Rick Hughes offers a compelling discussion on the nature of self-induced misery and the role of volition in overcoming life’s challenges. By dissecting common misconceptions and highlighting the power of divine guidance, this episode presents practical wisdom for those seeking to grow in faith and understanding. Tune in for deep insights and a renewed perspective on living a spiritually fulfilling life.
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. This is your host, Rick Hughes, thanking you for tuning in one more time this Sunday morning. You’re so kind to give me a few moments of your time. Remember, our show is about motivation and inspiration, education, without any manipulation, which means we don’t ask for money. We’re not soliciting funds. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re just trying to give you some information that will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life. And obviously, if you can do that, then you can orient and adjust to the plan if you want to. But the plan starts with you receiving Christ as your Savior. That’s the single most significant decision that you could ever make. The best news you could ever hear is that Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, redeemed you and me out of the slave market of sin. So he paid our debt to God, and we are free from the penalty of death and the power of sin in our life. We don’t have to go to the lake of fire, and we don’t have to let sin control our life. There is an alternative. There’s a new way to live, not letting the sin nature dominate our life. It’s the spiritual life, and it’s empowered by two things, by the Word of God in your soul and by means of the Holy Spirit who directs you to the Word of God. and convicts you when you sin. So that decision to believe in Jesus Christ is the open door to reboot your life, to start it again. That’s why the Bible says, if any man’s in Christ, he’s a new creation. Old things are passed away, all things become new. So God, as we say so many times on this show, gave us two different ends. One of those ends we sit with, and the other one we think with. And success in our lives depends on which one that we use. Heads, well, we win. Tails, we lose. That’s why 2 Peter 3.18 tells us, if we are Christians, that we are to grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Grow is a verb, and it means to increase. It’s an imperative mood verb, which means it’s a command. and thus we have the Flatline Radio Show. I’m not a pastor. I’m simply a person that can point you to a pastor. I’m an evangelist. It’s my job to evangelize and to give accurate Bible information, hopefully to identify the positive volition that may be listening this morning. If you’re positive to the Word of God and you want to learn and grow, then you’re listening to the right show. But again, you’re going to have to get under a well-qualified pastor. I was fortunate enough many years ago as God the Holy Spirit directed me to a man who taught me so much. And so much of what I give you, I learned under his ministry. Today, that church continues to prosper and thrive in Houston. And everything that’s taught there is available free of charge. And not only at that church, but many, many others that I’m aware of. Most of them are small, non-denominational congregations. But the information is accurate. The information is true. And you can study at home with your Bible, with a notebook, with a cup of coffee early in the morning or a glass of tea in the evening. If you don’t have a good church close by where you can get instruction, then this is one way you can do it. And this is the way I’ve been doing it for years, listening every morning to my pastor teach me the Word of God. And we are currently, you’ve heard me say, in a study of the life of Christ. and we’re up in around 1300 hours studying the life of Christ. It’s amazing when you find a pastor that can take care of the sheep because I’m just a dumb sheep and I need a good pastor to instruct me watch over me to give me information, and hopefully some of that information I can pass along to you. So we started studying last week about your volition. This is what we said, that God gave you a soul, and in your soul there’s mentality, and volition is a conscience and a self-consciousness. You have volition. It’s a free thing God gave you. It’s the chooser. You first saw it demonstrated when God told Adam and Eve, you can have anything in the garden, but don’t mess with that tree over there. Leave that tree alone. That was a volitional choice that he made to disobey God. And Adam made a volitional choice to do the same thing when he partook of the fruit itself. You and I must make good decisions. Bad decisions limit future options. And the bad decision that Adam made cast all of us underneath the penalty of sin and death. Because the Bible says, For by one man sin came into the world, and death by sin, and now death is passed upon all. For all have sinned, and the wages of sin is death. A lot of people get confused and they think that bad things send people to hell. Fornicators, adulterers, drunkards, drug addicts, that’s what sends people to hell. That’s not true. What sends people to hell is the fact that they are in Adam. In Adam, all die. In Christ, all are made alive. You are born spiritually dead. That’s why you have to be born again or made spiritually alive. See, you can’t have a relationship with God if you’re dead spiritually. So look at it this way. You have a body and a soul, but you have a dead human spirit until you come to Christ and believe in Christ. When you receive him as your Savior by a simple act of faith and maybe expressing it through prayer, then your spirit, which has been dead and dormant, is indwelled by the Holy Spirit and born again. You’re made spiritually alive. This sets up a conflict, the flesh versus the spirit. Galatians talks about that, the flesh versus the spirit, spirit versus the flesh. There’s a war constantly going on, and it is, and it’s about who’s going to control your volitions. Are