Forgive us for what we have taught our children: that evil is good and good is evil; that darkness is light and light is darkness; that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. Forgive us for teaching them that left is right and right is wrong, that true is false and falsehood is true.
Forgive us Holy God for teaching sexual promiscuity in our schools more effectively than we have taught sexual restraint to our students. Forgive us for teaching self-esteem better than we have taught science and civics. Forgive us for teaching values clarification more than virtue. Forgive us for diminishing the value of marital fidelity and leaving our kids clueless as to how to defend the definition of marriage.
Forgive us for leading the generation that follows us, to believe it has the authority to define life for the generation that follows it, and that “choice” gives them the right to take away the right of the youngest to choose.
Forgive us for our narcissism: For proclaiming we are “as God,” and that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for and that we are the change we seek.
Forgive us for making justice unjust and injustice just.
Forgive us for celebrating lies rather than pursuing truth.
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Forgive us for our self-refuting duplicity of pedantically preaching that the tolerant do not tolerate those they find intolerable.
Forgives us for the hypocrisy of hating those we find hateful.
Forgive us for diminishing human dignity; for dumbing down the definition of a human being to nothing but the sum total of his or her sexual inclinations; to nothing but appetites, proclivities, passions and base desire.
Forgive us for pretending that we believe women should not be subjected to the power and the passions of men but then electing men who publicly use women for their personal passions.
Forgive us for boasting of freedom while yet living in bondage to our own deception. Forgive us for separating head from heart and fact from faith. Forgive us for severing belief from behavior and religion from reason. Forgive us for, as C.S. Lewis warned, “removing the organ and yet demanding the function” for creating “men without chests” for the foolishness of “gelding the stallion and bidding him be fruitful.”
Forgive us for worshiping government more than God and trusting in Caesar more than Christ.
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God, we ask you to forgive us. We ask that you rescue us from the ugly hell or our own making. We humbly petition you to grant a reprieve of your judgment. We ask that you give us liberty in Law and rescue us from the bondage of our own arrogance
In Jesus Name Amen.
Dr. Everett Piper, Ph.D., is president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He is a daily and weekly radio commentator in Tulsa and author of “The Wrong Side of the Door: Why Ideas Matter,” an anthology of essays on the “pride of politics, the arrogance of the academy and the pathology of power.”
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