# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S106
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

106 On the Zeal of Preachers.

penetrate into hearts, and be like a hammer that shatters the hardest
rocks. In short, whomever Christ saves, he saves through foolish
preaching.

Likewise complete. For it is our task to teach not merely some things
but everything that Christ has commanded us. Not even the smallest
portion of the Word of God may be withheld from his people; rather the
whole counsel of God must be proclaimed, without adding to it and without
taking from it, Acts 20:27. If someone then is lost, he is lost through his
own fault, not through ours, for we discharge our office faithfully when we
teach, admonish, pray, and so forth, without deceit or pretense, and set
forth everything necessary to salvation. Let us imitate the courageous and
noble-hearted Micah, who publicly declared that he would not say what
the flattering courtiers wished, but what Jehovah had commanded, 1 Kings
22:14.

But that everything may be clear and complete, let us everywhere teach
with sincerity and faithfulness, and seek not our own glory or gain, but
God's, Phil. 4:17. If only Christ's renown, glorification, and honor
increase, we must be content even if we ourselves decrease and step into
the shadows, John 3:30. For the lust for glory is the mother of heresy. Let
us therefore truthfully and sincerely teach the way of the Lord, and
increase his glory to the best of our ability; for those who honor him, he
will honor again. —

Above all a preacher should not be greedy (ἀφιλάργυρος [not a lover of
money], 1 Tim. 2:3), far from covetousness, without love of money. He
does not say that one should not have money, but that one should not love
it. For it is not money that he condemns, but the love of money, because
this turns the mind toward foreign things and makes it less fit for the
holy office, and indeed hinders hospitality and care for the poor.

Add to this that we are soldiers of God, and that no soldier entangles
himself in the affairs of livelihood, 2 Tim. 2:4. Hence those are wholly
unworthy of the name of servants of Christ who think only of gaining
money and seek their own advantage more than that of the church. It is a
vice condemned in everyone and dishonoring to everyone, but most of all
to the teachers of the church. Therefore such are called ravenous and
insatiable dogs, Isaiah 56:11, liars, Jer. 5:31, biting, Micah 3:5, who
profane and desecrate the name of God for the sake of a handful of barley
and a morsel of bread, for the sake of the meanest and most worthless
thing, Ezek. 13:19. This is called in the epistles "filthy lucre," because it
is obtained in a disgraceful, covetous, flattering way, and through dirty
dealing, with the dignity of the preaching office set aside. This the Apostle
condemns, 1 Thess. 3:3 [sic], Titus 1:7, 11, 1 Pet. 5:3. Therefore we by no
means approve the perverse way of certain preachers of earning their
livelihood, who take greater care for the feeding of their livestock and the
tending of their fields than for their studies and the further-