Shane Hughes 2-8-26

Please be seated. Thanks. Jace. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here.

And if you're here for the first time, and it is so good to have you with us, it's a delight to be with you here today. I want you just to take a moment and think about what you admire about Jesus. What is it that you admire about Jesus? I am so fortunate because I get to. I get.

I get to work in a job where I get to just talk for weeks about what I admire about Jesus. We could spend the next five years in the Gospels just talking about how awesome Jesus is. We would never run out of things to say. If you turn to the person next to you, I almost guarantee they would say something different about what they admire about Jesus than what you admire about Jesus. I love Jesus wisdom.

I admire Jesus wisdom. Do you remember that story in John where the Pharisees bring a woman caught in the act of adultery? And Jesus is in a no win situation. He's either gonna be soft on law or he's gonna condemn this woman to death. And it seems like they've caught him.

It seems like he's trapped. And then Jesus wisely asks one question and then spends a little time riding in the sand. And all that's left is the woman. And him. He says, go and sin no more.

I love his wisdom. I love his power. I admire his power. His power to heal, his power to exorcise demons. His power to create miracles that feed thousands.

I love his love for children. I love the way that in a society that did not value children, they were best silent and swept away. Jesus invites them to come and to be near him. And, and you can almost in the, in the, in your wonder of your life about Jesus. What did he play with him?

Is he playing catch? Is he rolling in the grass? I love the story of the cross. I admire Jesus courage as he knows exactly what is going to happen. And he asked God if there's any other way.

I would rather do that way. Get not your will, but mine. Not my will, but yours be done. But not just the story of the cross. It's the story of the empty grave.

It's the story of the example that he raises for all of us to live and that we too can live resurrected lives. And the answer that has evolved for me, what I admire about Jesus. And it's changed for me and lately there's kind of been a concept that's completely changing the way I understand God and what God is doing in the world through Jesus. And Figuring out how I can be part of that witness and part of that plan. And that's where we're inviting our church to go over the next three years.

We've talked for the last few weeks about the 2029 Restoration Vision, about the. The work that we're going to do in our church, in our city and in our world. And I want to just kind of point out these new signs on the side of the wall. This is our job, this is our mission, to be part of a restoration movement, right? We're going to find where God is doing the restoration of all things.

We're going to join that work. We're going to join that work in our hearts where God is moving within you. We're going to join that work with our neighbors in our city, and we're going to spread that message around the world. And so today our text is in Second Corinthians. And just for a little bit of context, I think that if Paul was trying to describe his relationship with the Corinthians at this point in the story, he would say it's complicated.

So, like, after he leaves planting the church in Corinth, he hears about some things that are happening in that church, and they send him some questions. This is First Corinthians. And so he responds with some answers. And some of those words are pretty harsh. Some of the stuff he says is pretty hard to hear.

But he wants to come and meet them. And so he comes to visit them and they don't like what he said. And that visit does not go well. And so Paul leaves again. And sometimes it's better just to leave when you're in that intractable argument.

He steps away and he writes Second Corinthians. It's a letter of reconciliation. He's trying to do two things simultaneously. He's trying to let them know his heart of how he feels about them, but also he needs to reorient them toward the gospel. At the same time, he needs them to see, to work to repair the relationship, also enlightening them to what God is already doing.

And N.T. wright has been offering this kind of revolution of what our purpose is, because he says, maybe the kingdom of God is less about us falling in love with Jesus and then waiting around to die and then escaping this world so that we can spend eternity with God. Maybe it's less about that instead. Maybe it's more about what God is doing in this world by bringing the experience of heaven to. To earth.

I wonder if what God has in store for you for the Rest of your life is more than just waiting to experience heaven. I wonder if restoration, if reconciliation, can happen to you now. And I wonder what happens when we become the ambassadors of what that looks like to the people around us. Because what Paul wants to say is we are new creation. And I think what Paul means by that is we are giving a new story to our broken narratives.

