In this episode, Rick Hughes examines the critical battle for your mind and soul, exploring how modern influences can sway your decisions. He highlights the crucial importance of guarding your thoughts with biblical principles, understanding false teachings, and why standing firm in God’s truth is vital for living a life of tranquility. Equipped with wisdom and knowledge from scripture, Rick encourages listeners to grow in grace and knowledge for a more profound spiritual existence.
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, you have an invitation to stick around for 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education, and absolutely zero manipulation. That’s right, we’re not here to con you. We’re not here to solicit money. We’re not gonna ask you for anything. We just would like for you to listen up as we discuss the Word of God. Hopefully I can verify and identify God’s plan for your life, and you can orient and adjust to the plan if you’d like to do that. That’s up to you, but remember what we tell you every Sunday morning. God gave you two ends, one of those ends you think with, and one of those ends you sit on. And success in your life depends on which one you use. Heads, you’ll win. Tails, you’ll lose. That’s why we always say bad decisions limit future options. If you make enough bad decisions, you will not have any options left. Good decisions open the door to wonderful blessings in your life, and the best decision you could ever make, ever, is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul told the Roman jailer, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy entire family. The Bible is clear, he that believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. And he that believeth not, the wrath of God abides on him already. That was the big question. Is Jesus the Messiah? Is he the anointed son of God? That’s what people had to decide when Christ walked on this earth. And once he went to heaven through the resurrection and the ascension, he commissioned the apostles to go through the whole world and tell the whole world the story that he had resurrected from the dead. Now, here’s the interesting thing. They didn’t speak the languages. They didn’t have time to learn all the languages of the world, and that’s where God the Holy Spirit miraculously gave them the ability to speak in those languages called tongues. Not what you hear about today, but that’s what it was back in those days, the ability to speak a foreign language. without having learned it. Now, this show, The Flatline, is about you building 10 unique problem-solving devices inside the thinking of your soul. If you learn these wonderful biblical principles and use them, then you will be able to stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. It begins with you learning how to rebound, how to confess your sin consistently, not waiting until you go to bed at night, but when you sin, name it immediately because the Bible says if we confess our sin, then he’s faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It also deals with you understanding the filling of the Holy Spirit. The Bible says in Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Spirit. How does that happen? Well, the moment you rebound, the moment you name any sin, you are instantly filled with the Holy Spirit. You were indwelled by the Holy Spirit at salvation, Ephesians 1.13. But You are filled with the Holy Spirit when you name sin. This gives you the opportunity to function under the faith rest drill, taking the promises of God’s word, living on those promises, using them in your life every day. By the way, we have a book on the promises and the principles provided in the word of God. And it’s a free book if you’d like to have a copy of it. Don’t hesitate to contact us at rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org, and we’ll send you a free copy of that book, Bible Promises and Principles. And there’s no narrative there. It’s just simply the promises that are associated with certain circumstances in your life and short one-line, two-line, three-line principles that will carry you through life. So as you learn the faith rest drill, as Moses told those Jews, stand still and watch the deliverance of the Lord. You begin to orient to God’s grace, understanding we’re saved by grace, we live by grace, there’s grace in heaven, we die by grace. We show grace to other people. Once you start living by grace orientation, it opens the door to a wonderful way of living with a monkey off your back waiting on God’s deliverance. This comes by biblical orientation or what I call doctrinal orientation. with you learning the scriptures. And how do you do that? Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. That’s the only way you can learn the scripture, is to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Study and grow are both imperative mood verbs. And they are telling you that as a Christian, you must grow up and you must come to the place where you understand the protocol plan of God in your life, how it works, because it’s much more than just ritual without reality to it. Many people go to church every Sunday to perform a ritual, and there is no reality to it. The Christian life I’m speaking about is very real, and it’s a unique way of living day by day, 24 hours a day, moment by moment, day by day, utilizing the assets and the provisions that God has given to you. This gives you a personal sense of destiny. You know you’re going to heaven. You know that to be absent from the body, to be face to face with the Lord. But you also have a destiny in this life. You have a destiny with your spiritual gift. And what has God provided you a gift to do? How does he want to use you? Where does he want to use you? It’s like the football team. We’re not all quarterbacks. We’re not all tackles. We’re not all ends. We’re not all running backs. Each person plays a position on the team. And you have a spiritual gift. God has equipped you to do a certain thing. And part of the maturity process is you learning to growing up and learning what that gift is. And this