Our Unique Life – Part 3
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 618 aired on July 2, 2017
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next thirty
minutes stay with me, please, will you? It’s going to be thirty minutes of motivation, some
inspiration, some education. And we always do this without any type of manipulation, no games,
no gimmicks, no appeals for money, not asking you to join anything, not want you to fess up,
give it up – nothing like that. This show is simply about giving you accurate information. Not
human speculation. Information from the canon of Scripture called the Bible and hopefully that’ll
help you orient and adjust to the plan of God. My job, verify and identify the plan of God. Your
job, orient and adjust if you would like to do so. The FLOT Line deals with the forward line of
troops. If you’ve never heard this show before – F.L.O.T. – Forward Line Of Troops. And what
we’re teaching is we’re using a military analogy to explain how if you’ll learn ten unique
problem-solving devices and use them as a forward line of troops in your soul then you can stop
the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside sources of stress. That’s why
we always say adversity is inevitable and stress is optional. So the Christian life is a very unique
life. We live in a unique time in history and you have the most unique life in history. And we
began a series two shows ago on this unique life that we live. And when we stopped off with our
last message we stopped off talking about our unique assets. And what I said was, once we
receive Christ as Savior, then we enter into the most amazing life the current world has ever
seen. I don’t know if you remember that, but I made that statement. I said, this life is unknown
and unseen in the Old Testament, but now we experience it. We are in the church, the body of
Christ, the church. No one in the Old Testament knew this would even exist. It was called the
mystery doctrine and yet here we are. Jesus Christ living inside of you. The same Christ that
resided in the temple of the Shekinah Glory is in you. 1 Corinthians 3 teaches,
“Don’t you know
that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?”
It’s Christ living in you. So it is an amazing
time and we have all of His assets. We are to assume His personality profile. The Bible says,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
And the Bible says,
“Put on the Lord
Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.”
So we are to think like He thought and we’re
to have the same personality profile that He had. And we do all of this, all of these things.
Ephesians 3:20,
“Now to Him who is able to do all of these things exceedingly abundantly above
all we could even ask or think, according to the power that works in us.”
And that power is the
Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit, problem-solving device number one, rebound allows you to be
filled with the Holy Spirit. Because as a believer you’ll sin and when you sin you’ll break
fellowship with the Holy Spirit. You don’t lose your salvation. It’s not that you’re no longer a
Christian because you committed a sin but the Holy Spirit is quenched and grieved in you and
you cannot live God’s plan for your life in the energy of the flesh without the power of the Holy
Spirit. It’s impossible. The Christian life functions on the power of the Holy Spirit. And so when
I sin, and I sin just like you, I have to use problem-solving device number one, go to God and
confess my sin. And this is where the Bible says,
“if we’ll confess our sin, He’s faithful and just
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to forgive us and purify us from all wrongdoing.”
So that’s problem-solving device number
one, rebound, confessing my sin and it opens the door to problem-solving device number
two, the filling of the Holy Spirit. I can live my life as a Christian in the energy of the flesh
or I can live my life in the power of the Spirit.
The Bible says,
“The flesh wars against the
Spirit, the Spirit wars against the flesh; these are contrary one to the other.”
So you can’t live in
both. You can’t put one foot in and one foot out. If you’ve quenched the Holy Spirit and grieved
the Holy Spirit it’s because you’ve sinned. When you sin you’re out of fellowship with God in
time. You don’t lose your relationship but you are out of fellowship. And we rebound to get back
in fellowship. We rebound to claim the filling of the Holy Spirit again. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17
says,
“Don’t you know that you’re the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
That’s
how unique you are. This wasn’t in the Old Testament. Only a few people were endued with the
Holy Spirit. Now every Christian, every Christian that hears my voice today or the voice of any
pastor-teacher evangelist who communicates the truth, they are indwelled by God the Holy
Spirit. That’s how unique we are. Verse 17,
“If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
destroy for the temple of God is holy and you are the temple.”
That’s a warning. When we get
into sin and we fail to rebound then we set ourselves up for the sin unto death. If you don’t
rebound, if you commit sin and don’t confess that sin to God. Some people say you have to
repent but they don’t know what the word means. It means to change your mind. Repent is
metanoia
to change the way you think. And this means you have to acknowledge that it’s sin and
you confess the sin to God and He’s faithful and He’s just to forgive you. Will you be tempted
again? Sure you will. And so that’s why your Christian life is a life of volitional decisions. You
have to make a decision every day. Will I wake up? Will I shower? Will I brush my teeth? Will I
go to the Word of God? Will I listen to a pastor teach me the Word of God? Will I apply the
things that I learned? Every day we have to make decisions. That’s how we advance in the
Christian life. There’s no one-shot deal. There’s no one-shot miracle where you can go to a
retreat and become automatically super spiritual. That doesn’t happen. So, as we live in these
unique times with the unique assets that we have, we have the ability to reside in the devil’s
world. But there’s always those temptations, always those distractions. Remember, you fight
against the world, the flesh and the devil. The lure of the world, the lust of the flesh and the lies
of the devil. In 1 Timothy 4:1-2 the Bible says,
“The Spirit expressly says that in the latter times
some will depart from faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking
lies in hypocrisy and having their conscience seared with a hot iron.”
