# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S185
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus, or the Apostolic Pastorale. 185

...take, then, a strong and sweet comfort — namely, those ministers of Christ and his Church who are assailed especially concerning their fitness for the calling — and who indeed would be without such assault? For to do those noble and glorious works, there is no absolute need for a great measure of theological learning and public eloquence from the pulpit, nor likewise for a high degree of spiritual wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Even through less gifted ministers of the Word, provided only that they are orthodox in faith and competent to teach, the Lord works these works through his Spirit and Word in their mouths. Indeed, it is not seldom the case that plain, simple pastors, who nevertheless possess a shepherd's heart filled with the love of Christ for each of their parishioners, have congregations that display, in the confession of their mouths, as well as in works of Christian love and patience under the cross, in Christian conduct and discipline — in short, in every kind of godly life — far more faith and spiritual life than congregations that have great theologians and pulpit orators, even orthodox ones, as their preachers. And undeniably, the Lord and King of his spiritual kingdom, his Church on earth, means by this also to show that the effects of his Gospel flow solely from his free grace, and not from the great natural and spiritual gifts of his ministers — even though he himself has allotted these gifts to them. And so that the glory may remain his alone — he who works all in all according to the gracious good pleasure of his will — and so that before him no respect of persons may count, and no flesh may boast, he therefore sometimes accomplishes, through weaker and frailer instruments, great things that he denies to the most highly gifted.

The less gifted, then, provided only that they are faithful — and of stewards, after all, one rightly seeks nothing else than that they be found faithful — should likewise take cheerful comfort in this: that they too have been called by the Lord of the vineyard, the Father, at the request of the believers, to labor in his Church; that they too have been set by the Lord Christ as shepherds and teachers; that they too have been appointed by the Holy Spirit, through their congregations, as his fellow-helpers and fellow-workers, to feed the flock of God which he has purchased with his own blood. But the more gifted and learned should always keep in mind that they are nothing in themselves, that everything they are and have they have received from the free and undeserved grace and gift of God, for the sake of the meritorious suffering and death of Christ — so that they might, in serving love, apply their talent all the more richly to the common good — and that the devil, through spiritual pride, lies in wait for them all the more, precisely in order to dislodge them from simplicity in Christ, to instill false and seductive doctrine into their heart and mind, mouth and pen, thereby drawing disciples after himself and tearing apart the Church of Christ.

But it is fitting alike for both — the more and the less gifted and learned ministers of the Church — since it is the free grace of God alone that is and works all in all, to remain seated at the feet of the divine Word; it is fitting for both, likewise, to learn ever better from the present epistles of St. Paul,