Playing Dumb with God

Romans 1:18-23, 2:14-15
J. Budziszewski | Sunday, January 23, 2000
Copyright © 2000, J. Budziszewski

Introduction

(By P. G. Mathew, Senior Minister, Grace Valley Christian Center)

Dr. J. Budziszewski is associate professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his doctor of philosophy degree from Yale University. I understand he was born into a Christian family and confessed Christ early in his life. But at college he became an apostate and an atheist. Though God granted him a strong intellect, through his mulish pride he became very stupid. He became more Nietzschean than Nietzsche ever was.

Yet God did not abandon Dr. J. B. In his great love and rich mercy, the Good Shepherd sought him, found him, and brought the prodigal back into himself as a transformed Christian. Today Dr. J.B. is a lover of Jesus Christ and uses his intellect to defend and proclaim the faith of our fathers passionately.

The following statement of St. Paul I believe is equally applicable to Dr. J.B: “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who believe on him and receive eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:15-16).

His book, How to Stay Christian in College, should be read by Christian parents as well as by students who are considering college or are already in college. Now it is my joy to welcome Dr. J. B. to Grace Valley Christian Center that he may minister to us from God’s word.

Part One

Dr. Budziszewski:

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

I would like to read Romans 1:18-23. I am going to read it with certain emphases that concern what I am going to be talking about this morning:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Again, in the second chapter of the same book, verses 14 and 15. Paul is continuing a theme, you know. In that last passage he was speaking about our denial of the knowledge of God that we truly have, and now he was speaking of another kind of knowledge that we truly have but also deny:

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)

We all know what it means to play dumb. It means pretending that we don’t know something, even though we really do. It means playing at being ignorant even though we are really in the know.

I suggest to you that we human beings play dumb with God. We do it all the time and we’ve been doing it ever since the Fall. The most characteristic condition of mankind outside of Christ is what the psychologists with their fashionable lingo now call “denial.” The most popular way to play dumb with God is to pretend that we don’t know we need him. The most popular way that I know to keep that game going is to say, “I can be good without him,” to pretend we don’t have a sin problem so that we don’t need a redeemer. “I can be good without God. I can be good without believing in God,” or “I believe in God and I can be good without his help. Why would it matter to God what I believe? I am a good person. I am decent. I haven’t murdered anybody. I can be good without him.”

Alas, that is not true. We can’t be good without him. Not only that, I think we really know we can’t. We only pretend that we don’t know. My purpose today is to blow away the smokescreen, to expose the self-deception, to dredge up from down below the truth that we know but try to suppress. I know of no better way than to tackle head-on the question, “Can we be good without God?”

Let me confess, for reasons that will come as no surprise to you, the question holds personal interest for me. Years ago, in the days when I was an atheist, when I turned my back on God, I rejected the very idea of a difference between good and evil. If someone had asked me, “Can we be good without God,” I would have said, “There is no God and there is no good. There is no God and there is no good and there is no evil, and we aren’t responsible for our actions anyway.” But then again, I was an extreme case.

Someone who asks, “Can we be good without God?” isn’t trying to be extreme. He is looking for a halfway house. He is looking for a way to reject God without rejecting the distinction between good and evil. He is looking for a way to reject God without rejecting personal responsibility. He is looking for a way to reject God without denying his responsibility to the moral law, but he claims that he is satisfying it.

Instead of telling you my story, I’ll just try to lay out the logic of the matter. Can we be good without God? Well, now, I am a university professor, a member of the hairsplitting class, so you might have guessed that I would split a few hairs this morning, and I won’t disappoint you. You see, the question, “Can we be good without God?” can be taken in at least two different ways. They both need attention. One way takes the question, “Can we be good without God?” as meaning “Can we know what is good without knowing God?” The other takes it as meaning, “Can we do what is good without following God?”

Let’s think a little bit about both ones, about each of the two. As to the first, whether we can know what is good without knowing God. You may think that I am going to say that unless we study the Bible, we can’t know anything at all about right and wrong. After all, I am here as a representative of Christianity. I am speaking uncharacteristically from a pulpit and in a Christian church.

