Date: February 5, 1939

Prayer for the Heavenward Vision

O Thou who hast said, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Christ, our risen Redeemer:

Surrounded on all sides by decay and death, we implore Thee: Help us by Thy Spirit to triumph over the fear of the grave by trusting in Thy blood-bought victory on the cross. Show us daily that, though the wages of sin are death and eternal exclusion from heaven, in endless mercy Thou didst give Thyself unto death that not one of us, our sins forgiven, our trust centered on Thee, should die eternally but be blessed by the pledge of heaven. Enlighten our hearts with divine wisdom and keep us always prepared to meet Thee, since the hour of departure is known to none of us. Because we have Thy Savior love and in the fullness of this mercy a heavenly guarantee against eternal death, let our souls not sorrow too deeply in the dark hours of bereavement, as though we were without hope, but direct our vision heavenward! Help all to trust Thee and so to live that we rejoice in sincere gladness over the sacred promise of seeing Thee, blessed Savior, with Thy merciful Father and purifying Spirit, face to face in the endless glories of heaven. Thou hast promised that, if we believe in Thee, we shall pass from death to life. Lord, we believe; keep that promise mightily in our lives and help us find in Thy resurrection the proof for our eternal life. We ask this confidently because Thou hast instructed us to pray in Thy blessed name! Amen.

This is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life. – 1 John 2:25

WHAT, do you suppose, is the most destructive fear that grips human hearts today? Some of you, we may be sure, will answer that the shadow which darkens your life is the worry over money, these sinister question­marks in your pathway to happiness: “Will I keep my work? Will I have the means to provide for my family?” Labor leaders tell us that despite the commendable and costly efforts of our Government to decrease the regiments of the unemployed, we now have more men and women out of work than a year ago. These experts frankly predict that, unless a radical change comes,—for which they can find no evidence,—we shall continue to have ten million unemployed, with many of them actually suffering hunger. In the richest country of the world, which could offer constructive work for every employable citizen, there is indeed reason for deep-rooted fear when we behold the growing impoverishment of the many poor and the heaping wealth of the few rich or read of a $50,000 “high-society” party a few miles from the slums.

Others among you who are not so hard pressed by financial worries, will say that the most haunting fear in your lives is the dread of war. It is a ghastly spectacle, this present picture of highly civilized nations provoking one another to conflict instead of working for cooperation, with irresponsible, saber-rattling statesmen thundering defiance instead of pleading for reconciliation. When we realize that paid agents are systematically at work in a satanic attempt to hurl our country into another war for profit, it fairly makes one scream in protest to know that, unless God Almighty intervenes, thousands of young men from coast to coast will have their bodies drafted to stop bullets in European trenches. Only a little more of this poisonous propaganda, the blare of bands, the waving of fflags, the inflaming of mob hysteria, the harangues of hatred from the same preachers who twenty years ago helped to involve us in Europe’s war,—only a little more of all this, and blinded millions will be ready to line our city streets and cheer their own sons as they march into an aggressive war, with its disease, degeneracy, and destruction. The dread that all this may be closer to us than we realize is indeed one of the most terrifying of all fears.

Some people, however, remain unconcerned by these national issues. Their worries are personal. They are afraid of cancer or consumption. They are terrified by the thought that their husbands or their wives may prove unfaithful, their children ungrateful and they, deserted, may have to face life alone. They are plagued by the terror­filled thought that their mental power is weakening, that it may be lost completely.

Yet you can take all these fears and phobias, add to them any other sorrows that life can invent, and their sum total, as appalling as it may be, is exceeded by the deepest terror men know—the fear of death!

You may think that this is an alarmist point of view; but even those who have little regard for God and the Christ whom I preach have admitted this fact. A few months ago, in Switzerland, one of the world’s most noted psychologists, Dr. C. J. Jung, declared shortly before his death: “The world is mad because modern men and women are afraid to die.” Our age has lost its sense of true religious values, and confusion reigns because men have discarded religion and robbed themselves of every assurance concerning the hereafter. Middle-aged people especially, thwarted in their ambitions, constantly ask themselves: “What comes after this life? What happens to my body when the earth closes above it? Can I expect to live again, to meet those whom I have loved on earth? Is there a new world to come, with a punishment for all my sins? Or does death consign this body to decay and end all?” Because with all our culture men have lost Christ and with Him their moral balance, this fear of the hereafter has made ours an age of unparalleled nervous breakdowns, violent insanity, and frequent suicide.

As a protest against this despair and as sustaining guidance for the age-old mystery of death I bring you the message of

ETERNAL LIFE—THE PLEDGE OF DIVINE PROMISE

basing this blessed assurance on the infallible Word of Truth, Saint John’s First Epistle, chapter two, verse twenty-five: “This is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life.”

I

ETERNAL LIFE PROMISED BY CHRIST AND HIS WORD

At the outset let us come to an agreement on one basic fact: this “promise” of “eternal life” is not simply a pious wish, a comforting theory. It is rather the positive truth, a fact verified by the most exalted source, the almighty God Himself. I do not want to leave your hopes dangling on a vague “if,” “perhaps,” “maybe.” When our soul and body are involved, we need more than theory or any uncertain “It seems so” or “It may well be.” When we think of death, the grave, its decay, and know that all this ends every earthly hope, we need an unquestionable, inviolable truth; and—praise be to the love and power of God!—we have this in “the promise that He hath promised us.”

God keeps His promises. Politicians glibly pledge themselves to a course of action and then quickly forget their obligations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks and bonds, signed and sealed by American business and industry, will never be repaid. Thoughtless young people commit themselves to unbroken love as they begin married life; but the courts reveal that one of every six of these wedding vows is broken, and only God knows how many more are shattered without the formality of divorce. But here, assured by the blood of Jesus, is our heavenly Father’s promise that will never be broken because it can never be broken. “The heavens shall vanish away like smoke,” He tells us, “and the earth shall wax old like a garment; . . . but My salvation shall be forever, and My righteousness shall not be abolished.” We are not now debating whether there is an existence beyond the grave. We are not conducting a laboratory investigation of the soul’s immortality nor searching for a testing-ground on which the promises of our text may be tried and examined; we are speaking of the divine truth, the immovable assurance, that there is an eternal life promised by Christ Himself, pledged in hundreds of passages of that blessed Word which will not pass away, though “heaven and earth shall pass away.”

Someone objects: “How about the scientists who emphatically deny the life to come or at best shrug their shoulders to say: ‘We can never know what happens after death’?” For every man of learning who contradicts the resurrection of the body I can show you distinguished scientists in the same field who have gratefully accepted the whole truth of the Savior’s repeated promises. We witness altogether too much exalting of reason and of scoffing at revelation, a folly that has always misguided men and misplaced their hopes. During the terrors of the French Revolution blasphemous unbelief sought to dethrone God by placing a harlot on the altar of the Parisian cathedral as the goddess of reason in her triumph over Christ. But a few years later, when a policeman was making his rounds in a disreputable section of Paris and was summoned to a filthy garret, he saw there, under indescribable conditions, a haggard, half-starved, half­frozen woman lying beneath a pile of rags. When he poked his stick at her and asked her name, that wretched creature croaked: “I am the goddess of reason.” A similar misplacement of hope marks all who accept human wisdom but reject the divine; who actually swear by man’s word but at God’s. They are following the same delusion today as the Parisian atheists who bowed their knees before a painted hag.

Some of the outstanding public enemies of Jesus Christ have learned their lesson in the eleventh hour. For instance, John Stuart Mill, one of England’s widely discussed unbelievers, who in his own words had only a “probable God,” for whom the Bible with its promise of eternity was but an outworn superstition, lived much of his life against the will of the Almighty. Despite vanity and unbelief, when his last hour came, John Stuart Mill turned to the Christian faith, as the physician who attended him in his last illness clearly testifies. And may the Spirit of God somehow seize and similarly cleanse the hearts of many in this audience who do not yet know God nor the promise of the resurrection!

Again, someone objects: “Well, if eternal life is so sure, how does it happen that many preachers, particularly those acclaimed as outstanding religious leaders of America, have torn from the Apostles’ Creed its last statements: ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.’?” It is a lamentable fact that liberal, Scripture-questioning Protestantism, instead of acknowledging the life to come as Jesus describes it, teaches a vague, indefinable, nondescript survival of personality. Have you noticed how this whole subject of heaven and hell, eternal life and everlasting death, is hushed in the modern pulpit? When did any of you ever hear a radio sermon on the resurrection of the body delivered by one of the New York preachers who week after week are given the free use of a vast broadcasting system? They do not like to talk about the grave, for this is an unpopular subject, and—why not be popular? “Don’t worry about death,” one of them says; “think of this life.” Because they have exiled Christ’s glorious comfort from their pulpits, they preach futile sermons on political and international subjects that leave hearts untouched. Today, in the city of Saint Louis, themes such as these are being discussed in local churches: “Trends of the British Empire,” “Calling Hard Names,” “How to Read a Newspaper,” “Life Is No Picnic,” “The Life that Precedes the Literature,” “Hitler’s Last Address.” With many modern pulpits featuring a thousand other subjects, they leave unanswered the most persistent, fear­provoking question that confronts the entire race, the issue of life after death. All normal human beings want this answer. Their conscience reminds them of eternity; every funeral recalls it; and though they like to dismiss this unpleasant thought from their minds, they know deep in their hearts that every day brings them closer to the grave and the inevitable reckoning.  Why, in the face of impending death, do men turn to prayer? Why was it, a few days ago, that, when the Italian liner Vulcania was struck by a furious storm off the Azores, its 360 passengers were thrown into such terror that one of them testified: “We did not expect to live through it. There was a general hysteria. Women fainted and screamed. Everybody was praying”? Why was it that, when the Cavalier, palatial air-liner, fell on the Atlantic in the darkest terror of the night, the surviving passengers and crew, rising and falling with each swell and drop of the sea, did what most of the papers neglected to report—spoke and sang prayers to the Almighty? Why, when scoffers come face to face with death, do they often shudder before the yawning uncertainties of the hereafter? I think of John Addington Symonds, who declared that he could find no trace of God as much as he searched for Him. Yet on his deathbed he clutched—what?—his mother’s book of prayers. Is not all this to be explained by the fact that, when men stand before eternity, the question demanding an answer is not this: “Is there a hereafter?” but rather: “How can I prepare for the hereafter?” Then men feel their sins in contrast to the holiness of God. They review their past life, and they wonder where they can find the assurance of heavenly love. A few years ago a young explorer died alone in an isolated hut at Long Rapids, Alberta. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police broke their way into the cabin, they found him in a sitting posture, his skeletal hand still clutching a letter with these words: “The sun is shining, Mother, but I feel so cold. I can still walk a little, but that’s about all. There is no blood in me because I haven’t eaten for so long. . . . But . . . the only thing I worry about now is if God will forgive me my sins.” So, for every one of us—and I mean everyone, with no exception or exemption—the question is not: “Is the creed of the Church right when it says: ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,’” but: “Will the Almighty forgive me my sins, so that, cleansed, I can see God and, reconciled with my Father, may be resurrected unto life eternal?”

II

ETERNAL LIFE PROMISED THROUGH CHRIST AND HIS MERCY

Only Christ, our blessed Lord, our merciful Savior, can solve the problems of my sin and yours. For the one assurance of eternity that God has given all men for all sins we must look to Jesus and with the disciples say: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life!” For our text speaks in everlasting truth when it says: “This is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life.”

If you ask: “How can Christ, who lived and died nineteen hundred years ago in a foreign land, save me from sin and rescue me from death?” I answer by pointing you to the final source of our Christian strength, the heavenly assurance that Jesus, by the will and mercy of His heavenly Father, loved every one of us despite our sins, our screaming ingratitude, our open rebellion against purity, loved us with such divine outpouring of His compassion that He undertook the task—impossible for men and angels combined—of freeing us from our sins and preserving us for heaven. He paid the debt our transgressions incurred. He gave the ransom for our freedom. He quenched the fires of divine wrath, removed the deep, dark stains on our souls, fulfilled the laws we had broken, satisfied the righteousness of God, and paid the penalty for our inborn wickedness and multiplied sins.

