Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all.
Father, Your Word tells us to rend our hearts and not our garments, and yet we live among a people who won’t even rend their garments anymore. Father, we confess that we have soft-pedaled the demands of Your law for so long that men don’t even know that repentance is something even to be pretended. And so we come before You now, acknowledging that our nation is one where the heart of the people is thick with calluses. We confess this, asking You to have mercy.
We know, Father, that if we in the Church regard iniquity in our own midst, or in our own hearts, this prayer will be ineffectual
. We confess to You now that we have manufactured lists of sins, invented by us in order to manipulate false guilt, and we confess also that we have neglected dealing with those things which Your law specifies clearly as sin. Give us eyes to see, and a heart to confess rightly.
We now confess our individual sins to You—and Selah . . . We do this in the gracious name of Jesus Christ, and amen.
When your sins are forgiven, the light of the sun is sevenfold. You have been awakened from the dead, and brought into the light. You have confessed your sins honestly, openly, without reserve. As a minister of the gospel of God’s grace, I therefore declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!