But I am not going to say that, because, although the Bible is true and authoritative and is our standard for belief and for life, the Bible itself doesn’t say that. In the Bible, in fact, St. Paul makes the opposite claim. He says that God has written his law on the hearts of every human being. That is sort of a strange, rattling, jarring claim. You heard me read it a few moments ago.

He also speaks of conscience. Everyone has a conscience, and although the outer ring of conscience may be influenced by culture-you heard of conscience speaking with conflicting voices-although the outer ring of our conscience may be influenced by culture, and cultures do disagree about things like whether you can have one wife or four, the inner core is universal and unchanging. For example, there isn’t a human being alive-I don’t care if you go into the darkest cell of the deepest prison and seek out the most hardened murderer-there isn’t a human being alive who doesn’t know the good and right of love; there isn’t a human being alive who doesn’t know the evil and wrong of murder. These things, in fact, are known to us, even if we suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

In the biblical view, if we are confused about such things as sex, selfishness, abortion, euthanasia, money, the problem isn’t so much that we don’t know about right and wrong, that we haven’t a clue, that nothing is clear, that there is no knowledge-the problem isn’t that we don’t know, but that we suppress what we do know about right and wrong, for we can’t not know the basic outlines. Perhaps matters of detail we can not know, but we can’t not know the core.

Perhaps you think, then, that the answer to the question, “Can we know good without knowing God?” perhaps you think, “Well, all right. He’s already answered that one.” You may think the answer to the question, “Can we know good without knowing God?” is “Certainly, Dr. B., and you agree. Didn’t you just say that we can?” And, of course, there are a great many secular moral philosophies which do say this.

For example, the infamous Humanist Manifestos published-I didn’t used to believe that there were really card-carrying secular humanists. I would hear evangelical Christians talking about secular humanists, and I thought it was like the Roswell aliens or something. But there are such people. There is the infamous secular Humanist Manifestos published in 1933 and 1973. A new one has just been published, by the way, called Humanist Manifesto 2000. They claim that belief in God is not a necessity but an obstacle to morality. They said that ethics must be derived, not from God, but from man, which is a puzzle, because God speaks, but I don’t hear man speaking, except in conflicting voices. They said that what they called salvationism is a distraction and that man must save himself. So there is a-they have a salvationism of their own-and that human moral inquiry must be grounded not on what God says but on what we can figure out for ourselves.

And you may think that since I talked about the law written on the heart that I am agreeing with them. Not so fast. The coin has two sides, not one. Yes, it is true I’ve suggested that we all, all of us human beings, once we have reached the age of reason, at least, know something about good and evil. But I’ve also suggested that we tend to suppress that knowledge. That is the other side of the coin. That is tails.

Let’s dig a little bit more deeply into this business of suppressing what we really know. We human beings do lie to ourselves about right and wrong, don’t we? Now why do we do that? We do it for the simple reason that we have a vested interest in doing so. We have a vested interest in lying to ourselves about some of the things that we know. We may want to know the truth-that is an authentic desire that has been placed into us at creation by God-but the desire to know is not the only desire regarding the truth that is at work in us. The strong desire not to know, born of sin, competes in us with the desire to know because our knowledge of good and evil is an inconvenience to us. It is a pest. It is obnoxious. It is a nag. It makes our ears itch.

And so we moan about how difficult it is to know what is right, even in many cases when we know perfectly well what is right. Everyone in this room, I think, can confirm this from his or her own experience, if only we will be honest with ourselves.

Just how much human beings lie to themselves and how much this has become accepted, in fact, in our culture, was recently confirmed in last year’s White House scandal. Do you remember? There was a lot of commentary about this. The talking heads were all on the TVs and interviewing the man in the street and people were writing these things up in newspaper editorials and magazines and this and that. Everybody from Geraldo Rivera to Jerry Seinfeld seemed to agree, and I quote, “Everyone lies about sex.” Remember that? That was a Geraldo Rivera line, that’s a Jerry Seinfeld line. That was their response: “Everyone lies about sex.” As Seinfeld put it in an August 5 interview-this was actually in 1998-with Michael Blowen of the Boston Globe, “Truth and sex don’t go together. Truth just isn’t going to happen.” I take him to be talking not just about our lying to other people, but about our lying to ourselves too, because, you know, you can’t do that much lying to other people without rationalizing it to yourself somehow. The sense of an obligation to truth is too strong. It is not too strong to keep us from lying, but it is too strong to lie without making excuses.

