ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 52.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> DAVID: My name is David, and I come from central city Cleveland. My background comes out of the health care industry where I was employed for too many years to count. You have now told us about the worship that God seeks, but why were the means of grace and ministry so important to all of this? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: The means of grace and the ministry are key to it. The reason is simple. That is God's delivery system. Now, if you want a picture in your head, if somebody sends you a gift, it comes in a package, and a truck has to bring it. It's the UPS delivery system for God. This is the way the confessions look at it. In the Augsburg Confession in Article 4, the centerpiece of the whole thing concerning the point of faith after original sin is described in Article 3 concerning justification. Then the obvious question is how do you become justified before God. Obviously, it is through faith. And so, how is this faith assisted? How is it created by God? How is it sustained? And there is the ministry. So they confessed, "To obtain such faith, God instituted the office of preaching." This is Article 5. "Giving the gospel and the sacraments." These are then the means of grace. As they say, "Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith." So these are the means to create and make faith. "Who produces faith where and when he wills, namely, the Holy Spirit. " So the spirit is doing this among us. It goes on in those who hear the gospel. Just reading the law won't do it. But in those who hear about Jesus Christ. In fact, the Latin version expands a little bit here and says, "In those we hear the gospel, that is to say, in those who hear that God, not on account of our own merits, but on account of Christ justifies those who believe. That they are received into grace on account of Christ." So these are beautifully intertwined, the means of grace and faith. Continuing now with what the German said. "It teaches that we have a gracious God, not through our own merit, but through Christ's merit when we so believe." The pastoral office is given then, we can look in Article 7 to see that it's explained a little bit further, as the way of delivering the word and sacraments.