Spirit of God Wk 12: Justin Huibregtse | August 23rd, 2026 |

Good morning, Eastridge.

My name is Justin.

I'm the senior pastor here.

And uh before I get started in my message today, I would like to invite up Wyatt and Adriana uh Buckner.

We are going to be dedicating Darien today.

Um so you know uh we are this is really exciting because uh I've been I've been meeting with this couple for a while now and uh and they're amazing, great people.

And this is really exciting because not only is Darien getting dedicated today, hi buddy, um, but also uh Adrian Hunt's getting uh baptized this evening.

So we're gonna kind of kind of do a kind of a full circle thing here.

Uh yeah, you guys could clap for that.

That's okay.

Honestly, yeah, that's amazing.

So um, so yeah, we uh we do dedications here at Eastridge, which is basically our way of saying we know that you as parents are the that you love the Lord and that you want to uh serve him and desire to serve him, uh, and you want to raise your children to do the same thing.

So uh so yeah, that's what that's what we're all about here, is raising people to be lifelong learners of Jesus Christ.

And we start at a very young age.

So um I'm gonna ask the parents a couple questions and then I'm going to uh ask the congregation a couple questions as well.

So uh, okay, will you guys, will you uh Wyden, Adriana, uh, pledge to support and love Darien by providing the opportunity for him to grow up in the family of faith with the hope that he will someday make the decision to follow Jesus Christ?

Will you, to the best of your ability and with God's help, provide a loving family environment in which Darien can grow in love, loyalty, and obedience to God?

If so, say we will.

Will you encourage Darien to grow in faith so that he might later be baptized into the faith, just like his mom tonight, uh in the faith of Jesus Christ and continue to serve and worship in the church?

If so, say we will.

We will.

Excellent.

So, and then congregation, uh, we did not uh you know intend to raise our families alone.

And we know that it takes uh the entire church to raise a child in God.

So I ask you uh who are here uh today to take seriously your responsibility in Jesus Christ.

Will you, as members uh and friends of Eastworth Community Church, help these parents raise the child in a loving and nurturing environment and lend a hand when needed?

If so, say we will.

All right, that's excellent.

So now I'm going to uh to pray uh over over Darien.

Um Darien, Alistair, Alistair Buckner, you are dedicated to the Lord in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We pray that you, God, would guide Darien in this life through the guidance of his parents, of why and Adriana, that you would give them a loving home, one that is filled with hope, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control.

Help that fruit of your spirit guide Darien into this world.

Father, we thank you for this grace and the mercy that we get to experience every single day through children and through our commitment to you.

We thank you, God.

We love you.

In the name we pray.

Amen.

Let's give a round of applause for this, these folks up here.

That's amazing, and that's super fun to do.

If you uh also have the desire to get your child dedicated here at East Ridge, just email the office.

We would love to do it.

We love having these.

It is it is uh a great honor to actually do that here.

So yeah, uh don't hesitate to let us know that this is something you want to do for your family.

So uh today we are continuing our message series in all about the attributes of God, the spirit of God, and we're gonna be in the book of Ephesians.

But first, uh I you know uh how many of you brought your Bibles this morning?

All of you?

Yeah?

Great, excellent, great.

So we're gonna be in here today.

Um I I want you to bring these because uh we we are going through this and uh and we're going to be sharpening our swords.

Ephesians 6 says that we need to have the sword of the spirit.

If we're going to use the sword of the spirit in our daily lives, we come here on Sundays and we get these things sharpened up, okay?

So we're gonna be in the book of Ephesians, um, starting in chapter one.

Uh put your put your finger in there for a while because we're gonna we're gonna we will come back to it, I promise.

But last week we started off in the whirlwind that Job was in, where he experienced God, where he saw that he is all powerful, that that the Leviathan is untamable for us.

But it is something that God does very easily, and nothing is beyond his power.

Now I hold that idea in one hand because this morning I want to put something in your other hand.

Because here's a question I want us to answer before we're done today.

Is that what does God actually do with all that power?

If he says that he is all powerful and we see that, what does he actually do with it?

Because power tells you what someone is capable of.

It doesn't tell you what they exactly care about.