Now the problem with lying to ourselves, of course, goes far beyond sex in a sex-drenched society like ours that provides lots and lots grist for the mill, lots and lots of illustrations that a speaker can use, and, of course, always illustrations that get people’s interest. But I propose to you that one of the things about good that we know perfectly well is the reality and the goodness of God.

Some of my students say, as I used to say, “Well, I am an atheist.” They may or may not be. They say, “Well, I don’t have any knowledge of God.” Or, “I am an agnostic.” You know, an agnostic is one who says he is not sure that there is no God, but he certainly does not know that there is one. And they may or may not deny their knowledge of good and evil.

Well, when the Bible tells us-this is in Psalm 14, the first verse. You may have heard this- “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,'” what does the psalmist mean? I believe he isn’t calling him, the person who says there is no God-he isn’t calling him a fool for thinking it, but he is calling him a fool for saying it, even though he knows it is isn’t true. He is not calling him a fool because he doesn’t know that there is a God. He is calling him a fool because deep down he knows that there is a God, and yet he says that there is no God.

Paul says the same thing in Romans 1. Isn’t that what we read? We aren’t ignorant of the truth about God; well, at least, of some truth about God, that there is a God, and about his eternal invisible qualities, as Paul speaks of them. We aren’t ignorant of the truth about God, but we hold it down. He doesn’t criticize the Gentiles because they don’t know about God, but because they do know and pretend that they don’t.

From the biblical point of view, then, the reason that it is so difficult to argue with an atheist, as I once was, and more than an atheist-the reason that it is so difficult to argue with an atheist or with an agnostic-is that he is not being honest with himself. How can he be honest with you? He knows there is a God; he only tells himself that he doesn’t.

Now, if you are not a believer, you may find this rather preposterous and arrogant, that I am telling you what you know when you say you don’t know it. What a lot of nerve. Well, there are two things that I can say to that. I don’t think it is matter of nerve, and I beg you to consider this a bit longer. First of all, consider the strangeness of your own reaction. Ordinarily a person is offended because we tell them, “Oh, you don’t know anything.” And he is offended because he says, “Of course I know.” This is a case where I am telling you you know something, and that is what offends you. I am telling you that you are knowledgeable, and you are offended because you say, “No, I am not. I am ignorant.”

Further, if you don’t want to take this on the authority of the Bible, you don’t have to. If you are not a believer, listen to what the famous philosopher Thomas Nagel, who was an agnostic, says in his book, The Last Word. This is a famous book. It is about what is called subjectivism and the theory of knowledge, and he is defending what is called rationalism. To put that more simply, he wants to defend the idea that truth can be known by the mind and he argues this pretty convincingly. And as he is going along, he notices-Nagel notices, this agnostic notices-that the fact that truth can be known by the mind points strongly toward the existence of God. Now, never mind whether he is right or wrong about that. My concern at the moment is not to examine the logic of his argument about whether rationalism points to the reality of God or not. It is his own reaction to his noticing this that I’d like to call your attention to instead.

He thinks this is true. He says, “I am a rationalist. I believe truth can be known by the rational mind, and it seems to point to the reality of God.” What does he say next? The interesting thing about that is that he says that today’s denial of the knowability of truth may be due to “fear of religion” (his phrase), and as a case in point he cites himself. He cites his own fear of religion. Here are his very words. I am quoting from page 130, if you ever want to look it up. He says, “I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true, and I am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and naturally hope that I am right in my belief. It is that I hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

There are a lot of statements like that sprinkled in the writings of non-believers who have unexpected moments of honesty with themselves and with us. Another one, a sort of a smoking gun, was an article which was published in the New York Review of Books not too many years ago by Richard Lewontin, who is a Harvard population biologist. Lewontin was talking about Carl Sagan, who was a naturalist. He believed nature was all there is. You know, he would always open those television programs of his saying, “The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.” You know, no God, no Creator-it is just stuff.

