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 are invited to address You as Father, and on this Father’s Day, we are particularly mindful of the fact that our people are in the grip of a deep and confusing father hunger. We confess that our lives are not going well for us in the land because we have not obeyed the first commandment with a promise, that we should honor our fathers and our mothers. Because of this, we dishonor our fathers, and we become fathers to whom dishonor is easily rendered. Father, in this nation, we pray that You would turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers.
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
. We confess that in the Church we have spent too much time explaining why we have not needed to honor our own fathers. And because we have not modeled what it is to really respect our fathers, and what it is to be the kind of sacrificial fathers to whom respect comes naturally, we have led our nation astray.
Father, we now confess our private sin to You—and Selah . . . We do this in the strong name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and amen.
God is a perfect Father, and He delights to receive wayward children as they come back to Him. Because He promises to do this, I therefore declare as His minister that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Congregation: Thanks be to God!