Shane Hughes 9-13-26

Good morning, Hyland. It is good to see you here today. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here. One time I was at my grandmother's house.

My grandmother lived in rural middle Indiana, and she had grown up. She was on a farm that she and my grandfather had. Small farm, four or five acres. And as she got older, she hadn't been able to really keep it up. And so she had her little vegetable patch that was beside her house, but the rest of the area had gone pretty wild.

And that was most of my experience when I was little to about 10 years old. When I was there that year, it had just been. You know, it almost become forest. There were trees and lots of grass and some scrub all this around. But this year that I was there, she had leased out that space to a real farmer who was going to plow it.

And so while we were there, I saw the process of this kind of fun, imaginary place. We got to run around and just turned into flat chaos, right? All the trees got pulled, all the scrub brushes got yanked, all the grass got plowed under, and it just became these troughs. And like most summers in Indiana, in the afternoon one day, it rained pretty hard, and all that dirt became mud and puddles. And I lost something.

I'd lost the beauty of my grandmother's, you know, land. But she took me aside and she said, I want to tell you what this farmer is going to do, because he was there, he was doing the work. And she said, he is going to plow this ground so that that rain doesn't wash all the good soil away. He's going to make the contour of it around the earth. And then he's going to plant corn.

And if you were to come back here later on in the fall, that corn would be six, seven feet tall. And when I think of that story, I think that's how I've come to understand the old words of Genesis chapter one. Then God said, let us make humankind in our image.

It's that moment before the ground is tilled while there's still chaos all over my grandmother's farm, where someone is going to take that and in the combination of their own hands and the sun, create flourishing. Would you please pray with me? Heavenly Father, we're grateful to be in this place. I'm grateful for these people who. Who have gathered together around your table in your name to remember your son, Jesus, the power of his life, his death, and his resurrection.

And, Father, for all of the concerns that run through our minds, the Worries and the anxiety and the things that we need to get done this week, Father, we pray that we're able to put them aside for a moment as we meditate on your word, as we allow its power to seep deeply into our hearts and our souls. Souls to transform us, to create order out of chaos, to create life where there was nothing, Father. To make this a good place full of good people. And to that end, I pray that you pour through me the gift of preaching that I might speak your truth in love to these, your people. It's together that the church said amen.

So this summer, while I was on study break, I had the opportunity to read several books. One of those books was called Letters to a Future Saint. And it was a fascinating book. It's actually written by a guy named Brad east, who's sitting right over there. And it was a fantastic work.

And the reason it was good is because it takes kind of a systematic theology, which most scholars need thousands of pages to articulate, and put it in this thing that's very easy to read over the course of a week. And I began with a pencil and then a highlighter, and I began conversations in the margins. And then I realized, like, I know this guy. I can talk to him whenever I want. And so this.

This fall, we're going to be working slowly through that book together, using that kind of the. The scope and the sequence in a series that we're calling from Dust and. And we're in week four now. We've already been in it. You didn't know it, but we're in it.

And so if you want to get this book and you want to catch up and read along with us, I think that's a great idea. But you don't have to. But we're going to be thinking together about the wide big story, story of the power of the gospel. I think there's two people in this room that probably need this book more than anyone else. Man.

If you're brand new at this Christian thing and you're not sure what to think about it, if you're here for the first time and you're like, I have no idea what just happened at communion. I have no idea what all these people are talking about. I don't understand half the words in these songs. Like, this doesn't make any sense. This is a good book for you.

You. Because it's going to set out in a way that allows you to see what God's future, preferred future is for you. I think this is a great way for you to hear the gospel the other way, you might. Person that might need to hear this is somebody in this room that's tired. You're kind of cynical.

You've heard it all already. You kind of. You know where this bus goes. Maybe you need a fresh look and a fresh hearing of what the gospel and what Jesus can do in your world. So those two people, if that's you, if you find yourself in that space today, if you're a college student, just trying to figure it all out, this is a good book for you.

So what we're going to talk about today, what I want us to think about together, is what does it mean to be created in the image of God? The imago dei. Last week, I wanted to challenge you just to experience the goodness of God's creation. God made it, and it is good. It's day one, it is good.

Day two, it is good. Day three, it is good. And I wanted you to have, like, a. A very concrete expression of gratitude, not for creation in general or life, but something very much in particular. And I got a ton of text last week.