If Christ had brought this deliverance to a select few and granted heaven only to the most self-sacrificing workers in His kingdom, even to them this would be undeserved mercy. But His pardon of eternal life is offered to all Jesus becomes the Attorney who at the bar of divine justice, in the case of the holy God versus your sinful soul, pleads before the Judge of eternity: “Father, I carried his sins; on the cross I was wounded for his transgressions; My hands and feet were bruised and bored through for his iniquities; Father, forgive him!” Answering this plea, the heavenly Judge promises all who accept Christ with unquestioning faith: “Your sins are forgiven. You have everlasting life!”

If God had said: “I will make a way to heaven and eternity, but you must travel far, seek restlessly, to find this way,” we should still praise His holy name and search by day and night. Yet in His boundless mercy the Savior’s promise of forgiveness and heavenly glory is so near that it is never removed from us, so clear that a little child can understand it, so direct that, if we know the full meaning of only these four short words “Christ died for me!” and sincerely believe their truth, this faith has saved us.

Once more, if the almighty God had told us: “I may forgive your sins; I may provide a life to come,” we would thank His mercy for not casting us off altogether, and with all our strength we would try to meet any demand His goodness might impose. But—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!”—His love could not leave us in uncertainty. Instead, He gave us a positive, definite faith by which, all questions removed, we can exult: “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that Day,” the great day of eternal Judgment.

My fellow-worshipers, is this Christ, the complete, true Savior, both God and Man, once crucified, but now glorified, the Christ who gave all for you,—is He, the divine Redeemer, welcomed into your heart? As this question is mysteriously hurled through hundreds and thousands of miles of the ether to put you squarely before the supreme issue in your life, will you not believe that the great God in heaven above now directs this question pointedly to you? What will be your answer, the response that decides your destiny for ageless eternity? You either take Christ and with Him His gift of eternal life, or you reject Him and by that unbelief sign your own death-warrant. It is either heaven or hell. There is no second chance after this life, no third or intermediary stage. If the blood of Jesus Christ does not save you, nothing else in this world or the next can. How all-decisive is this question: Do you trust and follow Christ, who alone promises never-ending blessedness and without whom “no man cometh unto the Father”?

Try to picture to yourself as best you can the glories of heaven. Some of you will think in first instance of this unspeakable blessing that in the eternal homeland we shall be free from anguish and suffering. How blessed, of course, to be able to say to you: “Are you sick and weary now? With Christ, in the eternal mansions, you will never be pain-racked and sorrow-ridden. Is your family torn by discord here? Nothing can mar the perfect peace there. Are you lonely and forsaken in this life? You can never be neglected and cast aside in Christ’s eternal life. Have you seen your hopes crumble as unexpected sorrows have added affliction to agony? In heaven there are no disappointments, no cares, no griefs,—nothing but joy, gladness, peace, beauty, holiness.” These are all strengthening promises; but the greatest joy of heaven, for which we should pray daily, fervently, to our God is that supreme happiness, the most radiant of all glories, that of beholding Jesus face to face, living in the celestial realm where He is King. Again, it is a comforting realization to know that our bodies, though they be marked and pitted by the ravages of disease, maimed and broken by the cruelty of accident, worn and weakened by the advance of old age, in the resurrection will be transformed into the glories of a new perfection. Yet, incomparably more glorious will be the unending life with Jesus, worship before His throne, the blending of our voices with the heavenly chorus of the redeemed, living together with the mighty heroes of faith, the self-sacrificing parents who first showed us the way to salvation, the self-denying pastors and teachers who furthered our Christian knowledge, the friend who helped bring us to Christ or whom we helped by God’s grace to accept the Savior. Because I want to share all these blessings with you, I repeat: “Is there anything I can do to bring you this Christ and His promise of eternal life?” Last Sunday in Minneapolis, at the close of our message, a father, not a church-member, living in a spiritually indifferent home, was moved by the Spirit of God to call a pastor of that city to his home, with the result that an entire family, father, mother, and children, were won for Christ and for instruction in the Christian faith. In the name of Jesus I ask you to call, write, or visit one of the thousands of pastors working together with me, so that you, too, and by the grace of God your whole family may have the blessings of eternal life.

Don’t delay! Thousands of you are seventy, seventy-five, eighty years old and older. Cold arithmetic tells you that your hour may come quickly. Have you set your house in order? Are you ready to meet your God? Have you put your hand into the hand of Jesus for His guidance into eternity? You young folks and you in the height of achieving lives, you know how suddenly your last day may dawn and your last hour break. I beg of you as I speak in the name of Christ, and of those who, now in eternity, would have me speak warning and comfort to your soul: Take time for Jesus! Take time for your soul! Take time for membership in a true Church of Christ! Take time now for eternity!

Only with faith can you triumph over the cold sorrow of death in your family. From Pennsylvania a distracted husband writes: “I lost my wife about two years ago, and I am in agony and despair. I can’t overcome my loss. I sometimes feel like a shipwrecked sailor, with no hope of ever reaching the shore.” From Indiana a sorrow­crushed wife sends these grief-weighted words: “I am in great need of help. My husband passed away two weeks ago. We were married only four years and had the most perfect married life of which I know. We were buying our home, owned all our furniture, and had a prosperous business. Now I cannot understand why everything that truly matters had to be taken away and I have nothing.” I know those tears and that numb heartache death causes every time it enters our homes, even when it takes a world­weary grandfather or a time-tried grandmother. But dry those tears! Stop that heartache! Look to Christ! If you say, “Jesus, Savior, pilot me,” you cannot be a shipwrecked sailor, for His grace promises: “Fear not, I will pilot thee!” If you have Jesus, you cannot say: “I have nothing!” but you will rejoice: “I have everything,” for with this Savior yours will be the blessed assurance that, though His way is not your way, it is always the best way, the blessed way, the way to heaven. While the severing of earthly bonds may have left a bleeding wound, you know that those who die in the Lord are blessed forever, that they are removed from all the trials and agony of life, its dark and bitter moments, its sin and suffering, its anguish of heart and pain of body. Would you call them back from the blessed presence of Jesus?

Oh, cling more closely to Christ! For without Him every funeral is a mark of human futility, every burial the curse of human frailty. George Jacob Holyoake, an applauded British agnostic who ridiculed the Bible, suffered the tragedy that his small son Max was run over by a cab and killed. When the unbelieving father stood beside the casket, a few moments before the form and features of the child were to be taken away forever, he put the lad’s favorite toys and handbrush into the coffin. Why? He suddenly remembered that the ancient Aztecs in Peru often placed some objects into the hands of their corpses, and in his own words he declared: “We buried the poor fellow like a little Peruvian.” That agnostic father seemed to snatch a few crumbs of strength in some vague hope of the Aztecs. “And so we buried him like a little Peruvian.”—I want you to bury your children like little Christians. See how Martin Luther faced a similar bereavement! For fourteen days his daughter Magdalene, to whom he was especially attached, hovered between life and death. As that sorrowing father kept his vigil beside little Magdalene’s bed, someone heard him pray: “Father, I love her very dearly and should like to keep her if Thou, Lord God, wouldst leave her with me. But if it is Thy will, dear Lord, to take her to Thyself, then I shall rejoice that she is with Thee.” Someone else heard him ask the sick girl: “Magdalene, my child, my precious daughter, you would like to remain here with your father, but you would willingly go to the Father above, would you not?” to which the brave sick girl replied: “Yes, dear, darling father, as God wills.” And when Magdalene was taken by the angels to her heavenly home, the Great Reformer, returning from the cemetery, said: “We Christians have no cause for sadness. . . . We are most certainly assured of life eternal; for God, who cannot lie, has promised this through, and for the sake of His dear Son.” Is not this the trust you need, the soul-deep conviction that God cannot lie, that, when our text says: “This is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life,” God Himself cannot change this everlasting truth?

For the salvation of your soul, for strength in your last hour, for light in the darkness of family bereavement, for the assurance that heaven offers a blessed compensation for the injustice of this earth and that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us,” I leave with you the question asked before, which, I hope, has battered its way through all sin and self-righteousness into your innermost heart. In the name of God the Father, who created you for eternity, God the Son, who saved you for eternity, God the Holy Spirit, who can preserve you for eternity, I ask you, as though in this moment there were only two people in all the world, you and I: “What can I do to help bring you to Christ and to faith in the promise of endless life?” God grant that your Spirit-filled heart will respond so that even now, looking to Jesus, you may say: “This is the promise” Thou hast “promised us, even eternal life!” Amen.

Published with the permission of The Maier Center, Concordia University, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105.

Date: January 22, 1939

Praise for Our Creator

God Almighty, whose power has created us:

Bless every message of Thy divine truth which tells men they are more than beasts, far more than human accidents in a chance world. Help us rather to believe that Thou hast created man as the masterpiece of Thy love and omnipotence. Show us with ever-increasing clarity that, when sin entered into the world to destroy the creatures of Thy hand, their souls were so precious in Thy sight that Thou didst send Thy Son, our only Redeemer, to save them from sin and death.  Direct our vision toward Christ and the divine assurance that, if—far from sparing Thine own Son—Thou didst deliver Him up for us all, Thou wilt freely grant us for His sake also all we need for this life. May Thy Spirit take possession of our hearts, so that, trusting in Thy saving goodness, we may not be disturbed by worry but find comfort in the thought that Thou art with us. With Thee at our side, what can overwhelm us?  Give us a sense of deep repentance for any acts, known or unknown, which have offended Thee and betrayed our ingratitude for Thy manifold mercies. Bless our mission of the air, in which we press the miraculous powers of Thy nature into the service of the Gospel that throughout the land sinners may be brought to repentance, trust in Thy love, and reliance on Thine unfailing promise of heaven. Hear us, for we pray at the Savior’s request, with His promise and in His glorious name. Amen.

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. – Psalm 121:2

DO you know the real, basic trouble with our age and world? Ask the first ten people you meet on any street, “What do we need for a better life?” and at least nine will answer in three syllables, “More money!” Our trouble, however, lies much deeper than the financial surface. We have more money in the United States today than in any other decade; in fact, we have been obliged to build vast subterranean vaults for the protection of gold and silver bars, massively piled. We have so many superfluous funds that the unused savings accumulated in our banks form one of the most pressing problems before the average banker. With all these rich endowments of a country that could guarantee a happy, profitable existence to a population much larger than our present number, we have failed so abjectly in the management of our money that, when recently in Congress the proposal was made to drop 200,000 from our relief rolls, one Senator shouted in warning, “Only God knows what these people are going to do—unless they starve.” The specter of famine in the wealthiest land of the world!

Rooted far below these dollar difficulties is the fundamental failure of our entire age: heedless striving against God, the dark tragedy that the men who seek to run the world without God or against Him are making a ghastly mess of it. This exile of the Almighty controls much of modern thought. It starts with eliminating God as the Creator, a gloating over the claim that man is a creature of chance on an accidental planet that has no place for God. The world runs itself, we are told, and it is up to human genius and power to direct men’s affairs as best they can. Every man shapes his own destiny, it is claimed; for in this materialistic creed God—if there be a God—cannot regulate and guide individual lives. When the apostles of man’s chance-beginning see their fellow-men struck to the ground by the impact of uncontrollable adversities, they only shrug their shoulders and whisper something about the cruelty of fate.

Because this damnable doctrine excludes God as it teaches the triumph of the strongest and the success of the shrewdest, it has helped throw our age into the turmoil of worldwide suffering and the tyranny of selfish power. Statesmen, scientists, and men of public affairs not noted for religious zeal voice the need for a spiritual basis on which men can build better lives and the hope for a better age. On the Continent a celebrated Swiss psychologist, shortly before his death, cried out: “The world needs religion. It is the insanity of the white man that he has lost the religious order of life. Until he finds that, he will scarcely be healed of his troubles.” In England British statesmen have warned that, if religion fails, the foundation of our civilization must crumble. In Pittsburgh, a prison warden, watching the lengthening procession of criminals, asserts, “We need religion.” In New York a student of human problems writes a book that quickly becomes a best seller under the title The Return to Religion. However, the cry should be, not, “The world needs religion,” any kind of religion, any sort of creed, but, “It needs the religion of Jesus Christ.” Instead of a “return to religion” we want a return to the religion of Jesus Christ. For of all the knowledge ever gathered for our guidance, the Bible alone gives us divine assurance on the questions of human origin, the perplexities of life, and the ultimate hope of heaven.