you going to think in terms of human viewpoint or are you going to acquire the mind of Christ and think in terms of divine viewpoint? Human viewpoint is always relative. It’s always expedient. It’s always anything but factual. Divine viewpoint on the other side is concrete, solid, sound. This is what the Bible says. This is what the Lord Jesus Christ said. It’s not debatable. It’s not situational ethics. It’s this is it. And that’s a wonderful thing because it takes the monkey off of your back and puts it on the Lord’s back. Let’s see, I got to make a decision. Flip a coin, heads I win, tails I lose. Or what does the Bible say? Oh, that’s easy. If I stick with what the Bible says, I will have a lot less misery in my life. I won’t get myself into trouble. The law of volitional responsibility is how you get yourself into trouble. And you are responsible for every decision that you make, me and you. And so we have categories in our life that we must look at. What we think, what motivates us, the decisions we make, and the actions we accomplish. And this is interesting about God. He knows what we’re thinking. He knows what our motives are. He knows what Our decisions are going to be he’s omniscient, he’s omnipotent, he’s omnipresent. And he sees the end results of our actions. And so as we think negative volition, we think wrong. We wrong think. Thinking wrong is thinking human viewpoint. The cosmic system offers you a mirage of answers. But none of them are true. You know, like happiness belongs to people. Happiness belongs to circumstances. If I could just win the lottery, I’d be happy. If I could just meet the right woman, I’d be happy. If I could just meet the right man, I’d be happy. If I just had this, had that, I’d be happy. Happiness is not related to circumstances. Happiness is related to thinking clearly what the Word of God says. Because Jesus Christ, our Lord, said it himself. In Luke 11, 27 and 28, happiness belongs to those who hear my Father’s word and keep it. So wrong thinking will bring self-imposed misery into your life. Wrong thinking or negative thinking includes having a bad mental attitude, Such as, you know, mental attitude sins like jealousy, hatred, bitterness, vindictiveness. All these things form from the arrogance in your own soul. Self-centered arrogance. Because the arrogant person doesn’t see himself as he really is. He actually sees himself as he thinks he is. And if he thinks he’s something, he can’t see any bad decisions that he makes. I mean, you’ve been around people that are never wrong. You’ve been around people that always got to have the last word. You’ve been around sarcastic people that just drive you crazy because they always have some snide comment to make. And you can think wrong about these people, like I’d like to bust them in the mouth sometime, but that’s not the answer. wrong mental attitudes all forms of arrogance busting somebody in the mouth will not solve the problem everything by which you react to life in your thinking you can react a lot of different ways emotional reaction you know revenge motivation but negative thinking wrong thinking revenge motivation It’s self-imposed misery in your life. So you can make yourself miserable. You have the ability to make yourself miserable. And some of the problems you’re facing even today as you listen to me, problems that are causing you consternation and misery are there because you made a bad decision. So we enter into self-imposed misery long before we make decisions any decisions that cause us self-induced misery. We get this self-imposed misery by thinking wrong and then we do the action wrong and that brings self-induced misery. So wrong attitudes bring wrong actions and wrong actions bring problems. Negative or wrong decisions is self-induced misery. Negative or wrong actions, once you think about it and then you do it, well, that’s called self-gratification. If you make an impulsive, wrong decision, it’s self-gratification and it can bring self-induced misery. Listen to what the Bible says. I hope I’m not confusing you with this. Wrong thinking, wrong decisions, wrong actions. Wrong thinking leads to wrong decisions. Wrong decisions lead to wrong actions. Hosea 8.7 says, They who sow to the wind will reap the whirlwind. Is it windy where you live? Are you having a little whirlwind twirl around you this morning? Maybe it’s because you made a bad decision. Is there a way out of that? Absolutely. Yes. First of all, we do what the Bible said. We recognize the problem. So we have to recon our life. And we say, okay, the reconator, I want to see this. Okay. Now I’m going to confess what I see. I’m going to rebound. After I recon, I rebound. Rebound is 1 John 1, 9, problem-solving device number one on the flatline of your soul. Rebound means if we confess our sin, he, that’s God, is faithful and just to forgive us our sin, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So we recon, we rebound, and then we resume our spiritual advance. So Hosea 8, 7, those who sow to the wind will reap the whirlwind. That’s true, but there’s a way out of that storm in your life. In Colossians 3, 25, Paul wrote these words. He who does wrong will receive the consequences of that wrong, which he’s done. And there is no partiality from God. There are people listening to me today that are incarcerated because they made a wrong decision. Maybe they made an emotional decision and it brought something wrong action. And now they are incarcerated because of those consequences. They don’t have to remain that way forever. Maybe their time will be up soon. They can get out and resume a normal life. We wrote a book called A Divine Pardon. We’ve given away thousands of these books to penal institutions across America. It’s about how Jesus Christ pardoned the criminal on the cross and will pardon you as well. If you’d like to have a copy of Divine Pardon, write to us. Don’t send money, just write to us. Rick Hughes Ministries, P.O. Box 100. In the mighty city of Cropwell, Alabama. Cropwell. That’s C-R-O-P-W-E-L-L. Cropwell, Alabama.
