Now, this is what the Lord says,
the one who created you,
and formed you:
“Don’t be afraid, for I will protect you.
I call you by name, you are mine.”
Almighty God, beloved heavenly Father, through Holy Baptism You have made us Your children and heirs of Your kingdom, grant us Your Holy Spirit, so that we, having died to sin, may live faithfully in a new life with Jesus Christ, who together with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.
Almighty and most merciful God, we acknowledge and confess that we have sinned against thee in thought, word and deed; that we have not loved thee with all our heart and soul, with all our mind and strength; and that we have not loved our neighbour as ourselves. We beseech thee, O God, to be forgiving to what we have been, to help us to amend what we are, and of thy mercy to direct what we shall be, so that thy love of goodness may ever be first in our hearts, that we may always walk in thy commandments and ordinances blameless, and follow unto our life’s end in the footsteps of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Because Christ also suffered once for sins,
the just for the unjust,
to bring you to God,
by being put to death in the flesh
but by being made alive in the spirit.In it he went and preached to the spirits in prison, after they were disobedient long ago when God patiently waited in the days of Noah as an ark was being constructed. In the ark a few, that is eight souls, were delivered through water. And this prefigured baptism, which now saves you —not the washing off of physical dirt but the pledge of a good conscience to God—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who went into heaven and is at the right hand of God with angels and authorities and powers subject to him.
1. Peter 3:18-22
]]>1. Water, blood, and Spirit crying,
By their witness testifying
To the One whose death-defying
Life has come, with life for all.2. In a wat’ry grave are buried
All our sins that Jesus carried;
Christ, the Ark of Life, has ferried
Us across death’s raging flood.3. Dark the way, yet Christ precedes us,
Past the scowl of death He leads us;
Spreads a table where He feeds us
With His body and His blood.4. Through around us death is seething,
God, His two-edged sword unsheathing,
By His Spirit life is breathing
Through the living, active Word.5. Spirit, water, blood entreating,
Stephen P. Starke 1955
Working faith and its completing
In the One whose death-defeating
Life has come, with life for all.