The New Living Way Prepared by Christ

tax, what is due to the tax; they give them, as God’s stewards, all honor and respect; they pray day and night, as well for the King as also for all his councilors and judges, primarily for their spiritual welfare as well as temporal happiness, and for all men: whose prayer God also alone hears, and whose work and activities are also blessed by God. Whereas, on the contrary, the prayers, works, and activities of all godless teachers and listeners (as long as they remain in their avarice, pride, and lusts) are an abomination to God and cursed. Only that they must obey God’s law and evangelical orders in spiritual matters more than those of men; indeed, often they must act diametrically against the statutes and orders of men through divine impulse, the more these raise the work of their own hands above God and what is called true divine worship, and hinder, restrain, and quench their church orders against the Gospel of Christ and the Spirit of God.

7. In what does our divine worship consist? R. When we are driven by God’s Spirit in this or that house, or in the field, to come together, either on Sunday or during the week; that we encourage one another for the constant growth of Christianity, in the living faith, in the divine, pure love toward God and our neighbor—both friends and enemies—in humility, meekness, chastity, righteousness, temperance, truth, and divine wisdom, to increase daily, and to become ever more complete, until we come to the perfect manly age, which is in the measure of the perfect age of Christ; to become ever more alert, earnest, courageous, and brave in watchfulness and earnest struggle against all sins and their temptations, and not to cease until our faith becomes the victory over all sins, world, flesh, devil, Babel, death, and hell, in and outside of us.

That we might become ever more like Christ in the complete denial of ourselves and the world, in the willing acceptance of all crosses, sufferings, persecutions, and tribulations, which God, out of pure love for our trial and purification, lets come over us every day, and consequently on this narrow and strait path we