assistance. And then he could confidently confess Christ, then he could step fresh and joyful before the legates of the Pope, before Emperor and Empire, he, a lonely and despised monk, and bear witness of his Savior and his Gospel, although he knew that imprisonment, indeed death threatened him. In