Our Father and God, we worship you now in the name of Jesus, and in the goodness of the Holy Spirit we entrust ourselves to You now, asking Him to make our worship complete before You.
Two thousand years ago, when our Lord suffered and died, You were the God who made the land of Israel dark from the sixth to the ninth hour. And when our Lord Jesus cried out in His faithful despair, asking why You had forsaken Him, His lament was right at the conclusion of that darkness, around the ninth hour. As at the very beginning of our world, Your Spirit was moving in the darkness, His intentions laden with glory.
Gracious Father, You, “who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, have shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Father, we thank You for this, and we pray that You would thicken our understanding of how profound this gift of the new birth actually is. Help us to celebrate just how good this Friday is.
Great God of mysteries, we rejoice in the fact that it was in the beginning that our Lord cried out it is finished.
It is in His name that we pray, and amen.