In this spirit I ask you to behold in

THE GREAT GOD OUR CREATOR AND SUSTAINER

to find in Him the Author of our existence, the Protector of our lives, as the sacred writer in the One Hundred and Twenty-first Psalm (verse two) exults: “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.”

I

GOD THE CREATOR

When the unnamed psalmist, on his pilgrimage up to Jerusalem, looks to God and declares, He “made heaven and earth,” he uses the same language by which thousands of millions through centuries of peace and bloodshed have confessed their faith in the first article of the Apostolic Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” This morning on every continent, in hundreds of different languages, yet with an absolute unity of conviction, myriads repeated this acknowledgment of God’s creative power. That Creed is shared by all who are truly Christ’s, as every Christian, whether he be Catholic or Protestant, Lutheran, Episcopal, or Reformed, will subscribe to each syllable of Martin Luther’s remarkable statement, which, explaining the personal meaning of the words “Creator of heaven and earth,” declares: “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses.” Here we who call ourselves Christians stand on common ground, whatever the differences may be that keep us apart otherwise; we look to God as the Author of our lives, the Originator of this universe. If anyone changes the first sentence of the Apostles’ Creed to read: “I do not believe in the God who is the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” no matter who he is,—he may be a scholar of notable learning, a doctor of divinity sponsored by multimillionaires,—one thing is certain: he is no Christian!

It is the unholy mark of our twentieth century that more than ever before men brazenly claim that this is an accidental world. We are told that ageless millions of years ago a wandering star by random chance happened to steer its course too close to the sun and in passing tore out a large segment of gaseous masses. After unnumbered ages these solar gases became solid, and through further transformations, each one haphazard and without divine forethought, the globe which we now call the world took its present form. Once more, by a fluke of fate, the first living cell (for which no anti-Biblical theorist has ever adequately accounted) found itself on our planet in those days of dizzy distance; and by thousands of chances, each one absolutely without God, this simple life-cell developed into the complex forms of plant and animal existence, until, after the roulette-wheel in this lottery of emerging life had spun frequently enough, the first men—half animals, half human—emerged and began the human race, which, we are assured with all seriousness, is on its way upward to a golden age,—all the achievement of chance.

That full-faced denial of God the Creator is being taught millions of American children. It has usurped a place in the liberal pulpit today, where Modernists tell their audiences that God, unknown and unknowable, is a distant force, unconcerned about the continuance, beginning, or ending of our lives; that man is but a superior animal, only a few notches above the more intelligent beast. This coronation of chance and campaign against God’s creation crystallizes a critical issue, in which those who would be Christ’s should take a decisive stand. We look either to God for our bodies and brains or to some gorilla­like creature. We accept either divine creation or an accidental origin.

Which will it be? Which can it be, I say, when the Word of God has spoken decisively? Not in one passage or dozens of passages but in more than one hundred distinct statements of Scripture, Old Testament and New, the Bible, as our psalmist, says that God “made heaven and earth.” Be dear on this one pivotal point: The attack on man’s divine origin is not only a questioning of the Old Testament verses; it is an attack upon the whole Scripture. You cannot reject Genesis without rejecting the Christ of whom Genesis testifies; you cannot accept Jesus as the infallible Son of God without accepting the creation which Jesus teaches. The Bible is not half right and half wrong. To be the Word of God, it must be entirely right! It must be—and again we publicly confess it to be—God’s holy, inerrant, infallible truth from the earthly Paradise in Genesis to the heavenly Paradise in Revelation.

We are against this claim of man’s ape ancestry and this banishing of God, not only because it is against the sacred Scriptures, but also because it contradicts human reason. The very thought that our bodies should be the result of chance, the haphazard combination of various life-cells and organisms is preposterous. For example, certain evolutionists actually teach that the eye originated in this way: some animal had a freckle on the side of its head, and when this creature happened to turn to the sun, the light agreeably affected the freckle. As successive generations did the same thing, by the sheerest chance, that freckle developed sensitiveness, and after countless years a nerve was produced, and from that nerve came the beginning of the eye—all without God! Now, what are the facts? The eye consists of nine major parts. Mathematicians will tell you that the mathematical possibility of these nine parts’ being made as they are and their combining to form the eye by mere chance is one out of one hundred quintillion.

Or take the ear, which, by the claims of those who deny God’s creation, likewise owes its existence to a hit­and-miss process. The ear consists of twenty major parts; I am not even considering the smaller parts and the basic units. Mathematically the possibility that the ear developed accidentally is one chance in a number so large that it must be written with the figure one followed by forty-one zeros. How much wiser the sage of the Old Testament was when he declared: “The hearing ear, the seeing eye, . . . the Lord hath made both of them.”

Remember, too, that the ear and the eye are only two parts of a mechanism. If you take the other complex parts of our organism and then ask what is the mathematical possibility that the human body would acquire its present form by chance, we read the conclusion that the human body has “less than one chance out of one decillion times one decillion times one decillion times one decillion times one octillion to originate by mere accident.” And that figure, I believe, is far too small. I ask you, without recourse to the Word of God, Is it not more reasonable to assume that the human body was created than that it developed at random?

Besides, this theory of chance is directed toward the destruction of all morality. If we are but the advanced brood of the beast; if, as a popular university lecturer tells our academic youth “animals we are, and animals we remain,” then trample down the Ten Commandments! Live the one life that we have to the fullest before we return to the endless silence of the grave! If we have only refined animal blood coursing through our veins; if our heart is essentially the heart of a chimpanzee; if our brain differs, in general, only in quantity from the brain of an orangutan, forgetting God and the superstition of religion, why not live for ourselves, as the beast lives? Down with right! Let might rule!—These are the logical extremes to which the dethroning of God must lead. A hundred thousand Chinese killed and wounded in 3,500 air raids! Almost two million Russians murdered by Soviet executioners in the first five years of the Red terror! That is the kind of world this rejection of God always wants and always makes. It has no room or compassion for invalids, aged, and non-productive; instead, as radical evolutionists have expressly demanded in their writings, the anti-God campaign is ready to kill off the helpless, crippled members of society. This blasphemous, atheistic exaltation of the animal is dangerous to the state, since its closest ally is Communism. It is destructive to Christian marriage and Christian home-life; for once God is removed as the Creator, His holy ordinances are likewise set aside and the unbridled fulfillment of every lust, even the most perverted, is licensed.

Will you not agree fully with me when I insist the churches must be aroused to defend this sacred truth that God is the Author of life? The churches must be instilled with a holy aggressiveness! Particularly in our large cities, we should throw open at least parts of our large church­buildings, otherwise closed for six days of the week, so that people can daily commune there with God! Open reading-rooms in our churches would help us lay the claims of Christianity before the American public. More courage in truth-loving congregations would expel from the pulpit any preacher who violates his trust by denying the creative miracles of God! Give us more Christian citizens who will protest at school-board sessions and public meetings whenever Christian children are subjected to spiritual poison, God-fearing men and women who will say, “You can teach this thing as a theory if you insist, but in the name of God and the Constitution of the United States, you cannot deliberately tear the truth of the Bible out of our children’s hearts.” Let us offer more money, more support, more students, for those church-schools and colleges where the faith of our young people will not be assailed. Support us with more prayer for the extension of this radio hookup, so that we can put the issue before the people throughout America by the quickest means that God has given us, the radio (remembering that, while evolutionists broadcast their denial of God free of all charge, for almost six years we have paid for every moment of every regular broadcast). Before it is too late, the Christian churches of America must set their houses in order and prepare to testify and tell the world: “We believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

Don’t be dismayed by the fact that the general scientific trend seems to be against the Bible’s acknowledgment of God as Creator; for even if intellectual circles continue largely to oppose God’s Word, this would not be the first time in history that the Scriptures have emerged victoriously from the conflict with Christless culture. Even now, however, unmistakable signs are evident that many scientific leaders—and I mean leaders—are questioning the claims of man’s animal ancestry and are protesting in unmistakable terms against the atheistic doctrine of chance. While armchair authorities and high-school experts continue to accept the wildest assertions as facts, the real scholar is content with labeling the teaching of man’s rise from the animals as only a theory, unproved and filled with many difficulties.

The Christian, however, surrounded with this cutthroat assault on the first truth of the Scriptures, has the mind of the Psalmist as he directs his eyes to God, who “made heaven and earth.” He looks up to the night skies, where, the astronomer tells him, there may be 30,000,000,000 shining stars; he beholds the earth, only a small part of this universe, and he exclaims, “What an almighty Creator my heavenly Father is!” He studies the human body, with the marvels of the brain, the wonders of his heart and lungs, the miracles of the senses, the many mysteries of the human body, not a single one of which can be reproduced in any laboratory, and he says: “What an all­understanding Creator my heavenly Father is!” He contemplates man’s position on earth, with a world of resources about him every day, with lavish supplies for food and shelter, with unlimited prospects for delight in the surpassing beauties of nature, or the constant opportunities of life, and he exclaims: “What a generous Creator and Sustainer my heavenly Father is!”

II

GOD THE SUSTAINER

The Christian not only acknowledges God as the Originator of the world, with everything in it; he also gives Him glory for the omnipotence, love, and wisdom which combine to protect and preserve His children. With the psalmist of our text we, too, must say, “My help cometh from the Lord.”

As a potter discards a marred, misshapen vessel, so the Father who created us might have rejected our entire race when we rebelled against Him and lost the image of His holiness. He might say to you and me: “You had your chance. You have broken My Law instead of keeping it. Now bear the consequences! Don’t look to Me for help.” But that could not be our God. He who loved man as the masterpiece of His creation, loved him even when he was “dead in trespasses and sins” and showed His mercy by sending His Son to take away our sins, restore us to God, break the stranglehold of death and hell over our lives, and preserve us until we are brought—after this life—into the glories of an indescribably blessed eternity. If you have never been truly touched by the marvel of Christ’s love for your soul, try to learn how wondrously God’s sustaining love in Christ speaks to your soul! God might have made the road of reconciliation hard by imposing many difficult demands; but in the grace of His Father­heart of love He left the way of salvation accessible to every one of us when He says: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” He asks of you not the tiring labor of your hands and muscles, the dripping sweat of your brow, the exhausting struggle of all your energies; He only says, “Believe!” God might have completed part of the plan of salvation and left the rest to us. He might have said: “I have done My share; now finish what I have started.” But in His all-surpassing mercy He did not leave us in doubt, with our salvation incomplete. When Jesus, broken under the weight of all human sin, nailed to the cross in punishment of all mankind’s iniquity, dying at Golgotha in the sinners’ stead, gasped in His last moments, “It is finished!” the task of redeeming a world from its sins was completed forever and for all men. God might have looked from His high heavens to select the best, most virtuous, most deserving, most considerate among men. But He did not. His love was not for a choice few, but for the world; and only those are barred who bar themselves through their rejection of Christ.

So as the writer of our psalm sings: “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord,” my fellow-ransomed, you, too, can lift up your “eyes to the hills,” especially that climax hill of history, Calvary, and, pointing to Jesus, say, “‘My help’ for the needs of my sin-stained soul; ‘my help’ for a purer heart, for the twice-born life without which no man can see God,—‘my help’ cometh from this Lord, languishing here on the cross.” Let nothing keep you from Christ’s sustaining love! Sometimes when I broadcast, unable to see you, as I urge you to accept Jesus, I feel hemmed in and restricted. But I know that the Spirit of God can touch your hearts; and I pray, as thousands of others in our assembly of the air also intercede with God, that many from the East to the West, in Canada, in our own country, in Mexico, by that Spirit may be brought to the Savior and to the glorious assurance of His sustaining love. Will you not believe, then, that the God who regarded your soul as so precious that it could be saved only through the atonement of His Son wants you to acclaim your Redeemer, to bring your sins now in spirit before His cross, to point to the Crucified and say, “‘My help cometh from the Lord,’ the Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of sinners”?

