# Der Lutheraner_Frankfurt am Main_Juni 1948_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Number 6                              June 1948                              Page 49

The Young
Lutheran

What does "The Young Lutheran" want?

Our youth will gratefully welcome the fact that in our Lutheran congregational paper "Der Lutheraner" a youth corner is being made available to them, which under the title heading "The Young Lutheran" immediately tells them: Here the youth are addressed, and here the youth themselves get to speak. This already states what "The Young Lutheran" intends. It will fulfill a twofold task. It gives our now united Lutheran churches, which likewise wish to work closely together in their youth work, the opportunity to direct their word especially to the youth and to show them the right way with admonition and help, and on the other hand it gives the youth themselves the opportunity to voice their thoughts, to exchange suggestions among themselves, and to encourage one another to service in church and congregation.

This twofold task will give "The Young Lutheran" its character. The word that the Lutheran church has to say to its youth will here too, in these columns, be nothing other than God's Word, under which we all, old and young, bow in obedience of faith. But it is not meant simply to repeat, in form and shape, what "Der Lutheraner" already has to say. For it should not be the case that "Der Lutheraner" is read only by the old and "The Young Lutheran" only by the young. Rather, what "Der Lutheraner" offers in instruction and edification, as well as in reports on current events and the congregations, should also serve you young Lutherans for the furtherance of your life of faith, and conversely "The Young Lutheran" hopes that the old, too, will come to love it and take joy in it. But because it turns especially to the youth with what it has to say, it will also address particularly the concerns and troubles, wishes and hopes of the youth, for which Scripture itself gives us an example. Does it not contain many a word worth taking to heart for the young Christian, beginning with the very serious accounts in the Bible of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and further through Joseph and David down to the encounter of the LORD Jesus with the rich young man and the word of the Apostle John: "I write unto you, young men" (1 John 2:13)? Have you ever thought about this and read in Scripture how much God's Word has to say especially to you for your youth?

To help you in this and to open up Scripture to you, "The Young Lutheran" is being placed in your hands. In doing so it also wants to serve you so that your sense of responsibility may be strengthened and deepened; for only he who knows himself responsible before God, and therefore lives in godly fear and faith, comforted by the grace of God, will also be ready to place himself joyfully and willingly as a living member in the service of his congregation. This sense of responsibility also includes the right Lutheran awareness of confession, so that even our youth already know why they belong to a confessionally faithful Lutheran church, and that they hold dear the doctrine of their church as the pure divine truth. Only he who in faith knows himself responsible before God will also take the right stance toward all the questions and temptations by which young Christians in particular are moved and assailed. All warnings against worldliness and frivolity, which will not be lacking in this youth corner either, all admonitions to cooperate in church and congregation and to take living part in the great work of the church, the work of missions, will bear no fruit if they do not reach the ear and heart of a youth who knows that they too must give account before God for everything they think, say, and do, and that therefore they too can live only by God's grace, and that this grace drives them to the confession: "Whether we live, we live unto the Lord."

But where such a sense of responsibility and right, believing readiness for responsibility fills the hearts of the youth, there they will also be moved to make "The Young Lutheran" their own mouthpiece. Just as our youth in the congregations should not stand aside and limit themselves to being "hearers only," but as "doers of the word" should grow ever more firmly into the fellowship of the Christian congregation, so too here in "The Young Lutheran" they should let become deed what they carry in their hearts of love for God's Word and for church and congregation.

Regard "The Young Lutheran" as a gift which you should not hold in your hands with indifference, but should now use joyfully and diligently as a means of serving one another with mutual instruction, encouragement, and stimulation in everything that moves and fills you as young people.

Ask your questions, express your opinions, thoughts, concerns, wishes and hopes, cares and troubles, and in doing so always let yourselves be governed by God's Word and will! Thus "The Young Lutheran" wants to serve you, and through it you can and should do this for one another. A beautiful and promising task you are thereby set before. God grant that through this service, which "The Young Lutheran" wishes to render to our youth, and to which it at the same time calls the youth, what is said in Scripture of the young Samuel after his call into the service of the LORD may also be fulfilled in them: "And Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him." (1 Samuel 3:19).

How readest thou?

"How readest thou?" thus the LORD Jesus asked the scribe who had put to him the question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" And then the LORD gave this man, who knew the law and the Scripture of the Old Testament very well, an instruction through the story of the merciful Samaritan, which showed him that despite all his scriptural learning he was not yet truly familiar with Scripture and did not yet understand it; for even for him, as the Apostle Paul writes of the Jews (2 Corinthians 3:14), the veil of Moses still hung unlifted before the Old Testament.

"How readest thou?" This question shall also occupy us here in "The Young Lutheran" again and again. It has always been a special task of Lutheran youth work to promote personal Bible study. This is more necessary today than ever, when so many among us live in dispersion and do not have the opportunity to hear a Lutheran sermon regularly, and when we are all, more than ever, surrounded by manifold troubles and dangers in our life of faith. A Christian lives by the Word of God and cannot remain in faith without the Word. But every one of us who has made the serious attempt at regular personal Bible study will also know from experience that Scripture has often seemed to him like a closed book, as though a veil hung over it. He has begun to read this or that book of the Bible, or has followed this or that Bible-reading schedule, and then stopped again, because the reading seemed to remain unfruitful and to have no effect on his heart. But that was not the fault of the Bible. It is, in everything that is written, the living Word of our God and "profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." (2 Timothy 3:16). It lies in yourself if Bible study has so far perhaps given you little. To you too applies the question that Philip once put to the eunuch from the land of the Moors: "Understandest thou what thou readest?" (Acts 8:30).

How readest thou? Yes, a great deal depends on this—how you read Scripture, whether you read it with the right understanding. And in this "The Young Lutheran," for its modest part, wishes to render you the service that