Rick Hughes explains the significance of doctrinal orientation in The Flatline, emphasizing the importance of learning to think with a divine viewpoint. Delve into the disciplined study of the Word of God and its application in everyday life. Discover why understanding scripture accurately is vital, and how it reinforces personal growth while preparing believers to face spiritual adversities confidently. This episode offers insights that bridge personal faith with broader social and national implications.
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 good morning and welcome to the flatline it’s your host rick hughes every sunday same time same place thank you for tuning in you know the show is not about any sort of gimmicks no games not trying to hustle you for money It’s just designed to give you accurate information, hopefully that will help you to verify as well as identify God’s plan for your life. And my prayer always is, if you can do that, that you will orient and adjust to the plan. The Flatline, this radio show, is designed to remind you of all these biblical truths. and hopefully to introduce you to an in-depth way of studying and learning the Word of God. Again, no manipulation, no solicitation, just some education and some motivation. So it starts with the best news I could tell you today, and that is that Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, redeemed you and me out of the slave market of sin. He paid our debt, and we are free from the penalty of death and free from the power of sin. And if you or me, anyone who receives Christ as Savior, we are in effect accepting the offering he made on our behalf. Free gift from God, compliments of God, free, free, free. Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It’s the, and I’ll put in the word free, it’s the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast. In Titus 3, 5 through 7, not by works of righteousness, which we’ve done, but according to his mercy, he saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which he shed on us abundantly. What that simply means is this. That when you are born, you are born spiritually a dead, but physically alive. You have a body and you have a soul at birth, but your spirit is dead. You’re spiritually dead. And thus the reason is for by one man centered into the world and death by sin. And now death has passed on all for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That’s not referring to personal sins you commit. That’s referring to your position in Adam. In Adam, all die. And so when you believe in Jesus Christ and are, quote, born again, as Jesus told Nicodemus in John chapter 3, this doesn’t mean physical birth. It means a spiritual birth, that your human spirit is made alive again. Why? Because God the Holy Spirit indwelled your human spirit. And now you’re indwelled by God the Holy Spirit and you are now, you have three parts to you. Trichotomous, you have a body and you have a soul and you have a living human spirit. When you depart this earth as a believer in Jesus Christ, the body goes back to dust, back to the ground. But your soul and your spirit ascend immediately to heaven. There you await your resurrection body, and what a wonderful time that will be. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, but the Bible gives us some hints about it. But we will get a resurrection body, and it’ll be the body we live in forever. So if you learn these things and understand these things, it’s a great confidence, great reward, great encouragement in your life. You know, last week I spoke about grace orientation, orienting to the grace of God in your life, beginning to see every day that every breath you take is gracious of the grace of God. Every breath you take compliments of the grace of God. The grace of God sustains us even when we fail in our lives. Even when we sin, he doesn’t kill us. He doesn’t take us out. He allows us to continue breathing. He allows us to continue to survive. God even provides all the logistics we need to make it. And so that’s grace. Grace orientation means that not only do I understand the grace God provided me, but But in return, I’m able to multiply that grace to other people. I can grace them out also. One of my favorite things to do is grace waitresses out when they wait on us. If my wife and I go out to eat and they wait on us and they bring us a bill, I like to grace them out with a wonderful tip. Some of them work very, very hard just to try to get by. And so we never tip just like a 10% deal. We like to always go way above and way beyond that. So gracing people out is wonderful, and you can grace out your enemies when they turn on you, when they’re bitter towards you. When they malign you, you can grace them out by not maligning them back, as 1 Peter 3, 8, and 9 says. Don’t get into cursing and cursing each other out. That’s definitely a sin for a believer to do that. So grace orientation is a wonderful problem-solving device, one of those great problem-solving devices. Because we know that by God’s grace our lives will be sustained and we know by God’s grace we don’t have to worry about anything. We know that by God’s grace the Supreme Court of Heaven is open 24 hours a day and will always be there for us if we need to go there. We know by God’s grace we can rebound any known sin and confess it and God said he would be faithful and just to forgive us. and to cleanse us from that. That’s grace. Maybe you have not exploited grace in your life. Maybe you’ve hidden sin in your life. Maybe you’ve lived with guilt and shame. You don’t have to do that if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ. Simply go to the Father, name your sin, and put it behind you. Move forward. Keep going. Go on down his way. Thy way, highway, as one person said. The thy way, highway. Not the my way, highway. The thy way, highway. Another problem-solving device that’s always critical for us