With that blood-bought protection for your soul and that blood-sealed title to heaven you are granted the assurance of God’s sustenance for your body, the promise of His guidance for this life. If God did the greater thing and through Christ saved your soul, will He not do the lesser and by His mercy protect your life? Or, as the apostle puts it: “He that spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him freely give us all things?” Believing Jesus, you have the deep-rooted conviction that there is no chance, no good luck or bad, in your life, but that every day you toil and every night you rest is marked by the guardian protection of your heavenly Father Himself. By faith you believe that despite encircling dangers your life is more than a series of accidents and you yourself far more than a haphazard atom of humanity to be crushed by the avalanche of fate. You know that your life is precious in the sight of God and that in the hour of trial, looking to Christ, you can say, “My help cometh from the Lord.”

Expressed in terms of practical, everyday life, this means that the Lord whose wisdom created you, whose love redeemed you, will in Christ sustain you, if necessary through His almighty power. Many, I know, can show how God fulfilled the promise of His Word “He shall give His angels charge concerning thee” and in His miraculous way protected you from destruction. There is a close example of that in my own father’s life. Once while traveling in the mountains of Switzerland, he lost his way and was overtaken by nightfall far away from his destination. He pushed on in the darkness as best he could, until an inner voice suddenly urged him to stop. He obeyed that impulse and slept under the dark cover of a starless Alpine sky. Can you picture his horror, and above that his gratitude to God, when, awaking with the early sunlight, he found that he had slept through the night on a cliff within only a few feet of the edge that overhung a deep ravine? The fact that he was spared and that as one of many consequences I was granted life and being is not the result of blind chance nor a stroke of fortune, good or bad. Like many similar instances it is the fulfillment of hundreds of passages in which the God who redeems our “life from destruction” pledges, “I am continually with thee.”

This sustaining love is shown not only when God averts danger but also when He richly and daily provides those who are His, not with all they want but with all they need. We should try fully to believe this truth and stop the worries embittering our lives in these problematical years! If only we would trust the God whose ancient prophet kept oil in the widow’s cruse; the Christ who multiplied the loaves and fishes and who can and will perform the same miracles today! If only when we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread,” we would know that God, were it necessary, would rain bread from heaven as He did for Israel in the wilderness!

His protecting love is so pure and perfect that it can turn sorrows into rejoicing, money losses into spiritual gain, retreats into progress. God loves us unswervingly and surrounds our souls with complete protection. Rather than permit success, applause, health, to take us away from Him, He is ready—and this is the real test of love—to let us suffer so that we may be purified and after the collapse of our ambitions to build a better foundation on humble faith.

Is not this the faith you need? Is not this loving Father, this redeeming Savior, this purifying Spirit, the God you must have if you are to face life confidently and death victoriously? What else do you need besides the assurance that once you are Christ’s, everything in life comes from God’s love and is directed by His wisdom toward your welfare? What other religions of which men have ever heard throughout the aging centuries could give man what Christ gives to those who believe in Him, when His Word says: “All things work together for good to them that love God,” the sacred pledge that we are not the playthings of fate but the objects of Christ’s devotion and of His transforming power by which liabilities in our life may become assets, reduced income lead to increased trust, physical pain result in spiritual pleasure, loneliness bring a blessed companionship with Jesus!

May God’s Spirit give you all, above all else for which hearts of flesh and blood may crave, this peace in a war­racked world! May He bring us with the dawn of every new day closer to the personal realization that God is our Creator and Sustainer, our Redemption and Resurrection, our glory in earth and in heaven! With that faith we can push our way through all fear, worry, affliction, opposition, and with Christ at our side exult: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord!”

Men and women of America, young men and young women, boys and girls, fathers and mothers, and you, my aged hearers, who have traveled far into the night of life: with eyes directed to the Christ of the cross repeat as the expression of your faith in God, the Creator and Sustainer, the conviction of the psalmist: “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth,” and by that confidence in Christ be blessed, now and forever! Amen.

Published with the permission of The Maier Center, Concordia University, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105.

Date: January 8, 1939

Prayer for Christian Education

Our all-knowing God, in whom abides the highest wisdom:

We come before the throne of Thy mercy in behalf of our country’s youth, especially for the solution of the manifold problems involved in their education. Earnestly do we ask Thee to awaken within parents a sense of sacred responsibility toward their children, so that the power of home-training may not be lost. Send Thy Spirit also into the hearts of America’s boys and girls and show them the heavenly knowledge that begins with Thee through faith in Jesus, the Savior from sin and its destruction. Particularly do we bring before the throne of mercy the spiritual needs of the young men and women at institutions of higher learning who, often away from the protecting influences of their homes and surrounded by multiplied forces of unbelief, need Thy guidance to keep them faithful amid the daily temptations to disavow their spiritual loyalties. Prosper every school that reveres Thy Word; protect all teachers who love Thy testimonies; let a double measure of grace rest upon those nurseries of Christian knowledge which our churches maintain for the Christ-centered instruction of our children! All this, heavenly Father, we ask that our youth may be kept firm in the faith, and the message of Christ, our Savior, be proclaimed with increasing power throughout the world. Hear us, as Jesus has promised us Thou wouldst answer! Amen.

Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called. – 1 Timothy 6:20

THE average American child, even in Sunday-school, receives less training in the Christian religion than the typical Russian boy or girl does in atheistic Communism. More time and daily energy are spent in impressing 25,000,000 Soviet children with the delusion that God does not exist and Christianity is a fraud than we in the United States devote to teaching our sons and daughters that there is a God, that His Word and work are unmistakably revealed in the truth of Scripture. If it is a fact, as educational experts assure us, that 80 per cent of the nation’s youth are not properly prepared by our schools to assume their responsibilities in life, then more than 90 per cent of the young people in American churches are not adequately trained in spiritual matters, for the life beyond the grave.

To my mind this ignorance regarding the soul that results in dethroning the Almighty and making demigods of puny men is the most disastrous menace both to the future of our country and the eternal welfare of its millions. By ignoring Christ or denying His mercy, by ridiculing His Gospel or blaspheming His holy name, masses in this nation have already gone far on the road to ruin. We are reaping the heavy harvest of disaster sown with the seeds of unbelief. As never before we have—with all our splendid Christian young men and young women—a widespread youth movement away from Christ. Our penitentiaries and corrective institutions are overcrowded with teenage prisoners. We have more illegitimate births and abortions, more support for Communism among our young people, more youthful recruits for atheism and its offensive against our Christian faith, than the United States has ever known.

If we lose the rising generation for Christ, it can hardly be won for morality and the righteousness that exalts a nation. A prime purpose of all American Christians must therefore be to spread the Savior’s Gospel, particularly to win youth for Christ. Our legislators and executives are endeavoring to make this an $80,000,000,000 nation; our armies, navies, air forces, protect us from invasion; our scientists dedicate their efforts to produce a safe, comfortable, productive country with a high standard of living; our teachers and the schools labor to advance our intelligence; but God looks to the churches for intensified youth-training along spiritual lines. Unless an inner reawakening shows itself in an energetic, testifying clergy and laity concerned with bringing our youth to Jesus; unless modernist, Christ-denying preachers are removed from leadership in Protestantism and fanatical Jew-baiters, heralds of hate, learn to preach the Savior’s pardoning love; unless you men and women who occupy the pews are ready to stand up for Jesus, without fear or hesitation to proclaim the message of His cross and loyally adhere to the requirements of discipleship, the days of the Church’s influence may be numbered, and we may face persecution and the confiscation that has uprooted thousands of churches or invited government control of religion. As I speak to you on one of the crisis issues of this present day, I appeal:

KEEP THE TRUST OF FAITH!

Fight error! Promote the blessings of Christian education in conformity with this counsel of Saint Paul at the conclusion of his First Letter to Timothy (chapter 6, verse 20): “Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.”

I

KEEP THE FAITH DESPITE WIDESPREAD OPPOSITION!

Many of you will recall that these words were addressed to a young man who had consecrated his life to Christ. With fatherly interest and the experience based on many years of suffering for the Savior’s sake Saint Paul reminds Timothy, his young co-laborer in the Kingdom, that he must avoid “profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.” His faith, the apostle says, will not remain unchallenged but will be attacked by men who speak volubly against Christ, lay claim to imposing learning and advance the theories of science in their opposition to God’s Word. The repeated voice of unbelief will tell Timothy: “You cannot believe what Paul of Tarsus taught you. Why, his preaching of sin, which says that ‘all have . . . come short of the glory of God,’ which damns all sinners with one sweeping condemnation: ‘The wages of sin is death,’ especially his message that Jesus of Nazareth, whom His own countrymen crucified, can cleanse us from our sins; Paul’s hope of heaven and the promise of eternity in that Christ,—all this,” the unbelieving world would continually remind Timothy, “is contradicted by the claims of our best minds and the teachings of our learned schools.”

If this opposition to our Lord’s atoning love flourished in the Apostolic Age, today young disciples of Jesus are much more completely surrounded by insistent, challenging unbelief. It starts in our public-school system, where frequently despite the basic American principles framed to prevent any public interference with our religious life, children from Christian homes are deliberately taught antichristian doctrines. This hostility to God continues and grows in some of our high schools, with the result that during these formative years plastic minds are being molded for life by teachers themselves so filled with hatred of the saving Gospel that they go out of the way to impress pupils with a contempt of Christ and His Word. In many colleges and universities, including some of the oldest and best established by the churches, in others among the largest and wealthiest, supported by taxpayers’ money, in not a few even that are under Church control, the movement against God and His Christ climbs to its destructive climax.

The modern philosophy of education from beginning to end is often based on a code which flatly contradicts the Bible. According to this creed man is not a fallen being, lost in trespasses and sins, but an advancing, improving creature, constantly rising to new heights of moral achievement. They tell us that the Bible is just another book, which may be viewed in part as good literature but which must be denied all authority, since it is saturated with superstition and error, leaving only those parts to be retained which can be endorsed by modern science. This philosophy holds that religion, after all, is nothing more than an issue of personal opinion. It matters not what a man believes as long as he is true to that conviction, since we are all traveling toward the same goal, only along different ways. Of the regenerating power of God’s Word, the necessity of rebirth by the Spirit, and the character-building power of Christianity this unbelief knows nothing. Because the very foundations of the Christian faith are thus rejected, above all, the Christ of endless mercy ignored as on the cross He bears the sins of all mankind; because modern pedagogy has openly declared war on the atoning power of Jesus’ holy, precious blood, we see that many schools are deliberately engaged in destroying the Christian hope of our boys and girls.

In church and Sunday-school our children hear that man is the masterpiece of God’s creative love; but during the five days of the ensuing week their teachers often picture him as a close cousin of the chimpanzee. During high-school age this youth is taught in Bible classes that the Scriptures come from God, that the Christian religion is the revelation of His love; but in the freshmen classes of many high schools all this is opposed as textbooks confidently describe Christianity as only another religion, which happened to grow together from Jewish, Greek, and Persian sources. These young people leave home for college, and many of them are obliged to take courses on religion in which the instructor deliberately reduces Christ to a human level common to all religious teachers. And the result? As some of you parents know from heart­ breaking experiences, these “profane and vain babblings” and these “oppositions of science falsely so called” have too often made skeptics of sincere Christian young people, doubters of disciples, Christ’s enemies of those who most solemnly pledged Him their allegiance. With tears and trembling many fathers and mothers have cursed the day in which their child came under these destructive influences.

This Christless culture is not only anti-Biblical; in a day when we need every ounce of patriotic support for the inner progress of our nation we realize that this academic uprising against God is also anti-American, that our colleges and universities have sometimes become recruiting-stations for leaders in the social and political revolution with which this country is threatened. It was a recognized figure in American cultural circles who declared that there are enough ardent Communists on every college faculty to emphasize the radical point of view to the students. A Negro poet, reputedly an atheist and a self-acknowledged Communist, spoke at the University of Minnesota convocation exercises, so that the students in a State where Lutheranism is deep-rooted and widespread were invited to hear a man whose poems are not only blasphemous but ultra-Red. In the same way undergraduates at Columbia University in New York attended a course of which one of the Communists enrolled reported that half of the time was devoted to the industrial revolution. While the course lasted, he said, “most of the students, regardless of their social origin, professed to be Socialists, anarchists, or syndicalists.” Examples of this kind could be multiplied at much length to show that not only our colleges but even our high schools have been contaminated. In Oklahoma City police authorities uncovered a radical organization which had enrolled high-school boys and girls for a program along definitely communistic lines. In New York City the assistant superintendent of schools is openly quoted in the newspapers as declaring that he would do nothing to prevent the organization of communistic groups in the high schools of the nation’s largest city. Almost twenty years ago a Boston teacher declared: “Give us a generation of small children to train to manhood, and we will set up in America the Bolshevist form of Soviet government.” That Communism in this country is working overtime thus to gain the rising generation for loyalty to the hammer and the sickle of the Red flag is a fact with which we must seriously reckon today. If the younger minds of the nation are won for atheism, that means the overthrow of the Church’s work, the confiscation of its property, the closing of its buildings, the martyrdom of its pastors,—the financial, social, moral bankruptcy of the nation.