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35054.
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You can find that on our website, rickhughesministries.org. You can order that book, A Divine Pardon. And if you have someone that is incarcerated and you’d like to get them one, let us know. We have a wonderful friend who has a tremendous prison ministry, and he can probably get it in for them. So give us a shout if you need that book. But that book on divine pardon is a book that God has used in a lot of ways. Now, there are seven categories of wrong decisions. I don’t know if I’ll mention them all here, but they all produce self-induced misery under this law of volitional responsibility. You can make a wrong decision based on a sin. know your sin nature tempts you don’t say the devil’s tempting you because he’s not the devil is not omnipresent he’s not able to be in america and france and great britain and russia at the same time he can only be one place at one time he’s a created being so for you to assume that the devil is tempting you is kind of ludicrous The Bible says you have three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil. And so the world may tempt you and the flesh may tempt you. So if you make a bad decision based on the temptation of the flesh, then you may have sex lust, power lust, ego lust, money lust. I mean, it’s every day you read about someone making a bad decision based on a lust pattern in their life. Those bad decisions bring about self-induced misery. When we sin, if we fail to confess that sin, then we come under divine discipline. And so there’s also another category of self-induced misery called wrong decisions based on human good. The ultimate human good we see propagated today in our society is socialism. If we can put a chicken in everybody’s pot, then everybody will be fine. If we take money from the rich and give it to the disadvantaged, then everybody will be equal. It fails to take into consideration what my pastor said many times. Man is just no good. Man has a sin nature, and nothing that you can do is going to control that sin nature other than the rebirth experience and God the Holy Spirit combined with the power of the Word of God in that soul. But putting people on a level playing field by what they claim to be socialism, that’s not gonna change anything. There’ll still be hatred, there’ll still be bitterness, there’ll still be resentment, because that’s the part of the sin nature they can’t correct. So if you get into human good, socialism, put a chicken in everybody’s pot, Maybe a wrong decision resulting in some sort of evil, like you’re going to try to clean up the devil’s world. Are you kidding me? How are you going to clean up the devil’s world? Are you going to march down to the dirty bookstore and get a placard and and say anybody that walks in here is gonna go to hell. What, are you gonna get out and demonstrate and you’re gonna change the world? Listen, that’s exactly what the devil wants you to do. He doesn’t want you to give the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. He doesn’t want you to be that invisible spiritual professional. He wants you to get out and make an idiot out of yourself so that people see you on the side of the street with a sign in your hand and they go on the other side. They’re tired of getting beat over the head by self-righteous individuals that want to tell everybody how they’re going to hell because of how they’re living. So this evil, this is not grace. Evil is Satan’s genius, taking grace and twisting it. For example, grace says, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast about it. But the evil of the genius of Satan would say, for by grace are you saved through faith, And then he may inject something and giving up peanuts. No more peanuts. Eat a peanut, you’re not going to go to heaven anymore. So he’s going to add something to it. Self-righteous legalism always adds something to the grace of God. And that’s not salvation. That’s not God’s plan. You can read in Luke 18 about the two men that went to the temple to pray. One a Pharisee and said, thank God I’m not like that sinner over there. I’m a good person, and I pray, and I fast, and I tithe. And the other person just beat on his chest and said, God, have mercy to me, a sinner. Wrong decisions resulting in evil actions promoting the devil’s world. Wrong decisions based on erroneous emotions. That’s the worst reason to ever make a decision. And emotional decisions, emotions don’t think. Emotions are irrational. And they’re wonderful if given in the right place. God gave you emotions and you should use them correctly. but not to make decisions, to use them for appreciation. You should have appreciation for your grandchildren. You should have appreciation for beauty. You should have appreciation for art. You should have appreciation for your team or whatever, but not let your emotions dictate what you do. I remember not too long ago in Alabama, there was a man who hated one of our universities. And he decided that he would go to that university and poison these famous trees on that university campus, trees that had been there over 100 years. So he went down and he poured some kind of poison all in the roots and then called a radio talk show and admitted that he did it. An emotional decision based on hatred for that university over a football team. That’s the goofiest thing you’ve ever heard of. But that’s what emotions do. They don’t think. They don’t rationalize. They don’t have any common sense. Emotions just act. and then you can make wrong decisions based on bad judgment and that’s very common you know that it’s due to a lack of common sense you’re just disoriented to life you don’t know your own limits and so