To sear your conscience
with a hot iron is the Greek word
kauteriazo
.
Kauteriazo
is the Greek word sear and we get an
English word from it, cauterize. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a skin surgery or not. I had a
small skin cancer taken off my arm recently and to stop the bleeding they cauterized it. You
know and you could smell it. They’re burning it away. And that’s what cauterizing is like when
the cowboy would brand the cow and put the brand on him. He would take that hot branding iron
and press it into his hip. He’s branded. Sin brands us. It cauterizes us. And so when we have our
conscience seared with a hot iron, that means we have scar tissue. Scar tissue on the conscience.
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And that scar tissue can keep you from ever feeling guilty, it can keep you from ever feeling
conviction, it can stop your conscience from working. And this is exactly what Satan wants to
do. Those who spread false doctrines, those who spread lies in the latter times have their minds
branded with demonic thinking, demonic doctrine. It’s called doctrines of demons. Now listen,
no believer can be demon possessed. That’s impossible because the Bible says,
“Greater is He
that is in you than he that is in the world.”
But a believer can be demon influenced. He can buy
in to the doctrine of demons. He can believe a lie. And I have seen it happen. I have seen sound,
fundamentally sound, wonderful people change their mind about what they think the Bible says
and move away from the things they learned to things that not even true any longer. And so the
Bible warns us put off the old manner of man, put off the old habits, put off the old actions which
are corrupt and lead to deceitful lust and be transformed and here’s the word repent, be renewed,
transformed, in the spirit of your mind, change the way you think and put on the new man which
after God is created in righteousness and in true holiness. So what are the mechanics for putting
on the new man? If I just said, ‘Hey my friend put on the new man.’ What exactly does that
mean? Well, one, here it is, one, if you use your volition to advance spiritually, you’re putting on
the new man. That means that you are
taking in God’s Word on a consistent basis under the
authority of a well-qualified pastor.
Now I’m going to be honest about this. If you’re a believer
in Jesus Christ and you don’t spend time studying God’s Word daily, it’s going to take you a long
time to ever advance to be spiritually mature. And you’re not going to do it by doing a fifteen
minute morning devotion with some book you bought at the bookstore. Listen, I recommend you
sit under the ministry of a great pastor who can teach you God’s word and there a lot of guys out
there. You’ve heard me say it over and over again, they offer their Bible studies free of charge.
They don’t sell anything. My own pastor has been teaching the life of Christ well over one
thousand hours and you can get any of those thousand hours. They’re yours free of charge. Other
pastors that I know across this country have tremendous ministries. And that’s what I do on a
daily basis, sit down with a notebook, with a Bible, listen to my pastor teach me God’s Word.
You have to do that.
You have to use your volition to advance spiritually.
If you’re not
growing, if you’re not studying, you’re not advancing. You’re going backwards to tell the truth.
But secondly, the second mechanic for putting on the new man is to change the way you think.
The Bible tells us quit thinking human viewpoint. Learn to think divine viewpoint.
Romans
12:3,
“Stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think, but think in
terms of humility as God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from His Word.”
And then, number three, change the way you relate to life. In other words, now once you’re
beginning to advance in God’s plan, if you’re going to put on a new man, you have to live with
grace orientation. You have to orient to the grace of God which means, number one, you know
you’re saved by grace and you know you’re living by grace and you know there’s dying grace,
there’s even surpassing grace when you get to heaven. But living by grace is an amazing thing.
Grace – I operate my ministry that way. Sometimes people are amazed that we don’t ask for
money. Sometimes when I speak in schools or other places that I speak, they want to know what
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the charge is and I say nothing and they like, well how do you do it and I say grace. If God’s in
it, God pays for it. I learned that from my pastor many years ago. Don’t go around with your
hand out. Any Christian that has got his hand out trying to raise money is not depending on
grace, he’s trying to do it himself. So I keep my mouth shut. I don’t even talk about money and
God supplies the needs. It’s that simple. He graces me out. He graces you out. He graced us out
in eternity past. He graces us out every day. I bet you can give me illustrations in your life just
this past week where God protected you, where He blessed you, where He promoted you, where
He graced you out. And you are supposed to grace other people out. That means you don’t seek
revenge, you’re not bitter, you’re not implacable, you grace out even those whom you don’t like.
