Volitional Responsibility
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 640 aired on December 10, 2017
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes I’d like to ask you to stay with me. The FLOT Line, 30 minutes of motivation, some
inspiration, a whole lot of education, and it’s all designed to remind you of Biblical truths and
introduce you to a new way of studying, an in-depth way of learning God’s Word. It’s all done
without any type of manipulation or even any solicitation. My job here is to verify for you and
identify for you, if I can do this, God’s plan and I hope your job will be to orient and adjust to the
plan. Remember, the FLOT line stands for an invisible line of troops in your soul. It’s a new way
of thinking. It’s forming a main line of resistance that keeps the outside sources of adversity
before they ever become the inside sources of stress. That’s why we always say, adversity is
inevitable, stress is optional. By learning God’s unique resources, those problem-solving devices,
you are able to keep the adversity at a distance. You’re able to have divine viewpoint. You’re able
to maintain a relaxed mental attitude and you’re able to not get stressed out over anything in your
life. That’s one of the advantages of being a Christian. We have so many advantages and
sometimes we have to make a course correction in our life when we get off track and forget those
advantages. That’s what I want to remind you about today, having a course correction, taking a
look at yourself and seeing some of the things that maybe we need to correct. Today I want to
talk to you about volitional responsibility.
What is volition? It’s your ability to choose.
God
gave you a soul, the invisible immortal part of you and this soul has mentality. You have the
ability to think and to logic and to reason and to comprehend. You also have volition and that’s a
decider, a chooser. God did not make you into a little bitty automaton or a robot.
God gave you
free will, the freedom to choose, and under the law of volitional responsibility most of the
time we cause our own misery and our own suffering.
A specific cause for suffering,
especially in believers, is that we make our own misery. About 90% of the suffering we go
through is self-induced by mismanaging our money, mismanaging our health, or mismanaging
our personal relationships. Every human being, whether a Christian or not, has to take the
responsibility for their own decisions and for their own actions in life. We need to understand
that we cannot blame other people for our misery.
We cannot blame other people if we’re
unhappy and we cannot blame other people for our suffering. We must take full
responsibility based on our own wrong decisions
related to our associations in life, our
activities in life, our motives in life, and our functions in life. Because it is inevitable that
throughout all of our life as a Christian we are going to sin. We may get into performing human
good thinking that it’s glorifying God when it’s not. It’s really just evil. And we may fail by
getting involved in evil. Volition is the cause for every sin, even in insanity or neurosis or
psychosis or sociopathic behavior. It’s always the volition. So God states the law of volitional
responsibility in Galatians 6:7,
“Be not deceived, God cannot be mocked. Whatever a man sows,
this he will also reap.”
Under the law of volitional responsibility, everyone of us inflicts on
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ourself unbearable suffering much of the time from, for example, our personal sins. And we get
under divine discipline when we don’t rebound and recover from these sins. We suffer from the
function of immoral degeneracy in our life. We suffer when we grieve the Holy Spirit and
quench the Holy Spirit and we suffer many times because we don’t have any common sense and
we make some seriously bad calls, bad judgments because we get subjective and we get arrogant.
We overestimate our own abilities or we fail to see ourselves as we really are.
Both a believer
and a nonbeliever, the disadvantaged person, have to function under the law of volitional
responsibility not only in regard to sin but also from the perspective of the laws of divine
establishment.
These are the operational laws for the entire human race within the framework of
a national entity like America. There can be intense suffering when we violate the sacredness of
life, property, privacy, by committing criminal acts and there’s also suffering when we reject our
responsibilities in freedom. Many of our wrong decisions come from our own arrogance so God
seeks to protect you and me from this. He’s provided parents, police officers, pastors, coaches,
bosses, all of these are types of authority and we are to orient to this authority. You know, it’s
obvious since the fall of Adam that man is essentially kind of a fool. This is proved by a
tremendous amount of suffering we experience throughout every generation in human history.
The reason is because we’re all born with handicaps. Some of them are genetic handicaps and
flaws, these are things you’re born with, the tendencies you have. Some are acquired handicaps,
acquired environmental handicaps like drug addiction or alcoholism. Maybe your parents were
alcoholics and you know you’re not suppose to be drinking but you do anyhow and you become
an alcoholic. That’s a genetic handicap. Then we make decisions and we handicap ourselves with
our own arrogance flaws and this adds up to suffering.
We have genetic tendencies and we
have chosen tendencies, things that we choose ourselves, the acquired flaws in our life.
