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, we bow before You as the one who knows the hearts of all men, and the condition of every man. Father, not only so, but You know the secrets of the nations. You know every conspiracy ever hatched, every conspiracy that ever failed, and every treacherous conspirator who ever succeeded—meaning of course that he did not go down in history as a traitor, but rather as a founding father. Father, You know all of this, as though every detail were laid out on a table before You. And so, Father, as Your people, we confess all the sins and crimes committed by our nation, whether they were just simply hidden, or disguised as great virtues. Father, we lift them up to You now, asking You to reveal them, and to cleanse them.
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
. And so confess that we in the Church have not dealt rightly with our own secret sins. Father, we confess secret sins of two kinds. First, we confess those sins that are invisible to us, for whatever reason. Reveal them to us, we pray, that we might deal with them under Your grace. And second, we confess those sins that are known to us, but which we have hidden from others—sins of lust and betrayal, or sins of theft, anything like that, Father. We know that so long as individual Christians indulge their own conspiracies against Your Word, we cannot ask You to unveil the great conspiracies. And so, we now confess our individual sins to You—and Selah . . . We do this in the great and strong name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and amen.
The God to whom we confess is omniscient—we do not confess to Him so that He might become knowledgeable; we confess so that we might grow honest. Having confessed your sins honestly, and because He promised us the gospel in His Word, and because I am a minister of that gospel, I therefore declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!