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 to You that the modern world is in love with spectacle and with image. We confess that in devising our own images to distract us away from You, whether we make them with oil and canvas, or hammer and chisel, or motion picture cameras, or with programming skills with ones and zeros, we confess that we are bringing down Your generational curse, to three and four generations.
And Father, we confess also that we have forgotten Your generational promises of kindness and blessing to those who love You, and who refuse to bow down before images, and that this promise extends to a thousand generations. Father, we confess that the unbelieving world has rejected Your holy Word, Jesus of Nazareth, and has been turned over to the blindness that looks to images.
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
. So we confess also that we in the Church, the one place where the Word should be honored above all, have drifted also. Forgive us for this grievous sin, we pray.
And now Father, we confess our individual sins to You—and Selah . . . We do this in the strong name of Jesus Christ, and amen.
God speaks through His gospel, and I am a minister of that spoken gospel. In this assurance of pardon, I do not hold up a picture. Because of God’s promises to forgive those who confess their sins, and only because of that promise, I gladly declare to you that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!