Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year? If you did, how is it going now?

Perhaps you’ve managed to keep it up this far. But more than likely you will, like me, have let it lapse weeks ago.

This week has one of my favourite pastoral one-twos in the BCP. On Lent I, we remembered Jesus’ fasting for us and asked that God would give us grace rightly to use the abstinence of the Lenten season. On Lent II, less than a quarter of the way through Lent, we get this collect:

On Ash Wednesday, I asked why Lent needed to be quite as long as it is. One reason is that forty days is easily long enough to fail. There is time for Ash Wednesday resolutions to slip, to be remade and to slip again. Ten days into Lent, it will be clear to many of us that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.”

Although this collect is one of the ones that dates to the sixth century, this is good Reformed theology. As the general confession reminds us every time we use it (and for Cranmer that meant twice daily) “there is no health in us”. Nothing within us gives us the power to heal our own sickness of soul. Even our fumbling attempts at repentance reveal that we are, even at our best, sinners seeking grace. For all our fasting, amendment of life is far more God’s gift than our achievement.

Putting this collect at this point in Lent serves as a healthy corrective to the triumphalism of some Evangelical spirituality. Sometimes, we can speak quite freely of victory or transformation as though our sin is something which can be easily left behind. Using this collect teaches us to be mindful of what a slow and painstaking process sanctification usually is. Quantum leaps do sometimes come in our walk with God and we should be thankful for every breakthrough. But the normal Christian life reminds us time and again that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”.

Yet this collect is not simply defeatist. Its confession of our inability is part of the acknowledging of our wretchedness which the collect for the season reminds us of. But that wretchedness is being acknowledged before the God of all mercy. God is the one who sees that we are helpless. And this collect is a plea that he would view our wretchedness with a merciful eye.

Through this collect, we entrust ourselves to the only God who can help and keep (i.e. guard) us. We ask his grace to protect us, both from bodily injury and from everything that harms our souls. God gives the penitent sinner a new and contrite heart. Growth and godliness are possible, but not through our own resources. Rather, as we come to God for his grace (and especially to the means of grace he has promised to work through), he will defend our hearts from the sinful thoughts and attitudes that plague us. We cannot help ourselves, but God is ready to help the helpless when they come to him.