You
may be suffering because of a flaw, an acquired flaw, a lust for something in particular. This is
where we get into real problems. So essentially we manufacture our own problems and the result
is suffering. But wonderfully stated, God manufactures solutions and blessings in the middle of
suffering because only our God has provided a system that can turn all cursing into blessing and
this is through the rebound technique.
If we are suffering because of sin, because of evil,
because of mismanagement of our life, mismanagement of our circumstances, if we go to
the Father and we admit our sin, all suffering is turned to blessing.
The pain may continue
for a while but for a different reason, not because He’s trying to discipline us, but because we are
needing to learn something. There are some ways you can make yourself miserable under the law
of volitional responsibility. It applies in several categories of your life. Things you think, the
reasons you’re motivated to do certain things, the decisions that you make, and your actions.
Let’s consider this one first.
Negative or wrong thinking is self-imposed misery.
What’s
negative thinking? It’s human viewpoint thinking.
The Bible clearly states in Philippians 2:5,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
We are to think like Christ thought, the
Bible clearly says in 1 Corinthians 2:16, the Bible is the mind of Christ. As we learn God’s Word
and we acquire divine viewpoint, we begin to think correctly. We don’t think wrong. Thinking
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wrong is thinking in terms of arrogance, blind arrogance and you begin to see yourself as you’re
not. You think you’re something but you’re not. That’s having a false self-image, unrealistic self-
image and over-estimation of your ability to do something. Negative thinking includes any type
of wrong mental attitude, arrogance, any type of bitterness, any type of antagonism, things that
cause you to react in your life, things that cause you to get out of the plan of God rather than
responding by thinking divine viewpoint.
Wrong thinking leads to wrong motivation and
that’s also a type of self-imposed misery in your life.
Wrong thinking, wrong motivation, and
we enter into self-imposed misery long before we make any decisions that cause a lot of
suffering. Then we get to our decisions, we make a wrong decision and this brings more misery.
Wrong decisions lead us to wrong actions. These wrong actions can be classified in one or
two ways, deliberate wrong actions or impulsive wrong actions,
which is nothing but self
gratification or self-induced misery usually based on your emotions. Let’s go over this one more
time. Listen carefully.
There are several ways to make yourself miserable and the law of
volitional responsibility applies to each one of these: wrong thinking, wrong motivation,
wrong decisions, and wrong actions.
The Bible clearly says in Hosea 8:7,
“They who sow to
the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”
In Colossians 3:25,
“For he who does wrong will receive the
consequences of that wrong for which he has done for there is no partiality with God.”
There are
several categories of wrong decisions which produce this self-induced misery that I’m talking
about under the law of volitional responsibility.
The first one would be a wrong decision based
on sin.
You know what sin is. You don’t need me to tell you. Sin can be something you think,
something you say, or something you do. When you make a wrong decision based on one of
these motivations to sin, to think something you shouldn’t think in the form of lust, to say
something you shouldn’t say in the form of lying or criticism or backbiting or slander, or to do
something you shouldn’t do, the result of some actual sin like drunkenness or adultery or
fornication or stealing, these are wrong decisions based on the sin nature. And when you get
involved in this you’re going to come under the hammer from God. If you are suffering today, it
may be the hammer of God disciplining you. You have to make this decision but if you think it is
true, then rebound the sin and God will turn the suffering into blessing.
Another way we suffer
is from wrong decisions based on human good. Human good is not divine good. Human
good is doing something that you think is right but you do it in the wrong way.
For example,
prayer can be human good. There’s a right way to pray and a wrong way to pray. So you can pray
all you want to but if you’re praying in the wrong way it’s not going to go any higher than the
ceiling. That’s why I’ve told you this verse that says,
“If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord
will not hear me.”
Sin quenches the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Sin grieves the Holy Spirit. And
any good that you do for God while the Holy Spirit is quenched or grieved in your life is human
good. 1 Corinthians 3:11-16 calls it
“Wood, hay, or stubble.”
When you make a wrong decision
based on human good it’s wood, hay, and stubble. It does you no good. You can make a wrong
decision resulting in evil in your life.
Evil is the perpetuation of Satan’s plan for the
glorification of mankind.
All humanism, progressivism, anything like this is evil, this is Satan’s
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genius. You know, the progressive or the humanist may say, “If we just put a chicken in
everybody’s pot. If we can give everybody the same amount of money. If we could give
everybody this or that, then we wouldn’t have any more crime, no more sin. We would all be
happy.” That’s not true. No one can solve the problem of the sin nature. We all have it. Even the
president has a sin nature, even a king has a sin nature, even a Catholic Pope has a sin nature.