Pictures of sunrises, pictures of sunsets, but none of it captured them. What happened more than on Thursday when it rained and all of a sudden the temperature dropped like 30 degrees. It was awesome. Soccer practice was canceled. It was amazing.

And we had that, like, it was like a future glimpse of the fall. Like, it won't be long, you know, just hang in there. We only had it for like 12 hours, but it is coming. You know, it's going to be cool eventually.

And so I want to challenge you this week to do something a little bit different. We're going to talk about that at the end of the sermon. We've argued for centuries about what the image of God means. How do and how do we bear that image? Is it our logic, our ability to reason?

Is it our capacity for relationship and love? Is it our place that God puts us in, in creation, as stewards? All of those have been offered. But what I want us to realize is that the story itself begins with God, who faces a formless and void, faces formless void, and then speaks light into it, who gathers the waters and sets a boundary, who brings forth green things and living creatures, and finally walks in the garden in the cool of the day. The first thing we learn about the one whose image we bear is that this one creates order out of chaos and then rests.

And there's some very clear ways that you can see that we bear the image of God in the way that God created a humankind, so can you.

You can create a new life that has its own personality and its own ability to choose. And it will choose to love you, it will choose to disappoint you. It'll choose to do a million things. It will make things you never expected and see things you never imagined and. And you made it.

And so I want us to think about the idea of the imago dei. The image of God is not a possession we hold. I'd like you to think about it as a rhythm we're invited into. You watch a child, right? Two year old, give him a handful of blocks or pile of mud or a bunch of magna tiles, it doesn't matter.

Something in them cannot leave that chaos alone, right? They must make a tower. They're going to create a road through the mud and a creature with sticks and arms. And then they're going to create a story that goes with those things that they created. They don't know the word ex nilio, but they know the pull, the desire that's in them to take something formless and give it a shape that was not there before.

Adults do the same thing with an empty page to write a poem, an empty room to create a space that's hospitable, a broken relationship and make it whole. Even a whole neighborhood that's forgotten how to talk to itself. I love this line from Barbara Brown Taylor. She says we are haunted by the possibility of order. We keep trying to speak a word that gathers the waters.

Yet that same story, that same impulse that gives us the creativity, also gives us the seventh day. After all the work of ordering comes the deliberate ceasing. I'm sorry, I said that wrong. After all, the work of ordering comes the deliberate ceasing. Struggle and peace are not enemies, they are partners.

And the field that was once chaos becomes a place of green and then in its season, a place of harvest, rest. And I believe that the human heart is created for both movements. We're not meant to be only to live in the frenzy of making, not only in the stillness that never risks anything new. We are made for the rhythm, the lean into, the hard work of shaping and the trust that lets the work be enough for now.

Not only are we created to create, but also we're created to be noble stewards. And I think that word nobility probably has grown a bit thin in our mouths because I think we've lost the reason for it. I imagine most of us think of nobility. We might think of like the King of England and wonder what he's there for. But there's an older sense which remains.

And it's a powerful, it's a deep word. To be noble is to use what strength you have on behalf of something larger than your own comfort.

And that image is completed when one has been given the power to create, begins to give that power away for the sake of the weak, the overlooked, the next generation, the land itself. Sacrifice is the mature form of the creative life. The God who spoke light into darkness also walked toward the cross. And I've watched people live in this rhythm without ever naming it. I don't know if you know this story about Highland, but our former community minister, Joe Amanza, he turned a neglected lot on the other side of the Grace building into a community garden.

And he spent time wrestling weeds and summer heat. But then at the end of the day when the harvest came, he sat quietly at a table and he watched children eat the tomatoes he grew.

Or the one who rebuilds a broken friendship through patient, costly conversations, then simply enjoys the ordinary evenings that follow. Or the artist who keeps making beauty in a culture that prefers distraction, then offers the work without demanding it save anyone.

In each case, the same two movements appear. The holy struggle to bring order from chaos and the quiet nobility of spitting oneself for the good that outlasts the self.

And I think there's no end to human dignity being.

There is an end to human dignity being a world where there is no longer the struggle to produce, protect or steward. I heard a story a couple of weeks ago from a friend of mine that works back in California in Silicon Valley, and his manager had sent him like a three page document that had been clearly written by AI. It was plainly obvious to which two of his co workers responded with almost the exact same phrases. And they had done it separately. Now I don't know if they were doing this ironically, but the responses were like, you're absolutely right.