These “profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called” are not only anti-Biblical and anti-American; to a much higher extent they are also antimoral. Do you know that one of the most destructive influences directed against Christian marriage and the home arises from certain sectors of the educational system? Indignant parents have repeatedly protested against specified teachings on questions of sex and family life. The attitude openly endorsed by some university lecturers and textbooks amounts to free and easy love, promotes impurity in the hearts and lives of the students, and systematically contradicts the Bible’s pronouncements on the holiness of marriage, its indissolubility, its blessings in childhood and parenthood. This tendency which ridicules Christianity and excludes Jesus Christ from the classroom has helped to produce cleverness instead of virtue; trained the mind but not the heart; imparted knowledge but not wisdom; glorified the body but neglected the soul. Think for a moment of the major criminal events of the year. The most notorious perjurer and blackmailer of 1938 was a graduate of North Carolina University. The Number One thief and forger was a Harvard A. B. The master mind in one of the biggest rackets attended two of our large colleges.

Now, I hope you will not think that perhaps the Bible may be wrong, after all, with so many voices raised against it. It is a sad fact but true that often the cultural trend has been markedly anti-Biblical. When Voltaire, the destructive infidel, rode into Paris after having written repeated attacks on Christian faith, the scientists of his day celebrated his return with a glamorous festival. As he proceeded to the theater where he was to be feted, fanaticism was so widespread that the people kissed the horses that pulled his coach. They fought to touch his clothing, to tear a few hairs from his fur coat, which were to be preserved as a relic of humanity’s greatest genius. People even fell down to kiss Voltaire’s feet; but in the same year that arch-scoffer died, shrieking: “I am deserted by God and man!” Who gives a complimentary thought to Voltaire today? No matter how widely these babblers and scientists “falsely so called” are hailed as public idols, even though they be exalted to the highest positions, like a former premier of France, who has written a dirty book endorsing promiscuous relations and even filthier proposals, the hour of reckoning will inevitably come to every one of them.

Neither should you refuse to accept the Christian faith because someone tells you that practically all scientists are on record against it. Exactly the opposite is true. Many of the most devout minds in all centuries since Christ, leaders in various branches of scientific research, have been humble followers of Jesus. The situation is not this, that here and there, at rare intervals, a Christian mind has loomed high on the scientific horizon. On the contrary, the most eminent scientists have been Christians.

Rather than being charged with presenting a hand­picked list of geniuses noted for their faith, I will concentrate my remarks on only one section of scientific activity, the field of light and vision. Not a religious organization but the Better Vision Institute of New York City has published a list of about twenty-five men who have helped to preserve and improve the eyesight of the world. For some of these scientists the particulars of their religious life are not now available. Two of the twenty-five, as far as we know, never accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. Five others are simply listed as members of Christian churches. But here come the rest, an impressive procession of believing, Christ-revering scientists in this single field and its related branches: William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, ranked with the supreme masters of medical science, who wrote: “I do most humbly render my soul to Him who gave it and to my most blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”; Sir David Brewster, titled expert in optics, inventor of the scientific stereoscope, often used in correcting defects of the eye, principal of Edinburgh University, a valiant defender of Christianity, who repeatedly asserted that there could be no conflict between true Christianity and true science; Gregory Mendel, who helped to formulate the basic laws of heredity, an Augustinian monk, who gave all glory to God; Thomas Young, the first to suggest definitely the cause and cure of astigmatism of the eyes, the man to whom millions with improved eyesight are directly indebted, a sincere Christian, who was acquainted with the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible; John Kepler, genius in the field of vision, responsible for epochal discoveries in lenses, an astronomer of over-towering proportions, who with faith in his Savior spoke to God in these words: “Creator of all, how I thank Thee that Thou didst choose me, a miserable worm, to proclaim Thine exalted praise”; John Dalton, teacher, chemist, and physicist, whose studies in color blindness have proved of the highest practical importance, a trusting Christian, who regularly attended the services of his church; Sir Isaac Newton, acclaimed the greatest of all scientists, who not only observed the apple fall but who asked himself: “Why should the apple be rosy red?” and who found the answer by means of the prism, which split the rays of the sun into many different colors; Newton, who confesses: “To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things; and one Lord Jesus, by whom were all things and we by Him”; Louis Pasteur, world-famous bacteriologist, whose studies have helped to cure eye infections, the unassuming disciple of Christ, who asserted: “I pray constantly while at work in the laboratory”; Galileo, constructor of what is virtually the first telescope, whose testimony to the Bible rings clear in this confession: “The sacred Scriptures and nature both come from the divine Word”; Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most celebrated painters, the discoverer of basic facts concerning light and shade, who exclaimed: “How wondrous, O Creator, is Thy wisdom!” and who gave the most telling testimony to his faith in the artistry that immortalized the Savior; Roger Bacon, the first, it seems, to describe what we call a reading-glass, the greatest mind of his age, an uncompromising disciple of Christ, who wrote a famous treatise, In Praise of Holy Scripture. Here, in short, in one specialized field, the overwhelming preponderance of scientific leaders is notably Christian!

While I know that, if a religious census of college and university professors could be taken in our country today, it would reveal surprising inroads of atheism and unbelief, we have more scientists of humble, Christian faith than many believe. For the Church of Jesus Christ is not against true science, and true science is not against the Church. Only when men babble instead of speaking the truth, when they advance claims, not of actual science but of science “falsely so called,” can there be any dispute or disharmony.

II

KEEP THE FAITH AS A SACRED TRUST!

Now, when the apostle reminds young Timothy: “Keep that which is committed to thy trust,” he also tells us that the glories of our Christian faith are a sacred trust, a most precious possession, a blessing incomparably greater than wealth, learning, social position, and the pleasures of life. The divine hope I offer you every Sunday on this broadcast “is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” While admitting that without Christ we are lost forever,—with nothing we can do or say able to save us from the cruelty of life and especially from eternal death,—our hope in Christ nevertheless takes our heavenly Father at His word and, beholding “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” finds forgiveness, salvation, eternity.—That blessed hope, which is yours through the free mercies of God, must be guarded as our sacred trust after nineteen centuries of persecution, pain and blood. We can lose everything else in life and still be blessed forever; but if we lose that Christ, not all the wealth of this entire world can compensate for that terrifying loss. To be saved, to be assured of Christ’s immeasurable blessings now—and make no mistake about it, this rich fullness of the Christian life starts on earth and even here gives you peace, comfort, strength for the trying times through which many of you must pass; to be numbered among the vast, white-robed host of those who will find their eternal home in heaven, accept Christ now, lay hold of this trust prepared for you before the foundation of the world and guaranteed by the strongest surety man can ever know, the redemptive suffering and death of God made man.

To have faith and “keep that which is committed to” our “trust,” is Saint Paul’s appeal today. For this we need a much more penetrating program of Christian training and education. This, like many other blessings, must start in the home. Give us more love and interest in our family circles to train our children as Timothy was trained by his God-fearing mother and his devout grandmother! God, raise up fathers who, blessed with time and intelligence, will strike some items of business or pleasure from their daily calendar and speak to their own children on the eternal questions of their soul! If only you mothers, whose faith or lack of faith, to a degree greater than you realize, may help to show your own flesh and blood the way to heaven or to hell, would drop some of the pastimes and interests that take you away from your children and, instead, learn to bring them up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”! In Old Testament times the father who was confronted by a conflict between the time of eating and of teaching his household the Law of God, was urged to sacrifice his meals. The mother who began to teach the child on her breast the Law of the Lord was praised with the highest recognition. Parents who refused to meet their obligations were called the scum of the earth. We have drifted far from this strenuous zeal in behalf of home training; but may God lead every one of you parents, if necessary through reverses and losses, to know the Savior in an intimate, personal, trusting way and then to keep this trust for the next generation by giving it to your children.

We need Jesus in the education of our children outside the home. If we stop to realize that often they are growing up in this treacherous age without spiritual strength and direction, the raw human material for every anti-God and antimoral movement that the next years may bring, will you not agree that, if you really love your child, you will encourage it to attend a true Sunday­school of God regularly and see that it enjoys every possible additional training in God’s truth? It is a great source of pleasure to me personally that the Church which I represent, the only Protestant Church that has assumed this privilege on a large scale, maintains many hundreds of Christian day-schools where children receive not only an accredited training in the branches taught by the public school, but also in the Christian religion, the study of the Bible, the treasury of Christian hymns. These schools are open without restriction to all American children, and those of you who want your children daily to learn more about their Savior and His Word are invited to write me, so that I can direct you to the nearest of our church­schools and thereby to greater happiness for your children.

We must have institutions of higher learning in which Christian leaders can be developed, where nothing that will warp the mind or injure the soul is taught in the classroom or illustrated in the lives of the teachers, high schools and colleges to which parents can send their children without the gnawing fear that they will enter as Christians and leave as infidels. Again I am happy to state, even though some of you mothers write me that your children lost their faith in a denominational school, there are still splendid, fully accredited colleges where Christ and His faith reign unchallenged. I think particularly of one school with which I am personally connected, and that represents the type of Christianity which God permits me to bring you, Valparaiso University, in Indiana, a college that I can recommend to all parents who know that their children are not profited if they gain distinctions in the Christless academic world but lose their own souls. Let me send you particulars concerning this and the dozen other of our definitely Christian schools and colleges throughout the country now open to your sons and daughters.

Far-reaching issues are involved in this appeal to accept Christ and to keep the trust of that faith for ourselves and our children. In these coming years, when, beyond all doubt, Communism, atheism, movements to restrict Christian rights and liberties, Fascist agitation for government control of all education, will sweep over our country with greater force than ever before as the backwash from European tides of Sovietism and state absolutism, the churches may have to fight for their very existence. We must learn the duty of protest and strenuously repel every attempt to curtail our privilege of maintaining Christian schools. We have two powerful forces on our side, God and the Constitution of the United States. Let us strengthen our defenses even now by more courageous confession of Christ, by prayer for deeper faith, greater zeal, more unselfish service, more generous offerings for the purposes of the eternal Kingdom. Led by the Holy Spirit, we must learn to appreciate our sacred trust in the full and free Gospel of a Savior slain for the sins of an evil world. With all that we have and are, let us resolve to keep Christ first, last, forever, uppermost in our homes, in our churches, in the hearts of millions whom we must help bring to Jesus. With this resolution: Christ only, always, everywhere, Christ for every sin and every sinner, Christ for every conflict and crisis, Christ for life and death itself, let us keep “that which is committed to” our “trust” through Him whose Word now assures us: “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” God grant it, by His promise! Amen.

Published with the permission of The Maier Center, Concordia University, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105.

Date: December 25, 1938

Prayer for Christmas Day

Thou blessed Babe of Bethlehem, long-promised Redeemer of the race:

Our hearts are exalted in festive joy because on this sacred day we realize, as far as human understanding can grasp this mystery of the ages, that Thou didst leave heaven’s glories and become incarnate to make us eternally rich through Thy poverty. If on this anniversary of Thy birth we have but Thee, ours is indeed an immeasurable wealth of comfort. By Thy Christmas benediction we can be happy in the midst of sorrows, confident though surrounded by fears. All other holiday gifts are doomed to decay. Even the devotion that binds us most closely to our dear ones will come to an end; but the mercy which brought Thee to the lowliness of Bethlehem’s manger to grant us through faith the promise of the heavenly homeland,—that radiant love can never change. How can we ever thank Thee for the tidings of great joy that every festival of Thy nativity emphasizes? Help us give our hearts to Thee in living gratitude for the grace of Christmas. Enlighten us with the personal understanding that this day of Thy birth appeals to men in all conditions of life, particularly those afflicted by the manifold distresses and sorrows to which our age is heir. Let not these happy hours draw to a close without shedding rich blessing upon many lives. Hear us and fill our hearts with holy Christmas joy for Thy truth’s sake! Amen.