And this morning's attribute is where we find out what God has been aiming his power at from the very beginning.

And if you have ever been in a Bible study with me, you know that if we I always say, you know, let's go back to the beginning.

Let's go back to Genesis and see what Genesis actually talks about so that we can find out where all this began.

His power, his and this attribute that we're gonna talk about today, which is peace.

Peace.

I I told you a few weeks ago as well that you know theologians came up with these communicable attributes, which are attributes that we share with God, that that uh that we share in a in a certain degree with God.

And there's incommunicable ones that are just like, whoa, what is that?

This is an all-powerful thing.

This is amazing.

Um, but really the the the we are created in his image so we can share some things with him.

Peace is one of those shared attributes that we have with God, which means we are not just here to admire it this morning, we're here to receive it and then carry it.

So I had to admit something though, that I am a I am really great at peace.

I am I am a huge proponent of it.

I am I am uh I'm the probably the best practicer in this room of peace, okay?

And you know how how you can tell that is because I will wake up in the very middle of the night and go over emails in my head that you know needed some punctuation changes in there.

You know, the email was really well written, it was really, it was it was good and everything like that.

It was even replied to, and I'm like, that needed a semicolon there, or this needed this needed some some changes here so that I could you know be more funnier or or more or more spiritual.

And that's so I go over that in my head.

And then recently I sent a text message out and I was really having a struggle with like, should I send this with an exclamation point or the period?

And I sent it with nothing, so people think I'm dead, you know, because I I don't have anything that there's no there's nothing that's in there.

So I'm trying to figure out what exactly is there, and then I am so good at peace though that I actually have a machine that sits right next to my bed that plays music or plays sounds, so that my my head doesn't need it because I'm so good at peace.

But it's there anyway.

So it and and and so uh and all this to say that no, I am terrible at peace.

This doesn't, you know, a lot of it doesn't make sense in my head because it's not how we define peace from the Bible.

You know, when we when we think of peace, we normally think of quiet.

We normally think of, oh yeah, I'm gonna sit by sit by the lake, it's gonna be nice and nice and quiet.

I don't need uh a lot of distractions, I don't want to hear noise.

You know, if you're asking my wife Sarah about it, it'd be where someone isn't saying her name every two minutes, uh, maybe go three minutes without saying your name uh would be would be peace, you know.

And there's some people who have a house full of uh of people and they're making a lot of noise, and they're completely at peace with that too.

So it it how we define peace in the world is really different from what the Bible says.

Um there's been times in my own life, though, when a relationship went sideways and I handled it simply by you know just backing off.

And there was no blow-up, there was no confrontation, uh, just a slow and quiet drift from what was there.

And from the outside, it looks peaceful.

Uh nobody was fighting, nobody was upset, and but nothing was healed either.

It was just kind of a cold relationship.

And that's how that's how I often look at peace.

Uh, and that taught me something about the difference between two things that we tend to call the same thing.

Uh, you know, when we think of peace.

A ceasefire is when the shooting stops between two factions, you know, warring together.

A ceasefire is when the shooting stops.

Restoration is when the thing that was broken between these two factions actually gets rebuilt.

Most of us settle for the ceasefire where nothing is, you know, we stop the shooting.

God, though, has never once settled for that ceasefire.

A ceasefire is when the shooting stops, but restoration is when the broken things get rebuilt.

So let me ask you what is broken in your life this morning?

Not what is loud, what is actually broken.

For some of you, it could be a relationship that has gone quiet.

And the quiet has started to feel a little bit permanent.

For some of you, it's it's inside your soul.

There's an idol that you're worshiping, there's a sin that you're not admitting to.

Uh you're carrying something you've never told anybody, and you've kind of made a truce with it where you're like, I'm okay with it.

I don't need to do anything about it.

You're not fighting it anymore, you just learn to live around it.

For some of you, it's with God.

You still come to church, you still sing, but somewhere along the line, the closeness between you and God went out.

And you've been managing a polite distance for a while now.

So here's what I want you to hear this morning is that God is not content to leave any of that where it is.

There in uh in Jeremiah, um, uh, you know, we've talked about it before, the the Israelites, that Jerusalem was being surrounded and invaded by Babylon.

