Hard Hearted People
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 642 aired on December 24, 2017
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes I’m going to ask you to stay with me. It will be a brief time of motivation, some
inspiration, a whole lot of education, and we do this without any manipulation. We’re not trying
to sell you anything, we’re not trying to hustle you. We’re not trying to get you to join up, fess it
up, give it up, we would just like to ask you to listen up. The show The FLOT Line that you’re
listening to is designed to remind you of Biblical truths and introduce you to a new way of
growing, a new way of studying and learning God’s Word, a way that’s done with no solicitation,
just 30 minutes of education. My job is to verify and identify God’s plan for you and your life.
Hopefully, if you agree, you will orient and adjust to the plan. The FLOT Line is heard every
Sunday morning here on this radio station, I thank you for listening. We have a very interesting
subject we want to cover today. Let me remind you a FLOT line is a main line of resistance in
your soul. It’s your forward line of troops and consists of 10 unique problem-solving devices that
you learn found in the Word of God. If you learn them and use them, 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. The FLOT line is made up of the
rebound technique, problem-solving device #1, confessing your sin to God, solving the problem
of personal sin we do as Christians, 1 John 1:9, how we handle sin. The second one is we have a
genetically formed sin nature and how we handle this with problem-solving device #2, the filling
of the Holy Spirit. The third one is the difficulties and the trials that we face in life and how we
handle these, that’s the faith-rest drill, standing on the promises of God. There are seven other
problem-solving devices that we’ve taught. We’ve gone over everything from grace orientation to
Biblical orientation to a personal sense of destiny to personal love for God, impersonal love for
others, sharing the happiness of God, and occupation with Jesus Christ. These are all extensive
studies that we’ve done. I hope you will get them and I hope you will listen to them and I hope
you’ll build a FLOT line in your soul. On our last radio show we were talking about the three
different lives. We were talking about the physical life, the spiritual life, and eternal life and I
want to go back to this before we move on to our next subject. I wish there’s something I could
tell you about everything to expect when you get to heaven, but I just can’t do this because the
Bible limits our understanding about all that awaits us. There are some things that I can tell you
and this is what they are.
You cannot take your current body to heaven, that’s why you must
die. This body will not work in heaven. It has to be a different body, the Bible refers to it as
a resurrection body.
Since this body is infected with sin and everything in this universe is
infected with sin, then it all has to die. Your new body, your resurrection body is seen in Romans
8:23 where it says,
“We eagerly await the adoption and the redemption of our body.”
In Romans
6:5,
“For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the
likeness of His resurrection.”
We will get a resurrection body. When they lay you to rest, whether
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they cremate you or bury you, whatever you decide, that’s not you. The real you is your soul and
the spirit inside of you. The old body is going to wear out, shut down, go away back to dust but
you’re going to get this new body if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ, the perfect body, the
resurrection body. There will be a new heaven and a new earth also. Most people have this
strange idea that they’re going to go to heaven and live in heaven for eternity but listen to this in
2 Peter 3:12-13.
“Looking for and hastening unto the coming of the day of God wherein the
heavens being on fire shall be dissolved and the elements shall melt with fervent heat and
nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for the new heaven and the new earth wherein
dwelleth righteousness.”
Everything here is going to be destroyed. All the universe will be wiped
out. The sun will be gone, the moon will be gone, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, that’s all gone, all
infected with sin. Here we come to the new heavens and the new earth and on this new earth
there will be what we call the holy city. In that holy city, this is where you will live your life in
the new heaven and new earth, being able to go to the holy city, the New Jerusalem. The Bible
says in this environment we will never age, we’ll never get sick, we will never lack for any
happiness. Revelation 21:4,
“And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will no
longer be any death. There will no longer be any mourning. No more crying, no more pain
because the first things have all passed away.”
This is eternal life and this life will be a
phenomenal life. It starts the minute you believe in Christ.
“Whoever believes in Him shall not
perish but have everlasting life,”
John 3:15 says this and it will never, ever, ever end. John 3:15,
“Whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life,”
so true because it’s already
started the minute you believe in Jesus Christ and it’ll never end. What a wonderful thought, what
a wonderful thing eternal life is. It’s hard for us to imagine. That’s why the Lord doesn’t give us a
whole lot of perspective on it. But I can tell you there will be colors you’ve never seen, there will
be sounds you’ve never heard, there will be things you’ve never dreamed of in heaven. This is all
complements of the grace of God by means of His Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ who
paid the ultimate penalty for our sin.
