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 confess that we as a people have wandered away from the way You have ordered time for us. Our nation once honored the Lord’s Day, and to our own grief, we have accepted the demands of a ceaseless slavery. We have compounded our sin by pretending
that this was made necessary somehow by industrialization or the developments of modernity. We know that the Sabbath was made for man, and not the other way around, and so we pray that Your grace would be extended to us in a way that gives us rest.
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. Father, we confess that breeching the fourth commandment is common among believers, and we lament the fact. We confess that we have been Sabbath-breakers through a stringent and unloving adherence to the day, and we have done the same by ignoring it entirely. Forgive us our sins, we pray.
And Father, we confess our own particular sins to You now—and Selah . . . We do this in the strong name of Jesus, and amen.
God summons us to holiness, and the only way that we can get there is through the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. But the good news is that this blood has indeed been shed for you, and on the basis of that atoning death, I declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!