And that is also the philosophy of Lewontin. He is a materialist. He thinks nature is all there is, and nature is matter. Matter is all there is. And he calls believing that science. That’s a little odd. Most of us would say that science is following the facts, the evidence, wherever they lead, but he says, “No, science is being a materialist.” And he says, in a very interesting passage, that because of this prior commitment to materialism, “we,” and he means, you know, people who believe as he does, “we have a great tolerance for explanations that violate common sense. They don’t look right. They are not because of the evidence; they are in spite of the evidence.” This is a scientist saying this: “explanations that are not because of the evidence but in spite of the evidence.” He says, “Because we have a prior commitment to materialism,” and he says that the reason for this is “that we must not let a divine foot in the doo.” His words.

Now, if Nagel is speaking truthfully about himself, if Richard Lewontin is speaking truthfully about himself, if other people who have spoken in this vein are speaking truthfully about themselves, then those who are say that belief in God is a crutch have got it backwards. For our intellectuals, it is atheism and agnosticism that serves as a crutch.

Part Two

Dr. Budziszewski:

C.S. Lewis made this point once. He said people are always trying to club Christians over the head by saying, “This is just a wishful fulfillment fantasy that you have that there is a God. You wish there was a God, and so you believe there is a God.” And he said, “If there can be wish fulfillment fantasies,” and he says there are such things, “can’t there be fear fulfillment fantasies? You are afraid that there might be a God, and so you tell yourself there is isn’t.”

The biblical view that the atheist or agnostic is not being honest with himself, that he knows that God is real but only tells himself that he doesn’t know, is looking better and better.

And there’s more. If this daring, preposterous biblical view is true, as I think it is, then it changes everything. Why does it change everything? This is important. It changes everything because it shows that the real meaning of the question, “Can I know good without knowing God?” Right? I said, “Can I be good without God?” breaks down into two questions, and one of them is, “Can I know good without knowing God?” The question presupposes that it is possible not to know God. It is now looking like it is not.

So what that question really comes down to is, “Can I admit one part of my moral knowledge while denying another part and holding it down? Can I admit to myself that I know about, say, the goodness of love and the evil of murder, while not admitting to myself that I know about the goodness of God and the evil of treason to him?” It changes the complexion of the question, doesn’t it?

Well, it is still a question, though. Can you do that? Because you know your knowledge of God is not just a metaphysical fact: “There is a God. Okay.” It has implications. If there is a God, and God is God, we owe ourselves to him.

So you see, by suppressing your knowledge of God and yet saying, “Well, I can know the moral law,” you are saying, “I am holding down this huge part of the moral law. Can I know the rest?” That is the question. Let’s ask it. My answer is, “You can certainly do that. Lots of atheists and agnostics do. But you will never do it well.” To hold down one part of your moral knowledge is, after all, to lie to yourself. So what?

Think. What do we know about lying? As a matter of common, everyday, ordinary experience, what do we know about lying? We know from experience that one lie leads to another-always. One lie leads to another. If you tell a big enough lie about something, pretty soon you have to tell a second one to cover up the first. And then, if you don’t come clean, you have to tell a third and a fourth to cover up the second. You can get so entangled in this, so ensnared in this, that after a while you find yourself lying about lots of things, and then you start losing track of when you are lying and when you are not. You can’t quite keep track of it anymore. You find yourself lying even when you don’t intend to lie, for no reason, needlessly. Before long, you can’t even tell. You are lost in a maze of your own making, unable to see the difference between how things are and how you said they are.

Now, the same thing is true when you lie to yourself. Here, too, one lie leads to another. This is especially true with the biggest self-deception of all, which is pretending to yourself that you don’t know God is real because that knowledge is connected to the knowledge of everything else.

Let me illustrate this with something that I mentioned earlier-the knowledge of the good of love and the wrong of murder. Now, you might think, “Well, telling yourself there’s no God couldn’t change that, or, at least you, Dr. B., couldn’t admit that it could change that, because you have already admitted that everybody, even the atheist, even the agnostic, knows the good of love and the wrong of murder.”

