Shane Hughes 1-11-26

Highland. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here. And if this is the first time you've ever come to Highland, it's a delight to have you. We want to welcome back, as Jeff said earlier, all of the college students that are here.

It is good that you bring us energy and joy in life. I am so glad. I want to give a Right before we jump into the text, if you have your Bible with you, either paper or digital, turn to Ephesians 4 because you're going to want to look at it. But before we do that, I have some very wonderful news to share with you this morning. In fact, Suzetta and I had a thumb wrestle to decide who got to share this.

But then she had to go out of town, so I won. Haha. I want to tell you the result of the restoration offering from this past season. Thanks to your incredible generosity and faithfulness, the restoration offering this year was 500,000. 700 or 500.

I messed it up. $579,980.

This, this is a tremendous blessing. And we are deeply grateful for each gift that has been given in faith and love. And we believe that our Lord can take even the smallest of gifts freely given with generous hearts. If he can feed a 5000, he can do powerful things here in Abilene. Now we, we, we set a very high goal.

Well, last year we set a goal of $700,000 because we're starting a new iteration of our vision, the restoration vision for 2029. And we didn't quite get there, but that's okay. We got enough to get started. And we're going to get started with. You're going to see some changes here on campus and a few other places.

You're going to hear about more about what's happening with Highland as we partner with God or Highland and Abilene in the world. And so. But this is a powerful testimony to this congregation's heart. Heart and to God's work. This is a bigger offering than we've had in, in recent memory.

Every dollar represents sacrifice and prayer and trust to what God is doing among us. And if Suzetta were here, she's not. But if she were here, she would want us to think for a minute and to Wonder about that 96 cents. And you, I would invite you to wonder, to imagine, although it's not hard because I've seen it happen, a child going to those boxes in the back wall and dropping in coins. You know, as Robert told us, Christian saying bye bye money as he headed off to his kids.

Right. That 96 cents is just as important as the. The five at the beginning of that number. And so if you still feel led to contribute, there are still lots of options available. But we're going to be good stewards for what you've already given, for our vision and our planning in the future.

We're going to continue to feed the homeless, to feed the hungry, to care for the homeless in Taylor county and so much more. And I'm excited to tell you about some of those things that are going to happen today. So I want to say thank you for your faithfulness and your generosity. Whether through your financial gifts or prayer service, it continues to make ministry possible here at Highland. And we're blessed.

We're blessed as Suzetta and I are blessed, our ministry staff is blessed, our leaders are blessed to serve alongside you as we partner with God in the restoration of all things. Would you pray with me, please? Father, we're so grateful for the generosity of hearts that feel compelled to do what you've asked them to do. Father, we're so grateful for the ways that you open our eyes to the opportunities around us in our city, in our families and our neighborhoods to serve others in the name of Jesus. Father, I pray now that you open our hearts the way that you open our eyes, that we might see scripture clearly, that you might change us, transform us by the power of your word, make us new people.

To that end, Father, I pray that you pour through me the gift of preaching, that I might speak your truth in love to these, your people. And it's together that the church says Amen. All right, so I want you to notice in Ephesians, chapter four, there is the. The. Our text begins with the word therefore.

And this is a massive hinge in the book of Ephesians. Everything up till this point in the book of Ephesians is about what God has done for us. Everything after it that follows is how we live as a community in light of the work that God did through Jesus. So everything before this is what God has done. Everything after this is how we live together.

And what we see in Ephesians is if God has triumphed over the powers of darkness by uniting humanity in Christ, if God has built them into a holy temple and now dwells in them by his Spirit, and if God is growing them into a body with ligament and sinew, connecting us together to form one people, then therefore, the people of God embody the triumphant by maintaining that unity created by the Spirit. And when churches effectively perform their roles as communities of reconciliation or restoration and unity. God's triumph over the divisive powers is proclaimed in the cosmic realm. But there's the beginning of this text that it makes it. To be honest with you, it's kind of been sand in my eye over the course of this week.

It felt like a chain that was hanging around my neck, and it felt heavier and heavier and heavier as the week went on. And the more I lived into this text, the more it bothered me. And so I wanted to dig deeper and understand more. Worthy is not a word I love. In this text, Paul says, live a life worthy of the calling you have received.

