In today’s episode, Rick Hughes explores the key aspects of living a life aligned with divine principles. As he discusses the Fantastic Four of spiritual growth—wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and understanding—Rick critiques the growing disconnection from local churches due to technological conveniences and changing societal norms. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion on God’s role in governance, the importance of a consistent spiritual journey, and the perils of modern idolatry.
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 Flotline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. And for the next few minutes with you, Will, please stay with me. Our show is always dedicated to motivation, inspiration, education, without doing any type of manipulation. That means we don’t raise money, we’re not soliciting funds, we’re not selling anything. We’re just offering accurate information. disseminating accurate information that will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life. And if you can do that, then you obviously have the freedom to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. But this radio show, The Flotline, has been playing over 12 years across America in selected cities. And I thank you for listening. Thank you for praying for us, being a part of the radio broadcast. And so many of you I don’t even know. I’ve never met you. But you faithfully listen every Sunday morning. And I hear stories repeatedly about things like that. So I’m very grateful that you give me your time to spend a few minutes with me before you start your Sunday today. We have been studying the Fantastic Four, and we’re in the middle of a study, although we did take a short break and dedicate a show to those in Redding, California, who were struggling with the fires up there. But we want to continue our study in the Fantastic Four today. The Fantastic Four is not the Stan Lee cartoon characters that came out a few years ago in the movies and comic books, but the Fantastic Four comes from Proverbs 2, verses 10 through 11. Here’s what it says. When wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant unto your soul, discretion will preserve you, understanding will keep you. Amazing, fantastic four. Wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and understanding. This is how you’re made rich, according to the Bible, is having this wisdom. The great treasure of the Word of God is a word treasure. The word treasure, actually, in the Greek New Testament is the word thesaurus. It’s the Greek word thesaurus. And you know what that is. It’s a word study. So we have a treasure of the Word of God. And so we continue our study dealing with how would it be possible for you to know if America is toast? How would it be possible for you to know if America is done for, if we’re over? And we have been looking at some ways that you could tell. The last thing I remember telling you last week, if you were here, was Romans 12, 19. Don’t take your own revenge. Beloved, leave room for the wrath of God, for his written vengeance is mine and I will repay, says the Lord. And so nowhere does God authorize crusader arrogance to take up weapons and try to overthrow the government because… You don’t like what the government’s doing. There are many of us that don’t like some of the things that have been going on in the government for a long time. But that doesn’t give us the right to overthrow. Let the Lord handle it. Romans 13 says no one’s ever been elected that God doesn’t allow. Whatever we’re going through, the Lord is well aware of it, and the issue is for you and for me to become spiritually mature adults so that our nation can have blessing, historical blessing by association with us. That’s the concept because here’s the principle. As goes the believer in the United States of America, so goes this client nation. So how about it? How goes your life? And then we talked last Sunday about the trend to disassociate with the local church today. It’s a big trend today to use social media and do to convenience sake. In other words, people seem to want their spiritual lives to be convenient today. And we want church to fit into our schedule, not us fit the schedule of the church. That is, unless it’s, of course, the traditional Sunday a.m. service before we go to grandmother’s house for lunch or Luby’s or wherever you go. I said these things last Sunday, and I want to remind you of them. Social media and spiritual matters does not play well for accuracy because on the social internet, anybody can say anything and the authority of the pastor is removed. One pastor that I read about in Toronto said, if coming to Christ means coming to your church in a set location and a set hour, you need a new strategy. Well, I disagree with that statement. If coming to Christ means coming to your church in a set location, in a set hour, you need a new strategy. I disagree. I think having a local church and having a set meeting time and coming to learn the Word of God is critical. But I do not think someone has to come to your church to be saved. They can accept Christ in many different places if you do your job and if I do my job. But this particular pastor from Toronto goes on to say, In the same way, solo pastors will likely be replaced by a team of communicators and leaders. A few years ago, we split the roles of lead pastor and lead communicator at my church, and even lead communicators like me only teach 30, 35 times a year. In my opinion, that’s pitiful. I think God set up one shepherd for the sheep. I believe that if you have a local church and you have a shepherd, you don’t need five shepherds. You need one shepherd who will study and teach the Word of God. And I think this is where the problem begins in America is that people are not hungry for the Word of God. Many pastors that I know kind of wind up being cruise ship directors, having a lot of programs, trying to keep everybody involved. And it seems like if they spent