Shane Hughes 6-15-25

I love how every year calf invades downtown Abilene. I love to go with my kids and experience the whole thing. It wasn't 108 degrees this year, which I was grateful for. It was a great weekend. And many people here at Highland are part of the reason why calf happens at all.

This isn't one of the kind of the formal aspects of our vision in the work to restore Abilene, but it's just this good work that happens. We have the visionaries here and the dreamers and the instigators who began calf. We have people here that read the same story over and over and over, and they had just as much energy the first time they read it as the 12th time that they read it. We have friends here who cut out literally hundreds of monster horns, panda noses for crafts. But we're particularly grateful for one of our own, for Jeff Nelson.

He has chaired the steering committee for staff for at least the last two years or three. Three years. And we are grateful for the way that you love and you serve our city, Jeff. Let's thank Jeff for the work that he.

There are. There are ways that we as a community are intentionally working to partner with God in the restoration of our city, but there's also just a million different ways that you can plant good work and good blessing to be good neighbors to those of us around you. And we're grateful for when we see it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, for the work of your hands that happen in this city, that happen in Thailand, that happen around the world, we give you power.

Praise Father. We're grateful for the way that the stories of the past have shaped our future. That changed the way we understand ourselves as new creation, changed the way we understand the world and our purpose around us. And so now, Father, as we turn our. Our minds and our hearts back to Ephesians, I pray that you pour through me the gift of preaching that I might speak your truth and love to these, your people.

It's together that the church says amen. So we've been in Ephesians for a little over a month now, and. And the entire way through, Paul has been trying to remind the church who they already are. The thing that Paul wants him to grasp is not a new teaching, it's not a new idea. It's.

It's not to give them something that they have not yet received. It's for them to realize what they already hold in their hands. And they were Jewish and they were Gentiles, and that meant they were separated by law and Ethnicity. They were apart from God because of sin and rebellion. They were lost and they were wandering.

But God chose them and through the Jesus Christ united them as a family and reconciled them back to God through his blood and formed them into a new creation, made them into a new people. And this reconciliation was not just with God, but it was with each other through Jesus Christ. God breaks the dividing walls between us and it makes something new. And God chooses to make them. And by this I mean the collective y', all, more than the individual you.

God chooses to make them into a temple, a place for God to abide. And because of Jesus Christ, they are adopted into God's family. Because of Jesus Christ, they are holy and they are separate apart from who they used to be. They are called into new purpose and meaning. Brothers and sisters, you are more loved than you could possibly imagine.

Paul says you are children of light.

And so I want to do two things today. One, I want us to grasp what we already have, that we are new creation. And that new creation involves more freedom than you could possibly imagine. I think there's more here. You are new creation.

And I wonder, like, how does this happen? How does this happen that somebody is transformed and changed? And part of the time I want to imagine it's like a light switch, that there was darkness in their life. And then Christ comes in and there's a flick. It's a sudden change, and you're this new creation.

You come out of the waters of baptism and you're changed. And if it were that simple, I mean, sometimes it is. My dad, before I was born, it was back in the 1970s, he smoked. He smoked cigarettes. And one day, my eldest sister Shelly, she was about 2 years old, and she picked up one of my dad's, stubbed out cigarettes off the dirt and she put it in her mouth, pretending to smoke.

She was imitating her dad. And my dad, in that moment, threw away the pack of cigarettes that he had in his front pocket and he never smoked again. Which, if you've ever been involved in any sort of addiction, you've ever been addicted to anything, you know how difficult that is just to walk away.

But I don't know if that transformation always works that way. I mean, sometimes you get transformed and then you spend the next few years trying to figure out what that means. It's kind of like the. Like when they switch from black and white to color TVs in the U.S. it was in 1958, and the President of NBC put push this button on the screen and all of A sudden, live on tv, it all became color because they had replaced all the cameras with color lenses, and it was ready to go unless you had a black and white tv. Then when the president pushed that button, nothing happened, right?

And it took 15 years before the average household in America had bought a color tv. And so there was this gift that was available to them. It was being broadcast through the air, but they weren't able to receive it. They couldn't access. Took some time for them to get there.

When I was an intern at the Impact Church of Christ down in Houston, it's a church planted in the heart of the city of Houston, designed to help the least of these. And I was working with the youth group, and there was this moment where this guy walks in and he looks like a teenager, but he is massive. And I can tell from the teenagers sitting around me that when he walked through the door, there was a whole bunch of energy that just suddenly electrified my row. And I look over to the kid sitting next to me, and I asked him, I said, who's that? What's the deal?

And he said, that's Tiny.

And the dude was huge. And I said, he's Tiny. And he said, well, he was, but Tiny lived in the neighborhood, and he was part of a gang that terrorized students, terrorized children, robbed convenience stores. The reason that there was energy in the room is because they were all afraid. And they weren't quite sure if he was going to just brazenly rob the church or sit down to worship.

And Tiny makes his way to about the middle front, and he sits down on the aisle, and we just wait and we watch.