And how do you know? How do you know you've lived a worthy life, worthy of the gift that God has given us? On the History Channel, there's this, a survival show. It's called Alone. It's a fascinating show.

And what they basically do is they drop a person in the middle of nowhere in the northern part of Canada or all these other places. And there's actually. There's 10 contestants. And the goal is to outlast the people around you. You have a list of 40 items.

You can. You can take 10 with you, but there's no shelter, there's no food, there's no guarantee of water. You just have to survive. All you have are those 10 items and a sat phone. And at any point, you can call and they'll show up in a helicopter and they'll whisk you away to a warm bed with good food.

You see your family again. But the goal is, can you outlast everybody else? But the kick is, is that you don't know what place and order you're in. You never know. You don't know if everybody else has quit but one or if everybody else is still going strong.

It's all in your head. And so. So they didn't know when the other contestants would quit. And in the first iteration, the design of the show, they never aired it. They changed it before they actually aired it.

But they conceived not even to tell the last contestant. Right? They just let them keep going until they quit, which is, man, a mind twister for me. And they go last as long as they can. They finally call on the phone, they tap out, only to find out that they won't.

Now, the prize is significant because it's a half million dollars. Could you endure that?

Could you just keep going without stopping? Because you're not sure exactly where the finish line is, and you can't tell where the other contestants are in Relation to you. You don't know if you're the first one to quit or if you're the tenth. How could you, how could you endure that?

How do you know when you've done enough to be worthy of the calling we've received?

The Spielberg produced a movie, directed a movie called Schindler's List. It's based on a true story. Schindler was a real person who lived in Nazi Germany during World War II. And he basically protected a bunch of Jews by hiring them in as functionally as slaves to work in his factories. And he got very rich off of this.

Schindler was not a particularly good person. He wasn't particularly a moral person. He just saw an opportunity at the beginning and took it, that he could have reduced labor. But through the course of the war, he kind of realized, and you see this in the movie, he transforms to realize like, these aren't just opportunities. These are people, these are human beings.

These, they bear the image of God. And there's this scene at the end of the movie where he's looking around his office and he realized, I could have protected more people. I could have bribed more government officials to allow more people to work in my factories. I could have sold this. I didn't have to have this.

I didn't have to do this. And at the end of his life, the end of the movie, he is burdened by this overwhelming sense that he did not do enough or that if he had tried a little bit harder, he could have saved more.

And I think this is where this text, this is the hinge of this text for us. If our worthiness depends on our effort, that will lead us to a place of anxiety, of neuroticism and a guilt shame cycle. And what we know from guilt shame cycles is an anxiety is it drives you away from others, it creates a barrier and it ruptures relationships. So it's going to drive you away from the people you love and it's going to drive you away from the God that loves you. It'll drive us away from God because there will always be one more day where we could do just a little bit more, just to become a little more worthy, to earn our place.

But if our worthiness comes from a place of receiving grace and God's generous gifts and the church community around us, our lives look a lot more peaceful. Paul assumes what the Ephesians already know, that their worthiness was settled at their baptism when they were incorporated into the Messiah's death and resurrection. That therefore of verse one matters because you have this calling, because you are already in Christ. Now live accordingly. The Christian life isn't about generating enough moral torque to lift ourselves into God's presence.

It's about learning the habits of a family in a household that we've already been adopted into. You just learn how to live with the people that God has blessed you with. The calling comes first, and then it comes as a pure gift. We spend our lives learning to walk into clothes we didn't earn and cannot outgrow. The anxiety becomes when we forget that we're already dressed, we forget that we're already claimed.

We. We forget that we're already home. And so Paul's list about humility and gentleness and patience. These aren't a ladder that we climb to reach God. They're what it looks like when we finally stop climbing and learn to walk on level ground, surrounded by others who are just as beloved, just as stumbling, and just as held.

I think what this looks like is a comment by Joanne Rogers. You may not have never heard of her, but I'm almost certain you've heard of her husband, Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers from Rogers Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and interviews. After Fred's death, she spoke about how he truly rested. Fred Rogers loved a good nap.

In fact, he had a cot in the studio where he. They would film a Mr. Rogers neighborhood so that if he got tired, he just stopped and take a nap. Everyone would just take a break. He played piano for pleasure. During.