I want to tell you about a friend of mine named Derek. Derek. I met Derek in California. And I met Derek in a rehab facility. It was a skilled nursing facility.

Derek had been driving with his children. Derek was high, and he was in an accident. His children were fine, but Derek was paralyzed. And so when I met Derek, he was in the process of figuring out what does my life look like in a wheelchair? What does my life look like when my ex wife is now in custody of the kids?

Because I'm not responsible for that now. How do I move forward in this? And Derek's life was very simple at this point. Of all the complications that he had in the world, of all the stress that he had in the world, it had all boiled down to just one thing. Derek was fully committed to telling a new story to his broken narrative.

And I got to kind of witness this. As friends surrounded him and people from our church began to visit him, Derek's life began to change. And he began to work to reconcile things with his ex wife. Not that they're going to get remarried, but that they can live at peace with one another. And he began to reconcile things with his children so his children could begin to trust him.

And he began to do the internal work to begin to change his life. And he realized that he. His addiction was much more about self medication than it was about experiencing some sort of high. That there was pain in his life that he hadn't dealt with. And when he began to deal with that pain, his addiction began to fade.

And it was an exciting moment. Baptizing someone that's in a wheelchair is a tricky thing. It was an exciting moment when Derek is baptized and he's baptized in a tub in this skilled nursing facility. And the room is crowded because everybody from church has shown up because they want to see this moment. And it filled that little bathroom that we were all in.

And then it filled the hallway. And then there was people in the rooms just kind of straining to see. And if they couldn't see, they just wanted to hear Derek's confession. And bit by bit and day by day, Derek began to. Well, it wasn't Derek, it was God that began to rewrite a new story over his broken narrative.

Paul says, we regard everyone from an otherworldly point of view, because in the first century and in the 21st century, it's easy to disregard and dismiss another human being. Because I can't see the potential in them, because all I can see is skin color or social status. That's all I see. I can't look past that. And I'm reminded of my friend Jared.

Jared Jordan. Jared Jordan is a. Is a VP at Netflix. His. His salary bonus is more than I'll ever make in my life.

The Netflix decided that he flies so much that he should just use his own plane because it would be cheaper than keeping buying him tickets. Right. He's a very important person. And Jared was at church one Sunday. Tears are coming down his eyes at communion.

We talked to him afterwards. It turns out that that week, Jared had been pulled over by the San Jose police. And he had been sat on the curb, cuffed with his hands behind his back, as his two boys watched from the backseat. Jared had worked his entire life to insulate himself from that kind of problem. But because of the color of his skin, it found him.

I want to tell you the story of Damaran Berkeley. Paul says that we are Christ's ambassadors, and because of that, we are new creation. And that changes our minds and it changes our lives. Damarin Berkeley was second chair in a very important lawsuit between Google and Uber. I don't know if you remember, but a few years ago, Uber stole a bunch of IP information, and Google was suing to get it back.

And this is a lawsuit that's worth billions of dollars. And Damarin is sitting in the second chair representing Google in that case. But Damarin grew up in the projects in Dallas, subsidized housing. And it was because somebody believed in him that he got into college and because he worked hard and somebody else gave him a chance. He got into law school, and he finds himself in one of the most important cases in a decade in Google's history.

And then one evening, Damarin and his wife Wakita invited Natalie and I to their house. She said, we're going to have some friends over, some friends from church and some other friends, and we want you to experience it. Wakita made this lasagna. It was an amazing lasagna. Her lasagna can change the world.

And what happened afterwards was their friends that were mostly black and our church leaders that were mostly white, we all just kind of sat together in their living room, and Damarin Said we. What I want you to do is listen. And one by one, each of our black brothers and sisters began to tell stories of racism, institutional racism, personal experiences of racism, much like Jared's story. And we listened.

And now I realize what Damarin was doing. He was re. Traumatizing himself by telling the hard stories of his life so that I could have the benefit. He shouldn't have had to tell those stories to me, but he was willing to do it so that I might learn something. And something happens in that situation.

