O sovereign God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, my heart and the hearts of many of your people, who both love and who are thankful for this nation, cry out to you today on behalf of our nation in this time of national and global suffering. We groan in agony along with the entire creation, because of the power and pervasiveness of sin in both our nation and indeed throughout the entire world. Father, you know how pervasive sin is. You know it rules and reigns like an evil and despotic tyrant over individuals, over systems and structures, and over the entire creation. Father, you know that sin has reigned this way since our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned against you in the Garden of Eden, bringing a curse on the entire creation. Father, you know that this curse will continue to rule and reign like an evil tyrant over the entire creation until Jesus returns to make all things right and to restore perfectly everything Adam and Eve lost in the Garden.

However, Father, we, your people, know and are confident that because of your promise of individual, horizontal, and cosmological redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and because of the certainty of our redemption in Christ, we can boldly approach your heavenly thrown of grace in prayer today and cry out to you for help in our nation’s time of need.

Father, we pray for all of the families, friends, and neighbors of those in our nation who have suffered the loss of loved ones to shootings and to violence. Father, there are more deaths than we know and more than we are able to name. But we pray specifically for the families, friends, and neighbors of Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. We pray you will make yourself known to their families, friends, and neighbors as the God of all comfort as they grieve. We pray, Father, that by the power of your Spirit, you would help them know, feel, and experience you as a loving Father, Jesus as the good shepherd, and your Spirit as their comforter. Father, we pray that you would also surround them with support and encouragement from loving family, friends, neighbors, and churches in their cities during their time of grief. Father, please, also help the judicial system to do its work well, carefully, diligently, and precisely on behalf of them and their families.

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