their time studying and teaching that they might not be appreciated because people put unrealistic demands on them and expect them to do things that the deacons frankly ought to be doing. But this is the way it goes. And so I can tell you that in my church, my pastor teaches twice on Sunday morning, once on Wednesday night, once on Thursday night, four solid hours of teaching from the pulpit of the church, four solid hours a week. His father before him taught Sunday morning, Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night. That was the class schedule at church before he passed away. And I can assure you, you couldn’t get a seat. You had to go early, at least 30 to 40 minutes early to even get a seat, or you’d be sitting in the overflow room behind the auditorium. Trying to find someone who will spend time studying and teaching the Word of God is kind of hard. This particular pastor in Toronto said, try to find an under 40 influential pastor of a growing church. who’s more into teaching than preaching because there really aren’t that many. You see, as a believer in Jesus Christ, if you go to church on Sunday morning, you don’t need another gospel sermon. You’ve already been saved. You need a message on how to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. You need information that will help you grow and become Christ-like so that you can replicate the thinking of Christ. Philippians 2.5 says, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ. So 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. If you don’t have the word of God taught, you cannot get divine viewpoint. And divine viewpoint is the only thing that will insulate you from the cosmic system because the world will attack your thinking 24 hours a day. The world will appeal to your emotions 24 hours a day. So if you have a teaching pastor who teaches four to five hours a week, that is amazing. And I know so many of you say, I can’t find a church like that in my location. Well, guess what? You can get the information by MP3 or DVD, and you can study at home until God shows you where to be. If you don’t know where to go, I can tell you where to order tapes, how to order DVDs, how you can sit at home until the Lord makes that available, because I do believe that you need a local church to be involved in, a local church where you can be fed and where you can serve your Savior. So the question we have to ask today is, where are the men with the gift of pastor-teacher that should be preparing for the ministry? Where are they? What happened to the attitude of pastors studying and teaching and studying and teaching? When did the attitude change to when now they travel and see and go here and go there and they don’t have to stay in their pulpit? They can just take off and run around the country and run around the world and visit mission fields and Listen, it is critical that you and I have a pastor that studies and teaches God’s Word consistently, weekly. I know there are times they can take off for a brief vacation. There are times they can take off for sickness. But on the long run, they should be teaching the Word of God weekly, consistently to the congregation. A lot of evil practices are now called good and acceptable, where a lot of the good things that we used to believe in are now called evil and not acceptable. It’s interesting, in my travels, I often quiz young students when I speak in schools, and I quiz adults about what does it take to be a good Christian, and most of them don’t have a clue. If I ask you that question, what does it take to be a good Christian, what would you say? If I had just accepted Christ and I came to you and I said, could you tell me how to be a good Christian, what would your answer be? Would you tell me I got to pray and I got to read my Bible and I got to obey God, G-R-O-W, go to God in prayer, read God’s word, obey God, witness for Christ. That used to be a pamphlet back in the 70s, grow, this is how you grow. Well, those are things that good Christians do, but that’s not necessarily how you become a good Christian. Most people, when I ask that question, fail to even mention that until you understand the ministry of God the Holy Spirit, you will never be a good Christian. Because you can’t live the Christian life in the energy of the flesh. And the first thing any young convert, any young person that accepts Christ as Savior, the first thing they have to understand is the battle of the flesh. They have to understand how to recover from their sin. They have to understand how not to quench the Holy Spirit, how not to grieve the Holy Spirit, because our Lord sent the Holy Spirit to mentor us, to guide us and lead us. He’s our paraclete, the Greek word says. And unless people understand that, they can’t live the Christian life in the energy of the flesh because they only manufacture human good. Human good is anything an unbeliever can do as well. And that’s all burned up at the judgment seat of Christ. So do you understand that? If I ask you, how do I become a good Christian? You should be able to tell me, well, first of all, Rick, until you understand the ministry of the Holy Spirit, you’re not going to get past first base. Because you can’t live the Christian life in the energy of the flesh. You have to understand how to let the Holy Spirit control your life and how to recover when you sin and fail and how to keep advancing under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor so that you grow in grace. Nobody told me these things after I got saved. It was almost two years before I figured it out. And then everybody just told me, get emotional. Rah, rah for Jesus. And let’s do this and let’s do that. Nobody told me how to overcome the flesh. Nobody told me how to overcome the temptations. They just said, be strong, brother. Stand in there against it, brother. No one told me. Galatians, where the flesh wars against the spirit, the spirit wars against the flesh. And these are contrary one to the other. So that you can’t do the things