Between takes, just for fun. He did it at his household. He swam daily, not as penance or exercise, but as renewal, because that was the place where he felt God's good pleasure. His calling didn't consume him. Although he had an important calling to do, an important thing for.

For our. Our. Our. Our culture. But it was integrated into a life that included rest and play and relationships.

If being called worthily to a life worthy of the calling you received feels like a burden, a weight around your neck, then this is what I want you to hear. People felt drawn rather than driven, called forward rather than pushed by guilt or an unpayable debt. Fred had a purpose without the torture of wondering, did I do enough? Maybe I could have done a little bit more.

So living into God's mission is a life worthy of the calling you've received. And the only way this is going to work is if the unity that we share together, the oneness that Paul talks about is. Is if we hold mutual love as a higher virtue than any of the other virtues. And I want you to know all the things that Paul talks about that give us unity. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.

That's a seven. That's an important number in the New Testament. Seven is a number of God, who is above all and through all and in all. And then Paul mentions all three times. Another important number in the New Testament and God's best hope, God's dream for what this love looks like, what this unity looks like, what Jesus looks like is the church.

There is no plan B, it's us. God's plan when Jesus is taken back into heaven is, is that he breathes his spirit on human beings that are in community together. And those people are going to carry the gospel. The message, the vision of what Jesus can be, the difference that we can be in this world, it's in us. And God doesn't have another way to tell anyone it's you.

God doesn't have another card to play. It's the church.

All of this begins with Jesus. If you want to know what the gospel looks like, here at Highland, it's us telling the story of Jesus Christ. It's telling the story of how Jesus has transformed us individually and collectively and the world. The restoration begins with Jesus own bodily resurrection. It's the prototype and the guarantee of God's entire renewal project.

Because Jesus was raised for the dead, we will all follow him. The resurrection wasn't merely a spiritual event or some sort of recitation. It was the inauguration of new creation itself and the beginning of God's work to make all things new. At Erin Highland, the sum total of everything we do, the vision that we have for our purpose of gathering together, why we give, why we share, why we spend time with one another, why we so invest so deeply in the ministries that we support, is because we want to partner with God and in the restoration of all things. We believe that God is not only interested in your soul, God is interested in your body, not only interested in your body.

God is interested in all of creation to bring it back, all under his throne. And we want to do our part. Now the reality of God's mission is that it's incredibly enormous. It starts from the beginning of time. It goes to the end of time.

It involves everyone that's ever been born, that's ever drawn breath, all, all of them. It is so large. It is like the sun.

The sun is 97% of all the mass in our solar system, about 1.23 is Jupiter. The rest of the solar system is barely 1% of the mass of our solar system. And you think about it for a second. I can drive 444 miles from Abilene to El Paso. I. I'm still in West Texas.

That's not even all of Texas. That's not even all of America. North America, the globe, the water, everything. The solar system is enormous. The sun is huge.

Now, I want you to think for a minute that the sun, as big as it is, is God's mission. It's the mission of God. There's no way that we can be involved in all of it. There's just. It's impossible.

But the most amazing thing about the mission of God is that he invites the church, specifically Highland, to do our part. Now, I think our part is just one little pixel. Man, that timing is amazing. You're killing it back there.

Our part is a pixel on the surface of the grand mission of God. But that's what God's given us to do.

God has given you your family to love and care for. God has given you your friends and roommates, the people around you, your classmates. God has given your co workers. All those people are in your life because that is your pixel in God's work. And you get to partner with God in the restoration of all things.

And so we as a church, we want to do our part. We just want to be a part of what God is doing in this world because we have found that our life is found more worthy when we participate in what God's doing than we try to do it by ourselves. And so there's three principles that we've worked out. And I talked about this back in November before things got derailed. And there's three truths that surround our vision.

And the first truth is very simple. We are a church that is confident to innovate and incubate ministries. And if you know anything about the history, the hundred year history of Highland, you know that we have been on the edge to innovate new ministries that gets copied by other places all over. Before people were doing radio ministries, we were doing radio ministries. Before television ministry, we were doing television ministry before we.