to understand is called doctrinal orientation. Some people call it biblical orientation. It’s us learning to think with the mind of Christ. Thinking with the mind of Christ is called having divine viewpoint. And the only way you can get divine viewpoint is by learning the Word of God. Here we have a Bible in front of you, or here I have a Bible in front of me. And these words recorded by the apostles, by the writers of Scripture, are designed and kept for us. They are our textbook, and it’s designed to be taught to us. It’s not a novel. It’s a textbook. God even ordains certain men who have the gift of pastor, teacher, and their job is to study and teach the Bible. Not to be a lonely hearts counselor, not to give you a cruise ship experience, but to study and teach the Bible. And if you’re looking for someone to hold your hand through times of adversity and tell you, don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine. My brother died with it, but you’ll make it. That’s not the pastor you need. You need one that will feed you. You don’t have to know him personally. You don’t have to have a great camaraderie with him. You just have to have him be accurate in teaching you the Bible so the Holy Spirit can take what he teaches you and lead you to apply it into your life in a way that can glorify God to the maximum as you stand on your own two feet. not trying to depend on your pastor to tell you what to do. So why should you study the Bible? What is it about studying the Bible that I keep pushing? Well, the mandate is found in 2 Timothy 2.15. The Greek word spoudazo, S-P-O-U-D-A-Z-O, is the English word study. Spoudazo. And if we do the morphology of that verb, it is a present tense verb, which means there never is a time in your life that you’re not to be a student of the Word of God. The active voice says the subject of that verb, which is you and me, that we produce the action of the verb. And being in the imperative mood, it simply means this is a command from God through Paul to Timothy. Study to show thyself approved unto God. Study. That’s a mandate. We are to study to show ourself approved unto God. Why? Well, the next word says rightly dividing the word of truth. Rightly dividing. The Greek word for rightly dividing, you’ll get a kick out of knowing this, We get a word orthodontist out of it. It’s orthotomeo, orthotomeo. The orthodontist will straighten out your teeth and orthotomeo means to get it straight, to teach scripture accurately. It is so easy to veer off course. It’s so easy to be led astray. This is something Satan is really good at doing is getting people to get away from what the Bible says and to present some sort of mixture of human viewpoint with their thinking. We are to rightly divide. Now, if you know anything about math, which I know little about, I just know how to spend it, not know how to count it. But if you know anything about math, you know that dividing means division. Divide two into 12, you get six, that’s division. Bible study causes division. It has to. People study for the wrong reason. People study the wrong way. Some have hidden agendas when they study. Some have a blind, click arrogance in their life. Some teach the Bible and they’re ignorant, not knowing the language of the Bible. And then sometimes people even claim extra biblical revelation that it’s not in the Bible, but God told me to teach you this. It’s a stretch sometimes because I’ve seen great men go off on these stretches to teach proclaim that they’ve had a new breakthrough and a new revelation about how something should be not literally understood, but understood in a different way. So they take great liberty with that. Dividing is division. Bible study causes division. So if our God told us to be careful and if our God told us to get it straight, then he must have known that there’s a possibility that some people would mess up. It’s here for you. The most critical thing in your life as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, apart from staying filled with the Holy Spirit every day by rebound, is to get under the mentorship of a well-qualified pastor, a man who’s dedicated his life to studying and teaching the Bible. And if you can do that, then you can begin to grow consistently studying on a consistent basis, just like you would exercise every day or just like you would clean house every day. Every day, you would take a few moments, 30 minutes to an hour every day to put in a DVD or an MP3 and listen to the pastor teach the Bible. Get a notebook, get a Bible, take notes. That’s what I do every day so that I can get it straight and get it accurate. My ministry as I travel and I speak and have been doing for 50 plus years now is based on accuracy, not personality. It’s not about the man, it’s always about the message. And when I speak in schools, private schools, talking to kids, I can’t get in public schools anymore, they won’t let you mention Jesus Christ in the public schools, but private academies that I speak in have quite a few kids, and they’re not just Christian academies. But my job is to be very accurate, not to entertain them, not to go in there and make them laugh. but to go in there and give them what the Bible says. And they are certainly smart enough, intelligent enough to make a decision whether they want to believe it or not believe it. But you can bet one thing, the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 14, 33, God is not the author of confusion, and it is not God’s design to confuse anybody. Akatastasia, akatastasia, confusion. It’s instability, it’s a state of disorder, it’s a disturbance, it’s a confusion. I have lost close personal friends who decided that the Bible didn’t mean what they thought it meant a few years ago, that it really meant something else. And so they abandoned the solid, sound, systematic teaching they had to go with a different viewpoint in a different way. And they’re totally