# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

12 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth convention

IV.

We shall conduct the struggle for our school rightly only if we remain vividly aware that the Savior has called us to be his witnesses.

Our founding and maintaining of Christian schools, our work in our schools, is only one form in which we carry out our witnessing. As soon as we lose sight of this, or as soon as we let this motive be mixed with others, our work in the school is no longer of the right kind. We are to be witnesses of our Savior in everything that we undertake.

Everyone feels readily enough that the Savior is telling us something great when he says: "Ye shall be my witnesses." Why does the Savior need witnesses in the world?

If we look at his nature, that he is God's Son, we must say that he has no need of a witness. And should he, as Savior, need a witness? Should it not suffice that the news of his work of redemption is communicated to the world? Should the world, which lies in death, not at once fall to this message? Should one not expect that the news of the redemption accomplished would spread like wildfire? Why then does the Savior need further witnesses? Yet he appoints us to it. What does he mean by that?

We must confess that by nature we are not fit to be witnesses of Jesus. By nature we always stand up for the very opposite of what our Savior stands for.

The whole life of our Savior had only one aim: to save sinners. Now what do men understand by blessedness? We need not even consider such people as seek their blessedness, like the prodigal son, in debauchery and carousing. Their doings are rejected by respectable people. But by most people it is still counted as essential to blessedness that we are healthy and free from pain, that we have sufficient food and clothing. Where this is lacking or present only insufficiently, one cannot, they say, speak of happiness and blessedness.

Others, who want to be somewhat more refined, seek blessedness in the finer enjoyments of this life. They therefore diligently pursue the sciences. They seek to penetrate into the deepest secrets of nature, of history, of philosophy, and think that one can be happy and contented only when one is clever and has found the solution of all riddles. In that, they say, one will surely be blessed. — Or they devote themselves to the cultivation of art. They rejoice when orators or poets express sublime truths in sublime language; when sculptors or painters portray grand objects in perfect beauty; when musicians express all the feelings of which the human soul is capable in melting melodies, in mighty harmonies, and arouse similar ones in the hearer.

To others blessedness is unthinkable without power. Personally