Churches in Sun Prairie

“``If you want a formal definition of baptism, this is how I would articulate it. Baptism is the public celebration of a private decision that somebody makes to follow Jesus. That's what it is. It's the public party. It's like the coming out party. It's like, hey, I made a private decision to become a disciple of Jesus. Then you throw this celebration, and you have a party to celebrate it, to mark the moment. That's literally what it is. It's a lot like a birthday party. Think about it this way. We don't have birthday parties so that we can be a year older. Right? We have birthday parties to celebrate the fact that we are a year older. It's the same with baptism. We don't have a baptism so that we can become a follower of Jesus. We have baptism to celebrate the fact that we have already become a disciple of Jesus.”

“So we woke up really early on Sunday morning at 4AM to check the forecast, and and now it said something different. So people must have been praying because all of a sudden, in the forecast, there was a two hour window where there was gonna be no rain, but it didn't start till 1PM. And so we debated, should we move our event to the afternoon so we can fit in that window where there's gonna be no rain? But we decided to just pray and simply ask God that, God, we don't wanna have 01:00PM church. We wanna have it at 10AM. So can you move the rain?”

“If my parents had me baptized as a baby, is it okay for me to get baptized again as an adult, or is that somehow, like, redundant? Is that somehow disrespectful to my parents who chose to have me be baptized? Again, no. This is absolutely you should get baptized again if you've made the decision for yourself to become a follower of Jesus. Think about this. When your parents chose to have you baptized as an infant, they stood before God and probably their church family, and they said, Lord, it is our hope. It is our prayer that that you would be a part of this child's life from an early age. We want them to live their life in the kingdom of heaven. Would you pursue them? Would you be with them? Would you protect them? Would you bless them? That was their prayer, and they had you baptized to reflect that heart. And now as an adult, if you're somebody who would say, you know what? I've made a decision that I wanna be a follower of Jesus. You getting baptized is the perfect fulfillment of everything they prayed over you all those years ago. Your baptism is the culmination of everything they hoped and prayed for.”

“And so today, whenever somebody makes a decision for themself that I wanna be a follower of Jesus, we encourage you to be baptized. Not because you should, not because you're supposed to, not because that's just the next checklist thing on the checklist. No, it's better than that. We do it because we wanna follow Jesus' example. We do it because we wanna we wanna be obedient to Jesus' instructions. We do it because we wanna experience the grace that God pours out on us personally when we choose to be obedient and to be baptized. We do it because we wanna anchor our faith to this public ceremony that we celebrated in front of a community of people who love us and are so excited to be a part of what God is doing and to see what God is doing in our lives. And we do it together. We do it in community. We do it with one another. And it is an incredible gift.”

“So, again, sometimes we are more hesitant to go through with, like, a religious ceremony or a religious thing. But I'm telling you, you don't want to miss this. God has something for you. He doesn't ask you to get baptized because he wants something from you. He's like, I need you to feel embarrassed, or I need you to, like, go out on a limb for me. No. No. No. No. He's got something for you. And he doesn't want you to miss it, and I don't want you to miss it.”

“We don't fight against people, we fight for people. So where do we see people hurting around you? What could you do to fight against evil for them? To love them. To help them. To bring them life. Where do you see people in pain? Where do you see people struggling? Next question. Could it be that you are the person God has placed in this situation to do something about it? Too many times I think we as the people of God go, oh, there's so much evil in the world. Someone should do something. God, you should fix it. What if God has asked you to be the one who stands against the harm being done in this world?”

“Now you might think, well, Paul, yeah, you must be sitting in some lush, cushy position, everything's grand and glorious. It's easy for a person who's sitting in that kind of a setup to say, yeah, be happy. You don't know my situation. But if you remember, or maybe you didn't know, Paul was writing this from a Roman jail. He was writing this while he was in prison. And Paul says, what you need to have is shoes. You need to have these shoes on that give you a peace, a don't worry be mentality no matter what comes at you in life. How can we have that kind of peace? Well, it comes from the good news because we believe what Paul believed. As followers of Jesus, we believe that victory is already won against evil.”

“``You see, this is really important. We don't fight for victory. We fight from victory. We're not trying to do what only God can do. God is in charge of that. We're in charge of fighting the battles that God puts in front of us against evil because we know the war is won. Those are the shoes of peace we put on. The peace that we, as Jesus people, should have is not that all evil in this world will be overcome by us, but that God will one day overcome all the evil and make all things new.”

“We don't fight for victory, we fight from victory. We don't worry, we have peace because we know God is in control. We have our shoes of peace Quick quick question to think about this week. What evil exists in your world that needs someone to stand up and do something about it? Where do you see people being harmed? People being treated the way they shouldn't be treated. People forgotten, marginalized, left out.”

“Peter didn't sink because of the waves. He sank because he trusted the waves more than the word that Jesus gave him. He didn't sink because the wave was there. He focused on the wave and the wind, and he got distracted. What's distracting you? What is it that's causing you to crash out every two days? Because some things that you are in sin with is not due to the devil leading you to sin. It's due to you're distracted. And when you're distracted I want y'all to really hear me. When you're distracted, the devil manipulates your distraction. That's his assignment. John ten ten. His assignment is to manipulate. His assignment is to destroy. His assignment is to get us outside of what God is calling us to. So the devil will take a storm in your life, allow you to focus on the storm, and now you're back in a cycle of sin because instead of going to God, you focus on the storm.”