And honestly, great question. Actually, wait, let me sit on this for a moment because I think there's a deeper layer. They both said the exact same thing. It was Claude talking to Claude like they didn't even need human workers anymore. And my friend reflected that there is real work that he's doing at the startup he's involved in.

And there's real vision and there's real goals to achieve. And none of those things are easy. In fact, they are quite difficult. But no one was trying to do the hard thing of stewardship and creation because the easy route was so easy.

You don't have to look very far in a culture Glued to no cost, algorithmic dopamine that has lost a sense of the richness of the struggle of creation.

And I wonder if this is what it means to be created in the image of God. I wonder if what God has given you, your firstborn gift, is your ability to imagine realities that don't exist and the deep desire in with you to have the nobility to struggle to provide something from someone else. I don't know if you've ever talked to a grown man in a way that they can articulate to you what they long to do as they die. But my experience in my opportunities to have that conversation, whether it's at a campfire or in a hospital bed, nine times out of ten, the way that a man wants to die is to die with meaning for something, because of something, to protect something they desire longingly in their hearts to be noble.

Not that we possess a divine spark that we must protect, but that we were drawn almost against our will into that same pattern of creating, resting and giving that marked the first week of the world.

Now how do we actually do this without falling into a couple of ditches? I want to think about that for a second first. That's that creative impulse that's within you. The danger on one side is grandiosity, treating our ability to bring order as if it were the original creator rather than sub creators. And if we start believing the project will justify any cost or that our identity and our success is in the thing that we're building.

And this is where we're reminded we are viceroys of a king, but not the king itself. We possess dominion given by God to be good stewards of our minds and our bodies and the community and creation around us. So on one side it's grandiosity to be known by our power, and the other side it's just paralysis, the fear that we cannot create something perfect or permanent, then we should not begin both. These are forms of pride. And the worst thing for me to do when I'm starting something new, it's a new hobby or a new skill or something I desperately need to do, is see somebody else that's been doing it for 15 years do it.

Well, I look at Jack Maxwell painting and I think to myself, there's no way I could ever do that. And so I don't even try.

The gospel is the answer. I'm sorry? The gospel answer is simpler and it's harder. You are free to create because the ultimate order of the universe does not depend on you. Christ has already spoken the decisive word over the chaos of sin and death.

Therefore, you can work with excellence and still sleep at night. You can start the hard thing knowing it may not be finished in your lifetime and it may not even be remembered.

There's temptation to be known. There's the fear of not being forgotten. One of my mentors in ministry, his name is Randy hall, and he worked in San Angelo for a while as a campus minister. But his father had worked there from before he was born until he was about 4 or 5 years old. 40, 50 years later, he and his wife Kathy, they go back to San Angelo to visit that church again.

And no one in that church knew his father's name. No one remembered that he had worked there at all, which was a humbling experience. I know another story of another minister, a former minister at a church who had retired, and he snuck into that church at night when no one else was there, and he hung a picture of himself in the foyer because he was so afraid he'd be forgotten. The goal has never been a statue. The reward is participation in the work that God is already doing.

And so we live in a rhythm of struggle and peace. And I think the modern life wants to flatten both of those things. It wants to turn struggle into chronic anxiety and peace into endless distraction. But the biblical pattern, the story of Genesis chapter one, is different. It's seasons of intense, focused effort followed by deliberate rest.

That is not laziness, it's trust.

Practically, what this means is to build real limits into your week. Sabbath habits for a disciple of Jesus are not optional relationships that are not constantly on work that has to have an endpoint at some point in your day. And without these limits in your life, the desire for noble struggle hurdles into burnout and into the counterfeit nobility of always being the indispensable one. But the truth is, you're not.

But there is a way in which nobility is sacrificial provision.

The world around us will tell you that self sacrifice is either codependence or a form of weakness. But Scripture says the opposite. The glory of the image bearer is most clearly seen when strength is spent for others. But there's two pitfalls for this. One is kind of a martyr complex that's constantly keeping score and a tally and eventually grows bitter.

The other is the quiet refusal to sacrifice anything at all. That's dressed up as self care or boundaries. But the way between those two rocks is the cross. Jesus did not die to make us feel guilty for not doing more. He died so that our imperfect and inconsistent efforts that Provision and sacrifice could be gathered into his finished work.

