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January 2, 2022
To confound justification and sanctification is one of the most horrid errors. The most beautiful preaching is rendered useless by this error. Only by a strict separation of justification and sanctification a sinner is made to understand clearly and becomes certain that he has been received into grace by God; and this knowledge equips him with strength to walk in a new life.
if you wish to believe in Christ, you must become sick; for Christ is a Physician only for those who are sick. He came to seek and to save that which is lost; therefore you must first become a lost and condemned sinner.
any good work even of a Christian, no matter how good it may appear, is damnable in the sight of God.
What must a person do to become assured of salvation? 1) He must amend his life and become a different man; 2) he must repent of his sins; 3) he must also apprehend Christ by faith.
refers to mourning over sin. They
They contended that grace must be preached first and then repentance. Indeed, they insisted that in the churches the Law must not be preached at all.
They do not tell him of a number of things that he will have to do first, for instance, to feel contrite. They simply say to him: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
When a minister absolves a person who has confessed his sin to him, he takes that sin of the other on his own conscience. He can cheerfully do this, for the party that came to him to confess perhaps the most horrible sins came with a bruised heart. He may cheerfully pronounce absolution to such a person and say: “I shall assume the responsibility for what I am doing, for I know that on the great day of Judgment Christ will say to me: You did right; for he came to you with a bruised conscience, and it was proper that you ministered the Gospel to him.”
Your melancholy is a work of the devil, which Christ wants to destroy if you will only let Him. You have had your fill of anguish; you have sorrowed enough; you have exceeded your penance. Therefore, do not refuse my consolation; let me help you.
Luther’s exegesis of 1 John 3, 8 is beautiful. The term “works of the devil” is commonly interpreted to signify horrible and gross sins, but Luther comprises in that term also doubt and melancholy as being the most grievous sin. Christ did not come to fill us with sadness, but with peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.
Depression As sin
“I wish to know,” Luther writes (St. L. Ed. XXI a, 20 f.), “the condition of your heart, whether you have at last come to loathe your own righteousness and desire to rejoice in the righteousness of Christ and to be of good cheer because of it.
learn Christ — Christ Crucified. Learn to sing praises to Him and to despair utterly of your own works. Say to Him: Thou, my Lord Jesus, art my Righteousness; I am Thy sin. Thou hast taken from me what is mine and hast given to me what is Thine. Thou didst become what Thou wert not and madest me to be what I was not.
Bold sinners do not acknowledge that they are sinners. What others call sin they call human weakness and a natural, inborn disposition.
that we are to find peace by wholly despairing of our own works. When a poor sinner regards himself, he does despair; when He looks at Jesus, he is made confident.
A wicked person, who wants to remain in his sins, whether they be gross or refined sins, — for the devil can bind men not only with the ropes of filthy, gross sins, but also with such delicate threads as pride, envy, lovelessness, — such a wicked person, Isaiah says, does “not see the majesty of the Lord.”
Whenever the preacher faces this class of people, he dare not preach anything else than the Law to them. Moreover, when he preaches before a multitude, his hearers must get the impression that what he says does not apply to all of them indiscriminately, but to the would-be righteous, who claim the Gospel for themselves.
A young man who has arrived at “faith” in God’s Word by a sterile conviction of his intellect is a pitiful sight. If he is an acute reasoner, he can easily be led to accept all sorts of errors and become a heretic, because he has never passed through any real anguish of soul.
A Christian is not reckless, wild, and vulgar, but his conscience is timid, low-spirited, and despondent. He feels the gnawing of his sin and trembles at the wrath of God, the power of the devil, and the thought of death.
For Christ has gained for us not only grace (gratiam), but also the gift (donum) of the Holy Ghost, so that we obtain from Him not only forgiveness of sin, but also the ceasing from sin.
We shall never attain to perfect sanctification in this life, but we must make a beginning and progress in this endeavor. For he that does not increase, decreases, and he that decreases will ultimately cease entirely using what God has given him. Finally, he will be a dead branch on the vine.