you think if i could just get that new job if i could be the head of this company i could straighten this company out well no you can’t was probably one of the reasons you’re not head of the company People that are head of the company had the moral courage to invest millions of dollars while you sit back, invest nothing but complain and gripe about it. And so you don’t know your own limits. So when you finally slander and lie and malign about people and run people down and get them fired so you can get promoted. And then the truth comes out, you really don’t know what you’re doing. You’re in big trouble. You didn’t know your limits. And that’s a man’s got to know his limits. Wrong decisions based on your lust patterns, as I mentioned earlier. But some of the worst are the wrong decision based on false teaching. Wrong teaching. I have seen this in my life. I’m so sorry to have seen it. People that were solid, sound, fundamentally correct people change the way they think. And all of a sudden they no longer think logically. They’ve now gone to think differently logically. We’re not even on the same page anymore, and they convince their friends that they are right because their friends have absolute trust in them. It’s really bad when it happens to a pastor, and he changes his whole direction and takes his congregation with him and wind up teaching something that’s not truth. You know, we’re all on the same team. That’s not the problem. We just don’t all have the same playbook. The playbook, obviously, is the Word of God. Systematic, sound Bible teaching. Dispensational, systematic, sound Bible teaching. Line by line, word by word. Do we take the Bible literally? Absolutely. We don’t take it literarily. We take it literally. And so as we learn and apply and grow, lag, L-A-G, learn, apply, glorify God. then we stay out of those bad decisions. Because when you make bad decisions, you get self-induced misery along with divine discipline from God. Proverbs 22.8, He who sows wickedness reaps trouble, and the rod of God’s punishment will surely come. You haven’t been punished until God smacks you down a few times for your stupidity because you fail to see your own arrogance. And it happens. It’s happened to me. And it will happen to you if you don’t wise up and get with it. Proverbs 11, 22, as a golden ring in a pig’s snout, so is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion. One of the most dangerous things in the world is a beautiful woman who has no discretion. She doesn’t have any insight. She gets carried away with her own beauty, and she makes bad decisions in her attitude and brings on to her life self-imposed misery. Now, an ugly person can do the same thing, obviously. Yes, my pastor said that years ago, but it’s particularly true when someone is trying to gain an advantage in life based on their looks. In Proverbs 12, 13, and the transgression of the lips, that’s the sin of your big mouth, running someone down, lying, gossiping, slandering. In the sin of your big mouth is an evil snare, but the righteous will escape this misery, this trouble. Have you ever sat down at dinner and talked about the neighbors? Have you ever maligned the guy across the street? Have you ever maligned the guy around the corner? Have you ever sat down and because you don’t like somebody talked about them over the meal? There’s nothing worse than that sort of gossip and slander and maligning. If there’s anything a Christian must do, he must keep his nose out of other people’s business and obviously not judge them. However, the arrogant person would never see that. They would think they’re totally right and they would not like you pointing it out to them. I’ve been in situations like that and I did not attempt to point out the idiocy of what these people were doing. I just kept my mouth shut and sat there. But you hear it, and it just makes you nauseated. So get out and get away. Go around. Go home. Leave those people behind. Every time you judge, malign, gossip, run someone else down, then you manufacture misery for your own life. The righteous here isn’t someone who’s perfect, but it’s someone who doesn’t gossip, who doesn’t malign, and who doesn’t judge other people. So Proverbs 13, 20, he who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of a fool will suffer misery. That’s good advice. Stay away from the idiots because as they make their own self miserable, they will make you miserable. If you associate with the wrong crowd, you’re making a decision that will cause you a tremendous amount of unhappiness in your life. Better is a dish of cabbage where love is than the Chateaubriand and hatred with it. Proverbs 15, 17. Proverbs 15, 17. In other words, you must not only choose your food, but you must choose who you associate with. You want to associate with someone? Proverbs 15, 33. Occupation with the Lord is the instruction for wisdom and before honor there must come humility. Good decisions in your life based on divine viewpoint thinking combined with humility and volitional positive volition will eventually lead to honor in your life, and you will be able to use virtue love as a problem-solving device. There’s a lot more to say about volition. I hope it’s clicking. I hope it’s making sense. I’ve been pretty straightforward this morning. I’ll try to come back next Sunday and do the same thing if you’ll show back up and listen. Again, this is Rick Hughes, rickhughesministries.org. If you need something, just get in touch with us. We’ll be glad to get it right on out to you. So until next Sunday, same time, same station, same place, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flotline.
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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.