Well, yes. But let’s think. You may try to hold on to your knowledge of the good of love but if you lie to yourself about the God whose very being is love, it’s not that you won’t know that love is good, but that you’ll cut the heart out of it. Your understanding of all love will be defective. So you’ll have this formal principle, “Love is good,” and really don’t know what to make of it.

I think that is why we humans can sometimes do such awful things in the name of love. “I love her, but she doesn’t love me. I love her too much to stand that, so I’ll kill her.” You know, many murders are committed out of jealousy. Or you may try to hold on to your knowledge of the evil of murdering your neighbor, you know, in some other case–you know, let’s not speak about love but just about this other principle. We all know that murder is wrong. You may try to hold onto that knowledge: “I know it’s wrong to kill. If I have done so, I am guilty.” But if you lie to yourself about the God in whose image your neighbor is made, then you are going to find it difficult to recognize your neighbor when you see him.

That’s why we humans do such terrible things, nowadays, in fact, to those who have the greatest claim on our affection, eliminating the weak and the so-called useless, such as the sick, the old, and the unborn. We want laws now for assisted suicide, which are really laws for elimination. You can’t not know that it is wrong to deliberately take innocent human life. And yet you can say, “It is not deliberate; I didn’t have a choice.” You can say, “It’s not life.” “If it is just my grandfather, he didn’t really have a life.” “I know I killed that man, but he wasn’t innocent. He took the job that should have gone to me.” “I took the life of my baby, but, you know, it wasn’t a human life because it wasn’t alive. It was only a product of conception.” You don’t recognize your neighbor anymore because your neighbor is made in the image of God, and you won’t look at God.

I said at the beginning that the question, “Can we be good without God?” may be taken in two different ways. We just considered the first way: “Can we know what is good without knowing God?” What we’ve seen is that in a superficial way, the answer is yes, but in a deeper way, the answer is no.

Now, let’s consider the second way. “Can we do what is good without following God?” Now, the answer this time is the same as before: yes and no, but mostly no. Yes in one sense, but no in a deeper sense.

The yes side is this: As everyone knows, even a person who rejects God can sometimes do the right thing. He can sometimes tell the truth. Of course. He can sometimes show compassion. He can sometimes even set aside his own interests for someone else. An atheist soldier may die for his buddies.

You know, the problem is that this isn’t enough. God is absolutely holy-absolutely holy. We’re not. When Moses, of all people, asked to see God face to face, God said, “No, Moses, because it would kill you.” Not because God is so bad, but because God is so good. We are not holy, you know, to stand it.

When the great prophet Isaiah caught just a glimpse of the glory of God, he said, “Woe is me; I am undone!” When the glory of the God filled the ancient temple, strong men fell down. And these weren’t men like me, who sit behind a desk and push the keys of computers. These were men who pushed plows, held heavy swords, and whacked at Philistines.

These were also what we call good people, but, as St. Paul says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” One of my students said to me once-the subject of Christianity had come up in class, and I had explained something about the Christian view of sin and redemption so that they could understand an author that they were reading-and he said, “I don’t get it about this problem of sin,” he said. “I think I’m a decent person. You know, why would God judge me, if there is a God? You know, I’m decent.” I said, “If you think that you are decent, your idea of God must be awfully low.” And he was insulted.

But I said, “Look, I’m not trying to point a finger at you and not at myself. But let’s just be honest. You know, I suppose you mean that you haven’t robbed any banks; you haven’t killed anybody. Okay. Have you ever taken credit for something you didn’t do? Have you ever had a murderous thought about somebody? Haven’t you ever thought, seeing some pretty college girl going across the street, that you’d like to sleep with her, even if you didn’t do it?” And his face started to change.

I said, “Okay, let’s make it easier. Let’s lower the bar. Do you think you could go a month without such desires, thoughts, imaginations, intentions? Do you think you could go a week? How about an hour? How about ten minutes?” His face was just falling lower and lower. I said, “How about one minute?” “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

You see, trying to do without God has ruined us inwardly. Now, don’t misunderstand me: By his mercy, some good things do remain in us. The problem is that because of our rejection of him, not one of those good things is in its original, healthy state. There are some good things in the body of a dying man, but he is dying. The heart of a man with heart disease is still doing some good things-it is pumping-but the pump is dying.

