LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 45

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PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS 45

be stress on “The Edifying Word.” This is always our
great need: to let the Word of judgment and mercy
build us up. This is the way in which God wants to
be at work among us to build the whole body of Christ.
God’s first work is to overwhelm us with His love so
that He takes us captive completely. God’s work always
begins with me. I am prepared to deal with my broth-
er’s failings when God has dealt graciously with my
own immense burden of guilt. When I have sensed the
quality of grace toward me, then I will know that the
grace of God gives hope for unity — and that nothing
else does.

3. The grace of God gives life. In the words of Hab-
bakuk and St.Paul: “The just shall live by faith.” It
is no accident that the Lutheran Confessions make the
Word and sacraments to be the marks of the church.
Where the grace of God touches men, there God is
bringing His life to men. The church is God’s creation
in a special sense, for the Word of grace speaks into the
tomb of the world much as Christ spoke into the tomb
of Lazarus to say: “Arise, come alive, come forth. Go
forth.”

We in the church treasure the Gospel, but we
dare never try to lock it into a treasure chest for safe-
keeping. It cannot be contained. It is God’s own ex-
plosive power. It produces changes as radical as death
and life. We seek to use the Gospel in order to sustain
faith but not to have faith as an end in itself; it is the
channel by which God gives life to men.

The church doesn’t have an easy time of being alive
in a world where the sickness that pervades is the sick-
ness unto death. We are always contending against
time in a contest where everything is at stake. And the
church has the only power that can really change any-
thing, for we have the Gospel of life for all men. God
doesn’t want His creation to be in bondage to Satan
through sin and death. God wants to restore His crea-
tures to Himself so that He might again give full sway
through His love among men. If we shrink at the sight
and sound and smell of hate and prejudice and war,
then we can imagine how God feels. After all, these are
all His beloved creatures and His wonderful creation.
God never intended things to come out this way.

How desperately God wants us to bring to a halt this
frantic race toward self-destruction He has shown be-
yond all doubt by the redemption in Christ Jesus. Now
He has entrusted to us the Gospel as life for a dying
world. All the visions for good that have been dreamed
depend on us as the bearers and sharers of the life of
God in Christ. We truly have the destiny of the world
in our hands. I need not remind you that when too long
we forget or ignore the charge God has committed to
us by our call to faith, God soon sends messengers from
the world to pound rudely on our chureh doors to de-
mand that we live out and give out life for the world.

4, Finally, as the church we confess that the grace
of God is the glory of God. Where God’s grace is most
evident, there we must respond by giving Him our
highest honor. We are indebted to praise and serve
God for everything but above all that in Christ He has

claimed and named us for Himself. Where we are at
our worst in our sin, there He has been at His best for
us. He has been most loving when we are most unlova-
ble. This is the Gospel. For this we give glory to God.
It is God’s doing alone. It is His power alone. What-
ever the Gospel has done among us and whatever it has
done through us, it has been the power of God at work.
To Him belongs all the glory.

It is at this sensitive point that our failure and God’s
great grace both become most obvious. At times it
takes voices speaking to us from the moon to remind
us that our high calling is to recognize and honor Him
who at the beginning made heaven and earth. But
what will it take to remind us that we ought to glorify
God by using the riches of our land and our technology
in a way that will help others to know the goodness of
God as Creator and Preserver?

For more than four and a half centuries we as evan-
gelical Lutherans have had the Word and its precious
Gospel cargo. But just where the love of God shines
most brightly we have so often beclouded Him by stand-
ing in His way with our little learning, by our stubborn
insistence that we with our prejudices and preferences
are His best interpreters, and by our maneuvering to
prevent God from saying and doing what He truly
wants to say and do.

The glory of God shines most brightly where He is
present as He lives in and among us. But we have
dared to assert our private lordship in the life of the
church and have done so in a way that our very way
of living dishonors Him and calls into question our trust
in the Gospel.

The work of our hands is to call forth praise for our
God. God alone can judge whether our stewardship of
time and money and talent says much to Him or to the
world about the way we love and trust.

Brethren, I cannot close on this note. To do so
would be to deny the Gospel power our text proclaims.
By His mercy God has already forgiven us our bad talk
and our back talk, our deceit and ambition and every
other failing. He who alone has the right to cast stones
has said: “Neither do I condemn thee.”

None of this is new to us. Each of us can rightfully
say: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Certainly our Synod says this. When we have put our
trust in His mercy, God has never let us down, whether
we have leaned on Him for ourselves or proclaimed the
Gospel to others. Nor will He. God’s highest goal for
us and for all men is that we should trust Him for the
sake of His grace. Christ is our proof that we will not
be let down.

God is still among us. God still reigns among us.
And where God reigns among His people, it is by the
Gospel alone that He reigns. What does this mean?
It means we can expect God by His Gospel to replace
our anxiety with courage, to bring us into closer rela-
tion with others who truly and trustingly call Him
Father, to awaken us to new life and service. Finally,
it means that we will sing and say much more: SOLI
DEO GLORIA. Outver R. Harms, President