We incubate and innovate all sorts of really amazing things. And the best things that come out of Highland for the last hundred years have come out of the pew, not the pulpit. The best ideas that Highland has embraced, the best ministries, the best that have spun off to do their own thing, didn't come from this place. It came from y'. All.

The second Thing that we noticed as we were looking at vision and what we want to do for the next three years is that we are the church that stayed when others had the opportunity to leave to go up to the hill to plant the University Church of Christ. We chose to stay in this neighborhood because we thought we could make a difference in this neighborhood. Two other times in the history of Highland, we've had the opportunity to purchase property down in Wylie and build down there. Both times our elders have wisely said, you know, we're going to stay. This neighborhood matters.

The people that live in this part of Abilene matter. And so we're going to stay. Our commitment to serve those on the margins by meeting their fundamental needs first continues. And the third thing, the third truth that has been shaped, our vision is that we are the church that seeks God's horizon, not our own. And that means we continue to invest in missions and ministries that will bear fruit that we will never see, whether this is generationally or geographically.

And so we invest to pay for children to have food in Myanmar, in Southeast Asia. We invest so that young boys in Thailand can escape from sex trafficking. We invest in missionaries in Brazil and Thailand so that they might hear the gospel in their own way. And probably none of us are ever going to see all of the amazing things that are going to come out of that work. We're never going to get to see it.

You are investing in the lives of children and those children are going to grow up and become things that you would never imagine, but you're not going to see it. And the reason we invest in those things is because we believe in God's horizon that is much bigger than ours is. And so there's three ways that we're going to get there. And I'm excited to tell you more about this next week and the week following. The new ways that we're going to kind of lean into God's restoration vision for the next three years.

The first is that we're going to reclaim our innovative DNA. We are a church that spawns new ministries. The best ideas have happened from y'. All. We're going to figure out ways to do that.

Number two, we're going to move from excellence in staff driven performance to lay empowered participation. I would stack Highland staff up against any church that I ever worked with or for. I think we have the most spectacular ministry staff that you have ever seen. And they are incredibly competent in the work that they do and they work incredibly hard. But we're going to make a shift in the next three years we're going to talk about what it means to be lay, empowered in our participation in the kingdom of God's work.

And number three, we're going to form missional discipleship. And community is not just for kids, students and college age people, but for all believers. Your spiritual formation does not stop when you graduate from those age and stage processes. God still has purpose for you and things for you to learn and things for you to experience and do. In the same way that we desire and long for our children to be shaped into people that own their own faith, we need to keep doing that work as adults for all believers.

And so this is going to look a million different ways. But let me tell you a few. This looks like the revitalization of St. Ann's into a pocket neighborhood as we partner with Habitat for Humanity. You saw that video in November. It's going to be on the website.

You can look at it again. This looks like a partnership with the West Texas Homeless Network to prevent homelessness from happening. So we're going to address homelessness in Taylor county on two sides. One, to provide housing for those that need it. Two, to keep those in housing if they can stay with the lightest touch because homelessness is a terrible place to be.

This looks like supporting foster parents here at Highland and in Taylor county, where you have the opportunity to become a CASA advocate for children who are in the worst season of their lives. Where we can support the workers at 2, Engage who are doing the difficult work of trying to figure out what the next step is to support our own foster families here at Highland with days off and respite care and those kind of opportunities for them, and then support all foster families in Taylor County. It looks like accessing the care portal again, we want to work with those that are those children that are in the worst part of their lives. But if the best thing for them is really just to, with the slightest touch, allow them to stay in the environment that they're in because it's safe, they just need a little help, then your small group and your class that you can come together and do that work to give them the lightest, gentlest nudge, to allow them to stay on the right track. Here's the point.

It's pretty simple. The gospel announces a new reality where the blind receive their sight and the oppressed go free. And I wrote those words in November and I said them in November and I had no idea what was coming the next week when I would personally experience what it means in a very visceral way. The gospel announces a new reality where the blind receive their sight and the oppressed go free. But that's not the end of the story.

The end of the story is that it creates a community that makes that announcement visible, tangible in the world. And that's us. That's you. You are the visible and tangible evidence to the world that God is in the work of the restoration of all things. It's the church, and there's no Plan B.

And so we get to partner with God, with what God is doing in this world. Would you please stand while we sing?