‘repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name.’ However, nowadays many speak only of forgiveness of sin and say little or nothing regarding repentance notwithstanding the fact that without repentance there is no remission of
By preaching faith only and saying nothing about repentance, the preacher leads his hearers to that awful condition where they imagine they are not in need of repentance, and finally they get so that they are past help.
what the Reformed Church lacks is just this — it cannot correctly answer the question, “What must I do to be saved?”
in other words, when they are told to keep on praying and struggling until they feel that God has received them into grace.
The only wrong feature in this part of their preaching is their depiction of the infernal torments, which is usually done in such a drastic manner as to engage the imagination rather than to make their words sink into the depth of the heart.
It is a pity that the great majority of nominal Lutherans, while cherishing a kind of human hope that they are accepted with God, that they have obtained forgiveness of sin, and will be saved, nevertheless have no assurance of these matters.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”? Heb. 11,
“The evidence that you have the requirements of a Christian is insufficient.”
“The first rule is: Pray for grace. The second: Be watchful lest you lose grace. The third: Meditate upon the Word of God in a proper manner.
This prayer you should offer, not once or twice, but you must continue offering it daily with sighs and strong crying, until you obtain grace, which assures you from your own experience that your heart has been truly changed.”
While speaking of the merits of Christ, he directs man to his own works, by which nothing will ever be achieved. His advice to cry to God “until you obtain grace” means, as the words that follow show, “until you have a feeling of grace.”
But grace is not something for which I must look in my heart. It is in the heart of God. Grace cannot be found in me, but is outside of me.
Modern theology is completely under the control of this error that man converts himself by spiritual powers that are conferred on him.
But a prayer for a change of heart will not be offered except by a person in whom such a change has been begun. Only a believer is a person of this kind. While still an unbeliever, a person is dead in sins, takes serious matters lightly, and is unconcerned about whether he will go to heaven or hell if he should die the next night.
However, a person who is concerned about his conversion already is converted.
It is awful to hear Fresenius speak of entering more thoroughly into grace, since grace is something in the heart of God. Grace is obtained either entire or not at all; it is never given piecemeal, as Luther puts it. A person is either a child of the devil or a child of God;
Now, who is right, Christ or the Reformed, the holy apostles or the ministers of the Reformed Church? I should feel ashamed to give the answer. You all know the answer.
For the confounding of Law and Gospel that is common among the sects consists in nothing else than this, that they instruct alarmed sinners by prayer and inward wrestling to fight their way into a state of grace until they feel grace indwelling in them, instead of pointing them to the Word and the Sacraments.
I entertain no doubt that I shall stand before the throne of a gracious God. Why? Not because I feel that way; not because I have performed good works; not because I have amended my mode of living. All these things would be sinking sand; for it is quite possible that in the hour of death feelings of gladness will forsake me. Being accustomed to rely on the Word, I have the trusty staff which I need for support at my passage through the dark valley of death.”
The doctrine of Zwingli is the source from which all false teachings of the Reformed churches have sprung.
For, alas! we behold a great many who are hearing the external preaching of the Gospel and yet do not believe because the Spirit is lacking.”
‘Faith comes from hearing.’
Now, anything that is predicated of the Word of God is predicated, as a matter of course, also of the Sacraments; for they are also means of grace. They are the visible Word.
baptism becomes an evidence of my own godliness,
For they teach us that the only good work that we do by communing is professing Christ; as to the rest, we merely eat and drink bread and wine in the Supper, and there is no grace in it for us.”
“Granted, then, that the fanatics talk a great deal about God, forgiveness of sins, the grace of God, and the death of Christ, still, when the question is raised how to come to Christ and obtain grace, how to effect a union with Him, they tell me that the Spirit alone must do this.
God has ordained that this treasure is to be offered and conveyed to men by means of Baptism, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and the external Word.
Every heresy that has sprung up was caused by the heretic’s inability to believe that man becomes righteous in the sight of God, and is saved, by grace alone.
But must I not add something to make God’s work complete? No; you are to fall prostrate before God as a poor sinner, like the leper in the Gospel, and praise and magnify the abounding grace of God. When you do this, you will perceive the fatuity of the fanatics’ insistence on having the Spirit.
Thy Baptism, Supper, and Thy Word My consolation are, O Lord, For they contain my treasure.
