# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S78
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

recognize and feel that they are sinners and in need of God's grace. Then Satan, the world, and the flesh at once work together to lull the awakened conscience back to sleep, or to numb it through intensified service of sin. And the devil is especially bent on keeping these people away from Christ and the Gospel precisely by this means, that he deludes them into thinking there is no grace to be had for them at all, that their sins are too great to be forgiven. For by such lying and deceptive trickery he seeks to drive them to complete despair of unbelief, and at the same time ever deeper into the swamp of sin, so that in gross transgression of all the commandments of God they outdo their companions, and the unbelief of despair is thereby strengthened.

But the good shepherd goes after this hundredth lost sheep as well, which he has indeed also purchased with his own blood; and this he does through the preaching of the Gospel from the mouth of one of his servants, whether from the pulpit or otherwise, by himself or by another Christian, so that he may believe in Him and be saved.

The doctrine of justification suffers another kind of damage from the doctrine of regeneration as it is corrupted by Pietism and enthusiasm. The pure evangelical, that is, Lutheran, doctrine rightly lets the doctrine of justification precede that of regeneration. For it is impossible that the sinful person — whether an infant and child, or a grown person — should be spiritually born unless, beforehand, through the appropriation of the merit of Christ by means of the Gospel or of Baptism, on God's part, and through faith on the part of the person, the guilt of hereditary and actual sin is removed, and the person is thereby declared righteous in God's judgment. For only then can he, with and in such forgiveness of sins, or justification, in God's judgment, receive the Holy Spirit, and through His working be inwardly, spiritually born; the heart filled with new spiritual impulses; the understanding spiritually enlightened; and the will, hitherto bound and perverted in spiritual things, made truly free — that is, made subject, in the obedience of love, to the will of God in His Word, and directed toward its fulfillment.

The enthusiasts, however, assert — as much against Scripture as against inner experience — that through prayer, which they also, quite contrary to Scripture and to all sense, make into a kind of means of grace, they obtain the Holy Spirit, and only afterward come to believe in Christ and receive the forgiveness of sins. They thus pervert God's order, and set up their work of prayer, together with all sorts of other discipline and preparation, in place of Christ's work of atonement, against the wrath of God — imagining that by this they obtain the grace of God and the gift of the Holy Spirit — and are thus essentially the same work-righteous people as the Papists. For, similarly to these, they cut off the gift of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins from the work of our justification already accomplished by Christ and from faith, Rom. 5:18, and instead credit it to their own work of prayer, as though only thereby were the granting