Faith and Duty: Sermons on Free Texts, with Reference to the Church-Year

With Reference to the Church-Year
By the REV. LOUIS BUCHHEIMER Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, St. Louis, Mo.
ST. LOUIS, MO. CONCORDIA PUBLISHING HOUSE 1913

Come thou and all thy house into the ark.— Gen. 7, 1.
The Bible, from beginning to end, is a series of object lessons. God sets before us certain persons, things, events, and bids us look at and learn from them, just as the teacher at school draws a diagram on the blackboard, and tells the children to look at and learn from it. No word, or single incident, recorded in the Bible, is wasted or useless; what may, at first glance, sometimes appear trifling and unimportant to us, may, on closer examination, mean very much, like the decimal point in arithmetic or the accent on a word. So it is with the words of the text just quoted. They may seem insignificant, yet are they most important.
The present season, beginning with this Sunday, is called Advent. We are accustomed, in the four weeks before Christmas, to direct our minds to Christ's advent or coming. This advent, we say, is threefold: First, there is Christ's coming in the flesh, when as a little babe He lay in the manger at Bethlehem, taking upon Himself the form of Abraham, made in the likeness of human flesh, and performing the pilgrimage of an earthly life that He might thus save man. Again, we distinguish His second coming, i. e. , His return, as we confess in the Creed, to judge the quick and the dead, when, arrayed in all the power and majesty of Almightiness, He shall come to execute vengeance upon the evildoers, vindicate and take home with Himself those who believed in Him. And between these two comings lies a third, which we are wont to designate His spiritual coming, by which we mean His coming and knocking at the door of our hearts for admission. This coming is not visible, however, as the other two, but invisible, yet none the less real on that account, and it is carried on by means of His Word and sacraments, through the instrumentality of the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper, for the execution of which He has founded a divine institution called the Church. To that Church He has entrusted the work of Gospel preaching and sacramental giving. She, if true to her calling and message, is the conservatory of His truth, the disseminator of His kingdom upon earth. It is within her pales that He dispenses salvation. Outside of the Church He does not promise to bestow forgiveness of sin and the blessings of His grace. How these preliminary remarks bear upon the selection and consideration of our text, what precious and instructive lessons we may gather from the comparison, that let us see, and may we be wise and heed.