Lose Not the Things Eternal

I’ve sat across from more than one parishioner over the years who told me, with real comfort in their voice, that they didn’t need to worry about it anymore. They’d made their decision for Christ years before, said the prayer, walked the aisle, and that was that. Settled. Done. Whatever came after didn’t touch the outcome. I understand why that comfort is attractive. There’s a kind of person who genuinely needs to hear it, the one paralyzed by scruple, endlessly relitigating whether they really meant it the first time. I’ve sat with that person too, and for them, the word is rest: Christ has you, stop interrogating yourself. But I’m not sure “once and done” is what our Collect this morning is asking for, and most of us, if we’re honest, aren’t actually the scrupulous one. We’re the one tempted to coast.

We don’t pray, “Thank You for the mercy already banked.” We pray, “Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.” That isn’t the language of a closed transaction. It’s the language of a road still being walked, with a guide who has to keep guiding, all the way to the end. The Collect doesn’t ask God to thank us for getting started. It asks Him to keep multiplying mercy upon us so that we arrive at all.

The Thirty-Nine Articles, which most of us have never read past the title page, saw this exact comfort coming and answered it directly. Article XVI says plainly that “after we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin.” Not before we believed. After. Grace already given can still be walked away from, which is why the Article goes on to insist that repentance remains open to us when we do. Article XVII goes further, warning that the doctrine of election, however true and however comforting to a godly soul, becomes something else entirely in the hands of “curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ.” It can lead them, the Article says, “either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living.” Reckless living. The very assurance meant to steady a believer’s hope becomes, in the wrong hands, an excuse to stop watching. Notice what the Article doesn’t say. It doesn’t say predestination is false, or that God’s grip on His own is weak. It says the doctrine, preached to the wrong heart, gets twisted into permission. That’s a warning about us, not about God’s faithfulness, and it’s worth sitting with rather than rushing past.

Our own Anglican catechism says the same thing in plainer English. To Be a Christian asks, in question 360, how God enables us to live in His forgiveness, and the answer doesn’t stop at being justified and washed and made an heir. It says I am given the grace to live continually in repentance and faith. Continually. Not once, back at the beginning, and then coasting. The next question is even more direct: are you still affected by your sin, despite God’s forgiveness? Yes, it says. I live in constant need of Christ’s healing grace. It points us to Paul’s own warning in First Corinthians, the one I have to preach to myself as much as to anyone in this room: let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.

None of this is a new anxiety dreamed up by careful Anglican divines centuries after the apostles. Jeremiah watched Jerusalem burn and wrote, in the middle of that wreckage, “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” New every morning. Not issued once, stored up, and drawn down for the rest of a life. New, every single morning, because the soul that wrote those words knew it would need them again before the sun set. The Psalmist’s confidence runs the same direction. “He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers.” That’s not a deed signed once and filed away. It’s a dwelling. You don’t sign a dwelling. You return to it, every day you’re still walking. We Encouragers know something about returning. This parish has never been the kind of place that thrives on a single decisive moment and then drifts on momentum. It thrives, when it thrives, on people showing up again: to the altar rail, to the pew, to one another, week after ordinary week. That rhythm of returning isn’t a lesser, watered-down faith next to some imagined one-time conversion experience. It’s what continuing in mercy actually looks like from the inside.

Paul takes the same truth and turns it toward what’s still ahead of us rather than what’s already behind us. “We ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” We are already God’s children. The catechism is right to call that adoption real and present, not a someday hope. But Paul is careful here to say we’re still waiting for something the adoption itself hasn’t yet delivered in full. The papers are signed. The inheritance hasn’t fully arrived. Notice, too, who else is groaning in this same passage. It isn’t only us. Paul says the whole creation groans and travails together, waiting on the very same horizon we are. That should keep us from a certain kind of impatience with our own slow progress. If the mountains and the fields and every living thing are still waiting on a redemption they haven’t yet received, we shouldn’t expect our own sanctification to arrive ahead of schedule either. We live in the space between the signing and the arriving, and nearly the whole of this present life happens right there, in that gap, which is exactly why the Collect keeps asking for mercy to be increased rather than thanking God that the matter’s closed.

Which brings us, by way of all that waiting, to a parable about eyes. “Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged.” Augustine read this Gospel and noticed something about the beam in our own eye: it isn’t a different, larger category of sin than the splinter we spot in our brother’s. It’s the same sin, magnified by self-love, which is exactly why we see the small one in him so quickly and miss the large one in ourselves. We’re quick to judge a fellow traveler precisely because we’ve quietly stopped thinking of ourselves as still traveling. C. S. Lewis named that same blindness pride, the vice that makes a man sharp-eyed about every fault but his own. Jeremy Taylor, writing on conscience a generation or two after Lewis’s Oxford, would have agreed but pressed the remedy differently: examine your own scrutiny first, he says, because a zeal that hasn’t checked itself for self-love corrupts more charity than the sin it claims to be correcting ever could. Lewis names the disease; Taylor prescribes the discipline. Either way, if none of us has finished the road, none of us is in a position to act as though someone else’s slower progress on it is our business to settle.

That’s the whole point of standing here, every single Sunday, at this altar. The altar isn’t a monument to mercy already spent. It’s where that same continual mercy gets renewed: this week, the same as last week, the same as it will be next week. We hear the law, we confess what the week has shown us about ourselves, and we receive, again, the Body and Blood of the One whose mercy doesn’t run out because it was never a one-time gift to begin with.

If mercy has to be increased and multiplied upon us simply to get us through an ordinary week, then none of us has any business hoarding judgment against a brother who’s struggling on the very same road. If the inheritance hasn’t fully arrived, then none of us has any business acting as though we personally have already arrived. If even the groaning creation is still waiting, then we can extend a little more patience to the slow progress we see in each other, and in ourselves. And if Christ feeds us at this altar today with the same mercy He fed us last Sunday, then we have every reason to come back again next week, and the week after that, because we are going to need it. That’s not bad news. We were never meant to carry ourselves the rest of the way on a decision made years ago and never revisited. We were meant to keep coming back to the one mercy that doesn’t run dry, and that’s the only news steady enough to walk on, this week and every week until we finally do lose nothing eternal at all.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.