The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1931, Page 179

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER. 179

“Give, and It Shall be Given to You.”
If we have a faith that makes us happy, if we

‘have a Gospel that satisfies our spiritual wants,

how can we with a good conscience withhold from
others this Gospel which brings happiness to us?
Certainly, we must sce that this would be inex-
cusably selfish on our part, and surely such selfish-
ness would mean failure on our part to do our
duty to our less favored fellow-men. But it means
even more; in the end it means spiritual decline
and death to ourselves. ‘The heart that refuses
to send its life fluid through the body dies with the

“yest of the body which it declines to serve; the

arteries that will not pulsate begin to mortify;
the lungs that no longer wish to breathe to bring
the life-giving oxygen into the blood of the body
soon lose their own vitality. Withhold from others
what it is your duty to give them, and you deprive
yourself of the very thing which you refuse to give
to your brethren. Refuse to share Christ with
others, and you have already begun to lose Him;
refuse to share the blessing of the Gospel of Christ
with others, and such refusal shows that the blessed
power of the Gospel is no longer exerted in you.
Refuse to share Christ with’ others, and you rob
yourself of Him who is the Source of all true riches
and bliss.
A Gospel for the World.

Christ plainly tells us that His Gospel is in-
tended for all men, that its contents are for the
world, that its blessings have been procured for all
nations, that it is the power of God unto salvation
to every one that believeth, of every nation and
every people. And if this is true,—and who can
doubt it in view of the Savior’s declaration ? — then
it is time that we recognize it and act accordingly.

Quite too long have we been provincial; it is time

that we become cosmopolitan, as Christ clearly
indicates that He would have us be. We must more
and more get out of ourselves. We shall never
prosper at home as Christ would have us prosper or
ever develop that earnestness, devotion, and power
in our own home congregations which the Lord of
the Church longs to find in us, until our narrow-
ness gives: place to the world-wide vision of the
Lord and we cultivate those world sympathies which
are so apparent in Paul.

Go Ye!

In His parting command, “Go ye into all the
world and preach the Gospel to every creature,”
Christ expresses the very spirit of His Gospel and
the Christian religion. In one of his famous lec-

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tures, Max Mueller, the famous scholar, said: “Let
us look at the religions of mankind in which the
missionary spirit has been at work and compare
them with those in which any attempt to convince
others by argument, to save souls, to bear witness
to the truth, is treated with pity or scorn. The
former religions are alive, the latter are dead or
dying.” While, of course, the learned scholar is
here speaking of religions that have not in them
life-giving power, which alone the Christian re-
ligion has, it yet remains true that we have here,
in the words of this great scholar, an important
lesson and a stern warning for us Lutherans. They
that would continue to possess the life of the Gospel
must manifest the life of the Gospel. Not to put
forth that missionary effort, which is a certain
manifestation of the life which the Gospel gives, is
an indication that the process of mortification, the
process of spiritual decay and death, has set in. God
grant us grace to see our privileges, our opportuni-
ties, our duties, and — our danger! F.J.L.

The Celebration of a Real Harvest-
and Mission-Festival at St. Paul’s,
Lutherville, La.

St. Paul’s celebrated its annual harvest- and
mission-festival on the first Sunday of October.
That day had been set aside by our members to
assemble in our house of worship to hold a special
service for the purpose of acknowledging and thank-
ing God for the unmerited gifts He bestowed upon
us this year. Although this year’s crop was rather
poor and the market price very low, our members
were able amply to decorate the church with some
of the products they had been permitted under God’s
providence to harvest this year.

In spite of the short crop and low market price
we have thousands of reasons to be thankful unto
God, not only for temporal blessings, but also,
indeed above all, for the many, many undeserved
spiritual blessings. ‘This year we had a special
reason to thank God, not only for the ordinary tem-
poral and spiritual gifts, but also for the special
manner in which God has blessed our efforts in
church-work. ‘This year we had a harvest of tem-
poral blessings, a harvest of spiritual blessings, and .
a harvest of souls, the latter by the reception of
new church-members. For on our annual haryest-
and mission-festival sixteen persons, varying in age
from eighty-six years to ten months, were gathered
into the church by baptism and confirmation. That