convinced that they’re right and I’m wrong or we’re wrong or somebody else is wrong. It’s amazing to watch this happen. So the Bible says God is not the author of confusion, but a peace as in all churches of the saints. Now here’s something very interesting. The very next verse, 1 Corinthians 14, 34 says, “‘Let the women keep silent in the church.'” I don’t know what that means. You can figure that one out, but that’s the next verse. I can tell you this, the Bible does not ever contradict itself. It does not teach one thing in this chapter and another thing in that chapter. It is never unfair. The Bible is never unfair. It’s never emotional. So if you’re going to have biblical orientation, it doesn’t come through emotional stimulation. It comes through the imputation of the Word of God into your soul. As you learn it, believe it, and apply it. We often use the term lag. A friend of mine coined that phrase. Learn, apply, and then you glorify. But learning and applying is critical. When the Bible says, study to show thy self-approved unto God, a workman rightly dividing, that’s applying. You can’t apply what you don’t know. And so if you learn and apply, then you’re able to rightly divide. Then you’re able to see and discern what’s right and what’s wrong. And you’re able to stay out of divisions that are caused by emotionalism or caused by arrogance or caused by something where somebody thinks they’re smarter than somebody else and so they got a better way to do it. There’s another verse that we have to take a look at on biblical orientation, and that’s 2 Peter 3.18. The last verse I gave you said, Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed. now we add to that but grow in the grace and knowledge of our lord and savior jesus christ grow is another verb just like study is a verb this verb grow is pronounced oxano a-u-x-a-n-o oxano translates grow and again it is a present active imperative There never is a time as a Christian you’re not to be growing. The active voice says you produce the action of the verb by your consistent filling of the Holy Spirit and your consistent submission to the authority of a qualified pastor. When you do that, the imperative mood is the mood of command. God is telling you through Peter, grow in grace. C-H-A-R-I-S. Cotteries. Grace. Last week, I talked about grace orientation and the critical need for grace orientation in your life. Learning about grace. There is saving grace. We talked about that last week. There’s living grace, Colossians 1.16. That’s where he provides all of your logistics that you need. Matthew 6 talks about that. Read Matthew 6 and look at it for yourself. Logistical grace provision. And then, of course, there’s dying grace in Job 5, 19 through 27. God will not take you out before you come to your full age if you consistently grow. Now, God can take you out early if you get into reversionism, if you, quote, some people say, backslide. if you turn away from the lord go down the byway highway fail to rebound your sin you’re going to come under warning discipline you’re going to come under intense discipline and you may even come under dying discipline that means that the father could call you home way before he intended because you’re incorrigible and you’ve reached the point of no return. I’ve seen that happen and you can’t judge people and say, oh, I know they went out under the sin unto death, but I’ve seen it happen, it’s real. And it can happen to you and to me if we forsake the Word of God if we forsake the filling of the Holy Spirit, if we fail to listen to what God tells us, and we continue down the road of the byway highway, then we get under tremendous discipline from God. designed to rescue us, designed to save us, designed to keep us from self-destructing. But the sin unto death is nothing more than self-destruction. And that’s what happens when a believer fails to listen to God. So there are a lot of ways to shorten your life. In Ephesians 6, 1 and 2, the Bible says, children, obey your parents in the Lord. That’s a prepositional phrase, in the Lord. So the ability to obey legitimate authority comes from the filling of the Holy Spirit in the Lord. And then, children, honor your father and your mother. One is obey and one is honor. There are two different words there. Honor your father and your mother seems to indicate that they’re not together anymore. The father and the mother have split up. In the first part, it says children obey your parents. There, they’re together. So there never is a time in the life of any child that they should be hateful, disrespectful, antagonistic towards either parent in the case of a divorce. We’re always to tama’o, honor, tama’o, honor our parents. which is the first mandate with a promise, the Bible says. I’m going to read it again. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. Honor your father and your mother, which is the first mandate with a promise. Well, what exactly is the promise? If I honor my parents, if I obey my parents, what is the promise God’s talking about? It’s found in Deuteronomy 5.16. that it may be well with you and you may live long, long time on this earth. This is the way to live a wonderful life. A long life is for you and me to orient to authority, to learn the Word of God, to be submissive to the Word of God, orienting to the authority of the Word of God, orienting to the authority of our parents so that we learn self-discipline at home and we don’t go into the devil’s world like a loose cannon. I’ve said it before. I’m going to say it again on this radio show. If you’re a parent and you don’t teach your children the Word of God, you don’t provide for your children an authoritative structure in your home, then you are abusing them because you’re going to turn them loose in the devil’s world without a prayer, not a hope, not a chance of making it because they don’t know the alternative. They only know what the world tells