God graced you out in eternity past where it says,
“God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son.”
That was before you were born, before you even came on the scene. God loved
you. Did you deserve God’s love? No, you’re a jerk just like me. We’re both just jerks and yet He
loved us and He saved us. Why are we jerks? Because we’re identified with Adam’s original sin.
We were born spiritually dead. We’re sinners. We have a sin nature. And even though we believe
in Jesus Christ and are born again, it doesn’t subdue the sin nature, it’s still there. The only thing
that will subdue your sin nature is when you get a new body in heaven. Once this body checks
out and goes back to dust, then you’ll get a new body, a resurrection body. It will not have a sin
nature because it will not be associated with Adam, like the one you’re in now. That’s why you
hurt. That’s why you’re getting old. That’s why things are going on in your body you don’t
understand. It’s Adam’s association. It had to happen that way.
“By one man sin entered into the
world and death by sin is passed on to all.”
Spiritual death yes, and physical death yes. So we
change the way we relate by using grace orientation. And here’s another way, point four, you
change your goals. If we want to put on the new man, we have
to think in a different way on
our goals in life and that’s having a sense of destiny.
See, having a personal sense of destiny,
that’s problem-solving device number six. Grace orientation, that’s problem-solving device
number five. Divine viewpoint is biblical orientation, there’s another problem-solving device.
These are all problem-solving devices and put them together and they make the FLOT line of
your soul. So these are all done, all of these things – using your volition to advance spiritually,
changing the way you think, changing the way you relate, changing your goals – they are all done
by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit plus the grace apparatus for perception. The grace
apparatus for perception is a Bible and a pastor in privacy and you have those three things
available to you. If you use your volition to get it, then you can allow the Holy Spirit to coach
you, mentor you, tutor you as Jesus said He would do.
He uses the Word to tutor us. He uses
the Word to guide us.
If you don’t have the Word of God, then there are no barriers that He can
direct you to. That’s what He uses. That’s why I just keep insisting that you grow spiritually by
getting under the ministry of a qualified pastor. So another thing unique about us is the
imputation of eternal life. Eternal life in John 10:28-29,
“I give unto them eternal life, and they
will never perish. Neither shall any man ever pluck them out of My Father’s hand.”
The
invitation of eternal life alone is completely amazing. I mean, just think about it, you are going to
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live forever. Death can have no victory over you. Yes, in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 15:55,
“O
death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin and the
strength of sin is the Law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our
Lord.”
We have eternal life. That’s an amazing asset. But we also have assets that we can use in
time. You’ve got a Bible don’t you? God gave you a Bible, a canon of Scripture. If you’re like
me, you’ve got more than one Bible. And it’s not designed to ride around in the back window of
your car. It’s designed to be a textbook, not a novel. Reading the Bible through once a year
doesn’t do anything for you. Glad you did it. Wonderful. Hooray. It’s not a novel.
The Bible is a
textbook. It’s designed to be taught to you by God the Holy Spirit through a qualified
pastor.
So the canon of Scripture is a Bible. Hebrews 4:12,
“The Word of God is alive and
powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and
the spirit and the joints and marrow, as a critic of thought and intents of the heart.”
Yes, you
have a Bible. That’s an asset available for use in time. Secondly, you have an asset available for
the use in time of the filling of the Holy Spirit. He’s the One who enables us to use these assets.
And then thirdly, the induement of individual spiritual gifts. You have a spiritual gift. A gift for
service in the body of Christ. It’s not earned, it’s not deserved, it’s not acquired by some
emotional experience. When you were saved, it was given to you and it becomes operational by
means of your spiritual growth.
Every person listening to me has a spiritual gift if you’re a
believer. Not all have the same gift. Some are pastor-teachers, some are evangelists, some
have the gift of helps, some have the gift of mercy, some have the gift of giving, some have
the gift of administration.
There’s no thing like the gift of singing;
that’s a talent not a
spiritual gift.
So people need to understand what the spiritual gifts are because you’ve got one.
That’s where you fit into the body of Christ. It’s critical you understand that the spiritual gift is
important. In 1 Corinthians 12:11,
“But one in the same Spirit works all these things, distributing
to each one individually as He wills.”
So that’s the Holy Spirit giving us those spiritual gifts.