That is our condition. We are broken. And not only are we broken, but we cannot repair ourselves. Could you perform surgery on your own eyes? A mirror wouldn’t help a bit, would it? Could you treat yourself for madness? Suppose you tore off both of your arms. You could do it. You might think, “Oh, no, I could only tear off one.” No, you could tear off two. You could attach them with ropes to the door, jerk back hard enough. Without hands, though, could you sew your arms back on?

Our sin sickness is something like that, you see. We may long-yes, even outside Christ, by God’s common grace, and by those inexplicable movements in our hearts which seek to draw us back to him-even outside of Christ, we may long to love purely, but our desires have become idols that control us. We may long to be holy, but our righteousness has become self-righteousness that rules us. We may long to be humble, and we pat ourselves on the back for our humility. We may long to be reconciled with God, but we can’t stop wanting to be the center of the universe ourselves-to not want God to be God, but to want to be God.

Because the law of right and wrong is written on the heart of every person, many religions and philosophies do teach about right and wrong without too many distortions, sometimes in the most unaccountable ways. There are religions which are pantheist and say that everything is divine–the universe is divine, all things are divine. Well, we see in the universe there is good and evil, so they are saying that divine includes both good and evil; that God includes both good and evil; so divinity is beyond this distinction and it really doesn’t much matter. You would think, of course, and by logic it ought to be the case, that such a religion, a pantheist religion, could never have a moral code. Yet sometimes even pantheists will admit “It is wrong to do this” and “It is wrong to do that.” Hinduism is pantheist, and yet there is this idea of karma. There are certain offenses that are going to drag you down. Right? Where is that coming from? It isn’t coming from the premises of the religion. There is a law written on the heart.

Because the law of right and wrong is written on the heart of every person, yes, many false religions and false philosophies can teach about right and wrong sometimes without two many distortions. As regards the truth, they muddle through, but what they can’t do is heal the sin sickness. What they can’t do is sew the hands back on. What they can t do is cure the eyes. What they can’t do is rectify the madness.

However true, no mere doctrine could do that. Even a true philosophical doctrine could not do that, even one that had no error at all. Our cancer requires more than a doctor, than a doctrine. What it requires is the divine surgeon, God himself. I will tell you the name of this surgeon: Jesus Christ.

If, like me, or if you are in a less extreme condition than I once was-if you are not just denying the difference between good and evil, but you say, “I can be good without God,” just open your eyes. Take your fingers out of your ears. If you open your eyes, I think you will see something. Way up there on the lip, on the very edge of the crater, the Lord God Almighty, whose word called everything into existence, is standing for you with a rope in his hand to pull you out. The name of that rope is Jesus Christ. He has thrown it down to you. There it is, gleaming in the darkness in front of your face. All you have to do is hold on. I wonder what you’ll do. Amen.

Pastor Mathew:

I thank God for renewing Dr. J. B.’s mind. He has brought us food for serious spiritual thought. I am sure there are people here who are filled with what he was filled with many years ago, what he termed “mulish pride.” I hope such people will think seriously in light of what you heard and I pray that by God’s help-you see, we cannot save ourselves, heal ourselves-by the help of the Holy Spirit that you will repent and forsake that arrogance and trust in Jesus Christ alone, the eternal Son of God, who was incarnate for our salvation. Trust in him alone, who declared that he is the way, the truth, and the life. Think, reflect, pray. Do not let this word fall to the ground. It only adds to our guilt.

Heavenly Father, we pray that you help us to see ourselves in your light. Help us to think your thoughts. Help us to humble ourselves before your majesty. Have mercy upon us, heavenly Father. Have mercy upon us, eternal Son. Have mercy upon us, O Holy Spirit. We repent of our sins. We forsake our sins. We confess that your Son is Lord. We confess that he died on the cross on behalf of us. Christ died for our sins and was raised for our justification. We hope in your Son. We trust in your Son.

Heavenly Father, forgive us all our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We come to you, O God, as people without rest. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you. Grant us your rest. Grant us your peace. For we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.