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 know that the sins of our nation are great and many, and we bow before You in disgrace. We have abused Your many gifts to us, and we confess this as arrogance and pride. But the heart of our sinful rebellion is this—we deny through our secularist vanities that Jesus Christ bought this nation with His blood. The most precious thing any people could ever have . . . we have thrown away. We pray, Father, that this blood we have rejected would draw us back in a spirit of deep repentance.
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 know that the Church has neglected the preaching of the gospel in power and in truth. We have thought that we could stand for Your Word without standing in the power of the Spirit, who would always lead us to declare all that the Scriptures contain. Return us, we pray, to a cruciform evangelism. Forgive us our sins, we pray.
And Father, we confess our own sins to You now—and Selah . . . We do this in the great name of Jesus, and amen.
You have confessed your sins as the Bible instructs you to. You have let go of them in repentance. Because of this, and on the basis of all God’s gospel promises, I declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!