# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1859_S109
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Care Most Necessary for a Preacher in His Conduct. 109

2 Corinthians 6:3. To grasp the force of this admonition all the more thoroughly, we must take it in its connection with what precedes and what follows it. Before this, the holy apostle admonishes the Corinthian congregation not to receive the grace of God in vain, and he does so as a fellow-worker, that is, as God's helper in the work of their salvation. We, he means to say, teach and admonish, but God inwardly gives the increase and the blessing through the Spirit. God is inwardly the true Master who does the best part, and we help and serve him toward this outwardly with the preaching office. Who would think lightly of the admonition of such a fellow-worker, since God speaks and works through it? To this he adds: now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. So he calls the time of the New Testament, which has dawned with the preaching of the Gospel, in which he lets go all wrath and punishment and offers all grace and help. When this blessed time is rightly recognized, then the human heart becomes glad and willing to do and suffer all things, for which the unbeliever has neither desire nor strength. But to receive the grace of God in vain means nothing other than gladly to hear the pure Word of God, in which God's grace is offered, yet not to take hold of it and abide in it, but to remain just as before. Immediately upon this follow the words: Let us give no one any occasion of offense. Whoever, then, gives offense receives the grace of God in vain, does not recognize the acceptable time, indeed despises God, who speaks to us and works in us through his fellow-workers. No less does the force of the apostolic admonition emerge from the words that follow: but in all things let us approve ourselves as the servants of God. A servant of God has become a different person; in his conduct before men he looks not to what pleases, profits, or is convenient to himself, but to what is well-pleasing to his Lord, whose servant he is. An unbeliever lives according to his own mind, and even when he lives at his very best, he still has no notion of that holy carefulness which seeks only God's good pleasure and honor and the edification of his neighbor. A servant of God has a tender conscience and a burning zeal to do, suffer, and avoid all things, so that only his Lord's honor may remain unimpaired — indeed, that his fame may be spread ever further.

After these preliminary remarks we ask what it means to give offense. It means to give cause and occasion for falling, for falling away from the faith. This may be given both through false doctrine and through a wicked life, whereby a person standing in the faith may be led into error concerning the faith, or an unbeliever may be hindered from attaining to faith. That the apostle here speaks chiefly of the offense of a wicked life is evident from the context. However great, too, the offense of the world is, on account of which Christ pronounces the woe upon it, yet the apostle here does not intend to rebuke the world for it. He has here only the Christians in view, and upon them he binds it strictly, to