Join Rick Hughes as he unravels the dynamics of a life anchored in God’s wisdom. This episode explores key spiritual principles that every believer should know about tackling life’s adversities with faith and understanding. Delve into the Scriptures to find practical solutions to life’s challenges, and discover how embracing divine wisdom transforms hearts and minds, providing peace and clarity. With thoughtful insights, Rick outlines the ‘Fantastic Four’ attributes essential for a resilient spiritual life, inviting believers to grow in grace and knowledge every day.
Welcome to the Flatline with your host Rick Hughes. For the next 30 minutes you’ll be inspired, motivated, educated, but never manipulated. Now your host Rick Hughes.
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Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few minutes please stay with me. Again as usual about 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education and And you remember, we do this without any manipulation. We don’t con people. We’re not asking for money. We are not trying to sell you anything. We’re just here to give you information, information that might help you verify and identify God’s plan for your life. And if it does, then you obviously have the opportunity to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. but my job is to be accurate and get it right. The Flotline is a radio show heard every Sunday on this radio station. My intent is to show you how you can stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. That’s because adversity is obviously inevitable, but stress is optional. Adversity may be what circumstances do to you, but you do the stress to yourself. That’s why the Christian life is such a unique life, because it’s a way to live without worry. It’s a way to live without fear. It’s a way to live without bitterness. It’s a wonderful lifestyle. And if you learn God’s Word and use it as a front line, forward line of troops, If you use that Word of God as a main line of resistance in your soul, then whenever circumstances hit your life, you can always reflect back on what the Word of God says, and you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to be bitter. You don’t have to be angry. because the Word of God has a solution. There’s a solution for everything in your life found in the Holy Scriptures of God. So keep that in mind. Learning the flotline includes learning how to rebound because you can’t live the Christian life until you understand that, first of all, that everything you do must be empowered by God the Holy Spirit. or else it’ll be done in the energy of the flesh. People can go to church and be nice people, and it’s all in the energy of the flesh, if they have unconfessed sin in their life. But by using rebound, as per 1 John 1, 9, if we confess our sin, then he, that’s God, is faithful and just to forgive us and purify us from all of our wrongdoing. If we use rebound, we are guaranteed that we’re not under the energy of the flesh, but that we are indeed filled with the Holy Spirit. The Bible is clear. Be filled with the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 5.18. The Bible is clear. If you’ll walk in the Spirit, you will fulfill the lust of the flesh. And this is not some mystical, weird, second blessing that ascends from heaven on you and you begin to babble. This is the daily walking in the Holy Spirit’s control. Jesus told those disciples, when I leave, I’m going to send my spirit back to you. And he will be your heavenly mentor. He will tutor you and lead you and guide you into all truth. And so it’s the same thing for you too in this church age. You have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But you can quench him and you can grieve him by sin. But when you confess your sin, then he is reinstated as a controlling factor in your life. And then you can be rest assured that you’re fulfilling God’s plan until you sin again. and you have to rebound again. So rebound is problem-solving device number one, 1 John 1, 9. Problem-solving device number two is the filling of the Holy Spirit, and that solves the problem of our genetically formed sin nature. The sin nature can do mighty good things, but it’s not glorifying to God because it comes from the energy of the flesh. Problem-solving device number three is the faith rest drill. And that’s learning, standing on, using those 7,000 promises found in the Bible. And we have a book of promises. If you want it, let us know. We’ll get it out to you, the biblical promises and principles. There are over 7,000 you can claim in the Bible. And then there’s also biblical orientation, grace orientation. There’s you finding your personal sense of destiny. There is personal love for God, which is the greatest motivational virtue any of us could ever have. as the Bible says in 1 John 5, 3, if you love me, you will obey me. And then impersonal love for others, where the Bible says if we say we love God and hate our brother, we’re liars and the truth is not in us. So we have to learn how to love those that we don’t even like. I mean, isn’t that what God did for you? He loved you, John 3.16. And then there’s also sharing the happiness of God, plus H. Jesus said he wanted his disciples to have his joy remain in them. And then there is occupation with Christ, and that’s living a Christ-centered life, being occupied with Jesus Christ so that you replicate his lifestyle and represent him to your friends. These are the steps in the plot line of your soul. These are 10 unique problem-solving devices you must know and understand. And we have them in a small booklet. If you’d like to have the book, just contact us. We’ll send it to you free. It’s called Christian Problem Solving. And you can always contact us through the email at our website. That’s rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org. Today, I’d like to begin a brief study with you called The Fantastic Four. The Fantastic Four. This is not some Marvel book of comic characters. This is, in my opinion, the four most dynamic things that we all need as believers in Jesus Christ. Without these four things in your life, you’re going to be in a heap of trouble. And I will read them to you, Proverbs 2, 10 through 11. And I’ll read it out of the standard King James version of the Bible. Proverbs 2, 10, when wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant unto your soul, discretion, verse 11, shall preserve thee and understanding will keep thee. And so we have four unique things, wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and understanding. This divine truth in Proverbs 2, 10 through 11, is recorded for us by Solomon. He was, by the way, the son of David through Bathsheba. the wife of Uriah the Hittite, whom David had killed. And this was preserved for us in the book of Proverbs by God the Holy Spirit. You might not know about David, but David had a lot of children. King David had 19 children in all, and two died at birth. And there, some of them are mentioned, and maybe not all of them, but most of them are mentioned in the book of 1 Chronicles 3, verses 1 through 3. And so he had six children born in Hebron. during the time that he ruled there. And then when he was in Jerusalem, he had four more sons born to him there. He was king for 33 years there. And then he had nine other sons. And this is in verse 6 of 1 Chronicles 3. And their names are all given. So he had a lot of children and he also had a daughter named Tamar. And she was assaulted by her brother Amnon who led a revolution against David. So this portion of Proverbs written by Solomon is addressed mainly to young people. I have just written a book. I’d love to give it to you. It’s called Life’s Toughest Years, and it deals with the teenage years, being a teenager, like from 12 to 18 or 19, and the tests that these young people go through. I know I went through it myself. You went through it probably. And this book is a compilation of some series of messages that I gave at a school that Mississippi and we have put it together thanks to the help of our editors and it’s free and available to you if you’ll get in touch with us we’re in the process of printing that book right now, and we’ll make it available on the website, rickhughesministries.org. So being mainly addressed to young people as a divine standard of protection and exhortation, that’s what this is. And this proverb starts off with the recognition that The thinking of an individual controls his destiny. The thinking of an individual controls his destiny. When wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, it recognizes a choice that must be made. Every young person has to make a choice, a choice in life, you know, bad decisions limit future options. We say that all the time, so this recognizes that it must be a choice to acquire divine insight. It’s not gonna just flutter into your brain. Either you want it or you don’t want it, and it’s called wisdom, the Hebrew word kokmah, wisdom. And the word for knowledge is the Hebrew word da’at, and it refers to experiential knowledge, yes, you know, actually having done something and learned it from doing it, not just some sort of cognitive awareness where you know about it but you don’t really experience it. And so it would include having intellectual assimilation and then practically applying what you’ve learned. This is the way the Bible is. When you hear God’s word, you have an intellectual knowledge of it. You have a cognitive awareness of it, but you must have an experiential knowledge, and that’s called faith application. So here’s the way it looks in the Bible. You hear the word of God. It comes into your nous, your mind, N-O-U-S. But it hasn’t done you any good yet because in the Greek New Testament, it’s called gnosis, G-N-O-S-I-S. That’s information you heard and understood. Until it becomes epinosis, the preposition epi is the word full, until knowledge becomes full knowledge, it has no dynamics in your life. And full knowledge, well, that’s when you begin to have the experiential knowledge. You put it to work. You use it using the faith rest drill. So the word for knowledge is critical here, and let’s go back and read it again. when wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant unto your soul. The wisdom of God is the sacred scriptures, and they will become pleasant, the Hebrew word yin-am, or attractive, or something that the growing believer desires to attain and hold on to as a treasure. I wonder if the word of God is that attractive to you. Do you think the word of God is pleasant As great to you as a treasure find of gold, if you went diving in the ocean and you found a sunken vessel, a pirate vessel full of gold, you would think this is fantastic. I found this amazing treasure. But the word of God is a treasure also. It’s a word treasure. And when the Bible says this word, knowledge is pleasant to your soul. The soul is the invisible inner part of you with an eternal presence. So your body will forfeit itself. You’re going to die. You have to. This body won’t work in the third heaven. You got to get a different body. And so the soul, it will go with you. Your soul and spirit will leave your body, go to be face to face with the Lord where there’s no more tears, no more pain, no more sorrow. And you will have a different body. The resurrection body with a believer is given after the resurrection. Tribulation is an amazing body, and it’s the invisible body. The invisible inner man is the soul. The soul is invisible. No one can see it, but God can because it’s made up of your mentality. That’s why the Bible says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is. It’s