Every man born has a sin nature and we cannot eradicate the sin nature because it’s part of our
Adamic curse.
“For by one man sin came into the world, and death by sin and now death is
passed on all for all have sinned and the wages of sin is death.”
When we allow our sin nature to
get in control of our life and to promote the satanic plan of humanism, progressivism, socialism,
these are all evil. This is saying that, “If we can make everybody equal, then we’ll have a utopia
and we’ll all be in great shape,” and that is not true. Our Lord Jesus Christ said,
“You will always
have the poor with you.”
Our Lord Jesus Christ said,
“There will always be wars and rumors of
wars.”
The Lord Jesus Christ warned about this. The satanic plan is the smokescreen that leads
you to get involved in his self-vindication. He doesn’t want to go to the Lake of Fire. He’s been
sentenced to the Lake of Fire and he spends this time in the angelic conflict trying to vindicate
himself by means of you failing and you buying into his plan.
We can make a wrong decision
based on our sin, based on human good, based on evil resulting in evil, and we can make
wrong decisions based on erroneous emotions in our life.
It’s the worst reason to make any
decision. Emotions don’t think. Emotions don’t rationalize. Emotions have no common sense and
that’s why when emotions get in control of the life of someone, mistakes are made, especially in
the lives of young people who think they’re in love and their emotions take over and the next
thing you know we have a problem and this is true with adults as well. We cannot live by means
of our emotions.
Emotions are wonderful. I enjoy a wonderful sunset. I enjoy a wonderful
sunrise. I enjoy family time. I have so many things that my emotions appreciate but they don’t
dictate, they are not designed to dictate.
Emotions will take over your life if you let them. You
have to learn to think divine viewpoint.
It doesn’t say, “Let these emotions be in you that were
in Christ Jesus.” In Philippians 2:5 it says,
“Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,”
so
you cannot allow erroneous emotions to control your life.
You can also make wrong decisions
based on bad judgment in your life.
That’s a very common cause and really it’s due to a lack of
you having any common sense, you being disoriented to life and not knowing your own
limitations. You can make wrong decisions based on lust.
Finally, you can make a wrong
decision based on some false teaching that’s not true.
Self-induced misery and divine
discipline are all illustrated in the Word of God. In Proverbs 22:8,
“He who sows wickedness
reaps trouble and the rod of punishment will surely come.”
It couldn’t be any clearer than this
could it? Self-induced misery causes divine discipline. Proverbs 11:22,
“As a golden ring in a
pig’s snout, so is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion,”
self-induced misery. This woman can
get so carried away with her beauty that she makes a lot of bad decisions in her mental attitude
and she brings upon herself misery. Any woman can do the same thing but with a lovely woman
it’s much more obvious because she uses her looks to appeal to those who have emotional fire
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and this can lead to terrible decisions. In Proverbs 12:13,
“In the transgression of the lips
[which
is the sin of your big mouth]
is an evil snare.”
Yes it is, it’s called triple compound discipline,
Matthew 7:1-2.
“In the transgression of the lips is an evil snare, but the righteous will escape
this trouble.”
In other words every time you judge somebody, every time you malign somebody,
gossip, rundown, you are manufacturing misery for yourself. Matthew 7:1-2 says,
“Judge not
lest you be judged because of what measure you measure, it will be measured to you.”
So when
you judge or you malign an individual, whatever you’re accusing them of, that’s the discipline
you will receive. God takes it off of them even if it’s true and gives it to you. So it’s always a
better thing to keep your mouth shut and not stick your nose in other people’s business. Of course
it’s going to get chopped off by God.
In Proverbs 13:20,
“He who walks with the wise man will
be wise, but the companion of a fool will suffer misery.”
We make good and bad decisions with
regard to the people with whom we associate. Obviously, if you associate with the wrong crowd
then you’re making a decision, a volitional decision that’s going to cause you a tremendous
amount of unhappiness and suffering in your life. Why did you associate with the wrong crowd?
What was your motivation for doing this? Oh, you were trying to get someone to like you. You
were trying to have an affinity with someone. You didn’t have the courage to stand alone. You
needed the support of weak people, bad, bad decision. In Proverbs 15:7,
“Better is a dish of
cabbage where love is concerned than a fatted calf
[a Châteaubriand]
and hatred with it.”