And at the end of the sermon, I don't think it was a particularly great sermon that day, but at the end of the sermon, when they had the call to say, hey, if you want to pray with somebody, you come forward. Tiny comes forward and he pulls out of his pocket blue rag, and he places it on the edge of the platform. And at that moment, he was done with his life. He walked away from everything that he had been doing.

And I wish I could tell you it was like a bright sunshine morning. Beautiful story. But for the next two years, Tiny paid for that choice almost every day.

And he still had a lot of rough edges that he had to work off. There was still a lot of places where he had to figure out what Christ's call meant to him. But he made that decision. It flipped a switch of determination in his mind, and then he lived into it for a while.

Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4. Now I affirm and insist on this in the Lord. You must no longer walk the way the Gentiles walk. In their futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart.

They have lost all sensitivity and they have abandoned themselves to licentiousness. Not a word we use very often. Greedy to practice of every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ, for surely you have heard about him and you were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus, to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds and clothe yourself with the new self according to the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness. You know, it's fascinating because Paul begins by calling them Gentiles, which is odd because he just spent the chapter before saying, hey, we're.

Jesus is breaking down the dividing line between Jews and Gentiles. How God is doing this through the life of Jesus Christ. And I think he's speaking there less about their ethnicity and more about the culture. There was no doubt in Paul's mind that the average Roman Gentile that lived in Ephesus lived a more morally decayed state than the average Jew. Now in Romans chapter two, he would say that everybody's fallen Romans Chapter three, you'd see everyone's fallen Jewish short of the glory of God.

In Romans Chapter two he'd say, yeah, you know, the Jews have their own problems that were equally destructive about pride and hypocrisy and things like that. They should have known better. But in this spot, he begins by saying, don't live in that life anymore, instead become new creation.

We're past the hinge in Ephesus that happens in chapter three, going to four, and we're done hearing about what Christ has been doing in this world. Now Paul wants to tell us how to live. He wants to say, you know how to live. And the reality that Paul tells us in chapter four and five is that boundaries create the space for freedom to thrive. And that probably sounds paradoxical to us who, who live in West Texas, who has this strong libertarian streak within us, because when we think of true freedom or absolute freedom, that just means to do life without any boundaries.

It sounds like a paradox. It's in counterintuitive for Americans because we dream about the most freedom possible so that I can do what I want, and that's what's best. But we know if we Read our Old Testament, the scripture. That kind of freedom is superficial and it leads to chaos and it leads to ruined humans lives. You can look at the Book of Genesis, chapters four, going through 11.

You can look at the Book of Judges where the author states, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes and everything goes wrong. And so there's parameters that Paul lays out in chapters four and five about how you must live if you are to be people of the light. Parameters like, how do you deal with your anger? What does sexuality look like as people of the light? And money and work and relationships.

And then. And how is this all supposed to work out together if you have a group of Jews and a group of Gentiles and they have different basic assumptions about how the world's supposed to work? We have to have parameters. And within those boundaries we find. We find freedom.

It's kind of like Legos. I don't know if you play very much Legos in your life. I'm playing a lot of Legos in my life right now, but this is what I've learned from watching my sons play legos. The first time you get a LEGO set, you use the instructions, right? And you figure out how to build what the thing is supposed to be, whether that's a car or a dinosaur or a police station.

And it doesn't matter. You just build what it's supposed to be. But then you take that apart and you throw the instruction book away. Because what's more fun than building what it's supposed to be? And let me tell you, the least fun of all is just to build it and set it on the shelf and never touch it again.

That's the worst way to play Legos. I'll fight you about that. But the second time you build it, you just kind of combine it with the rest of your tub of Legos and you figure out what pieces you want to use, and then you just build and you can make all sorts of crazy and clever and funny stuff. One of my boys built a trash truck that had like the working arm in the back. It picked it up and dumped the trash into the back of it.

It was so cool. We don't own a trash truck, but he built one. Because in the boundaries of those blocks and those nibs, there's all sorts of freedom. And I tell you the truth, if you gave him just a pile of plastic and said, do something with it, he would have never made the trash truck. When they were smaller, we put safety locks on some of the kitchen cabinets.

There was A drawer that was their drawer with their stuff in it. It had their cups and their plates and their bowls. It was down low so that they could get into it, and those were their stuff. And. But there were other spots, like under the sink that they should not have access to.

In fact, there were very few spots in our house that they should not have access to. At the beginning, we had those nice baby gates that I could not open. I ended up standing over them way more than I went through them. They were just fences for me. But there were some places in our house that they should not have access to.

And there's still some places in our house that they still don't have access to. They don't realize it because they're in plain sight. It's books that they're not ready to read yet. They had places in the house they weren't supposed to go, and most of it was just practical cabinets that were too high to reach. But now they can.

A workshop and tools that were dangerous, but now they can kind of figure out their way. But more importantly than that, they had places in our house that were theirs. Right now, it feels like the whole house is theirs. But they used to have, like, a playroom, and then they would fill up that void with all sorts of things that they wanted to do. And sometimes it's chaos that goes crazy, and then we try to pull it back in, but then that goes chaos again.