Whenever a bunch of white people are confronted by the stories that makes them feel uncomfortable, the first thing they try to do is exonerate themselves. They say, well, I'm not like those other people. The second thing they try to do is apologize. But the best thing that Damara taught me to do was just to sit, listen.

I got to tell you the truth. I believe that that context. I believe that that pan of lasagna really can change the world.

Because we aren't always going to agree about everything, even in church.

But if we follow the spirit of Paul and we practice this ministry of reconciliation, I think it's a miracle. But. But it's an everyday miracle. It occurs. Cause when you serve beside somebody else's ambassadors, even if we disagree politically, there is an incredible power that brings us together because God is reconciling the world to himself.

And we are invited to be a part. You are invited to be an ambassador. Right now, the Olympics are happening. The Winter Olympics, which are my favorite. I didn't know this, but this is the best definition of a Winter Olympic.

It has to occur on snow or ice. I can tell you where every Olympic event in the Olympics, every Winter Olympic event comes from. It comes from a bunch of kids that were playing around on winter break, right? Skeleton is the most terrifying event probably in the Olympics. You go face down on a sled, down a luge, and you're going 80 miles an hour.

You just have a helmet to protect you. I know exactly where that happened. It was a bunch of kids on Christmas break that got their sled, and somebody said, I'm going head first. Right? They went down the hill.

I have no idea what it takes to be like one of the ski jumpers. Like, those knees don't exist in my world anymore. But they're going 100 miles an hour, sailing through the air. They're 150ft off of the slope. That's crazy.

But it started when some kids said, hey, watch this. And I wish. I really wish. I often long for this, I've said it before, I really wish that they would put a normal person in the Olympics so you could see just how impressive these people are. I mean, Katie Ledecky is the fastest swimmer in the world.

Long distance wise, she's the fastest woman swimmer in the world. She holds 18 of the 20 records. The only person she's competing against is herself. If you put me against her in a one mile swim and you gave me a 40 minute head start, I'm still confident she's going to beat me. There's this amazing human achievement that happens at the Olympics and there's some level in which Olympians are serving as ambassadors.

We serve as ambassadors when we articulate our faith because this is the secret. This church is full of Olympians too. In a way. You should show up on a Wednesday night at Freedom and Grace and watch the Olympians at our church that connect to people that are very different than themselves. In the name of Jesus, you should show up in the pantry on a day when people from this church are being the hands and feet of Jesus, providing dignity to those in our city so that no one goes hungry.

We are serving lunches to families during breaks in schools so the bellies don't go to sleep hungry. We're preventing homelessness in our city. We stand beside those who are suffering. There are Olympians in this room.

I just wish you had the eyes to see them. Paul in Philippians, chapter three. Despite the amazing giftedness that God gave him and God gives us, he says, I count all those things as lost for the sake of Jesus. If someone else he writes, thinks that they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, Paul says, I have more. He's like, you want to compare a resume?

Here it is circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews in guard to the law, a Pharisee. As for zeal persecuting the church, as for. As for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But he says, and this is the key where you hang in there. But whatever were gains to me, I can now consider loss for the sake of Christ.

What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things, I consider them garbage that I may gain Christ. Paul in First Corinthians, chapter 9, he writes, for though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all so that I might gain all the more to the Jews. I became a Jew in order to gain the Jews to those under the law, I became one under the law. Although myself, I am not under the law so that I might gain those under the law. To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law, though I am not outside God's law, but within Christ's law, so that I might gain those outside the law.

To the weak, I became weak so that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all people that I might by all means save some. And I do it all. Paul writes, for the sake of the Gospel, so that I might become a partner in it. Now, what Paul is talking about here is an example that exists in First Corinthians.

He talks about it in other places is meat sacrificed to idols. And he says, there are some that are strong and some that are weak. And here's the situation, if you never understood this before me, is extremely expensive in the first century. And nobody would waste a piece of meat by eating it without it being blessed by a God first. And so the only place that you can really eat meat and most people didn't have enough money to eat meat every day.

