Author(s)Anne Kennedy
Date 6 April 2023

Almighty God,

grant to us the spirit to think and do what is right,

so that we, who cannot do anything good without you,

may be given the strength to live according to your will,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

One of the most irritating phrases of modern life, at least in the country in which I live, is “do the work.” To the non-native English speaker, it may seem a straightforward, even biblical, admonition. If you don’t work, for example, you don’t eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). If there are dishes in the sink, you should “do the work” to wash, dry, and put them away. But that is not quite what the phrase “do the work” means. Rather, it refers to the spiritual and political task of making the whole world a “better” place. It’s not enough just to do your duty, to show up for work, to look to the interests of others. You must also fight against injustice and for equity. Closely following on the heels of “do the work” is “do better.” You’ve done the work, or at least some of it, but the world is still a mess, so now do “better” work.

Part of the assumption of a post-Christian world is that if you “know better, you do better.” But that isn’t so. God had to reveal himself to us in the Scriptures because we don’t know what is good. We lack the power in and of ourselves to “do” what God commands. God’s grace has to go before us to show us the work and then enable us to do it (see Article 10 of the Thirty-nine Articles).

The church, in this beautiful prayer, offers the Christian rest from the folly of trying to do all the work better. In the first line, we corporately ask God to give us the thing we most need — the power to “think and do what is right.” The second line of the prayer reiterates that essential truth yet more clearly — “so that we, who cannot do anything good without you, may be given the strength to live according to your will.”

The good that we do isn’t good if we do it apart from God’s strength. All our works are only good in so far as we do them by the power and for the glory of God. If you “do the work” and feed the hungry, but do it to receive the laud and praise of social media, that work isn’t good. Worse yet, the “good” things that we do actually amount to our ruin if we do them in defiance of God’s grace, independently, not leaning on him for our help and salvation.

What a blessing it is to work in God’s kingdom! We don’t have to “do better” nor even “do the work” by the standards of the world. Rather, in meek and helpless dependence on Christ we can trust him to order our efforts, our desires, and our work. In that unlikely kingdom, his Spirit works a miracle. We pour out all our toil like water into a jar, but when it is spilled out into the Master’s cup, we discover that it has been transformed — by him — into wine.

So pray this with me:

Almighty God,

grant to us the spirit to think and do what is right,

so that we, who cannot do anything good without you,

may be given the strength to live according to your will,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.