Fixed Hearts in an Unfixed World

The Reverend Joshua Spencer / March 20, 2026

The Collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent - Passion Sunday

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

One might expect the collect for the fifth Sunday of Lent to begin with comfort, encouragement, or even with petition. To the contrary, it begins with a diagnosis, and a rather unflattering one at that: the human will is, by nature, “unruly.” Not merely weak, not simply prone to occasional failure, but disordered at the level of desire itself. This is the kind of anthropological honesty that makes this prayer so striking and so useful as we stand on the near edge of Holy Week.

This word, “unruly,” is not primarily describing bad behavior; rather, it describes a deeper problem. Sin does not merely make us do wrong things; it twists what we love and what we long for. Augustine put his finger on this when he described the human heart as restless, and Paul described it in Romans 7 with a candor that still feels uncomfortably personal: “the good that I want, I do not do.” This echoes Jeremiah from centuries earlier, that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and who can know it?” We can’t pretend to be optimistic about unaided human nature.

However, what follows from this diagnosis is equally important, and equally counter-cultural. The collect does not say, “God, help us order our wills.” It says, “You alone can bring into order what is unruly in us.” That exclusivity is the theological hinge on which the whole prayer turns. In a single phrase, it denies every program of moral self-improvement and every therapeutic model that promises to fix the inner life through the right techniques. The grace we ask for is not assistive, but constitutive. God does not renovate the old heart; Ezekiel says he replaces it (36:26-27). Our prayer is turning toward the One who can reorder it, which is precisely what Lenten discipline is meant to accomplish. Fasting, prayer, and almsgiving are not self-repair programs; they are postures of open surrender.

The petition itself is double, and the distinction matters. The collect asks for grace to love what God commands and to desire what God promises; these are not the same request. The first is about obedience in the present: can I learn to love the command itself, not merely comply with it grudgingly? To love the command we must love the Commander. The second is about hope for the future: can I learn to ache for what God has prepared, rather than for what the world is currently offering? Together these two preces cover the whole interior. I find myself wondering, pastorally and personally, which of these is harder. Perhaps we can train ourselves toward obedience more easily than we can reorder our deepest desires, but both are failures of grace, and both require the same Remedy.

The world the collect places us in is described as producing “swift and varied changes.” That phrase is, if anything, an understatement. The changes are swift in the sense that they come faster than we can adjust to them, and varied in the sense that they are unpredictable in kind, not merely in timing. For only a handful among us is this abstract language; PCS orders, deployments, loss, and institutional upheaval are the texture of daily existence. But the point is not only that the world is materially inconvenient but that the it is spiritually dangerous because disordered hearts will attach themselves to whatever appears stable in the moment. Money, relationships, career, and power are not bad things, but they are unreliable anchors. The answer proposed is not flexible hearts that can adapt to all this change; it is fixed hearts: fixed not on a feeling, or even on a doctrine, but where true joys are to be found. These true joys are, as the Psalmist puts it, the fullness of joy found in God's presence (Psalm 16:11). This is joy defined teleologically, not emotionally and it is not yet fully present. It is the promised Reality toward which desire is being reoriented.

It is here, shortly before Good Friday, that the collect reaches its deepest point. The One through whom our disordered wills are healed is the One who is about to go to the Cross. His reign is cruciform. The will of Jesus Christ was not unruly; his desire was, in the face of the world's worst, perfectly and immovably fixed on the Father. His obedience was not merely a moral model for us to imitate; it was, as Paul says in Romans 5:19, a saving obedience through which many are made righteous. The reordering of our desires is made possible through union with Him, not merely inspiration from Him. The collect, then, does not answer its own governing question with a strategy. It answers it with a prayer — and in doing so, it reminds us that the asking is itself the beginning of the answer. We cannot fix our own hearts; rather, we call upon to the only One who can, and who did, and who lives and reigns to continue doing so, now and forever. Amen.