“He who knew no sin
was made sin for us so that we could
be made the righteousness of God by means of Him”
(2 Corinthians 5:21). That’s how we get to
heaven. That’s how we have eternal life. Jesus said,
“I am the way, the truth, and the life and no
man comes to the Father but by Me”
(John 14:6). Now I’m going to switch gears this morning. I
would like to go in a different direction. I’d like to pick up with a new study and go into
something that is very interesting and I think you’ll find it interesting. We’re going to talk about
hard hearted people. Now remember, my job is to educate you, your job is to evaluate what I say.
If I can educate you, you can evaluate and make a decision, so I want you to listen. Throughout
the United States we’re seeing many young people relating to gangs and violence all across
America today. According to Wikipedia, approximately 1.4 million people were part of gangs in
2011. More than 33,000 gangs are active across the United States today, prison gangs,
motorcycle gangs, street gangs and juvenile gangs. Many people join these gangs to get a sense
of family, they are seeking some sort of identity. Some are just criminals, enjoying the risk of
demonstrating their power lust. They rob, they steal, and do whatever they want to, that’s the
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power lust. Most of these gangs are involved in some sort of criminal activity or sexual activity,
but there are also some Christian gangs. These are good gangs, bikers for Christ and the
Christian Motorcycle Association, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reaching people for
Jesus Christ, I’m not talking about them. The question that I’m asking you today is, how can a
young person, maybe 12, 13, 14 years old, get into a gang? How can a person commit crime and
how can they be involved in sexual activities at such a young age as some of these gang
members and it not bother them? There’s a crime game that some of them play called knockout.
This is practiced by street gangs who use this as an initiation into the gang. They have to walk up
to a stranger in the street and knock him out. They just hit him when he’s not looking, and this
has led to many, many serious injuries and in some cases even death. Some of the young people
are required to shoot somebody as proof of their willingness to be a part of the gang. This attack
of the cosmic system, a.k.a. what I call the human viewpoint, is the lure that sucks so many
unsuspecting people into a life of bondage, into a life of misery resulting from repeated bad
decisions that violate the protocol plan of God. I want to show you today from the Bible how
people can do such things, how they can hurt people and not feel bad about it, how they could
steal from people and not feel bad about it, how they could lie about you and laugh about it.
We
should not be surprised if we see our country fragmented where there’s a divide in the way
people think in this country about what’s best for the future. It’s the devil’s world, we call it the
cosmos diabolicus
,
cosmos
being world and
diabolicus
meaning devil, the devil’s world. This
divide that we have today in America is perpetuated by a constant barrage of human viewpoint
peddled by Hollywood celebrities, political leaders, and just plain troublemakers and they say it’s
the key to happiness. Unless we start reasoning with what we call establishment thinking, then
there will be no hope for the next generation.
The apostle Paul warns about how you can scar
up your soul to the point of complete loss of reality.
It’s covered in Ephesians 4:17-20. It was
written to the church at Ephesus, that church made up of Gentile converts. They were being
warned not to follow the path of their previous Gentile life. I’m going to read it to you,
“This I
say therefore and testify in the Lord that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk in the
vanity of their mind,
having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God
through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart. Who being past
feelings have given themselves over to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
But
you have not so learned this from Christ.”
All right, let’s break this down. Let me show you
what this verse is saying. I want to exegete this verse for you. That’s the way we study the Bible,
we study it under the ICE technique. ICE stands for isagogical, categorical, and exegetical.
Isagogical means we’ll go into the original language. We’ll see what the word meant when it was
written. Categories means that we will develop out of verses different categories like the
category of love, or the category of God, or the category of whatever, happiness. You can
develop categorical studies out of these verses, so isagogics, categories. Exegesis means line by
line, word by word, verse by verse. So let’s exegete this passage. Ephesians 4:17 starts off with
Paul giving a warning,
“This I say therefore and testify in the Lord,”
so the source of this
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warning that Paul is about to give is from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself through the apostle Paul
and by means of the Holy Spirit. Remember when the Lord Jesus Christ went to heaven, He sent
the Holy Spirit to guide us. The Holy Spirit is just as much God as the Son and as the Father.
Here God the Holy Spirit is giving a warning through the apostle Paul and what he’s saying is
this,
“I testify.”
The Greek word for testify is
marturomai
and it means to make a solemn
warning. It means to affirm, to exhort, so he is giving a very solemn warning to these people at
Ephesus. “I testify to you,” “I warn you,”
“Don’t walk as the Gentiles walk,”
Ephesians 4:17.
