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 humble ourselves before you, as citizens of a nation that pretends it loves liberty, and yet has forgotten what liberty actually means. In wanting a nation that can be politically free and yet filled with citizens who are enslaved to their lusts and sins, we have wanted a thing that cannot be. We mouth the words of liberty, and rejoice when the name of liberty is exalted, but we have forgotten as a people that liberty can never be exalted for long if Jesus Christ is not exalted. We confess as a nation that we have wanted salvation without a Savior, and we confess this sin to You as no small thing.
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
. And so we confess that we as believers have sought after other definitions of freedom. At the center of the Church’s compromise has been the desire to see liberty as some kind of freedom to sin instead of freedom from sin. Father, teach us the true meaning of sin and slavery, so that You might teach us the true meaning of salvation and liberty. With this desire in our hearts, we now confess our own sins to You—and Selah . . . We do this in the strong name of Jesus, and amen.
God does not delight in upbraiding you; He delights in forgiving you. Authorized by His promises throughout Scripture to the one who has genuinely repented, and as a minister of all those promises, I declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!