# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

14 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth convention

If we are to be his witnesses, a thorough transformation of our outlook, our heart and our mind must first take place. We must learn to recognize as truth, the only truth, what we formerly rejected as pernicious error. We must learn to love as the highest happiness what we formerly abhorred as death. We must learn to strive with all our might for that against which we formerly defended ourselves and which we fought to the point of bloodshed. Only by our natural mind being changed into its very opposite are we put in a position to be witnesses of Jesus.

That is not all. A further decisive difference between the outlook and disposition of the natural man and those of our Savior concerns the way that leads to blessedness. The answer of the natural man may be given in the most various forms; it essentially always comes down to this opinion: whoever wants to be saved must procure salvation for himself. Everyone is the architect of his own fortune. That is how it is with Tom, Dick and Harry in the street, and it is also the wisdom of the deepest thinker and greatest philosopher: we must work out our blessedness for ourselves, earn it ourselves, deserve it ourselves. The highest moral principle that natural reason knows is the idea of retribution. Right and justice demand that every good deed find its proper reward and every evil deed its corresponding punishment. What offends against this is wrong. Under this rule, natural reason thinks, God too must bow. When it therefore hears of God's righteousness, it can think of nothing further than reward and punishment. And what common notions of good and evil it forms in doing so, we need not even consider here. For this reason the only way for it to attain blessedness is that of merit.

The Lord Jesus proclaims the exact opposite. He says: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me," John 14:6. He declares: "No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven," John 3:13. There the Lord Jesus says that heaven is too far away to be climbed by works. There is only one who is able to enter heaven, and who can bring others into heaven, and that is he himself. Even to the best, the most righteous man heaven remains closed if, apart from Jesus, he seeks to force his way in. It sounds to the natural man like a mockery of all justice that in the business of being saved one's own works are to count for nothing at all.

In order to save men, Jesus and his apostles proclaimed to them the forgiveness of sins. And in doing so they did not first ask how great and grievous the sins might be, what effort the person concerned had already made to overcome them