It was kind of a special occasion. You would go to a temple or that meat had been sacrificed to a God, and then they took it over to kind of a restaurant that served on the side of the temple. And then there you could eat it and you could buy some, or you could bring your meat and have it blessed and then eat it. The problem was that these are pagan temples. And so Jews and Christians struggled with this question, can I eat that meat because it's contaminated?

It's been dedicated to a foreign God. There's no way I can eat that. Right? And so those that Paul calls weak of faith, they couldn't eat the meat. But then there were these others on the other side of the table who had a stronger faith, a mature faith, and they knew that there was no God but the one true God.

And so whatever that idol is, it's nothing. And so there's no reason that you can't eat meat. Of course you can eat meat, because there's nothing wrong with that inherently. But what Paul says is, though, even though I find myself in a mature faith, even though I find myself in a place of confidence that I can eat anything that I choose, I'm going to elect not to do it for the sake of my weaker brothers and sisters.

He gave up his freedom as a mature believer to eat whatever he wanted. He gave up his freedom for the sake of those he Was trying to share the story of God with Paul writes to win some, we become all things. I think I've experienced this in my life, personally. I know that you have two. I gave up my hoodie and my quarter half zip in California to move to West Texas, and instead I wear a Magellan fishing shirt.

Because you've become all things to all people. And I see some of you with Magellan fishing shirts on. I know you don't fish that much. There's not even that much water around here to fish that much. You become all things to all people.

We have, like a whole shelf of, oh, I messed it up in first, and I'm gonna forget it. I'm moving on. It was a joke. It was terrible in first. I should have just dropped it.

You become all things to all peoples, right? You know, like, to sports fans, I try to care about the game today more than I care about the commercials. Right? That's not true. But whatever.

You get into people's lives, you learn to see what they're passionate about. You learn to see what matters to them. You get into their business, you even get into their politics.

It's not just culture. Paul says he became weak to the weak.

And this is where we are. We must exegete our culture as carefully as we exegete our scripture.

And I think our culture has shifted. I think we used to convince people of the gospel. I think if we could just convince them that our truth was a better truth than their truth, then somehow, rationally, they would adjust to our truth and then they would be saved. But the locus for understanding truth has shifted from our brains to our hearts. The receptor for validating truth no longer exists in our heads.

What I mean is simply this. We don't argue people into the gospel anymore. We love them into the gospel. And that's going to change everything. We can no longer rely on big buildings and great programs to draw people into our church.

That's no longer true. I think our culture used to be interested in church as an institution that could provide meaning into their lives and help for their families and community, for their hearts. But I think that's no longer the case. It still exists, but it's no longer the case. That's our hospitality.

But it can't be the end of our story. I think us living together into the restoration of all things, living together into the life that God has called us to is not as members of a club, but missionaries sent by God. Our lives must be devoted into living into the promise that God offers us. That Heaven is not some distant future point, but heaven is the reality that we can begin to experience now. And here's my conviction.

My conviction is most of our neighbors that live in our city, most of the people around this world, they really don't just want to be members of a different club. They just. They don't want to just stand up here, sit up here, show up here on Sundays to get a ticket punched. Actually, what they want to be part of is what we want to be part of. The restoration of all things.

And I'm kind of excited to see what it looks like when our church begins to embrace this fully, to see our lives as living different stories, to be ministers of reconciliation, to be part of the restoration of all things, to be witnesses to what God is doing in our church, our city, and in our world. Will you please stand for our benediction?

Hyland, I want to invite you into the most wonderful task. It doesn't matter whether you wear a hoodie or a fishing shirt. What matters is that this week you carry the gospel into the lives of the people around you, that you share your heart and your life with them. That when they look at you, what they actually see is Jesus. So may you be bold and courageous in the words you share.

May you go in faith as you go in peace.