Shane Hughes 10-12-25

Good morning, Highland. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here. It's a delight to be with you. We are going through a series about our pathway, which is those five signs on the wall over there.

A pathway is the expectation of what you want to do. If you want to be a part of Highland, if you want to be a member here. This is. This is our expectation. This is what we would like you to engage in.

We'd like to. To engage in, in four behaviors, four postures, and we've been talking about these the last few weeks. If you're new, let me give you a brief update. You know, we want you to. To engage in table, not just the Lord's Supper, but also in a small group.

And the metric for this, as we talked about last week, was one unlikely friendship. Our goal would be that you form a friend that you would never have had otherwise because of your participation here at Highland. Someone that's very different than you, that doesn't look like you, doesn't come from the same place that you do, but it happens because you both believe in the same thing. You both believe in Jesus Christ. We want you to engage in baptism, not just to meet Christ at the waters, but a regular process, a habit of, of spiritual development, of formation.

And the metric of this is pretty simple. It's, are you a more kinder person than you were previously? Are you more joyful person, a more peaceful person? Do you worry less than you used to? What difference is active engagement in the spirit and the disciplines doing in your world?

And probably the best metric for this is just to ask somebody that's at your work, not necessarily somebody at your house, but ask somebody, do you see a difference in me? It's easy for us to come together, and for this hour and a half, you can fake it, you can be kind, you can be gentle even to your kids. But the real question is, are you being kind and gentle to the people around you? And. And so I would find somebody at your work, at your school, maybe even.

Even best yet, somebody that's not a believer. So they don't. They don't know what you're. The answer, right, that you're trying to get out of them. Am I a person who's more kind and gentle?

The third is cross. Are you self? Are you finding joy and self emptying service? Are you giving yourself up for others? Are you becoming a less selfish person?

And today we're going to talk about worship. We want you to know this experience of the living God and, And We've. We've talked. I got an email this week and I want to just address it because I think it was a very thoughtful deal. Our effort here at Highland, we talk about the vision of Highland is restore Highland, Abilene and the world.

And what we believe in that is that God's power working through us. We can partner with God to do kind of the will that God wants to do, to see God's preferred future being carried out in real life. We don't do. We don't restore Highland just so Highland can be great. That's never been our goal.

We actually do this. We work together so that we can be better vessels, be in the posture to be formed, to be shaped, to be changed. This isn't so much about being a part of this church as it is chasing after Jesus. Jesus is really our goal. It's never anything else.

Today we're going to talk about worship. And fundamentally, I think what you want to get out of worship, although we do want you to show up here on a regular basis because we believe that this, this time in the week matters. Taking the Lord's Supper together, hearing a word from God, being in community with one another, it matters. But more importantly than that, we want you to be in a posture that is open to experience awe. We want you to develop a mindset, a habit of a mindset that's attentive to God even when emotion fails.

Sometimes you might be here or sometimes you might be somewhere else and you just don't feel like it. Or even when words fail, you can't describe what it is that you're experiencing right now, whether it's positive, negative, or somewhere in between. When emotion fails and words fail, even when it feels like, or it seems like God is failing, God is distant. We want you to develop the habit where you keep showing up anyway. You keep finding yourself in that posture of worship that is open and attentive to the mystery and the awe for God.

And the reason that we believe this matters is because there is within you a hunger for the infinite. There is within you a hunger for mystery. And the reason this is is because you are not just made up of earth, you are also made up of heaven. And so there is. There is a part of you that desires intimacy with the intimate.

What part? Intimacy with the infinite. What part is that of you, that part of you that desires worship. And you can experience this in this room and in this place and as we sing together, as we lift our hearts and our minds together, but you can experience this in A million different places. Look up at the stars late at night, experience the ocean and hear the waves.

Find the dazzling beauty of symmetry in someone else's face or the fractals in a flower. Creation sings of the beauty and the power of the wonder of God. So literally, worship is to recognize someone or something as having superior value. And in the Old English, I think this, you can understand why the word changed. But in the Old English, the word used to be worth, ship.

