You are the one and only God, righteous and long-suffering, holy yet close, a god of wrath and a god of love. While you have revealed yourself through your word and your son and your spirit, no one among us can truly comprehend all that you are. 

Your ways are not our ways, and your thoughts are not our thoughts. Your holiness is beyond anything we have known, your righteousness so different from whatever righteousness we might think we have in us. We will never fully grasp all that you think and are. 

Unlike you, each one of us is insignificant. We are limited in time and space, our lives a mere breath, a flower that springs up for a season, then is gone. Just as we have forgotten previous generations of men, so too will we be forgotten. 

By our very nature, we are sinners – sinners from birth, sinners in our attitudes, in our actions, in our words. Our pride, our arrogance, leads us to think more highly of ourselves than we ought, to think less of others than we should, and to think nothing of you. We have naturally been your enemies, objects of your holy wrath against sin.  

Yet in your kindness, when we think of you and when we confess our sins, you forgive. When we acknowledge our sin to you, you cover our sins through the blood of Christ. When we do not hide our sin, but turn to you in hope, you reveal your lovingkindness toward us and deliver us completely from the penalty of our sin. 

It is in this forgiveness that we can find hope for the trials and temptations that come to us. When trouble comes, we know that you will see us through it since you have forgiven us in Christ. When we are discouraged by our sin, your forgiveness reminds us that you will never turn us away. Even when we are tempted to doubt our salvation because we think of the sin that remains in us, we remember that your forgiveness is complete and comes with a love for us will never end and will never let us go. There is no sin that is too great for you to forgive, no enemy too powerful for you to throw down, not one of your children so insignificant that you would ever lose them. While we will never comprehend all that you think and all that you are, your word and your son and your spirit help us to understand that your forgiveness is total and forever and that your love for us, your children, will never cease. 

Amen.