you should do. So people have to understand this. In America today, if you want to know how we are down the road to doom, you have to remember socialism is knocking at the door right now. Socialism is knocking at the door. Even the riots held in Portland and across the Midwest, all by the groups that call themselves Antifa. They’re socialists. They burn the American flag. We’re in trouble, and a lot of young people are drinking the Kool-Aid, I assure you. Internationalism is becoming an accepted concept, and the Bible never endorses internationalism. The Bible destroyed that concept at the Tower of Babel when God himself came down and scattered the people into different languages, different geographical regions, He never intends for us to be one world order because that way Satan can control one world order. You know, if you look across the nation and across the continent, Many of our enemies no longer even fear us since we appear to be weak internally. Not externally, we have an amazingly strong, powerful, effective military. But internally, we appear to be weak. There appears to be no national unity or even any desire to stand together as a free people. You know better than me what’s coming sooner or later if we continue down this road. Because in the book of Judges, we find these things written about how God dealt with rebellious Jews in the time of the Judges, and you know it sounds a lot like us. Listen to Judges 2.11. After the death of Joshua, the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they served Baal, B-A-A-L. I read an article written by Scott Brown, pastor of Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and it compared Baal worship to what goes on today, and it sounds very similar. This is what he said, and I will quote him now. What was Baal worship and why was it so popular? It is a mistake to think that Baal worship as some kind of other worldly practice that never happens today. On the contrary, it happens all the time in the form of cultural variations of the same general patterns that we see in 2 Kings 21, one through nine, and also in 2 Kings 17, seven through 23. We know that there were usually lots of people gathered at these ceremonies, often up on a high hill, just like a theater or a stadium, and they gathered there to observe public sex, just like we see in the movies and televisions and on the Internet. You can read about that in Numbers 22, 41 and 1 Kings 12, 25 through 33. We think here in America that our watching these things is different than the idolatry of the old. but our friend scott brown pastor of the hope baptist church in wake forest north carolina says that’s just not so the whole community would come out and all the best pagan ideas for success and crops and fertility were promoted just like a business seminar that promotes unbiblical ideas that justify the worldliness of its origin scott went on to say the wicked personalities or promoters and the performers were respected They were given the platforms like rock stars and Hollywood’s people. Some of the performers were great dancers and others were great musicians. You can read about it in 1 Kings 15, 12. People danced around the Asherah poles, which was nothing more than a phallic symbol. It’s quite possible that these poles functioned somewhat like poles in what are called gentlemen’s clubs today. And the people also acted out lustful, licentious, baldy scenes for the enjoyment of all who came to watch Isaiah 57, 5 through 8, Deuteronomy 23, 17. They had all the different kinds of sexual experiences on display, including men with women, men with men, and all the combinations that are popular today in our sitcoms we watch on television and news reports. On top of that, they invited the crowd to even participate, 1 Kings 14, 24. The children, though, were the real losers, as some of them were actually murdered, sacrificed on the altar to Baal, 2 Kings 16, 3 through 4. To participate, you had to reject your children. And so Baal worship, in reality, corresponds exactly to the activities that most people freely participate in today— And they do so without really understanding the nature of idolatry, for idolatry is simply the enjoyment of things raised up against Jesus Christ. The people were involved because they liked the excitement and the liberty and the business it facilitated. Plus the music was great and the entertainment was exciting. So the believers in Yahweh were conflicted. They did not agree with everything that was happening at the parties, but they had a really hard time giving them up because they liked the social aspect and did not want to be thought of as weird by their neighbors. Second King 23, seven through 20. Furthermore, personal success and net worth were dependent on being in attendance at these events. So if you quit going to the parties, you would not be able to do business like before. Your network would dry up and the guilds which promoted the high places demanded support. Therefore, to support the high places was to support the guild. Support was both based on participation and financial contributions. It was all tied up with the rules of doing business, just like the modern human resource policies regarding diversity. Anyone who questioned the activity ended up on the wrong side of public opinion. Like Elijah, Ahab summarized the attitude people had toward Elijah. Ahab, that wicked king, said, Is that you, O troubler of Israel? And Elijah said, I have not troubled Israel, but you and your father’s house have. and that you have forsaken the mandates of the Lord. 1 Kings 18, 17. End of the article by our friend, the pastor in North Carolina. In Judges 2, 16 and 19, listen carefully. Nevertheless, the Lord raised up judges, people like Deborah and Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, and delivered the people out of the hand of those that spoiled them. And they would not listen to their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods and bowed themselves unto them. And