And that's, like, hard to say. That's why it changed, right? That's why we lowered it down to worship. But worth ship, because you find value in something. This is what it looks like.

Imagine with me that you received some jewelry from your grandmother, but you didn't know what to do with it. It really wasn't your style, but so you just threw it in the top of your dresser. Or one day you find a painting at a yard sale or somewhere else, and you liked it, but you didn't really know where how to hang it. And so you just put it in a closet for a little while. But then one day, someone is over at your house and they understand something about jewelry, and you show them, well, yeah, here's a piece from my grandmother.

And that person just stops and locks in for a minute. And then they look at you and there's like, some excitement in their eyes. Like, do you know what you have here? And you're like, yeah, my grandma gave it to me. Like, no, you don't understand.

This is a real ruby. This is a large, real ruby. This is very valuable. And if they looked carefully, they might say, oh, and you know, the way that this is crafted together, you can tell this is very old. This is at least 200 years old.

And you're like, oh, really? Or they look at your closet and they pull out that painting and they say, do you know who painted this? And you're like, not really. Got it at a garage sale. And then they say the name.

It's a vaguely familiar artist to you. It doesn't really matter who it is. And then they say, look down here at the bottom. It's signed and it's numbered. This says 118 out of 200.

That means this is extraordinarily rare. And then they begin to point out to you all of the technical beauty of the piece, but also the fact that this artist is dead. And that means what you have in your hands is extraordinarily valuable.

So let me ask you the question. After you have that experience from that friend, what happens to you, my guess is like your stance about you toward your piece totally changes, right? You admire that piece of jewelry. You appreciate the art that you picked up. You imagine how your life is going to be different now that you have it.

And that night, you don't just put it back in the closet or place it back in your top drawer. You hang it above your mantle. You give it prominence. You might even think, I ought to insure this piece. You think of a frame that might look good.

You buy a better box to store your grandmother's jewelry. What has happened is that your friend that came to your house has led you in worth ship and there is this thing in your life that you didn't have a proper orientation towards, but when you do, it changes everything. And you imagine in your head, well, you know, one day I think I might wear this piece of jewelry that my grandma gave me that I never really cared for because it's very valuable. I and your friend might even say, hey, you know, if you go and clean this and have just a jewelry, do a little repair, it could become even more valuable. But really, with a piece like this, you need to send it to New York or to Switzerland and it's going to cost you a couple grand to do this.

But you say, of course, you know, you really, if you want to get this framed, you need to send it to an archivist so it can protect the vellum.

Or, you know, maybe it's led to a change. It's led to an investment in your life. Or imagine a piece of real estate. You buy some farmland out north of here somewhere. And then some geologist comes along and says, hey, I think you have oil.

I think we should invest a little bit of money and get some of that money back. Or a piece of real estate, any piece of real estate. This is a true story. When Natalie, my wife, bought our first house, we bought it, it was over at Canterbury Trails down off of Judge Ely, and we bought a HUD repo. Now this was back in like early aughts.

And so I don't know if these numbers make any sense to you. They don't make any sense to me anymore. So we bought this HUD repo and it was a terrible mess. It had one toilet, one shower and one sink that worked. They were all in different rooms.

So I had to brush my teeth. Here, take a shower. But when we bought this house, it cost us $55,000. After the down payment, my mortgage was like 4, 458amonth. That number just doesn't sound real to me anymore.

And so we lived here for a while, and then it was time to move. We were going to go to Arkansas. And so we called three real estate agents and we said, hey, would you come and tell us what you think we ought to sell our house for? Would you consider selling our house? And the first one came over and he said to me, you know, you bought this for 55,000.

You've lived in it for about two, two and a half years. Let's add five, 10% to the total. I bet if you sell it, you could sell it for $60,000. And we thought, wow, that's a lot of money. Like, this is pretty crazy.