And there was false prophets of Jeremiah's day.

And he said that they were going around telling everybody, peace, peace.

These false prophets were going around spreading peace.

They were putting a bandage, though, on a wound that needed surgery.

They were, they were, you know, God does not do that with us.

He does not put paper over what uh what is broken and call it peace.

He goes after the break itself.

God will not put a bandage on something that needs surgery.

So we have to start with the word peace itself because English has really shrunk it down to mean a lot of different things and not the full meaning of what the Bible actually says.

The Hebrew word for peace shows up well over 200 times in the Old Testament.

It's shalom, which means wholeness, completeness, soundness, everything in its right place and it's flourishing.

Shalom is not primarily about the absence of something, it is the presence of something.

It's the word used for uh a wall with no cracks in it.

Don't look at our ceiling, okay?

Or our foundation, okay?

I'm joking.

Um, kind of.

For a body, uh it's it's a it's the word that is used for uh uh a body with with nothing wrong in it.

It's for accounts that are fully settled with no debt outstanding.

It's it's for a community where everyone has had enough and no one is being crushed.

It means the with the the way that things are supposed to be.

So if we look at Genesis, uh God finishes creating something.

There is chaos.

There is the the world that that God created and it and it is amazing.

He created the stars and the sky, and and it's uh there's a lot of things that are out there, and he creates order out of chaos.

That's the picture of Shalom.

And then it goes even further that humanity, when he creates humanity, is at peace with God, walking with him in his garden.

Human beings are at peace within themselves, that there is no shame, there is nothing to hide.

And then there is also peace with each other.

And there's peace with creation itself.

Four relationships that are whole.

Nothing is cracked, nothing is missing, nothing is broken.

It's the world as God designed it to be.

And then sin enters the world.

We break our relationship with God.

The relationship with him breaks first when we sin, when we when we part ways with him.

Adam and Eve hear God coming and they hide from him.

The relationship with ourselves, the peace that's within ourselves breaks as well.

That we we we feel shame and so we we cover ourselves.

Uh the relationship with with uh with each other, with humanity breaks as well.

Adam and Eve start pointing fingers at each other on who said who what first.

And the relationship with creation also breaks.

There's thorns from the ground, there's sweat.

We have to work for the work for ourselves.

That's four relationships, all four of them fractured within nine verses.

And that's the world we still live in.

This is why our peace is so much bigger than stress.

It's why we why we think, you know, oh, you know what, I'm feeling not at peace right now, so I'm gonna sit by a beach, drink a pina colada, and I'm gonna forget about my world.

No, that's how you deal with rest, not stress, and rest and stress, not peace.

Our hearts and our souls are groaning for a bigger peace in our lives.

That just resting on the on the on a beach somewhere is not going to heal.

We need someone with enough power to rebuild what got broken.

Now let's come back to the question I asked at the beginning.

What does God do with all that power?

I want to put two of God's works side by side this morning.

And first, this is one that we talked about creation.

How much did it cost God to make a universe?

Think about that.

How much did it cost?

Genesis 1 tells us, and God said, Let there be light.

That's it.

All the stars in the galaxy created instantly.

You know, and we we think of we think of big things like that, all the all the really big things that were created all at once, but there's a there's a million, billion, trillion little things that also were created at once.

The the cells and things that make up cells and everything else, those are also created instantly by God just saying it.

That power.

There was no resistance, no pushback, nothing had to be overcome.

God, you know, through Job pointed at the whirlwind and the snow and the sea and saying, Look what I can do effortlessly.

I did it.

I said I was gonna say it perfectly, the uh last two services, but I can't say it.

Effortlessly.

It was done effortlessly.

Now, the second work that we talked that that that God shows, you know, this peace and his power is through something that's more precious to him.

If it cost God a couple words in an instant to create the universe, how much did it cost God to make peace with the rebels who had shattered his shalom?

It cost him his only son.

Making universe out of nothing took a word.

Making an enemy into a son and daughter of him took blood.

So which one is of uh uh the greater display of God's power?

Which which is the greater display of what God can do?

And we answer that in Ephesians 1.