made up of your volition or your chooser. So you either choose to obey or choose not to obey. It’s made up of your conscience and your self-consciousness. That’s the invisible part of your soul. So when the Bible talks about this, When it says, when wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant unto your soul, here’s a little bit of what it means. First of all, wisdom is acquired, not inherited. If your parents are mature believers, that doesn’t mean you can be a mature believer. You can’t inherit what they know. They may share it with you and encourage you to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but unless you grow yourself, you won’t have that knowledge. And that’s why the Lord Jesus Christ said this statement. He said in Matthew 11, 28, “‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, “‘and I will give you rest.'” Take my yoke on you and learn from me because I’m gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. No more middle anguish. For my yoke is easy to bear and my load is not heavy to carry, not hard to carry. So wisdom is divine insight from God into the affairs of man. In the New Testament, wisdom is pronounced the word, and the Greek word, Sophia. For example, in Ephesians 1.17, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, Sophia. So knowledge comes through Jesus Christ. As you study the life of Christ, you begin to see what your life should be like. It is a mirror to you. My pastor has been teaching a study on the life of Christ for over 1,000 hours right now, over 1,100 hours. And you think, how could anybody teach that long? Because it’s line by line, word by word. And it’s an amazing study on the life of Christ. I’ve learned so much of what Jesus did, who he is, how he acted, what he thought. how he interacted with his disciples, and it helps me to see what I should do. And so that is wisdom from the scriptures. Wisdom, Sophia, and God gives you wisdom as you learn and apply the word. Now wisdom can be human intellect, and that’s usually learned by experience more than instruction. But to acquire some biblical wisdom, Well, there must be some divine instruction, and that’s really what I’m doing for you now. I’m giving you divine instruction, not because I’m divine. I’m just not divine, I promise you. But I’m giving you what the Bible says. That’s divine instruction. So this instruction should come by two different ways. Number one, I hope, I pray you have a well-qualified pastor. And I pray that he is teaching you the Bible, not just on Sunday morning and Wednesday night. That’s not enough, I promise you. If all you’re getting is 30 minutes on Sunday morning, 30 minutes on Wednesday night, and the rest of the time you’re told to go do a daily devotion and read your Bible, That’s not growing up spiritually, I promise you. The way it’s set up is just like a kid going to the first grade. If you just went to the first grade for an hour a week, you’re never gonna get out of it. You sit under the authority of a well-qualified pastor who teaches the Bible to you, hopefully an hour at a time, hopefully several hours a week. And you say, well, I don’t have time for that. Really? Oh, you don’t have time for God? You don’t have time to gain wisdom? You’re not interested in the treasure because you’re more interested in what your kids are doing? You’re more interested in what your spouse is doing? You have to give your time to them so you don’t have time for God’s Word? That’s a mistake. without acquiring wisdom in the soul, you will have no chance to withstand the strategy of the devil. So the instructions that I’m talking about comes through the well-qualified pastor who teaches it to you from the pulpit of your church. and by means of God the Holy Spirit, who filters what that pastor teaches and purifies that information given to you. 2 Peter 3.18, 2 Timothy 2.15, both are mandates about growing in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So this spiritual wisdom that you are said to acquire in this passage, when wisdom enters your heart, It’s devoid of emotional decisions. This is not you getting emotional. You act on what you know, not what you feel. And that’s why the Bible clearly says, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. It does not say let these emotions be in you that were in Christ Jesus. Are emotions valid? Sure. They’re part of the body. Sure. We get emotional. At a beautiful sunset, are we get emotional when we see certain things? Absolutely. But the spiritual life is not lived by emotions. You have to remember that. Spiritual wisdom is devoid of emotional decisions because you act on what you know, not what you feel. Solomon was given a supernatural ability from God to discern and demonstrate unbelievable wisdom in his life, the man who wrote this Proverbs. And listen, this is where God gave it to him. 1 Kings 3, 12. Behold, I have done according to your words. See, I have given you a wise and understanding heart. so that there has not been anyone like you before you, nor shall any like you arise after you. Solomon was gifted by God to have amazing insight and wisdom. And I’m sure much of this came through his father David, as David fed him and taught him the Word of God. He was such a smart man, such a wise man, that the Queen of Sheba decided to come down and challenge him. And she was humbled by his insights. The Bible tells us in 1 Kings 10, Now when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon, our writer of the Proverbs, Concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions. She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue and with camels that bore spices and very much gold and precious stones. And when she came to Solomon, she spoke with him about all that was in her heart. And Solomon answered all of her questions. There was