The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen. – Luke 2:20

HOW easy it is to misunderstand Christmas! It took the Puritans, despite their deeply religious life, half a century before they permitted the observance of this blessed day; and when the first Nativity celebration was held in Boston, 250 years ago, armed guards protected the worshipers against personal assault. Christmas is still misinterpreted and opposed, particularly in countries where Christian liberty is violently threatened by governmental interference, where masses of the youth have been mobilized sarcastically to belittle the reverence for the newborn Savior, the Son of God and Son of Man.

Even in our own nation the message of the Infant Jesus is sometimes misconstrued. In 1918 Christmas was of unusual significance to me personally. While attending the university, I devoted my leisure time to the spiritual care of several hundred enemy aliens and prisoners of war then confined in concentration camps. To me the Savior’s command “Love your enemies” and “I was in prison, and ye came unto Me” were a challenge to bring His Gospel to men who through no fault of their own were deprived of the privilege of worshiping their Savior and ours. Since it was impossible for me to visit all barracks on that Christmas after the Armistice, I wrote a lengthy telegram to the North Carolina camp, conveying the comfort of faith in the Christ-child to these interned sailors, separated for more than four years from their loved ones. To economize, I did not write out in full the various Scripture passages but referred to them, as is customary, simply by mentioning book, chapter, and verse. For example, rather than write each word, “Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” I cited: “Isaiah 9, verse 6.” That telegram of Christian hope was never delivered. Instead, I was summoned before a board of investigators to face the charge of using a code to communicate with an enemy interned. It seemed impossible that such complete ignorance of Scripture could exist concerning the greatest event of all history, the birth of Jesus Christ; and I quickly explained that these abbreviations and figures, far from being sinister code messages, were simply Bible references to the holiest and happiest story ever told. A glance at the passage immediately proved my assertions, and within a few moments I was bowed out the room with profuse apologies.

I recall this incident to voice the plea that Christmas, its purpose and blessing, often misconceived, should certainly be understood aright by us today. We do not celebrate a day; for who can certify that Jesus was born on December 25? Older investigators recorded over a hundred different dates suggested as the birthday of our Savior and King. Christmas should also be more than a time of hazy, roseate good will toward men, more than a momentary peace that brings soldiers out the trenches for only a few hours’ truce, more than the excited hurry of a holiday with its gifts, its convivial eating, drinking, and merrymaking. To be a God-pleasing Christmas, it must be, and I pray God that in your heart it will be, above all the outward festivities, the day of all days, on which our souls sing

GLORY TO GOD FOR THE CHRIST-CHILD!

We must have the same desire to glorify our heavenly Father which filled the hearts of those who first beheld Bethlehem’s Babe and of whom it is written (Saint Luke, chapter two, verse twenty): “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen.”

I

GLORY TO GOD THROUGH OUR CHRIST-CENTERED FAITH

No misunderstanding of the first Christmas disturbed the hearts of these shepherds. They had heard, not from the lips of fallible men but in Heaven’s message of the angel this glorious summary of Christmas truth: “Unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” They had seen with their own eyes the mystery of the Incarnation, and they believed that in the cradled Child, God and man were united, heaven had stooped to earth, the Creator had become a creature, Deity had taken the form of humanity. Before that truth they bowed without doubt or debate. They refused to object: “How shall this be?” They made no attempt to analyze the glorious mystery of Christ’s becoming man, to interpret the hidden mysteries of the manger. With all their hearts they recognized in Christ their God; they believed Him, they trusted Him.

If on the birthday of Christ you demand proof that this Child is the Lord of lords, then ask yourself this question: If even the Bible insists: “Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh!” how can you, with the restricted powers of human reason, hope to understand what the inspired penmen of God could not explain? If in the small circles of your experience you cannot account for a hundred marvelous chemical, physical, psychical forces at work in your body and mind, how can you hope to disclose the veiled truths of God? And if you cannot make human ingenuity answer a thousand questions in your daily life, why do you demand proof for the basic fact of Christmas, when God Himself has given you the immovable assurance that His Word is truth?

Don’t raise the objection that the shepherds were uncultured folk, ready to believe everything, with no scientific approach to the question of the first Christmas. I recall these words of John Gladstone, one of England’s foremost scientists, formerly president of the Physical Society, then president of the Chemical Society, the man who created an entirely new department which our universities now call Physical Chemistry: “We begin with Christ at Bethlehem. The first men who came to Him were poor peasants; but the next were the scientific men of the age.” Since the days of the Magi, leaders in various phases of human thought have humbly proclaimed their faith in the Incarnation. Jean Andre Deluc, inventor of the hydrometer, the scientist who first applied the barometer to measuring altitude, exclaimed: “The Son of God, the Lord of life, had to assume human nature and a mortal body as we have it. . . . I firmly believe that this is the truth because the Bible teaches me this. I say with Saint Paul, who directly called religion a secret, ‘O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!’”—Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, called “a prince in the world of science, one of the greatest physicists,” exults: “That the power and the love of God are brought into relation with the weakness and the sinfulness of man in the Lord Jesus Christ—of these great truths I have no doubt. . . . Upon Jesus Christ as the One who, for God, affiliated Himself with man, upon Him I rest my faith and hope.”

Take time to read the Cambridge Memorial, a declaration signed by ninety university professors of theology, history, law, and science, who in their own words “fully recognize the value of the statement of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.” These and a host of other noteworthy intellects have joined in the faith of Sir James Simpson, one of England’s outstanding physicians, who, with the trust based on an intimate, cover-to-cover knowledge of the Bible, confidently asserted: “I have unshaken faith in Jesus only. . . . I have heard men of science and philosophy raise doubts and objections to the Gospel of Christianity, but I never for one moment had a doubt myself.”

Geniuses in the arts of all ages have also dedicated their talents to the glory of Christ. The choicest poetry, the masterpieces of sculpture, the world’s costliest canvases, some of the sublimest compositions of all music, they laid at the feet of the Christ-child with a living faith in His divine power. To many the most majestic of all Christmas music is the incomparable oratorio of Handel The Messiah. Crowned royalty rises when its sublime “Hallelujah Chorus” is sung, and few commoners can hear its exalted strains without a deep inner thrill. George Frederick Handel glorified God not only in music but first of all by a firm trust in his Savior. His mother, the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman, regarded the spiritual training of her son among her most sacred duties; and through her influence Handel’s faith was so strengthened that, though Rome and London asked him to join fashionable churches and popular creeds, he steadfastly replied that “he was resolved to die a member of the communion in which he was born and bred.” If we look for the heart of the Messiah, we must discover that intensely personal conviction by which Handel’s tears mingled with the ink as he penned its scores. In his own words he tells us that during the two or three weeks of composing The Messiah, “I did see the heavens open before me and the great God Himself.” As you see these heaped tributes to Christ as our God, don’t doubt! Don’t question! Don’t hesitate!—Believe! Accept! Trust! Acknowledge Jesus as your Lord, not because these gifted intellects have, but because the sacred Scriptures themselves, in scores of passages, proclaim Him God and King!

If now you ask,—and what question suggests itself more appropriately today?—“Why was Jesus born? Why did the Son of God become the Son of Man?” you are not left in any quandary. Jesus came, the Scriptures tell us, to reveal the Father, to show men that the God of grace and love seeks to win His disobedient, disgraced, deceitful children back to the blessings of eternal glory. Jesus came to take away forever all human iniquity, to remove from our stained souls the sin with which we daily offend God and increase our eternal punishment, to bear these transgressions on the cross, the high altar of all humanity, and there to sacrifice Himself, so that His holy, precious blood could completely cleanse us. Jesus came to destroy the hate-filled plans of hell that hold the world in their destructive spell, provoke misery in homes, churches, nations, blight your life and mine. This tyranny over men’s souls was broken through the first coming of Christ and will be broken forever in His second coming with power and glory. Jesus came—and this is the climax of His advent into the flesh—to destroy death, to bless you, me, and all believers with this promise, “I am come that they might have life.”

Pause before this Christmas Day all too quickly hastens to its end and ask yourselves whether you have ever realized how insignificant and puny and worthless you and I are under the appraisal of men today, yet how priceless everyone is in the loving esteem of our blessed Jesus. To the chemist, man is often a remarkable combination of various substances that ultimately decay and return to the dust. To the physicist he is only a mechanism moved by various forces that refuse to be controlled but that must finally stop and leave him lifeless. To the biologist we are accidental creatures that trace our ascent through a series of chance changes up from the primitive brute. To the astronomer we are infinitesimally small beings that cling to a world not much larger than a dot in the universe, a sphere that will be destroyed with everything in and on it. To the modern psychologist men and women are helpless things, swayed by emotions and the dictates of an unconscious mind that few can even partially conquer. To the sociologist man is simply the victim of his environment, with a hundred forces mercilessly hammering his life so that it fits into its surroundings. But to Christ—O blessed comfort of Christmas!—you and I are of such inestimable value and our souls such a priceless heritage of our heavenly Father that Jesus left the indescribable grandeur of eternity to come down to the poverty, the anguish, the vice, the death, of this sin-choked world to restore us to His Father’s love.

Without that faith in the Redeemer, Christmas is just another holiday, tinted with a vague cloud of good will but void of any tangible hope for anguished souls; but to hearts that adore the cradled Babe as the Savior of the race the birthday of Jesus is the climax of the year. Whatever else this day may have brought you, may the Spirit of God now bring into your hearts a resolution to glorify God through a personal faith, confident that Jesus came for all men, with endless mercy, with sure promises. Since He came with the only salvation that Heaven knows and on which we can build our hopes, I beseech you in that name above every name not to let night close this blessed day without receiving Christ’s Christmas-gift of Himself. The door to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is only five feet high, so that those who enter must bow down; and in a more personal way a Christmas pilgrimage to the manger of Christ means that you humble yourselves, that as the shepherds left their sheep to worship the Christ-child, so you must forsake all earthly cares, kneel in spirit before the Prince of Peace, the Savior of your souls, the Christ upon whose shoulders all government rests, the eternal Immanuel, the God-with-us in the flesh, and glorify God with a childlike unquestioning faith in the Babe of Bethlehem, as your Lord, your God, your Savior.

II

GLORY TO GOD THROUGH CHRIST-DIRECTED LIVES

When the shepherds left the manger and hurried back to their flocks through the hush of that sacred night, they carried the impress of the Child indelibly stamped on their lives. They had seen the Christ, and as the countenance of Moses, who beheld God in His majesty on Mount Sinai, gleamed with reflected glory, so the shepherds, who had seen God in His mercy, glowed with that Savior’s holiness. They kept on “glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen.” You, too, cannot see Christ through the eyes of faith without being made purer and more courageous; unless you church-members radiate Christ so that on this Christmas Day and every day people in the circle of your influence are able to recognize you as a follower of Jesus, something radically wrong is weakening your Christianity.

As these herdsmen of Bethlehem hearkened to the angels’ proclamation “Fear not,” so may you praise God in banishing the battalions of fear that surround many lives—the dread of sin, the horror of disaster, the fright of sickness, the terror of poverty, the specters that relentlessly haunt some of you, rob you of peace, tear down the tissues of your body, and hold you in a slavery more terrifying than any human bondage. Today God sends you the promise from Heaven, signed in the name of Christ and sealed in His precious blood, “Fear not!” Bring your cares and your worries to Christ the “Counselor” and believe in Him! Deep Christian faith has always found high courage in every fear-gripped moment. When the Vandals swooped down on North Africa, they persecuted the Christian Church with appalling cruelty. In one of the chapters of this martyrdom we read that they dragged seven confessors of Christ before their inquisition. When these witnesses remained loyal to Jesus despite threats and promises, they were sentenced to death; but they marched the streets to the place of their execution with a song on their lips. “What song?” you ask. None other than the Christmas chorus “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men!” To the people who lined the streets they cried out, “Fear no threats and no terrors, but let us rather die for Christ as He died for us!” With this joy they strode into horrifying death.—You, too, can have the same triumphant trust for the smaller fears of your life if only your Savior becomes all in all to you and your faith, more than lip-worship, springs from a soul alive in Jesus!