They were involved in temple worship and you know what was going on in the temple, they
were fornicating in the temple. Paul had to tell them to stay away from the temple, don’t get
involved in what’s going on down there. I mean literally they would get drunk in the temple and
sit around and chant, “
yakus, yakus, yakus,”
and then they would go fornicate in the temple. Paul
says, “Don’t live like the Gentiles live.” The word
“walk”
is the Greek word
peripateo
and it
means to regulate your life or live your lifestyle. What he’s saying to the believers at the church
at Ephesus is, “Don’t live a lifestyle like the Gentiles who go to the temple are living. You don’t
need to be involved in this.” “
Don’t walk like the Gentiles walk.”
“Don’t regulate your life like
they live their life” and then he tells you what it is.
“Don’t walk like the Gentiles walk in the
vanity of their mind.”
This is our first key to scar tissue, what it is and how we get it.
“The
vanity of the mind,”
the word vanity means empty or devoid of any divine viewpoint.
An
emptiness, a void much like a vacuum. A vacuum is where there’s a void, there’s nothing there
and it sucks stuff into it. One time my daughter in school made a vacuum in a bottle where she lit
a Kleenex and dropped it down into the bottle and put a hard-boiled egg over the neck of the
bottle. As the Kleenex burned all the oxygen up in the bottle, the egg miraculously began to slip
down through the neck of the bottle until it popped out into the bottle. I asked her how she did it
and she said “I made a vacuum and by burning up the oxygen inside, the pressure on the outside
was greater than the pressure on the inside and it pushed the egg down through the neck of the
bottle.” Pounds per square inch, pressure, we live under pressure every day in our lives. When
you have nothing in your brain, when you have no divine viewpoint, then everything that’s on the
outside will be pushed inside you and you can’t stop it because you have nothing to stop it with.
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus”
(Philippians 2:5), and the Bible tells you
in 1 Corinthians 2:16,
“The Bible is the mind of Christ.”
And if you don’t learn it and don’t have
it, then you don’t have any love for God because Jesus said in John 14:15,
“If you love Me you
will keep My mandates.”
How can you keep what you don’t know? What you don’t know can be
very detrimental because what you don’t know will be overrun by what the devil knows. If he
wants to attack you, he attacks your empty mind. If you have a teenage son, a teenage daughter,
grandchildren, people that seem to get into sin and trouble all the time or are into drugs and
alcohol abuse or anything else, they have scar tissue. They don’t feel guilt or shame like you do
because their soul has been covered up with scars. Paul said, “Don’t live your life like those
Gentiles live their life, with an empty mind.” This is what Satan always does, he attacks your
thoughts.
The first thing Satan will do is attack your thinking. That’s why you been told to
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renovate your thinking, change the way you think.
“Don’t think in terms of arrogance but
think in terms of humility”
(Romans 12:3).
Arrogance will justify why you are right and why
the Bible is wrong. Arrogance will justify why you’re right and why the preacher’s wrong, why
you’re right and why your parents are wrong. You will satisfy your own lust with your own
arrogance. The vanity of the mind, that’s the emptiness that Satan will attack and he will attack
your thoughts first. The Bible tells you to
“Put on the helmet of salvation”
(Ephesians 6:17) and
that’s to protect the way you think. In Ephesians 4:18 this passage goes on to say,
“Having the
understanding darkened.”
This means the ability to process and determine right from wrong is
blacked out. There are two Greek words that demonstrate this concept, understanding and
darkened. The word understanding is the Greek word
dianoia
and this means the mind is a
processor.
The mind is where you process information and it is darkened, the mind is
darkened. How is it darkened? The vacuum that sucks in all the cosmos diabolicus
thinking, all the human viewpoint thinking, it blackens out your mind.
The mind is
darkened,
skotizo
is the Greek word. It means to cover with darkness. It means to be deprived of
any light and remember that Jesus Christ our Savior said He is the light of the world. This is void
of anything to do with Christ. This is complete darkness as a blind man walking through a dark
room. You won’t see it, you won’t know it, you won’t know what’s going on until you run into the
wall because you have no light.
Their understanding is darkened, Ephesians 4:18,
“Alienated
from the life of God.”
This means they separated from God’s plan and God’s design by their
choice.
He didn’t separate them, they chose it. They are alienated from the life of God, separated
from God’s plan and design by their choice.