And then the next one came in and took a look at the house and said, wow, you know, you've. You've really worked on these bathrooms. You put tile in the kitchen floor. I bet if you sold this house, you would get 70, maybe $75,000 for it. And in our math, we just.

We like, we were doing, you know, math in our heads, we're like, wow, this is amazing. And then the third real estate agent comes, and she walks through the house and she comes back with a list. And she hands us a list. She tears it off, she hands it to us, and she says, if you do these things completely remodel your kitchen, you need to paint the exterior, put new roofing on, it's going to cost you about $25,000. But if you do these three things, these few things, I think I can sell your house for about $125,000.

And I was blown away. Now imagine with me for just a moment, if I just listened to that first real estate agent and thought, 10%, that's pretty good ought to go with this one, right? Is that what we did? No, of course not. We put in all the work.

We used all, we beg bartered steel to get enough money to do the repairs. And we didn't make $125,000 when we sold the house. I think we made like $127,000. It was amazing. Now imagine with me that instead of a house, take my Toyota Corolla to the, to the mechanic.

And the mechanic comes out and says, hey, you know, I think with about $25,000, we could really fix this thing up. I'm kicking that car to the curb, right? It's done right? It's over. There's a sense that, which when you put things in their proper place and then give them their proper value, it makes all the difference.

This is true in your things. It's also true in your time. You can imagine with me just, like, standing in line. Nobody loves to stand in line. You know, this is gonna be 10 or 15 minutes before it's your turn.

But you look in front of you or behind you and there's that him there or there's that her there. And all of a sudden, you don't mind saying that line very much anymore. In fact, you'd be just fine if that line took forever. I have a friend that lives up in New York City, and she was riding the subway and like an A list celebrity sat down beside next to her in the subway. Now, she did not say a word to him, but she rode the subway all the way down to Tribeca just to sit next to him for, like, that much longer.

She didn't care. That time was worth it, right? Never said a word to him. In John, chapter four, the author is giving us a sense of how to orient ourselves toward proper worship. And John chapter four is a deeply theological conversation between Jesus and a Samaritan woman.

Now, Jesus has deeply theological conversations throughout the book of John, but most of the time there were Jews, and most of the time they're with men. Like the story of Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a respected Jewish leader who comes to Jesus at night and has a deep conversation about what does it mean to be born from above. But this is very surprising because this person is not a Jew and is a woman. More often than not, Jewish men would not even speak to this woman.

But Jesus not only speaks to her, he considers her theological claims, and he responds to her. Jesus has a deep and meaningful conversation, and they're at a well when this conversation happens. Important things happen at wells. Abraham's servant meets Isaac's wife at a well, and Jacob meets Rachel at a well, and Jesus meets this Samaritan woman. Now, I don't think that Jesus is intent to marry this woman, but I do think John is trying to say something about the marriage that's going to happen between Jesus and the Gentiles.

And so she has a question to the one Jewish male that will talk to her, which mountain are we supposed to worship on? And he kind of vaults over that theological sawhorse argument about where is the right place to worship, who has the approved location to speak deeply into this woman's life?

And they talk about water. Jesus says, look, I have water. That if you drank it, you would never be thirsty again. And she misunderstands because she's had to lug her water jug all the way from the village out to this well in the heat. And that's no fun.

And so she says, would you give me that water? As a very practical ask so that I don't have to do all this work anymore. And Jesus says that water is a person who is right in front of you. He says, I am. He the one who is speaking to you.

Now, literally, what he says is, I am. Which if you know, is a big claim in the Bible, this is how God reveals God's self to Moses in the burning bush. I am. And in the Book of John, this woman is the only person whom Jesus reveals himself to. And Luke and Matthew.

He has this conversation with the Pharisees, really ticks them off because he says, you know, before the law, I am. And they get upset about that. But then he goes on to say something that's very important. He says, the worship is in spirit and truth. It's not in Jerusalem.