them. There is an alternative. It’s called divine viewpoint, not human viewpoint. There’s a different way to think and a different way to live, and you must expose them to that. There are a lot of ways our kids can shorten their lives. If they’re believers, they can commit to sin unto death for sure. Any of us could mismanage our health and abuse our bodies by doing things that are harmful to us. Our kids can run with the wrong crowd and get in trouble. et cetera. I mean, this is something that I faced in high school, hanging out with the wrong people, getting in the car with the wrong guy, scaring the fool out of me, thinking he’s going to kill me, telling that guy, I’ll never ride with you again, wrong crowd. but I’m to grow in the grace and knowledge and the knowledge and the knowledge to words grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. That word knowledge is a critical word. There are two words for knowledge in the Bible, both translated knowledge, one of those greek words is the word gnosis g-n-o-s-i-s but the other word which is also translated knowledge is completely different it says the word epi g-n-o-s-i-s the difference between these two is the difference between what’s in your mind and what’s in your heart when you go to church and you listen to the pastor teach you the bible The Holy Spirit’s job is to pick up that information, if you’re filled with the Spirit, and to help you process it and bring it into your mind so you understand what the pastor taught. Now it’s up to you to, by faith, believe it and apply it into your life. When you understand it, it’s called gnosis. When you believe it and apply it, it’s called epinosis. That’s the difference. Biblical information in your heart is epinosis. It circulates in your memory center. It becomes part of your frame of reference in your vocabulary storage. If it’s over just in your mind, there’s a verse that says a little bit of knowledge can puffeth up. Knowledge can. People that think they’re smart and wise can get arrogant about it. We learn knowledge so we can apply it into our life, not second guess it and not critique it, but to apply it. And again, you must be under a pastor you trust. You must be under a pastor who’s submissive to the will of God, who’s not trying to prove himself, not trying to make his own agenda, one that follows the course correctly. And if you can do that, then you’ll have a long, wonderful life. You can apply the doctrine that you learn. You can live grace orientation. You can explore the grace of God and share the grace of God. You can be a faithful witness for Jesus Christ. And you don’t set out trying to change the Christian world by some new doctrine that you think you’ve learned. See, my job is not to change the Christian world. My job is to reach out to the lost people in the world. And that’s your job also. But you’ll find every now and then a pastor who wants to change the way other pastors think or change the way other Christians think. And that’s a wrong agenda. So grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Our Lord himself said these words, Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I’ll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn, learn, learn of me. Learn. That’s the only way that you can become a mature believer is to learn God’s Word. If we don’t learn God’s Word, then it reflects into our nation, into our politics, into our schools, into our homes. And instead of glorifying God with the decisions that we make as a nation, We began to go down the my way highway internationally or nationally. And this is one of the reasons that discipline comes on a nation. The Bible is very clear why nations are destroyed. Nations destroyed, Hosea 4, 1 through 6 says, and this is a verse given to the Jews, but applicable to us. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Since you rejected knowledge, I’ll reject you. I would say that’s true in America today. The majority of Americans are not interested in the knowledge of the Word of God or what that says because of changing social agendas, because of changing rhetoric and what’s accepted. It’s like everything that used to be evil has now become good. And everything that used to be good has now become evil. You know, you’ve seen it yourself. You’ve seen on the news who has hidden agendas and who has open agendas and trying to force recognition and acceptance when the Bible says, no, it’s wrong. No, it’s wrong. And so when the nation begins to bend to political pressure from those that oppose what the Bible teaches, we guarantee discipline on the nation. And America, I believe, is under national discipline. I thank God for the reprieve we’ve had for the last few years. I’ve never seen such an attack on the institution of president as going on today. Whether you like it or not, he’s definitely under attack. But we are at a critical time in history. And who leads this nation must be oriented to the Word of God, must respect the Word of God, and must believe in divine operating principles. Divine institutions, freedom, marriage, family, nationalism, not internationalism, nationalism. These are all biblical principles that are critical for us. And that all comes from the Bible, learning the Bible, learning what God instituted in the Bible, learning what was written there, preserved, kept for you and me. If we do that and we understand that, then we have a bright and wonderful future. But to the extent that we shove it into the back closet and we forget about it and we get involved in life going merrily down the my way highway, it’s a guaranteed road to destruction and loss of freedom. That’s what we face in America today. I hope you’ve been listening. I hope you’re paying attention. I hope you’re grace-oriented and doctrinally oriented to the truth in your life. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
SPEAKER 02 :
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.