And the practical fruit of that kind of effort is freedom. It's to give without the need of a receipt or validation or a freedom to allow you to stop giving in particular ways when wisdom requires it. Without feeling you've betrayed your calling.

And I think the reward of living in a life of struggle and peace and rest, to be the person that bears the divine image of God, is deeper congruence with the one whose image you bear.

And I think you begin to experience in ordinary days the same joy that the Creator we can imagine took in that first week. That is seeing something good take shape and resting in it and spending yourself so that others might share it. And that kind of joy, that kind of joy is durable. It survives failed projects and unnoticed sacrifices because its source is not the outcome, but the participation itself. And we can live at times and moments that amplify and distort these longings.

Technology has given us unprecedented power to shape and order, code and markets and narratives, even human biology, yet the same power that leaves us feeling more chaotic and more fragmented and more alone. And so we can see around us the struggle and peace as a rhythm is everywhere.

And it's frequently answered with either relentless hustle or numbing consumption.

And I do think that this is something that's in you. It's the Creator's first gift. I think it's something that's innate, as innate as a sense of justice. You take that same two year old that's been building something out of Magna Tiles or Legos and you take something away from them and they will cry out about the injustice of this. It's a bodily elemental howl that says something has been broken that ought not to have been broken.

And nobody needed to give that child a copy of Genesis first. She already knew that is dust and breath talking long before we can tally up our achievements, long before we check the mirror to see if we measure up. The image of God is already there, already given, already breathing in us the way it was breathing in the first Adam before that human being had done a single thing to earn it. And that may be a hard thing to hear, because I think we have gotten very good in this country at selling the good life back to people who already have everything they need to live it. You turn on the television and in between the innings you see ads for things that you think are going to give you the good life.

And it's a cold beer and it's a truck driving into the sunset. It's a vision of your own childhood, scrubbed clean of everything that actually made it hard. You pick up your phone and there it is again, quieter, but no less insistent. Promising that you will finally arrive and that you will have the good life.

But there is another measure. The good life. And it's not a philosophy. It's not a five step program. It's a person.

It's Jesus, who lived one whole human life inside of a body made from the same dust as yours. Who never once needed the beer or the sunset or the filtered photograph to tell him who he was. Here's the thing about Jesus. Jesus lived his entire life and he never betrayed a friend.

Ever.

And so I asked my freshman in a Bible class that I teach over at acu, I asked him, have you ever been betrayed by a friend before? And almost every hand shoots up, right? We know what that feels like. Cause we know what it's like when we were two years old and someone took our toy. We know exactly what it feels like when someone betrays us.

And one student, he was a football player at acu, he raised his hand this semester and he said, yeah, you know, I was dating this girl back in Houston, and she just called me about a week and a half ago and said, hey, I don't think it's working out. He said, I found out about three weeks before she decided that. Just didn't tell me she was stepping out. You felt betrayed.

We all know what that feels like. Every hand in the room was up. And then I turned the question, do you know what it feels like to betray a friend? And not as many people wanted to share that part.

Jesus lives a life of dignity, seen every human being for who they are. And he never betrays any of them. Jesus lives his life and he never betrays his father. Not once. Not even in the worst hour of his life.

In a garden, sweating something that looked like blood, asking if there is any other way and staying anyway. And if you want to know what it looks like to have the good life, if you want to know what it looks like to live in harmony with God and with other people, it's not an achievement you post. It's not a beauty you curate. It's a faithfulness you keep one ordinary day after another until it becomes who you are.

And I have to tell you the truth, every other system in this world, every other philosophy cannot give you that. The only thing in this universe that can give you the good life is Jesus. It's not wealth, it's not beauty. It's not winning. Everything will leave you empty, except for Jesus.

But you know what? You look a lot like it.

I think you kind of look like his brother. I think you look a little bit like his sister. I think you have the same image in you that we see in him.

So I think there's only one question left this morning.

Which good life are you going to spend the rest of your life chasing? Because you are dust and you are breath.

And the gospel today is you have a choice. What do you want to choose? Would you please stand for our benediction?

My brothers and sisters, you have a striking image to our Father. I see it in each of you. You've got his ears and you've got his eyes and you've got his gait. Some of you have his laugh, and some of you have his smile.

So may you be an image of the invisible God to everyone you meet. May you find joy and peace in the work. And the rest, may you go with God's blessing and go in peace.