# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1859_S82
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

82 How should a pastor conduct himself at the sickbed of his parishioners?

meant thereby to lay no cushions under the arms and pillows under the
heads of lazy preachers, but only points out where faithful preachers
ought to be at work, and how they should train their parishioners for
salvation, so that when trouble and death should suddenly break in,
they might commend their soul to their God and Lord with a joyful
faith. It would therefore be carnal if a preacher were to use these words
of Dr. Luther to adorn his own laziness in private pastoral care,
especially when he notices that neglect of the understanding and of the
mental powers bears a good share of the blame for the fruitlessness of
public preaching. In such a case one will certainly have to be content
with the very least of Christian knowledge, and would it not be wisely
done if, for instance, one were to demand unconditionally even only the
recitation of the text of the Catechism, before declaring oneself ready to
give the Holy Supper to such sick persons? Let it rather be enough if
they recognize and confess from the heart that they are poor sinners
who have deserved God's wrath and disfavor, temporal death, and
eternal damnation by their many sins committed from youth up, and
that they know that Christ, the Son of God, died for them, and that
they wish gladly to be saved; and that Christ also wishes, in the Holy
Supper, through his body and blood, to grant them forgiveness of sins.

It is hardly necessary to remark that, nevertheless, the pastor must not
deal with any levity in this matter, but should, as much as possible,
take pains, in a truly simple and heartfelt manner, to work through the
Law a knowledge of sins together with remorse and sorrow over them,
and through the Gospel faith and trust in Christ. And if these are
people who will listen to reason, then God the Lord will surely also give
his blessing to it.

To these secure people the self-righteous are, in very many cases, most
closely akin. The self-righteous are actually also secure people; and
most of the secure belong also to the class of the self-righteous. For it
is, among many other things, a sad consequence of our corruption
through original sin that, alongside carnal security — in which a man
lives on indifferently and dully from day to day about God and his
Word and about his own eternal salvation, as though God possessed no
holy earnestness, and as though sin formed no dividing wall between
him and us men; indeed, as though the very concept of "sin" were
merely an invention of harebrained minds, requiring, in order to know
it, that one presuppose warped minds by one's own heart's example, and
as though heaven and hell, eternity and judgment, were at best poetic
fancies for amusement, or contrived means for enslaving the mind —
even the most dreadful self-righteousness has also found room in the
sinful human heart. In arrogant overestimation of himself, man,
through this sin of self-righteousness, makes himself into a god; he
seeks himself in his works, is more concerned for his own honor than
for God's honor, and yet stands all the while in the dreadful delusion
that God is gracious to him and that God's favor rests upon him.