# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S77
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the Preaching of the Correct Doctrine of Justification. 77

ments of inherited evil desire is not in the least restrained by the threats of the Law. A person, for example, may indeed, through such an effect of the Law and other refined outward discipline, be kept from the outbreak of evil desire into fornication and adultery; but inwardly it burns all the more fiercely, the less he has from God the special gift of chastity and continence, and the stronger his sexual drive is by nature. The more, then, he fights against this evil desire with the Law, the more unchaste and unclean, full of heat and lust, and so much the greater a sinner he thereby becomes before God.

Secondly, where the doctrine of repentance is legalistically overstrained, and the comfort of the Gospel is withheld from the penitent person in whom no feigned repentance can be shown, there the doctrine of justification and of faith is being curtailed in a harmful and soul-destroying way. Therefore a Lutheran preacher should never and nowhere preach the Law alone, but afterward the Gospel as well, so that penitent sinners are not held back from believing. Thus it is also stated in Article 12 of the Augsburg Confession: "And true, proper repentance consists properly in having contrition and sorrow, or terror, on account of sin, and yet at the same time believing the Gospel and absolution, that sin is forgiven and grace obtained through Christ — which faith in turn comforts the heart and sets it at peace." And even if there were only a single penitent sinner — though who can know whether there are not more — among a great crowd of the impenitent, this one should nevertheless not be denied "his due," namely, the Gospel.

Moreover, the Gospel should be preached to all people, whether they are inwardly penitent or not, for the producing of faith in the penitent, and as a testimony against the impenitent — already now in their conscience, afterward in their hour of death, and finally at the judgment of the last day, should they persist in impenitence — precisely because, in the face of the preaching of the Gospel, owing to the utmost corruption of our nature, the natural, inherited, innate unbelief of the heart turns into, and worsens into, malicious unbelief against Christ and his Gospel.

Finally, it can also happen that the Gospel, where it is testified fully and purely, with demonstration of the Spirit and of power, and with a joyful opening of the mouth, to a mixed multitude, snatches this or that brand out of the fire through the overflowing abundance of God's goodness and Christ's love — a brand which the mere preaching of the Law would only have driven ever deeper in, so that he would have been eternally lost in it. For in the very midst of the uncouth and perverse generation of the manifestly impenitent, to whom indeed the preaching of the Gospel is a savor of death unto death, there are always, even in this our time of wholesale falling away from the faith and of gross or refined service of sin, some people whose conscience the sword of the Law has already wounded, and who there-