What caused this separation?
“Because of the
ignorance that is in them,”
the lack of knowledge of divine things, they never were
interested in the Bible.
They never were interested in learning God’s Word. Listen, the mind is a
vacuum. It’s going to suck in what the devil throws at it. It’s an empty void and you can fill it
with the Word of God. You can fill it with divine viewpoint or you can fill it with human
viewpoint and what the world offers. Here we have someone whose mind is empty, it’s
skotizo,
it’s blacked out. There’s no light. They cannot see the difference between right and wrong nor do
they understand the difference. He goes on to say in Ephesians 4:18,
“Because their heart is
blind,”
blind is a wrong translation. It’s not blind. The Greek word
porosis
doesn’t mean to be
blind. It means to be callused, blunted, not able to think clearly.
When you have a callused
mind, then it’s scar tissue over your brain. Scar tissue, this is what keeps you from seeing
what you are.
This is what keeps you from understanding what you should be.
“Alienated from
the life of God because of the blindness
[or the scar tissue]
on their heart,”
both words are used
in this passage, mind and heart, they’re both used. Remember, the mind is where we process the
information and the heart is where we store the information and eventually apply it. You learn it
from the Word of God, you store it in your heart, and then the time comes when you have to pull
it out, put it on the launching pad of your soul, and use it. These people that Paul is talking about,
they’ve copied the Gentile lifestyle. Their minds have opened up and they’ve sucked in all the
cosmos diabolicus thinking. They’ve scarred up their soul, their understanding is darkened and
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now
“They are past feelings.”
What does this mean? The verb
apalgeo
means to cease feeling
guilt and cease feeling grief or to be insensitive to pain.
Anyone who has heavy scar tissue
doesn’t feel guilt.
That’s why a 12 year old boy can take a gun and shoot somebody. That’s why
a teenager could do the knockout, knock somebody he doesn’t even know senseless, and laugh
about it. That’s why a thief could steal from you and laugh, because he thinks he deserves it. He
has no feelings, he’s gone. The person who has extreme scar tissue never feels remorse, never
feels guilt. Let me ask you about yourself. Can you cheat on your taxes and it doesn’t bother
you? Do you justify why it’s okay to do this? Do you say, “Well, the government steals my
money, I’m just going to get a little of it back.” If that’s what you think, you’ve got scar tissue.
Do you justify why it’s okay if you found some money laying on the floor and didn’t return it to
its rightful owner? You have scar tissue. Just imagine some kid walking down the hall of the
school, finds a $20 bill, and he says, “It’s my lucky day.” No it’s not. It’s somebody else’s unlucky
day. So do you put it in your pocket and whistle on out the door? Or do you go to the principal’s
office and say, “I found this on the floor, I know somebody lost it.” If you find a billfold with
money in it, do you keep it or do you contact the rightful owners? See, this is what scar tissue
does. Scar tissue doesn’t feel wrong about depriving people of what’s rightfully theirs. Scar tissue
doesn’t feel wrong about committing adultery. Scar tissue doesn’t feel wrong about stealing. Scar
tissue doesn’t feel wrong about murder and theft. That’s scar tissue and that’s what happens when
you open your mind up to the cosmos diabolicus. When there’s nothing in there to protect you
and you think you’re so wise. You think you’re so smart. You think, “Oh, I can handle anything,”
and you are being manipulated and duped like a little duck.
“Having given themselves over to
lasciviousness,”
Ephesians 4:19, the word is
aselgeia.
It means unbridled lust, excessive desires,
or shamelessness, feeling not ashamed. Having excessive desires, giving yourself over to
lasciviousness, can’t get enough of it, you want more of it. In Ephesians 4:19, the reason you did
it,
“To produce all uncleanness with greed.”
Uncleanness,
akatharisia,
the Greek word means in
a moral sense impure, to produce impurity, the uncleanness of lustful living, giving into the
excessive desires of your sin nature and you do it with greed,
pleonexia.
It means you have a
desire to have more and more and the verse goes on to say,
“You did not learn this from Jesus
Christ.”
This is scar tissue.
Scar tissue is what can happen to you when you have a vacuum
in your mind, when the Word of God is not there, and your soul is infiltrated with the
cosmos diabolicus, human viewpoint thinking.
The cosmic system will fill you with every
kind of lie possible and you will wind up justifying your sin, believing that you’re something that
you’re not. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention. Until next week, this is your
host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Lne.