Giving (Romans 12:8), helps (1 Corinthians 12:28), mercy (Romans 12:8), administration
(Romans 12:8), service gift (Romans 12:7). There’s some of them listed right there with the
Scripture verses. My pastor once said that spiritual gifts are the basis for the team concept in the
royal family of God. In other words, your spiritual gift determines the position you play on that
team. No matter how inconspicuous or how insignificant your gift may seem to be, you are on
the team and your gift is critical and just as necessary as any other gift. Another one is you have
been given the provision of a well-qualified pastor as an asset in time, someone to oversee you,
to shepherd you. First Peter 5:2,
“Shepherd the flock of God
[Peter wrote]
which is among you,
serving as overseers, not by compulsion, but willingly, and not for dishonest gain
[you hear that?
not for dishonest gain, but what?]
but to be a shepherd
[an overseer, one who looks over, who
exercises and observes the authority within the congregation].” Your pastor is held responsible
by God for the direction and the administration of His body of believers. His job, he must keep
an eye on all that goes on using your gift, the service gifts in the congregation to keep him
advised, keep him informed. He can’t do all the work. And so he’s an overseer. To have oversight
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episkopeo,
overseer, means he looks upon, he exercises full control, to look at, to understand. It’s
a compound word,
epi + skopeo,
two words together and means to fully look at, to fully observe.
And so God gave you that man, that pastor. You want to know, finding your right man or your
right woman is a significant thing in your life. Who am I going to spend the rest of my life with?
You know what I’m talking about? You know equally important (I was going to say much more,
maybe so) is finding your right pastor. The person you will spend the rest of your life with as the
shepherd of your soul. The pastor who will look over you. See, one of the problems we have in
modern Christianity today is we hire these pastors and two or three years later we run them off
and get another one. Or they use the church as a steppingstone to go to the next bigger church
and the next bigger church and the next bigger church. Where are these men that are willing to
stick it out with their congregation? That shepherd that pastors a congregation 15, 20 years, 25
years. My own pastor, pastored his church fifty-three years before the Lord took him home. His
son is now the pastor and he’s been there thirteen years teaching God’s Word. What about your
pastor? How long has he been there? Has he stuck it out or is he a Johnny-come-lately, come and
go? Does he teach God’s Word or does he seek to fire you up emotionally with some kind of
emotional service to get you all fired up for Jesus and send you out into the devil’s world? That
doesn’t work. You don’t get fired up for Jesus.
You grow up spiritually and replicate Jesus,
replicate His life, re-present Him. It’s not an emotional thing. It’s an intellect that lives.
Your whole spiritual life is lived in your soul.
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ
Jesus.” “Whatever a man thinks, that he is,”
the Bible says. That’s where you live your spiritual
life – between your ears. And that’s what God checks on when He wants to check on you – what
you’re thinking. So it’s important that you learn that. Another way of understanding assets that
God has given us is we have new vocabulary. Now that we have a spiritual IQ, not just a human
IQ, we can develop new terms, new concepts. Learning to think in a different way. It’s called
thinking divine viewpoint and it’s the motivation behind any decision you have to make while
you’re still here on this earth, or as my friend, one pastor said, as long as you’re still in the arena
of contention. So God, you know, He inspects our human thoughts. He evaluates our progress as
believers. He checks out our motives and our intentions and our desires. If you didn’t know that,
Revelation 2:23b says,
“…I am He who searches the mind and the hearts and I will give to each
of you according to your production.”
We have an amazing promise associated with thinking
divine viewpoint. If we do that, the Bible says in Isaiah 26:3,
“You will keep him in perfect
peace whose mind is stayed on Thee because he trusted in Thee.”
Perfect peace. No worry, no
fear, no animosity, no hostility. What a wonderful way to live. And who does it?
“Thou will keep
him in perfect peace.”
God the Holy Spirit does this for you. He sustains you. In Psalm 119:165,
“Those who love Your Law have great peace and nothing causes them to stumble.”
This is not a
peace that comes from the justification of salvation. This is much more. It’s much more than just
being justified by faith. This is a peace that you are living your life to the fullest extent of God’s
plan and you are comfortable in your personal sense of destiny and you know that God is in
business twenty-four hours a day. The Supreme Court of heaven is open, you can always take
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any complaints to Him. It’s a life living free of anxiety, free of worry, free of depression – free.
Wonderful. Philippians 4:6,
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and
supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which
surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our
Lord.”
That’s an amazing life. That’s a unique life and only a mature believer can enjoy those
things. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re learning. And I hope you will come back next week.
As always, same time, same channel, same station. Until then, I am your host Rick Hughes
saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line.