Be faithful and constant
Faithful God,
keep your people, the church, in all faithfulness and constancy,
that we may always lean upon the hope of your heavenly grace,
and evermore be defended by your mighty power,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Faithfulness is hard. To remain faithful and constant in the winds and waves, the ebbs and flows of life is not easy. When faced with enemies within and without, toils and temptations, chaos and confusion, we are faced with two questions: how do we keep going? And why should we keep going?
We are bidden in this collect to ask the Lord of the Church to “keep your people, the church, in all faithfulness and constancy”. We cannot do so in our own strength. Our natural state is not one of constancy in any matter, much less in the matter of devotion to God. Fickleness, not faithfulness, is our specialty. The only possibility we have of remaining faithful is to ask God to keep us so.
Why? Why should we want to ask for such a thing? The collect answers: “that we may always lean upon the hope of your heavenly grace, and evermore be defended by your mighty power”. The result of the Church being in a state of faithfulness and constancy towards her God is that she may rely upon his grace and power. The Lord of the Church will aid and defend her in days of trouble. In a world of darkness and danger, such grace and power is the only hope we may securely lean upon.
The reverse — what would be lost due to unfaithfulness and inconstancy — is clear. An unfaithful, wavering, backsliding Church has no right to hope upon the grace or the defending power of God. A Church which turns her back on God in the day of trouble cannot presume to call upon him in that same day of trouble. The Old Testament Church found this out, to her great pain, time and time again. God promised his covenant people that were they to remain faithful to him, he would defend them from their enemies (see e.g. Deuteronomy 28:7). But if they were to forsake covenant obedience, they would lose his defence (Deuteronomy 28:25). A faithless Church is a defenceless Church.
Faithfulness is hard, and the Church is faced in this age with the temptation to abandon faithfulness and turn aside from God and his ways. I don’t think anyone — whether bishops, other clergy, laity, or General Synods — ever actually sets out to become unfaithful to God. Yet it happens. We are constantly witnessing those who would profess to worship God forsake obedience to him, spurning his word and his ways, and putting their hope elsewhere. When we lose sight of and confidence in the heavenly grace and mighty power of God, we lose all reason to labour on in faithfulness. But the great tragedy is that to abandon faithfulness is to forfeit our access to that same grace and power that is our only hope. Let us therefore pray that God would “keep his people, the church, in all faithfulness and constancy”.
So pray this with me:
Faithful God,
keep your people, the church, in all faithfulness and constancy,
that we may always lean upon the hope of your heavenly grace,
and evermore be defended by your mighty power,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.