Those shepherds, who earned but a few pennies a day, could return “glorifying and praising God” in the face of deep poverty. I hope that none of you, as undeniably hard as the yoke of money troubles may be, will permit the struggle against unemployment and mounting debts to destroy your Christmas joy or open your hearts to the radical agitators who promise everything but deliver nothing except delusion. Even though you can afford no Christmas­tree and not a single gift for your children, with Christ you have heavenly light for a future in which human vision cannot discern one assuring ray. If you recognize the meaning of His poverty, His exclusion from the overcrowded inn, His homelessness in a world that was His own, His death, which left, as human possessions are reckoned, only a crown of thorns and a few blood-stained pieces of clothing; if you know all this happened that through faith in Him and “through His poverty” you “might be rich,” Christmas can still be a day of immeasurable soul wealth.

During these trying times that border on destitution, God may be leading some of His children on blessed ways. Two days before the Christmas of 1857 Ulysses S. Grant came to Saint Louis to pawn his watch so that he could buy a few gifts for his children. He was bankrupt, a misfit, in whom nobody placed any faith; but the Savior whom Grant was later to confess and in whose name he was baptized on his deathbed was guiding Grant through the dark valley of discouragement. Within seven short years the “misfit” was the military leader of the nation and soon thereafter its President. In much the same way the God of unlimited grace can change your outlook on life within a short span of time if it be His will. If not, if in His divine wisdom He knows that your soul will be imperiled by wealth and your reliance on God broken by luxury, through Christ your hearts can beat in tune with God’s love and thrill with greater joy even in straitened circumstances than many who with their millions are still without God.

Again, if we with the shepherds have heard the angels sing, “Peace on earth,” we must be prepared to praise God by reechoing the spirit of that harmony and extending help to our fellow-men. God alone knows how our broken and bleeding age longs for that peace when class hatred, creed hatred, race hatred, and, in the smaller circles of life, family hatred make life unbearable for millions; when men persecute each other because they happen to be Christians, Jews, Negroes. What a protest the reconciling loft of Christ is to all the inhumanity we witness, not only in Europe, but with increasing force—sometimes with the support of the demagogues—in our own land! The very country in which Jesus lived is torn by disastrous warfare. The site of His birth is guarded day and night by two armed policemen. Yet we could well adopt one custom of century-old usage among the Christian Arabs of Palestine. When one tribe has committed a serious crime against another, the chiefs of the opposing parties, together with representatives of the involved families, gather—not in a courtroom—but in Bethlehem, in the grotto of the Church of the Nativity. There, before the huge silver star which marks the traditional place of Jesus’ birth, every effort is made to reconcile the opposing parties through an oath of peace. In the same spirit we ought to set aside the days of the Christmas week as a sacred period for the removal of strife in family circles and larger human relationships.

Fellow-pilgrims to the manger of the Christ-child, is your heart at peace, or has estrangement entered the doors of your homes? Husbands and wives, who ought to be welded together by a flame of love, has that devotion changed to cruel hatred? Children and parents, whom affection should bind together with strong ties of blood kinship, have you become separated through selfishness? I spoke the other night to a group of 400 destitute, homeless men, tossed about as they are by the cross-currents of life, without any haven or anchorage, and heard some of their tragic experiences. Even deeper than the tragedy of having no home is the sorrow of having a home, yet being exiled from it by hatred, as some of you are on this Christmas Day. Husbands, who know that you ought now to be with your wives; children who stubbornly refuse to write even your parents; fathers who with cutting cruelty have banished your sons and daughters, your flesh and blood, from your homes,—think on this Christmas Day of the Christ-child’s love, and may God give you the strength to magnify His name by returning to your dear ones and seeking reconciliation! Do not let this holy day draw to its close without stifling all pride and finding the peace brought earthward through the Christ-child!

The shepherds also glorified God by making “known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this Child.” They were the first missionaries of Jesus Christ. When your heart has been moved by the magnificent grace of Jesus Christ, will you not glorify God by telling others of the Savior? One of the best-beloved of all Christmas carols is Luther’s “From Heav’n Above to Earth I Come.” Tradition tells us that on Christmas Eve in 1534, while Katherine Luther was busily engaged in the holiday preparations, she knocked at her husband’s study and asked the Reformer to rock their baby Paul so that she might finish her household duties. As the cradle moved to and fro, Luther peered at the face of the child. The memories of the first Christmas Eve were revived in his heart, and he thought of the Babe cradled in the manger. The rhythm of the rocking suggested the melody of an old folk-song, and soon he had written the words of the hymn which millions have sung since his day. We, likewise, must behold our children in the light of the Christ-child. While Christmas, through the hundreds of Madonna canvases emphasizes the Virgin Mary and has rightly been regarded as the day that exalts motherhood, I ask you fathers to reflect Christ, as Luther did, by becoming priests of God in your own families. All of you who know the grace of Christmas I beg to go beyond your home and break the deadly silence that keeps millions in ignorance of Jesus. Shout the glad tidings! Proclaim Christ, and the God whom you honor by your testimony will in turn honor you by His power!

Within a few hours another Christmas will have escaped into the irrevocable past. As years add to years, these blessed days seem to slip away more quickly. How we would cling to Christmas and keep it with us forever! In the fifth century Jerome, translator of the Bible and teacher of its truth, who had moved to Bethlehem to live at the spot where the shepherds worshiped Jesus, was offered a high position in a church far away from the city of the Savior’s birth. He pleaded: “Take me not away from the manger of Christ. . . . Here in this very spot where God gave His Son from heaven will I return my soul to Him above.” With love and zeal for Christ like Jerome’s, may God give us, in youth and in old age, in adversity and prosperity, in sickness and in health, in war and in peace, always and ever, the grace to live in faith and hope and love with the Christ-child, our God and Lord of endless mercy!

Our Father, grant us the glorious Christmas gift of this faith for Jesus’ sake! Amen.

Published with the permission of The Maier Center, Concordia University, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105.

Date: December 11, 1938

Plea for Persevering Faith

O Christ, Savior of our souls, Sovereign of our lives:

There is one surpassing, all-absorbing prayer, into which all our other petitions would blend, one plea which this vast assembly, worshiping across wide areas, now directs to Thy grace, and that is the entreaty: Keep us in the faith! Bring us to heaven! Save us for eternity! Thou hast promised that, if we are faithful unto death, we shall receive the crown of life; and this eternal diadem we beseech of Thee above all else that we know or can ask. If at times we lose sight of life everlasting and rivet our attention on the unworthy things of this earth, forgive us and grant us a better, purer vision.  If we despair of eternal glory, show us that faith in the power of Thy blood can cleanse and save eternally. If in doubt or unbelief we question the reality of heaven and hell, or if we hesitate to accept Thy rich promises of never-ending blessing face to face with Thee, speak to us with Thy Spirit and show us that we can attain to the heights of highest joy when with childlike trust and implicit confidence we believe, even though we cannot see Thee with our natural eyes or comprehend Thee with the human mind. In order that our souls may be saved for the heavenly homeland, remove our doubt, banish our pride, bring us penitently on our knees before Thee; but always, O Christ of grace and truth, keep us in the faith that will lead us heavenward, homeward to Thee, for Thy glory’s sake! Amen.

Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. – 1 Corinthians 13:12

WHEN Samuel Finley Morse retired from active leadership in the worldwide industry that his invention, the telegraph, had created, he devoted his time to serious study of his Christian faith. The genius whose first message, ticked over the wires, was a triumphant telegram of praise for divine help, did not permit the honors heaped upon him by practically every civilized nation to lure him from his loyalty to Christ. In the quiet of well­earned rest Samuel Morse read his Bible continually, rejoicing especially in the glorious prospect of heaven. He used to tell friends: “I like to study the Guidebook to the country to which I am going. I wish to know more and more about it.” When his pastor emphasized the extraordinary goodness that God had shown him, Morse replied: “So good, so good; but the best part of all is yet to come.”

If that genius to whom the far ends of the earth had paid their grateful tribute and who had received more decorations and awards than any other man in his age of whom I know, could brush all these heaped honors aside and, looking to heaven, say: “The best part of all is yet to come,” how much more intently should our thoughts be riveted on the many mansions in our Father’s house! How much more eagerly should those who, far from receiving recognition, have met endless heartaches and reverses train their eyes on the heavenly homeland with the confidence that through Christ “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us”!

Yet we think so little and lightly of heaven! Our public libraries have imposing shelves of books on how to live long, live happily, live alone, live with others, live in a flat, live on a pension, live in England, live twenty-four hours a day, live on $2,000 a year; but more than this our age needs faith in the one Book that teaches men how to live for heaven and its blessings.

This promise of an all-glorious eternity through faith in Jesus Christ must be the absorbing issue especially for all those who have traveled far and long on the pathway of life. Today the United States has 8,000,000 men and women who are sixty-five years old or over, a group almost as large as the total population of Norway and of Sweden. Within the next ten or fifteen years almost all these will stand before the bar of eternity. We have generous pension plans and, more than any other nation, well-equipped old folks’ homes for those whom American industry, often with cruel short-sightedness, brands “too old.” Of inestimably greater importance, however, is the question: Are those approaching the threescore and ten milestone properly and personally impressed with the necessity of preparing for the better land, where there are no disabilities and disappointments for old age? Let the Government provide ample help for the aged; but let the churches with their spiritual calling approach the masses of our elderly men and women with a heaven-directed message of glory in the Eternal City, not built by men’s hands, without any disease or weakness, where Christ is King and His holy angels welcome every world-weary child of God.

The unspeakable glory of Christ’s heaven must be proclaimed to all ages. Children cherish the story of that happy land, and many times these sweet unblossomed buds in God’s garden have gone home to their Savior with unmistakable rejoicing. This childlike faith should live in every one of us, including our young people and those in the prime of life. With all the uncertainties of our existence that seem to multiply with every modern advance in civilization; with all the new diseases that take the deadly place of controlled sickness, the thought of heaven must be, though this blessing is often ignored, misunderstood, and denied, the magnet that attracts our soul’s affection more closely to Christ.

For this reason I ask you to stand in spirit with me

FACE TO FACE WITH JESUS

as we study the pledge of God’s sacred promise concerning heaven (1 Corinthians 13:12): “Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I

THE GLORY OF SEEING CHRIST FACE TO FACE

I shall not argue the question whether there is an eternity. If the Spirit of God does not convince your hearts, nothing that I can say will induce you to believe in a heaven opened by the grace of Jesus Christ. Skeptical scientists shrug their shoulders and call the statement of the Apostles’ Creed “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting” an unproved theory. Are not some of the fundamental facts of our existence unproved, though accepted by normal minds? Prominent unbelievers heap ridicule on the Bible truth that these bodies, though decayed, will be recreated through Christ into a newness of eternal life; but with Jesus we breathe a prayer of thanks that, while these unfathomable mysteries are often concealed from “the wise and prudent,” they have been “revealed . . . unto babes,” to those of childlike faith. A leading Modernist unblushingly confesses: “I do not believe in the resurrection of the body,” and preachers in many prominent churches who answered a questionnaire on heaven issued similar denials. But if men deliberately want to pull the crutch from beneath a crippled world and, against the dear testimony of Jesus Himself, bring disaster on their own heads by maintaining that the grave ends all; if some of you are drugging your consciences as you boast that the message of Judgment Day is an outworn superstition by which the Church selfishly seeks to put fear into men’s hearts, I cannot stop the horror of such unbelief, nor subject this promise of eternity to a microscope or telescope test. For me God has spoken, and that is sufficient. Deny the life to come, and you have destroyed the highest hope of the life that now is. For the injustice, sorrow, falsehood, of this earth we need the justice, truth, blessings, of heaven. If there is no hereafter, why blame those disconsolate souls, beaten down again and again by adversity, who raise themselves from the gutters to scream: “Life is useless!” “Life is tyrannical!”? If all our hopes end with our last breath, why not follow the suggestion of the California suicide who proposed that lethal gas chambers, public facilities for self-destruction, be established in all our larger cities where the wearied of life can secure quick release from its burdens?