In
other words, you not only choose your food but you must choose the people that you associate
with. Bad decisions will limit future options.
There is cursing by association and there is a
blessing by association.
When you associate with criminals, when you associate with evil, you
will get discipline. Proverbs 15:33,
“Occupation with the Lord is the instruction for wisdom, but
before honor there must come humility.”
Any good decision that you make based on humility
will eventually lead to honor. Based on humility includes virtue love, it’s a problem-solving
device. We have motivational virtue, which is your personal love for God and we have
impersonal love which is functional virtue. This is you loving based on who you are not based on
who they are. If you make a good decision from humility, which is orientation to the Word of
God with the mind of Christ, and you’re able to function with unconditional love, then there will
be honor. Proverbs 16:18 says,
“Pride
[or arrogance]
goes before destruction, and an arrogant
way of life goes before a fall.”
So both destruction and fall refer to self-imposed, self-induced
misery because you violated the law of volitional responsibility. Proverbs 17:1,
“Better a dry
crust with tranquility
[that’s peace and quiet]
than a house full
of religion
[or
sacrifices
]
and
strife.”
“Better a dry crust with tranquility than a house full of religion and strife.”
So you can
understand this one, “tranquility, peace and quiet is better than sacrifices.” In Proverbs 17:13,
“He who returns evil for good, evil will not depart from his house.”
In other words, it will not
only affect him but it will also affect everyone associated with him.
This is compounding your
self-induced misery to include your family.
If you return evil for good, then evil will not depart
out of your house. That’s revenge motivation, that’s retaliation, that’s someone treating you good
and then you sticking it to them when their back is turned and it will affect you and affect your
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whole family. Proverbs 17:20,
“A person with a perverse right lobe
[in other words a deviation
from what is right, being obstinate or petulant, being willfully wrong]
does not prosper. He
whose tongue is deceitful falls into trouble and misery,”
more self-induced misery from the law
of volitional responsibility because you can’t control your tongue, you can’t control what you say.
If you don’t learn to control your words, you will be miserable most of your life.
Proverbs 19:8,
“He who gets wisdom loves his own soul and he who cherishes understanding prospers.”
Proverbs 19:15, there’s a lot of verses here,
“Laziness brings on a deep sleep and the shiftless
person will suffer hunger.”
Proverbs 19:16,
“He who obeys instruction guards his soul but he
who is contemptuous of his own ways will die.”
Proverbs 19:19,
“A hot tempered man must pay
the penalty. If you rescue him, you will have to do it again.”
Proverbs 20:19,
“A gossip betrays a
confidence, so avoid the person who talks too much.”
In other words, don’t associate with people
that gossip or you will wind up receiving misery, it’s cursing by association. In Proverbs 21:19,
“Better to live in the desert than with a quarrelsome and nagging woman.”
In other words,
making a wrong decision in choosing your marriage partner will cause you to have a life of
misery. All of these verses are always there to remind you what God has said about self-induced
misery. In Proverbs 22:8,
“He who sows wickedness reaps trouble
[that’s the law of volitional
responsibility]
and the rod of God will come to punish him.”
Proverbs 23:27,
“A prostitute is a
deep pit and a strange woman is a narrow well. Like a bandit she lies in wait and multiplies the
unfaithful among men,”
bad decision to associate with a prostitute.
The Bible is clear, the law of
volitional responsibility and the law of divine punitive action.
That’s the first time I said this,
listen, the law of divine punitive action.
The first one, under volitional responsibility, we hurt
ourselves and in the second one, the law of divine punitive action, God brings us discipline.
There are three items in the procedure of dealing with problems. You must recognize your
problem, your problem is sinning after you got saved. You must utilize a solution which is the
rebound technique, problem-solving device number one.
“If we confess our sins He is faithful
and just to forgive us.”
And you must develop the 10 problem-solving devices including a
personal sense of destiny and personal love for the Father and then you can share the happiness
of God and be occupied with Christ
.
If the emphasis for God doesn’t have the priority in your
life, then all your interactions with people will constantly put you out of fellowship and you’ll
constantly be making bad decisions. Every bad decision you make, motivated from your sin
nature, comes under the law of volitional responsibility and divine punitive action. Did you hear
me?
Divine punitive action – God doesn’t look forward to disciplining you, but He will, and
maybe that’s what’s going on in your life right now.
You must choose, you must decide, it’s up
to you. I’ve made it clear, I hope you’ve understood. Until next week this is your host Rick
Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line