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 acknowledge that You have given this nation exceptional blessings. We have wrongfully and rebelliously inferred from this that we are an exceptional people. Forgive us for this—we acknowledge with grief that we have nothing that was not given to us, and yet we have boasted as though these blessings were not a gift. On behalf of a blessed and yet ungrateful nation, accept our prayers of confession, we ask.
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 we in the Church have often confounded the gifts and the Giver, and we have sought after the former, while neglected our love for You, the great Giver of all things. Restore a spirit of gratitude to Your Church, we pray.
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And Father, we confess our individual sins to You now—Selah . . . We do this in the kind name of Jesus, and amen.
Forgiveness of sin is glorious, but it is still hard to receive, and hard to learn. But you have been given this grace, and so on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus, I declare to you that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!