nothing too difficult for the king that he could not explain to her. And when she had seen all the wisdom of Solomon and had seen the house that he built, that’s the temple, the food on his table, the seating of his servants, the service of his waiters, and their apparel and cupbearers, and his entryway by which he went up to the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her, no more contention. Then she said to the king, it is true what I’ve heard in my own land about your words and your wisdom. However, I didn’t believe it until I came and saw it with my own eyes. And indeed, the half was not told to me. Your wisdom and prosperity exceed the fame of which I heard. Happy are your men, and happy are these your servants who stand continually before you and hear your wisdom. Blessed be the Lord your God, who delighted in you, setting you on the throne of Israel, because the Lord has loved Israel forever. Therefore he made you king to do justice and righteousness. Well, there is a testimony to the amazing wisdom and insight that Solomon had. And you read through Proverbs and just glance over it. She considered Proverbs a treasure. Now, he had not written the book of Proverbs at that time, but his wisdom demonstrated in that book was the greatest treasure she ever saw. You must understand the treasure of Proverbs. The treasure for you is in the word of God. By acquiring the mind of Christ, you yourself can actually have great wisdom and great discernment if you acquire the mind of Christ. You can have wisdom much like Solomon because your wisdom would be based on the mind of Christ. As you look at his life, as you learn how he lived, as you see what he did, as you see the writers of Scripture and what they said, all the wisdom of the Word of God in the New Testament is available to you if you want it, if you search for it, if you go for it. But to tell the truth, most people are not willing to pay the price. Most people don’t want it that bad. Most people just want to go to church and play the little game of conventional Christianity. Hello, preacher. Goodbye, preacher. See you next Sunday, preacher. Marry me, bury me, but the rest of the time, stay out of my business. Isn’t that the way it goes? Where are those who are hungry for truth, starving for truth? When I’m allowed to speak in various venues and various churches, sometimes people never even get the thrust of what I’m saying. They’ll come up and say, that was really nice. I enjoyed that. They never even heard anything I said because it was a condemnation to their lack of interest in the Word of God. Are you hungry? Because knowledge comes in two forms. Knowledge understood but not applied is useless information. But knowledge understood and applied gives you an advantage in any situation. That knowledge is wisdom. Biblical knowledge believed and applied equals great happiness in the devil’s world. That’s what Jesus said in Luke 11, 27, 28. Happiness belongs to those people who hear my Father’s Word and who keep it. So the more you learn and apply the Word of God, the more you want to understand, since it’s a never-ending treasure that enriches your spiritual life. The Word of God that’s stored in the mentality of your soul and applied to every circumstance in your life will free you from being under the emotional control of the flesh. You can recall the Word of God you’ve learned, you can recite the verses you’ve understood, and you can reap the reward by having a relaxed mental attitude in any circumstances, adversity or prosperity. So is the Bible attractive to you? Is the Word of God attractive to you? And if it is, do you store it in your soul? Because if not, then church is just a ritual without reality or just a total bore to you. Without divine insight from the Scriptures, you may be a total bore to other people too. You may be running around spouting your human viewpoint and preaching politics And my prayer is God would deliver us from self-righteous religious bores. I hope that’s not you. Proverbs 2.11, discretion shall preserve you and understanding will keep you. We’ll talk about that next Sunday when we come back. Same time, same place, same station. But I hope you’re listening to me. I hope you’re getting some of this. It is so critical in your life that you understand when wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, then discretion will preserve thee and understanding will keep thee. Wisdom, knowledge, discretion, understanding, these are the fantastic four. And without them in your life, you will wander down the my way highway, never really getting the gist of what your life is all about. never really understanding God’s plan for your life. You will never reach a personal sense of destiny to realize why God got you here and why he left you here and what his plan for you is. So it’s critical, critical that you use problem-solving device number one, stay filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s critical that you use problem-solving device number three, learning and applying the word of God through the faith rest drill. It’s critical that you have biblical orientation under the qualified pastor who teaches you and feeds you. And it’s critical that you reach that personal sense of destiny. That’s when you can shine. That’s when you can glorify God. That’s when you know why you’re here and what your purpose is. So thank you for listening. Thank you for paying attention. Please come back next Sunday, same time, same place. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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Thank you for listening to The Floodline with your host, Rick Hughes. If you’d like to contact Rick, please write to him at P.O. Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054, or online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
