# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S331
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Doctrine of the Lutheran Church Concerning Sunday. 331

do not what pleases me, I do it with will and with my whole heart. But
when I pursue my own works, and my limbs, ears, eyes, tongue, hands
and feet, heart and thoughts are directed according to my own will and
not according to God's will, then they are all works that go outside of
and against faith. Therefore these are the true works of the true Sabbath,
which proceed out of faith, in obedience and at God's command; there
God himself works the true Sabbath.
That is why God also kept such strict and hard watch over the
Sabbath in the Old Testament, whereby this spiritual Sabbath was
signified. For it all happened as a figure, Col. 2. The Sabbath of the old
Jews was only a shadow compared to the true Sabbath of the Christians;
therefore God even had stoned the man who gathered wood on the
Sabbath, as stands in the fourth book of Moses, the fifteenth chapter. But
this happened for our sake, so that we should indeed diligently attend to
our observance, and undertake or establish nothing apart from God's
Word or against God, but that whatever we do, we do at God's
command.
But those who fall into it with their own reason and opinion set up
idolatry and preach wrongly, presenting false doctrine under the name of
God's Word and the appearance of God's Word; these then lead the
world astray, come out boldly just to be heard; they think they have
accomplished something well, if only they bring something new onto the
stage. But this text here admonishes us that we should stand idle, and
guard ourselves against such works as are not commanded by God; they
then come blundering in, like swine, tear down images, and afterward
boast that God commanded it, that it is God's Word, done at God's
command.
It is, however, a work of their own choosing, and not God's work, as
was shown above in the First Commandment. God says to us: Be still,
hallow the Sabbath for me, let me work. When we now choose our own
work, and meanwhile let God's command stand aside, then we keep the
devil's holiday, not God's. . . . When you now notice in yourself a work
that God is not working in you, then trample it underfoot, and pray God
that he also bring to nothing in you everything that he himself does not
work. And even if you could, with a single sermon, save the whole
world, and yet do not have the command to do so, then let it be; for you
would be breaking the true Sabbath, and it would not please God."
(Luther's Works, Erlangen edition, vol. XXXVI, pp. 91–98.)
Further, Luther writes in the year 1538 in his "Letter against the
Sabbatarians": "The Third Commandment concerning the Sabbath, on
which the Jews pride themselves so highly, is in itself a commandment
common to all the world; but the ornament with which Moses adorns it
and assigns it to his own people belongs to no one but the Jews in
particular; just as, in the First Commandment, no one but the Jews in
particular are to believe and confess that the common God of all the
world led them out of Egypt. For the Third Commandment's