Starting in verse 19, it says this.

And what it's not gonna be on the screen, so I want you to follow along with me.

If you have your Bibles with you, please follow along with me with me right now.

It says in verse 19, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.

The immeasurable greatness of God's power is displayed through the empty tomb.

Not the stars.

It's pointed to the moment that God reached into death itself and reversed it.

Because here's the thing about creation: nothing was standing in the way.

In reconciliation with God in Shalom and making our relationship right with God, everything stood in the way.

Our sin was in the way, God's own justice was in the way, death itself was in the way, and God overcame every single one of them.

This is what I want you to see this morning, okay?

To see about God's power is that the whirlwind and the storm and the stars in the sky show us what God can do.

The cross shows us what God wants to do.

He aims all that power at putting broken things back together.

And notice something about how he did it.

The most powerful moment in history looked like weakness from the outside.

His hands were nailed to a piece of wood, unable to be moving.

That is the power of complete restraint spent entirely on someone else's good, our good.

Job saw that power that that was untamable to tame the Leviathan and said, That is amazing.

And now we see this power that makes us fall to our knees for a completely different reason.

It's forgiveness, reconciliation, shalom, the cost of his son shows you what God values and what he wants to do.

He wants to restore us.

So in Ephesians 2, it talks about the clearest picture of restorative peace in the entire New Testament.

Paul's writing about the deepest human divisions of his day, Jews and Gentiles, people who were of God and the people who were against God, and two groups separated by centuries of hostility and an actual wall in the temple.

That this wall that was in the temple, Gentiles were not allowed to go across.

So here's what it says in Ephesians 2, starting in verse 13.

Says here, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.

By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing hostility.

There's three things I need to point out to you, okay?

He himself is our peace.

Not that he gives peace, he is peace.

Jesus Christ is peace, which means you cannot separate the peace from the person.

You don't receive a substance called peace.

I mean, we can shake hands here as I do in some other churches and say, uh, I'm giving you peace, and you know, it's it's just a handshake and that's it.

That's kind of a substance, an idea of peace.

You receive Christ, and peace comes with Christ.

That's the first thing we need to know, that He is He Himself is our peace.

Second, he broke down the dividing wall.

This is restoration language.

It's it's saying that uh that you know that there's this is not ceasefire.

He didn't negotiate a true uh a truce across the wall, he demolished the wall completely.

So he is he is breaking the wall that is helping us know that this next point is very true.

He said, thereby killing the hostility.

Killing it.

Not managing it or not reducing it.

If we tried to manage the hostility that we have with God, it would look like us trying to get better with him.

Us proving that you know our good works, our good deeds, how good we are as a person is actually able to get us closer to him.

That's just not true.

It's not true at all.

At the cross, the hostility itself was.

Put to death.

And it was not just the hostility between us and God.

The shalom, the peace was restored between God and us at the cross.

But not only that, it was restored between people as well.

Between you and me.

Between all of us.

You cannot have the first without the second.

This is a shalom that is being rebuilt more than one direction.

He didn't negotiate across the wall.

He tore the wall down and allowed us to be restored to God and to each other.

And here is where I really want to show you, you know, why why this uh why this really matters.

Because 700 years before the death of Christ happened, Isaiah described the cost of our shalom very, very accurately.

It says in Isaiah 53, verse 5, but he was pierced for our transgressions.

Isaiah 53:5

He was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him Jesus Christ was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

So look at the exchange in that verse itself.

He was pierced so we could be whole.

He was crushed so we could be put back together.

The chastisement that brought us Shalom fell on him.

So if we go to the garden before Jesus is put to death and a death on the cross, he is praying to his father in the Garden of Gethsemane.

He is the Prince of Peace.

But he is face down in the dirt, in agony.

He is in so much stress that he is sweating drops of blood, asking the Father if there is any other way that this could be taken away from him.

This is the last and least peaceful night in the history of the world.

And he walked into it deliberately so that your shalom could be rebuilt with God.

And then on the cross, he lost the other thing that he had never ever been without, an unbroken closeness with his father.

He said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The reason why is because he's taken our sin, the things that broke the shalom between us and God.

He took all of that.