It's not on Mount Gerizim where the Samaritans think it might be. And I used to think that what Jesus is trying to say is, well, it doesn't mean you don't worship him here or you don't worship him there. It. It means that you can worship Jesus anywhere. But that's not what he means.

He goes on to say, true worship will come, but the hour, Jesus says, and the hour in John is always a reference to his crucifixion. The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. And I think what Jesus is trying to say is that it's not about the right mountain, and it's not about the right hymnody. It's not about the right notes. It's about the right person.

It's about Jesus Christ.

Because worshiping rightly changes everything. And you see this throughout Scripture, right? You see that in Isaiah. At the beginning of Isaiah, Isaiah's call, he has this vision, and he's caught up into the throne room of heaven. God is there, and the seraphims are there, and they're singing all day, all throughout history, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.

And then God in that moment, offers the worst job description ever. He says, who will go spend their career preaching to a people that will not listen? It doesn't matter how persuasive you are. It doesn't matter how creative you are. Who.

They will not listen. And Isaiah takes the job. Why does he do it in the New Testament, in the Book of Acts. There's Stephen. And Stephen is an early evangelist, and he's a witness to what God is doing.

And he's about to be killed as a martyr. And just as he's about to die, his last words are, lord, do not hold this sin against them. How is he able to do that?

Well, both of them are able to commit their lives to these things because they both saw God.

Worship of God puts your world in the right order. And I think it's. Sometimes it's difficult for us to grasp this. CS Lewis speaks of a child, you know, making mud pies in his backyard, rejecting an offer of going to the beach for vacation because they can't simply fathom what they're being offered. I think when.

When one of my boys was little, he had a blanket, and he named it Thick. We had another blanket. You can guess its name. It was called Thin. Very creative.

But Thick was his buddy. And Thick came with my son everywhere. Thick was dragged through the dirt and the grass and everywhere. Ended up in the bathtub once or twice. Everywhere.

And I firmly believe that about three years ago, you could have offered my son a house in Elmwood trading for Thick, and he would have said no because he understood the value.

God is not worthy of worship because of deity. God is worthy of our worship because God is good.

And worship when you're rightly aligned with God, when you're able to take that posture, it changes you. It gives you a sense of gratitude. Have you ever met a person that's not grateful for anything? Right. Met a person who doesn't praise anything?

These are the most mean, cramped, crabby people that I've ever met. Right. The food is always too hot or too cold. The service is too slow or. Or too rude.

And any little thing that happens in the course of their day that they don't like ruins their entire day. And they become that way because they don't have gratitude. And what they need more than anything else is just to behold God, to praise that which is infinitely greater than they will ever be. Tim Keller says it this way. When you can praise God, it unhooks all kinds of other praise.

It changes the way you see the world and you see beauty and you see and wonder and mystery everywhere. There is another set of people who demand to be praised and to be told of their worth. The people need to sit beside successful people so that they too can be seen. Or they twist stories or even make stuff up whole cloth so that they can be the hero. And honestly, I think they are to be pitied.

I think they're to be pitied because there's a deep and cavernous hole in them that they are desperately trying to fill. But the reality is they need the same thing as those who cannot express gratitude. They need to sit and bask in the wonder, the awe, and the worship of God.

So I'm not going to imagine some sort of backstory with this woman beyond what is given. She is tragically unfortunate, mistreated and broken. What she needed was to be able to worship God that was standing before her face to face.

And here's the bottom line.

You have to worship God so that you can be fully human.

There is no other way. There will always be a part of you that is a deep and cavernous hole that cannot be filled. You will always be desperately trying to search for the one thing that will try to fit in that spot, but never will. You will always be bitter and angry and full of complaint unless you can go outside at night and lift your eyes to the stars and see the wonder that God has created. True worship is not a place, or that place or any place.

True worship is a person. Jesus Christ, would you please stand for our benediction?

Hyland, I want to. I want to challenge you this week to find a place where you can put yourself in a posture, to experience awe. Place yourself in a space where you can marvel at wonder and experience worship of God in spirit and truth. May you go with God's peace.