Rely on grace
Almighty God,
may your grace always go before and follow after us,
and make us continually to bear the fruit of good works,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
“There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Sometimes attributed to the 16th century English Reformer John Bradford, this expression often seems sanctimonious, even smug. The important point it makes about grace is easily obscured by its focus on other people’s misfortunes. This collect gives us another context to understand the necessity of God’s grace in our lives: prayer.
Prayer is at its most authentic when it expresses our helplessness: this collect does just that. As we pray it, asking God to surround us with his grace, we are humbled before him. This collect refuses to endorse the illusion that we are in control of our circumstances. Instead, it commits us, and everything that involves us, to God’s grace; it entrusts all situations (before we enter them, and after we leave them) to him.
Why his “grace”? We could pray for other blessings in this wrap-around way: God’s protection, or his love. And praying like that wouldn’t be wrong! But the focus on grace is important: Grace is God’s undeserved favour, lavished on us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Grace is entirely God’s initiative: before we could ever meet his standards, and even after we had fallen far short of them, he loved us out of his grace.
God is better to us than we could deserve: grace means that his acceptance of us is a free gift we receive rather than a wage we earn. One way to describe coming to Jesus is to “have access by faith into this grace in which we stand” (Romans 5:2). No wonder we sing, with John Newton: “How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!”
But the collect reminds us that God’s grace is not just experienced when we begin following Jesus. Every second of our life in Christ is sustained by God’s grace, and there is no situation in which we can dispense with it. As Paul found in 2 Corinthians 12:9, even in terrible suffering we can discover that his grace is sufficient for us.
Asking for God’s grace to go before us and follow after us, then, is asking for our lives to be woven into what he is doing in the world today. Although grace means we are not saved BY any good works we do, by grace we are saved FOR good works. The collect prays that we, surrounded by God’s grace, will “continually bear the fruit of good works.” We are asking that every moment of our lives would bring him glory, that we might become part of something bigger and more beautiful than we could accomplish on our own.
We cannot do without God’s grace, not for a moment. Instead of turning to him as a last resort, when everything else has failed, this collect brings home to us how completely dependent we are on him — and gives us words to ask for all we need.
So pray this with me:
Almighty God,
may your grace always go before and follow after us,
and make us continually to bear the fruit of good works,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.