He took all that on the cross and he was forsaken so that we could be made whole.

And on the third day, we see that God demonstrated his immeasurable power that Paul talked about, and Jesus walked out of the tomb.

When he walked out of the tomb, one of the first places that he went to was into a locked room filled with his terrified friends.

And what was the first thing out of his mouth?

What's the first thing that he said?

Peace be with you.

Shalom.

He said it with nail holes in his hands, so you know that he had earned the right to say, This was not peaceful for me.

But it's peace that I want to bring to you.

So if you're here this morning and you have never had that peace with God, if there's a low hum of guilt under your life that you've never known how to quiet, I want you to hear this very clearly.

You cannot rebuild that shalom by yourself.

And that's exactly the point of it.

The rebuilding has already been paid for.

So turn from your sin and trust the one who was crushed so that you could be made whole and receive a peace with God that nothing in your life can undo.

So if we if we do that, if we have that security in our lives, as that peace in our lives, then we need to do something with that.

We can't just have this idea.

We need to go forward and learn from this.

So there's something you need to know, something you need to feel, and something you need to do this week.

First, something you need to know.

The rebuilding has already begun and it will be finished.

Revelation 21, 4 through 5 says this.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anywhere, for the former things have passed away.

And he who was seated on the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.

Also, he said, Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.

He is making all things new.

This is Shalom, fully restored, with every one of those four relationships put right forever, never being able to be broken again.

So the peace you have now is real, but it's a down payment for the peace that is to come.

The full restoration is on its way and it's guaranteed by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

So know that in your mind.

I'm not asking you to conquer this subject and this idea today because it is an idea that really takes a long time to understand.

I'm asking you, though, to wrestle with it.

To take your scriptures and to read through it and say, I want to get this idea of peace.

I want to know it.

I want to get to know what this is.

So know then your mind.

Feel this.

Feel settled even with something still unfinished.

You don't have to know everything repaired.

You don't have to have everything repaired to be at peace.

That's the whole point of shalom is that it's working its way.

You can still be settled even if something is still unfinished.

And then do this one thing this week.

Go first with one person this week.

God came to us first.

He settled that debt, he rebuilt that shalom with us first.

And he is calling us to be ambassadors with a message of reconciliation.

Says that in 2 Corinthians, talking about being ambassadors and people of reconciliation.

So if you are at peace with God, you need to get peace with others.

So make that first call, make that first text, buy the first coffee.

It's not going to be easy.

And I want to tell you something else that this isn't like a cheap thing to do either.

Reconciliation is expensive.

It's very expensive.

It's going to cost you your pride.

It's going to cost you your ego.

It's going to cost you your time, your mindset.

It has to change.

But it's for the reconciliation that you reach with God.

So you can reach it with other people.

And of course, I want you to pray before you do that.

When you do that, say, God, you went first with me.

Help me go first with them as I reach out to them.

As I say, I need to restore this relationship.

I need to get better with this.

It's just not settling for that ceasefire any longer and going further.

And then one more thing you can do is to make it public.

Make this decision public.

So tonight there's something that we're going to do very special that I want to invite all of you to be a part of.

And I really, and I truly, truly mean that.

I invite all of you to be there.

We're going to do baptisms at Pike Lake Beach Club tonight, okay?

And it's going to be an amazing and great celebration that I want you all to be there for for a couple reasons.

You know, this idea about shalom is uh if fits really well with this message because let me be clear about what baptism is not.

The water does not make you right with God.

Okay?

You are not reconciled by that water that's in there.

You're reconciled by the blood of Jesus Christ and nothing else.

Baptism is not how you get the peace.

Baptism is how you announce the peace that you already have.

It's a public action that declares an inward decision.

And we look at the scripture that says that we were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.

So if you want to get baptized, if you feel that's your calling, if that's where you want to go and that you want to get baptized, you're being buried into the water.

And that chapter of your life is being closed.

It's saying, okay, this is the old life.

You can be made new by coming out of that water as a new creation.

And the reason why I invite all of you to be a part of it is because we're not supposed to do this life alone.

Amen?

We're not supposed to be, you know, raising our children all by ourselves.

We can all come together.