But that's their space that they get to use. And in that space, I want them to reign. I want them to have free reign. I want them to choose what they want to do in that space. I don't want to go in there and micromanage that space and tell them how to build the Legos and show them how.

How to do the imaginary play. I don't want to regulate it. I don't want to micromanage it. I kind of want it to be feral time for them in our neighborhood. As they get a little bit older, I want them to be able to get on their bikes and go.

But they also need to know you can't stay on this side of South 27th and stay on this side of Buffalo Gap, because those are dangerous. But the rest of the neighborhood, it's theirs to explore.

And I think these are the kind of parameters that Paul lays out as we live our lives into our new identity as new creation. And actually, if you look at the book, there are very few limits that Paul wants to place on this new community.

But I think the reason that they're there is. Because if we refuse the boundaries of freedom, we end up in chaos. We end up harming one another. And so Paul says, don't lie, but tell the truth. In fact, all of these, through chapter four and chapter five, he's going to use that formula, don't do this, instead do that.

Don't lie, but tell the truth. How important is that into our world and into our community? Just to tell the truth, not to tell slant, not to tell your perspective, not to omit things, just tell the truth. And then he says, in your anger, don't sin.

And he doesn't say, I want you to notice that he doesn't mean don't get angry. If he were to say that, the response would be, that's impossible, because anger is the natural reaction to perceived injustice. And this may sound odd to you, but part of you was created to, to get angry because there will be injustice in the world and you're supposed to react to that and then do something about it. But there's a lot of times where our experience of anger is not justified in the circumstance that we find ourselves in. And so Paul says, in your anger, don't sin.

And if you want to teach your kids these things, here's the complicated part of that. You can't really tell them these things.

If you want to be a good parent, if you want to be a good dad, if you want to do these things, you can't really just tell them, hey, you have to tell the truth. Hey, you can't hit your brother. Hey, I realize you're angry, but you can't. You got to be kind because they're not going to listen to you. I know they won't listen to you when they're a teenager, but it's even hard for them to listen to you when they're little.

But they will watch you.

They will watch you to see if you tell the truth, whether it's convenient or it's not. They'll watch you when they're in the car, you get pulled over, and the police ask you the question, do you know why I pulled you over? They'll watch the way you treat your spouse and regardless of what you say, because Paul's going to get to this in just a minute when he talks the household codes of husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves, he's going to get to that in a second. But your children will watch the way you treat your spouse. So as much as you can say, respect women in your life, respect men in your life, if you're not doing it, they.

They can tell.

Paul says, don't steal, but do something useful with your time. And I think stealing has way more applications in our world than just seeing the bike in somebody else's yard and wanting it or the candy bar in the store. I think capitalism has created all sorts of nuanced means for taking things that's not yours, whether it's legal or not. It may not be kingdom work, but rather Paul says, make something. He says, do something not just so that you can store it up and gather it for yourself, but for others who are in need.

He says, do it for those that are hungry. And there is goodness in work.

I think Joyce Stalzell taught me this. There's. There's work was something that God created before the Fall. Work was intended to be part of God's good creation. And, and in God's kingdom, you get to make something, you get to do something.

And in our world, you often get to choose what you want to do. And in chapter five, he will continue. He says, in the kingdom, you don't get to have intimacy with just anyone you want. He'll say the intimacy is for covenant relationships, for marriage and those outside of those relationships. It's not appropriate.

Whether that's stepping out on the promise you've made or stepping into somebody else's promise, or playing flashed and loose with someone you have no intention of making a covenant with. All those things are destructive, but within the parameter of God, whether it's sex or work or managing your emotions, there is incredible freedom. And with that freedom comes creativity and comes purpose. And God wants to give that all to you.

And if you refuse this, Paul says in chapter five, you experience God's wrath. The best definition of God's wrath, I think, is. Comes from Da Silva. He says God's wrath is God giving us over, gives us to what we want. He says, if you refuse to stay within the parameters that are not destructive, then you can have what's outside of it.

But just understand, outside of that is chaos and hurt and damage.

God gives us parameters for the sake of freedom. And you cannot end up in the kingdom of God if you view freedom as a license to do whatever you want. But this is what God offers you. If you are willing to enter into new creation, to become a new Christian, you will be filled with the Spirit. Paul says, instead of being filled with wine and becoming drunk, be filled with the Spirit.

And I imagine that that filling happens in the same way that all the other changes happen. Sometimes it's a light switch. And you just decide, I'm never going down that road again. And sometimes it's an idea that you know is true. And it takes you 15 years to get to the place where you can live into that choice.

Sometimes it's just gradual awakening. I have parts of me that are completely filled with the spirit of God. And I have other parts of me. When this part grows to maturity, I realize there's another piece of me that needs to grow up and become mature and into the Spirit of God. And that God is constantly working on me and revealing all the different parts of me that still have not yet kind of submitted to God's kingdom.