Thank God, however, we have divine assurance that there is a heaven, a blessed eternity, a radiant life to come! I propose to show you this from only one section of the errorless Word, the thrilling third chapter of Saint John’s gospel There we read the promise that neither time nor hatred nor ignorance can diminish or erase: “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.” In the same connection, only a few verses before, is that magnificent summary of the Gospel, “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Here again we are assured that “the Son of Man must be lifted up that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” If one single chapter contains these repeated promises, how many more priceless pledges of heaven can we find between the covers of the entire Bible, each one an assurance in itself, but combined, a mighty, invincible defense of heaven! Friends and fellow-redeemed, believe this truth! Do not question or debate it! Do not think that you must be able to understand and explain it! Accept heaven in faith! Take God at His word!

That was the victorious trust of Saint Paul when in his matchless praise of Christian love he interrupts the trend of his thoughts to speak of heavenly bliss in this prophecy: “Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.” On earth, the Apostle says, we see things dimly, as, in Paul’s day, people looking into the poor reflection of an ancient mirror, beheld the objects imaged only in vague, hazy form; but then, in the glory to come, he promises, all uncertainty and obscuring darkness will vanish. We shall see “face to face.” Here, he continues, we “know in part” only, but hereafter “we shall know” in the same fulness of blessing with which Christ knows us.

How reassuring this heavenly knowledge will be! Human learning in its most elaborate conquest is pathetically limited. Science at its best makes many mistakes. It repeatedly changes its front. With candor and honesty it confesses, “We do not know.” One celebrated scientist admits that “the question how things began is wholly beyond the ken and scope of science.” Another confesses, “We do not know, and probably are incapable of knowing, what matter is.” A third concedes: “As to the origin of life, I know nothing at all.” Recall this when some “expert” tells you that the assured results of modern science have classified man merely as a higher-grade animal. In the world to come, with its better knowledge, those who are Christ’s may understand some of these deep truths of creation. We may have a profound insight into a hundred questions now baffling the keenest minds. The human eye, through the sublime power with which God has endowed it, can even now distinguish more than two million different tints and shades; but when we stand before that rainbow-circled throne of eternity, the range of our vision will be indescribably enlarged. God has given us an intricate system of hearing; yet it is limited. The best ears cannot perceive sounds below 16 or above 20,000 vibrations a second. Yet there are sounds beyond these two boundaries. This message from our station in Saint Louis is broadcast on a radio wave with 550,000 vibrations, although you cannot hear them. How gloriously, though, will the heavenly hallelujahs for our salvation and the celestial hosannas for our redemption resound before the throne of the Lamb when we see what “eye hath not seen” and hear what ears have not heard, “the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”

This promise of a higher knowledge answers the hopes of many bereaved who, lingering at the side of a grave, have asked, “Will we know our dear ones in the hereafter?” During a sad Christmas season when his wife lay apparently slowly dying, Charles Kingsley, preacher at Westminster Abbey, spoke “in the light of the cross of Christ of an eternal reunion, without parting or separation.” That thought brought lasting comfort. If any of you face death in the happy days of Christmas preparation, believe with all your hearts that, when you pass from this world trusting Christ who says, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” you join the company of those who have preceded you in that Savior. Scripture accepts this truth of an eternal reunion; never denies or argues it; instead it presents a long list of testimonies, with much emphasis on the joy of that eternal recognition. The Savior Himself tells us that “many shall come from the East and West and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” Does He not imply that in the hereafter the identity of these three patriarchs has been preserved? When the last book of the New Testament asks as it gazes upward to the new Jerusalem: “What are these which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they?” and the answer follows, “These are they which came out of great tribulation,” does not that identify these white-robed saints in glory as those who have suffered much for Christ? When Saint Paul tells the Christians at Thessalonica that they will be his “crown and glory” before the throne of the Lord Jesus, does not that infer that He will rejoice in eternity over his Thessalonian converts? No doubt can remain for the Christian who hears the promise of our text “I shall know even as also I am known.” He can look forward with an intensity that increases as the years multiply to that blessed heavenly reunion with his sainted father and mother, with the son or daughter snatched away in the joy of life; and through the strength of faith he confesses, “In Thy presence is fulness of joy.”

That fuller knowledge will also help us understand the mysteries of our faith. Now we “see in part.” We accept many teachings of our creed without being able to plumb their depths or understand their verity. We cannot analyze or dissect the truth of the Trinity or the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. Nor can we realize the full grace of God in Christ or explain why God eternally chose us to be His children. The divine working of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, through Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, is an impenetrable mystery to us now. But then, when we see “face to face” and “know even as also” we are “known,” we shall be able to delve more deeply in the “depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” Where the ten thousand times ten thousand worship with God in holiness, there will be no denominations and conflicting creeds; no Roman Catholics or Greek Catholics; no Calvinists or Reformed; no Missouri Synod Lutherans; no U.L.C. or A.L.C. Lutherans. In the glory of that heaven all who trusted in Christ and penitently came to His cross for forgiveness, in whatever Church they worshiped here on earth, in one united faith will sing His praise. Oh, that all churches were now outwardly and inwardly united, so that in conformity with Christ’s own words they could be one in advancing the cause of His kingdom!

Particularly comforting for us is the thought that through this sacred understanding in heaven our eyes will be fully opened to the merciful guidance of God and His ways, which on earth often seemed “unsearchable” and “past finding out.” In the glory of the Resurrection many of us, reviewing our lives on earth, will exclaim: “What profit came to me through earthly losses! What joy resulted from my tears! How I thank God that His will, and not mine, prevailed! How grateful am I that my heavenly Father did not answer those selfish prayers which I blindly put before Him!” There, in the heavenly light, you, the redeemed by Christ, will understand that your ambition did not materialize so that you could build your eternal hope on “nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” There you will penetrate the veil of earthly sorrow and see God’s high purpose in bringing you down on beds of sickness so that you might recapture spiritual health, in permitting you to lose an eye or a limb so that you might gain the kingdom of heaven. In that eternal radiance you, sorrowing parents, will know with perfect insight why God permitted your child, for whose life you pleaded with all your heart and soul, to be taken away in death. You will see that it may have been for the child’s sake, for your own sake, or for some marvelous purpose of God, and with the praise of faith you will acknowledge Him who “hath done all things well.” There, you bereaved husbands who have sent word that God unexpectedly called your beloved wives to Him, will see how blessed has been His will and how even these heart-breaking losses have been a part of the eternal harmony by which “all things work together for good to them that love God.” We ought to have much more of this trust for our lives! I appreciate the many letters that come day after day beseeching our prayers in your behalf, and I promise you that as God gives us strength, these requests will be answered. Even more than our intercession, those who face severe operations, who wonder whether tumors will develop into cancer, who seem to have suffered beyond the limit of a cold world’s cruelty, need the strength of faith, the personal assurance that whatever God permits us, as His children, to suffer; comes to us as a blessing in disguise, a fire that refines, a storm that restores. We ought to have more of Luther’s trust. When his beloved daughter Magdalena died, he knelt down to pray once more, and though the hot tears streamed down his heroic face, seamed as it was by sorrow and anguish, he raised his faltering voice to thank God for taking his child to glory.

Yet the most sacred of all joys in heaven, the surpassing glory, far above all these blessings of higher knowledge, is the indescribable and immeasurable bliss by which we shall see Jesus “face to face.” To live forever in the presence of Him by whom the world was created and humanity redeemed; to behold Him who is our Savior and our God, no longer weary and persecuted as He was, but now the Center of adoring faith; to see the hands and feet that once were nailed to the cross and to bow before that Christ in His Kingdom of Power and Glory; to contemplate the sacred head, once bleeding and wounded under the cutting crown of thorns, now glorified by the coronation of a heavenly diadem; to hear the lips of grace that once begged, “O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me,” speak wonderful words of a love too blessed for our human ears; to sing the new song of the redeemed, the melody of heaven, to the eternal praise of Him who on this earth had heard the jeering cry “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”—that is the fountain fulness of a joy and peace that truly “passeth all . . . understanding.” When the confidence of Job is shared by us and we know that our “eyes shall see Him,” what dazzling light, what infinite purity, what overwhelming joy, what celestial love, shall we behold, “face to face” with Jesus! Freed from sin and selfishness, fear and terror; freed from hate and envy, lust and evil desire; freed from pain and disease, suffering and anguish; freed from remorse and regrets, from disappointments and despair; freed from loneliness and darkness, from distrust and suspicion, we can—and this is the most glorious pledge of eternity—see Jesus “face to face.”

II

THE PROMISE OF SEEING CHRIST FACE TO FACE

If now you ask that supreme question for life and death, the pointed inquiry which, I pray God, has been asserting itself with restless insistence within your hearts, “How can I see Jesus ‘face to face’? How can I assure myself of the indescribable rapture of heaven?”—I lift my heart to God to thank Him for His grace in permitting me to send the answer from coast to coast. When the Apostle writes, “We shall know even as also we are known,” he bases the promise of this beholding Jesus “face to face” on the fact that Christ knows those who are His. The all-absorbing issue in life, therefore, must direct itself toward being known of Christ, having our names written in the Book of Life, hearing Jesus say, “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know My sheep,” and then becoming a member of His flock.

If we pursue this inquiry farther and ask, “Well, how can I be known of Christ?” “How can I have the confidence that He will acknowledge me in heaven?”—and once more I pray that thousands of you are repeating these questions,—then listen as our Lord Himself says, “Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.” Read Saint Paul’s assurance “If any man love God, the same is known of Him.” As in every blessing with which Christ enriches us in time and in eternity, we must have faith in God’s mercies. Only with hearts and minds directed heavenward through Christ, can we find the new and rich happiness of life eternal. If God had demanded that, before we enter heaven, we must atone for every sin in the long inventory of wickedness that marks every life, we would recognize, even with our restricted understanding, the justice of this claim and thank God for that opportunity. If our heavenly Father had insisted that, to assure our peace in heaven, we should have to pay untold millions, on bended knees we would thank Him for the permission to spend part of eternity, were that possible, in earning the price demanded. But praised be this unfathomable love! God offers the blessings of heaven freely, immediately, as the gift of His lavish grace, to all who have been washed white and sinless by their faith in the cleansing blood and the atoning death of Jesus.

If you have that trust, nothing else matters in life. No one can keep you from seeing Jesus “face to face.” Lazarus was sore and hungry. Dogs were the only friends moved by his sores and wounds, and crumbs were the only food that sustained him; but by a blessed compensation he was transferred in moment from the poverty of earth to the riches of heaven. The thief on the cross, guilt-stained and blood-marked as he was, had the true confidence. He heard Jesus promise, “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise,” and without any delay, without any purgatory for further cleansing and refining (the Scriptures know nothing of any such intermediary stage; it is always either heaven or hell), that saved sinner went from Golgotha to glory, from the pain of his penalty to the Paradise of Pardon. Stephen, the martyr, was stoned to a horrible death, but those jagged rocks could not crush the triumphant vision of faith by which in his last moments even here on earth he “looked up steadfastly into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.” Paul suffered from a thorn in his flesh, but he was so strong that in spirit he was permitted to see the higher joys of heaven. John was exiled to lonely Patmos; but he had faith, and in the Book of Revelation he received the soul-lifting foretaste of that eternal bliss.

The same promise of triumph can eternally enrich you despite all your sins, if only—and remember there is no other promise—you have this faith in Jesus. As the wise merchant in the parable sold all that he had to secure the pearl of great price, will you not, my fellow-sinners and my fellow-redeemed, focus your souls on the Christ who comes to us particularly during these days of preparation for His advent into our flesh? Will you not, —in His name I beseech you,—with your eyes trained to the blessed hour of seeing no longer “as through a glass, darkly,” but beholding Him, your ever-loving, ever-forgiving, ever­compassionate Christ, “face to face,” now pledge Him the allegiance of your hearts if you have never known Him before or offer Him the increased devotion of your hearts if you are His?

O blessed Savior, we cannot fathom Thy love! And even with this knowledge in part, we could never sufficiently thank Thee if all our lifetime, day and night, waking and sleeping, were devoted to Thy praise. How shall we ever sufficiently praise Thy name? Bless us even with adversity and affliction if necessary; but we ask, by the blood that dripped from Thy wounds and by Thine atoning agonies and death, keep us for heaven with everlasting life, where we shall see Thee “face to face.” Amen.

Published with the permission of The Maier Center, Concordia University, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105.