#32- Do Not Speak With Slippery Words, But Frankly Confess Christ

“For you will observe that the tyrants are not out merely to destroy Luther, but to wipe out the teaching. It is on account of the teaching that they attack you and ask you whether you are Lutheran. Here you must be sure not to speak with slippery or evasive words but frankly to confess Christ, no matter who did the preaching—Luther, or Tom, Dick, or Harry. The person you can forget; but the teaching you must confess. Paul also writes thus to Timothy in II Tim. 1[:8]: ‘Do not be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord, nor of me, a prisoner for his sake.’ If it had been enough here for Timothy to confess the gospel, Paul would not have commanded him not to be ashamed also of Paul—not of Paul as a person but of Paul as a prisoner for the sake of the gospel. Now if Timothy had said, I do not hold with Paul or with Peter, but with Christ, when he knew that Peter and Paul were teaching Christ, then he would actually thereby have denied Christ himself. For Christ says in Matt. 10 concerning those who preach him: ‘He who receives you receives me, and he who rejects you rejects me.’ Why this? Because holding thus with his messengers, those who bring his word, is the same as holding with Christ himself and with his word” (Luther’s Works, v.36 p.266).