So as these new creations come out of the water tonight, I want all of us to be there to say, I want to support you.

I want to carry your burdens.

I want to walk through these scriptures with you.

I want to see you on Sunday and say hi.

I want to do these ministries with you together.

Because that's where it's going to make the biggest impact is saying, let's do this together.

Let's be lifelong learners of Jesus Christ and let's do life together.

And before we close today, I want to remind us of two people, one in scripture and one in real life, about what what it actually looks like to have that shalom in our lives, as a as an illustration before we close.

One is a is a woman in 2 Kings chapter 4.

2 Kings 4 · chapter mention

She finally has a son, and she and uh this this child is given to her after years and years of being barren.

And this child dies in her arms.

Her only son.

She lays his body on a bed, she gets on a donkey and rides to the prophet Elisha.

And on the way, Elisha's servants meet with her and ask if everything is alright.

And she gives this answer All is well.

And here's what I want you to know: that the same word here for all is well is shalom.

I'm at peace.

The word is shalom here.

Her son is lying dead at home, and the word she chooses is the same word that we use for wholeness.

She is not in denial about how she's feeling.

She is riding hard toward the God who can do something about it.

She's saying, This is not finished.

It is well.

Now, the second person I want to bring to your attention is uh in 1873, there's a Chicago lawyer named Horatio Spafford, and he put his wife and four daughters on a ship bound for Europe.

And he had some business to finish up before he was going to meet with them a few days later.

And out in the Atlantic, there's uh the the ships that they're on collide with another ship.

And the vessel goes down in about 12 minutes.

All four of his daughters drowned at that moment.

All four of them.

His wife survived, and when she reached the land, she sent him a telegram with two words on it.

Saved alone.

Horatio Spafford boarded the next ship across the Atlantic to go uh to go get her.

And partway across the journey, uh the captain pulled him up onto the deck and said, This is about the area where the vessels collided and your family, your family, your daughters died.

And somewhere over that water, Horatiel Spafford took out a pen and wrote these words.

Whatever my lot thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.

Shalom.

Same word the risen Christ spoke into a locked room, the same word that the that the Shumanite woman said over her dead son.

And we're gonna sing a song inspired by those words that Horatio Spafford wrote.

It's the same power that laid the foundations of the earth and then spent its itself completely to put it back together.

So when we sing this in a moment, the the worship team is gonna come back up here.

I want you to sing it honestly.

If your life is good today, sing it with gratitude.

And if you're in the deep water this morning, if sorrow like sea billows are rolling over you right now, then sing it as a declaration of what is still true.

That through it all, through everything, our eyes stay locked onto the God of peace.

That our souls are let go and we trust in him.

The waves and wind still know his name.

So recall this truth.

Your restoration has been purchased, it is already begun.

And one day it will be finished completely.

It is well with your soul.

And and I don't forget what we're doing tonight, because I sincerely want to invite you all to be a part of it.

Some of your brothers and sisters are going under that water and coming up new.

If that is supposed to be you tonight, don't leave this room without telling somebody.

Let's stand and we'll uh we'll pray together.

God of peace.

You made a world that was whole, and we broke it.

We broke it with you.

We broke it with each other, we broke it inside ourselves, and you did not leave it broken.

You did not put a bandage over it and call it peace.

You sent your son into the wreckage.

Jesus, thank you that the chastisement that brought us shalom fell on you.

Thank you that you were pierced so we could be whole and crushed so we could be put back together.

Thank you that you are our peace.

And that you tore down a wall we could never have climbed.

Holy Spirit, do the work in us that only you can do.

Where we have settled for a ceasefire, give us the courage to seek real repair.

Where we are carrying something unhealed, come and heal it.

Where there is a wall in this church, tear it down.

Help us be ambassadors, willing to go first, because you went first with us.

And for the one here today in the deepest water, the one who does not know how they are going to sing this next song, meet them here.

Let them know all the way down that it is well with their soul.

Because of what Jesus has already done and what you have promised still to do.

And Lord bless what happens at the lake tonight.

For everyone stepping into that water, let it be a joyful declaration of peace you already secured for them.

And give courage to the one who has been putting it off.

You are making all things new.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.