they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in. Hello, America. Obeying the commandments of the Lord, but they did not do so. Their fathers did, but they didn’t. So when the Lord raised them up judges, the Lord was with the judges and delivered them out of the hands of the enemies all the days of the judge. for it repented the Lord because of their groanings by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them. But it came to pass when the judges were dead that they went right back, returned and corrupted themselves more than their fathers and following other gods, to serve them, to bow down unto them, and they cease not from their own doing nor from their own stubborn ways. Hello, America. That’s us, to the T. Do you understand what God expects out of you? Do you understand your options in life? In life’s experience, you’re only going to get one shot. You know, no redos, no makeovers. I read in the paper every day where some celebrity has passed away, some politician is passing away. Your time is coming and my time is coming. We are going to pass away because the Bible says it’s appointed and the man wants to die and after that the judgment. So in your experience, you’ve got just one shot. That’s it. And it’s crucial that you maintain some spiritual balance and stability in your life if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ. Balance and stability. Balance is the filling of the Holy Spirit. Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to be filled with the Holy Spirit? You’re indwelled with the Holy Spirit the day you get saved, Ephesians 1.13. Sealed by the Holy Spirit. But when you sin, you quench the Holy Spirit and you grieve the Holy Spirit. However, when you go to God and use the recovery process taught in the Bible, you can place yourself back under the leading of the Holy Spirit. 1 John 1.9 is how you do it. It’s problem-solving device number one. on the flat line of your soul. We often call it rebound. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and to purify us from all wrongdoing. So anytime you confess any known sin to God, you are automatically filled with the Holy Spirit. And anytime you commit a sin, you’re automatically quenching the Holy Spirit. and grieving the Holy Spirit. And I know you’re saying, I can’t keep up with all my sins. Well, brother, join the crowd. Because the Bible says if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and purify us from all A-double-L, all wrongdoing, even the ones you don’t remember. This is how you’re filled with the Spirit. You look at your life and say, Father, is there any unconfessed sin in my life? And if there is, name it. Tell him what you did. If we name our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us. You hide it. You’re going to just live under the quenching and the grieving of the Holy Spirit. You’ll come under warning discipline, intense discipline, and eventually dying discipline. So if you stay filled with the Holy Spirit and you operate under grace orientation, a wonderful problem-solving device, then you can have stability from doctrinal orientation. Learning the mind of Christ, staying out of the cosmic system, having divine viewpoint will orient your life and it will be what’s called in the Bible discretion and understanding. You see, advancement in the spiritual life comes from this balance of residency in your soul. Stability, including doctrinal orientation, and balance, including the filling of the Holy Spirit and grace orientation. We know that we must advance in the spiritual life. And the only way that can happen is when we have this balance of residency in our souls. So we know we are supposed to grow spiritually. The Bible tells us that. In Hebrews 5, 11 through 14, the writer wrote about those people that are dull of hearing, don’t want to pay attention. In 2 Peter 3, 18, the apostle Peter wrote about growing the grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Why is spiritual growth so important? What’s important about it? Well, Romans 12, one, brethren, because of this, I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice, alive, holy, and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service. Don’t be transformed, conformed to the present world. but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so you can test and approve what is the will of God, what is the good and well-pleasing and perfect will of God. It’s your reasonable service to have spiritual growth. It’s appreciation for what he did for you through Christ Jesus. You know, at this point in time, there’s no way that you can appreciate fully what God has provided on your behalf. But once you cross the finish line, Once you move from time to eternity, you will become completely aware that all that has been accomplished. So the only way to possibly for you to present yourself as holy and pleasing to God is to understand what all of that entails. You change the way you think, it’ll change the way you live. You get under objective optimism rather than subjective doom, which is doctrinal orientation. You discover the good, well-pleasing, perfect will of God set forth for your life. You have a vehicle. It’s called a life. You have to learn how to drive it so you can maximize your time and your performance on this earth. The way we do it as believers is to become a doulos, a free slave, dedicated to our master’s desire. Paul said in Galatians 1.10, for do I now persuade men or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I please men, I should not be the servant of Christ. Are you serving your master’s interests? That’s the question I have to ask you. Do you look for your master’s return? Do you represent your master with integrity? Or do you have unrealistic expectations of what your master expects from you? There are verses for all of those things. I’m running out of time. But listen carefully. We’ll get back next week. Same time, same place. So thank you for listening. 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.
