I love to write confessions for the Church. I do. The prayer of confession in the Reformed tradition is the moment where we get to tell the truth about who we are and who God is. In his book, Telling the Truth, Frederik Buechner writes "the gospel is bad news before it is good news." We start with the bad news so that we can proclaim the good news together as well. Nothing can separate us from God's love for us in Christ, nothing.
God, we confess sometimes we struggle to see you as you are and not as we expect you to be. We try so hard to please you and justify ourselves when you are asking us to give up trying. We can’t admit to one another or even to ourselves the things you know all about:
the pride, the self-righteousness, the anger and victimization
the fear, the shame.
We have failed to grab onto the Gospel of Grace, and build our lives on the foundation that is Jesus Christ, preferring to earn our way to a place at the table.
Help us to stop running from a gift too good to be true, long enough to admit that we are in need. We admit that we have preferred to live isolated rather than in community.
Help us to trust you to name what is good rather than clinging to what we have called “good” and has left us impoverished. Help us to cling only to your great love for us in Jesus Christ and to love one another with the love that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
God who often calls the unexpected, the weak and the disqualified
We confess that sometimes fail to see that you are more than enough. We lean on our own competencies and credentials rather than your creative power to make what little we have to offer into more than enough.
We name our weakness and our lack as “problems” to be fixed rather than realities that you can work with. Forgive us when we forget that your strength is made perfect in weakness, that five loaves and two fish fed 5,000,
that you chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; you chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong, you chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before you.
Forgive us when our lives boast about ourselves rather than glorify you. Forgive us when we fail to trust you and forget that all your promises to us in Christ are “yes” and “amen.”
God, we confess that we quickly forget that you are the God who has brought us from death to life, from darkness to light, and from confined and small living to a wide and spacious land. We have made our work equal to our worth, unable to rest in our identity as your children, preferring instead to earn acceptance.
We have believed the lie that we are not “enough,” rather than listening to you tell us in Jesus Christ that we are beloved. We have misused your name and mistreated your people. We have failed to see the image of God in all of humanity and preferred to separate ourselves into camps of right and wrong, good and bad.
Forgive us for making ourselves judges when you are asking us to be bridges. Forgive us for wanting what others have and forgetting to rest in the love, security, and belonging that we have in Jesus Christ.
Help us to see you running towards us, ready to embrace us and accept us just as we are. Lift off the veil from our eyes so we can see Jesus and move towards one another in love.
God, we confess that sometimes we get tired of waiting on you and we jump ahead to fix problems you are not asking us to fix.
We control, manage, muscle up and bear down
when you invite us to rest and fellowship with you Holy Spirit.
We forget too easily that no time is wasted with you.
- That you are at work in the waiting
- That you are not passive but actively making all things new in Christ - And that we are invited into the adventure of participating in your Kingdom
Reorient us now God,
grounded in your love,
shedding our false identities and fake faces
Forgive us Lord when our vision for who you are and what you are up to becomes as narrow and confined as our fears, rather than fixed on the redemptive work of Jesus Christ.
God, we confess that sometimes we prefer to keep you at a distance rather than enter into your Temple courts. We know that an encounter with you cannot leave us the way you found us, and we fear what we might loose in that process. We want to want you Lord. Forgive us when we want our own comfort and security more than we want to encounter you. Forgive us when we fail to respond to you calling our name.
Help us to see your beauty, to find our joy in praising you. Forgive us when we settle for counterfeit joy and define “success” on our own terms.
Enter our house Holy Spirit, the individual temple that each one of us is and our community gathered here together. Help us to trust you and deeper our love and trust for one another so that we can go out from this place and share the love of God that is our in Christ Jesus our Lord.
God, we confess that we have preferred to trust in other things besides you for our safety and security. We have responded to fear with control. We have made many things “king” in the place of you Jesus, our one true King.
Instead of asking you to search our hearts, our priority has been our reputations and the regard of others. We have preferred the praise of men and women to placing our worth and identity in what you say of us.
Forgive us when we trust our own eyes more than yours. Our seeing is only partial and always tainted by our own privileges and limited life experience. You are the only one who sees rightly Lord, the only one who sees what is in our thoughts, emotions and will.
We want life abundant, life to the full and have settled for mere existence. Forgive us Father.
Renew in us the life of your son Jesus Christ and fill us with the Holy Spirit.
God, we confess that we were here when our neighborhood explicitly prohibited the sale of property to non-white people and we stayed silent.
We were complicit in racist housing policies through our silence. As a people of God gathered in ______________, we did not protest and in refusing to fight injustice, we did wrong to our neighbors.
Forgive us Father, for in not taking a stand, we stood on the side of injustice. We failed to act when action was called for. We ask that you would make _____________ a place of welcome for all through your Holy Spirit.
God we confess that our minds are on ourselves much more than they are on your kingdom.
We have the mind of Christ, yet dwell on past hurts, future worries, and present perceptions. Still us now by your Holy Spirit so that we can let you order the chaos inside.
We confess that often we struggle to live together. We can be so concerned about our neighbor far away, but struggle to love the ones that live closest to us, sometimes even the people in our very own households. Renew in us a sense of your love for us in Christ, that we may love others with the love we have received from you.
We confess that sometimes we are so concerned with the values of the culture around us, that we forget the values of the kingdom: downward mobility, moving towards those on the margins, seeing transformation in our own lives, in our churches, in our society. Thank you for making us a new creation in Christ and reconciling us to you through Christ, making us agents of reconciliation in this world.
God, we confess that we don’t always live in uncertainly well. We rely on our own wisdom and solutions, rather than taking time to ask you for yours.
We get tired of waiting and we jump ahead to build something that will make us feel secure.
Forgive us God when we forget that our security is in You, that you always see more than we see and have creative solutions for even the most complex problems.
Forgive us Lord when our vision for who you are and what you are up to becomes as narrow and confined as our fears,
Rather than fixed on the leadership of Jesus Christ.
You God bring life out of death. You live with in our in between spaces and lead us even when we don’t know exactly where we are going.
Help our hearts to once again rest in you.
God, we confess that often when we hurt one another or hurt ourselves, we try to cover up, justify, or reason why we did what we did. We struggle to admit we were wrong, apologize to one another or to forgive ourselves.
Instead of running back to you, we tend to run away from you. We hide because we feel shame. We cover up what isn’t pretty and deceive ourselves when we think that we can keep the truth a secret.
Oh God who is light and who longs for us to live in the light, help us to come out of hiding.
Your love casts out all fear. Forgive us for letting fear rule our lives, our relationships and our community.
Thank you that you hear our cries when we call to you.
We call to you now individually in the silence of our hearts.
God as the Seasons change, we confess that we forget that you are a God for all Seasons. Your faithfulness does not depend on our good or bad behavior, forgive us for living like we can control or manipulate you. Forgive us when we make you an abstraction rather than a living God of resurrection.
We talk about you while fretting and worrying about the complexities of our lives.
We bite our nails while you call out “Come to Me” and find Rest for your souls.
We act as though you are slow or far off, while we hurry and scurry to tend to our “little kingdoms” instead of responding to an invitation to enter Yours.
Teach us to relax into Grace.
Help us to abandon our strategies of managing, when you are calling us not to “fix” but to surrender and to be remade.
Forgive us for settling for a joyless existence because it feels safe, when you are offering us the risky life of love.
Teach us to relax into Grace.
Help us to play, to delight in this world you have created because our hope is anchored in you and not in a resolution to our circumstances.
Renew in us a sense of gratitude in response to Grace, the gift we could not earn and the love we do not deserve.