LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1971, Page 95

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EVENING DEVOTIONS 95

ing of the oracles of God as they were given in the Old
Testament. We make a serious mistake if we do not
see that all these things were of God, with which He
blessed that segment of the world into separation from
the world at large and into being His chosen people.
Just like us here in convention assembled, coming to-
gether as the children of God, earnestly dealing with
those matters that pertain to God, harking back to and
seeking to maintain what we have received as the bless-
ing of God. And it’s with regard to that world that our
Lord asks us in these few moments of withdrawal:
“What goes on and what went on all day with regard
to Me? In all your much saying, who were you saying
Iam? What conclusion with regard to Me would some
outsider draw from the many expressions that were
made?”

Might it be that we represented Jesus at times merely
as another John the Baptist and thereby, unlike the
Baptizer, even unwittingly made Him decrease that we
might increase? Or did we represent Him as something
of an Elijah who ascended into heaven to be with God,
no longer living among us except by a kind of indirect
influence because of what He said? Or was He Jeremiah
with nothing more to offer than His woes and bitter
lamentations, only exposing our helplessness without
being our Help, only consigning us to the terrible dark-
ness which has finally been able to overwhelm the
Light? Or probably He was relegated to an even more
indefinite role, a kind of prophet with a great deal to
say about conditions in our religious world without be-
ing the Savior, even more to say about the Word of God
without being that Word made flesh among us so that
we could behold His glory, full of grace and truth? How-
ever it was, the grim possibility is there that that’s all
our saying said of Him and that’s all that our involve-
ments indicated with regard to Him. And that’s pre-
cisely why He always calls us back to Him Himself, to
gather us around Him once more before we call it a day
in this our very religious world.

We will never be with Him in anything resembling
direct, personal relationship but what Jesus compels us
to search our hearts under His probing as He asks:
“Who do you say that I am?” Yes, here we now sit
around Him, with everything else shut out, our re-
ligious world of synodical concerns as well as the world
that is beckoning out there with its offer of relaxation
and entertainment, our past glory as well as our past
shame, our knowledge of pure doctrine as well as our
views that are shaped by the newspapers and the
rest of our secular reading, and we are compelled to
give answer, each for himself and not in terms of what
others say or insist that we’ve got to say if we want to
be correct. And only out of a great humility which is
our emptiness of any personal claim or prerogative, only
in that lowliness where we find ourselves because God
has brought the mighty down from their proud seats,
only in total dependence upon Jesus Himself and His
offer of Himself and His representation of Himself, will
we be able to confess with Peter: “You are the Christ,

the Son of the living God!” And we will be wiser than
Peter if we will immediately add the prayer: “Lord,
I believe! Help my unbelief, so evident again during
the course of this day, so much more the manner of my
being and doing and saying than what I now confess!”

That’s the blessedness with which our Lord would
declare us blessed! We don’t come to such a confession
of Jesus as He is in our midst and in our time by the
conclusions which we can draw on the basis of what
we know about Him or anything else. We’re no wiser
or better or more religious in ourselves than the re-
ligious and irreligious world of men about us. It is
always only too evident how wise and good and re-
ligious we are when we operate apart from this con-
fession. Only the Father in heaven can reveal to us
that this Jesus of the New Testament, this Jesus in our
midst on the floor of our convention so obscure as not
to be recognized as present, this Jesus who rides on a
colt, the foal of an ass, to this day as He addresses us
through the mouth of a sinner and presents Himself in
such meekness that we can easily dispose of Him by
closing a Book or shutting our ears or bolting our hearts
—this Jesus is indeed the Christ, the One who came
from God and still comes from God because He is the
Son of the living God. Only faith so knows Him, and
only in faith can we so own Him, the faith which only
the Father can create by His Word and in which we
continually let it be to us according to God’s Word.

That confession of faith to this day is the rock, the
only rock, on which Jesus Christ builds His church so
that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And
that’s the glory of the church, not the I who confess
the faith, but the faith which sees as the Father de-
clares it to be, the faith which is always faith in Jesus
as the Christ, the Son of the living God. And that faith
continues in Christ’s Word, with no other source or
power or goal or purpose or energy, except the ongoing
assurance in this present as well as in the past and
certainly in the coming of every future: “I will build
My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against
it!” Whatever is the product of our efforts, and we must
make every effort, and whatever is the result of our
resolutions and plans and programs, and we had better
do the best we can, it will not be the church and the
gates of hell will yet prevail against it. Does that con-
sign us to a kind of quietism of inactivity or an indif-
ference to involvement in the labors of those who are
dedicated to the church and tirelessly labor for the
church? Not a bit of it! It calls us to the most difficult
of all, to the literally impossible because we cannot do
it or be it by ourselves. We can only confess in all
that we are and say and do what the Father reveals
to us and ever reveals to us anew: “Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of the living God!” Then all the rubbish is
cleared away together with all the underbrush of our
own workaday arguments and all the surface soil of
what we are in and by ourselves, and the rock is ex-
posed as the only foundation on which Jesus, the Christ,
the Son of the living God, still builds His church! Amen.

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