is all motivated because you love God. If you love me, you’ll obey me. My mandates are not grievous, the Bible says. Do you love God? Do you obey God? Because that’s the number one motivational virtue in your whole life, personal love for God. And how can you love a God you don’t even know? That’s the question. Most people don’t even know God is sovereignty, righteousness, justice, love, eternal life, immutability, veracity, omnipotence, omniscience. omnipresence. I know I just threw out a bunch of big words, but basically that’s the essence of God. Do you know that? Do you know anything about the God you serve? Learning about God’s word, learning the provisions God has made for you, beginning with his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, gives you a great appreciation for who the father is and what he’s done for you. And the more you know him, the more you love him. The more you love him, you can extend that impersonal love for all mankind, just like he did it for you. God so loved the world. He loved you even when you were a jerk. Even when I was a jerk, he loved us and he sent his son to die for us. Thus, we can love people that are jerks. We don’t have to hate them. We don’t have to be mad at them. We can love them based on our character, not their character. This takes us to sharing the happiness of God, a wonderful problem-solving device. The Lord Jesus Christ taught the disciples how to have his joy in them, and it’s a wonderful thing to have plus H, the happiness of God, because it doesn’t depend on circumstances or people. Jesus said in Luke 11, 27 and 28, happiness belongs to those people who hear my Father’s word and who keep it. And then there comes occupation with Christ, your final problem-solving device. When you begin to be occupied with the person of Christ, Christ in you, the hope of glory, reflecting Christ, representing Christ to your friends, representing Christ through your church, this is what it’s all about. It’s all designed so that Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, receive ultimate glory and honor, and that we bring men and women to Christ so that they might have eternal life. The Bible says not by works of righteousness, which we’ve been, 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 through by means of Jesus Christ, our Lord being justified by his grace. We should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. We are heirs in Christ. So here we are in time. wading our way through time, wading, you know, like wading in a creek, waddling, wading down the river, trying to figure out what this life is all about. And we started talking last week about Solomon’s imploring us to understand that there’s a time for every season, Ecclesiastes 3, 1 through 8. Let me read it one more time. There is a time for everything. There’s a season and a time for every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, a time to pluck up that which has been planted. A time to kill, a time to heal. A time to break down, a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh and a time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast away the stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to get, a time to lose. A time to keep, a time to cast away. A time to rend and a time to sow. A time to keep silent and a time to speak. A time to love, a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace. This passage I just read to you Is Solomon writing about God’s timing for all events on this planet? Some of these things you must act upon and some of them you have no control over. This is what we’ve been talking about last week and continue this week. Solomon’s admonition about the timing of God is critical since your course of life, my course of life, depends on the decisions that we make. For example, if we plant out of season, then we won’t have a harvest. There’s a right time and a wrong time to do most anything in life. And I want to tell you that a lot of critical mistakes have been made when people choose the wrong time to undertake certain events. There’s a right time and a wrong time. What you want to be sure you do is do the right thing at the right time. you know my pastor once told me that’s actually a right time to make no decision at all that’s right you don’t have to make decisions there sometimes you put them off because you don’t have all the information but if you are a believer in the lord jesus christ may i please ask that you get on god’s calendar and off of your own calendar since those distractions in front of you will wind up destroying you. You can live your life in turmoil if you want to, or you can live a life of tranquility. I mean, that’s up to you. But it all starts in your soul, what you think. There’s the real you, what’s spinning around inside that head between them two ears up there. What you think. And it’s where you live your spiritual life. That’s where it all takes place. What you think is what you are. So if you have been born again, if you have trusted Jesus Christ to be your Savior, then it’s imperative you understand that You must have a spiritual life. The spiritual life is not the physical life. They’re two different lives. The physical life is lived in the body. The spiritual life is lived in the soul. And the spiritual life is operational in the soul. Thus, the soul must be equipped to recognize and sustain the spiritual life. Now, you have a mind that’s part of the format of your soul, the mentality of your soul, and we’re not all on the same level mentally. Some are Mensa-type people, and some are just me. We’re here. But some people are very smart. Some people are not very smart. The plan of God doesn’t take all that into consideration. The plan of God provides everything you need to be smart and to make smart decisions. The smartest decision you could make is to learn that plan and live by it and stay off of the my way highway. So the spiritual life must be learned in the mentality of the soul because that’s where the battle takes place every day of your life. in your thoughts, in your mind, in your thinking. 1 Peter 2.11 says, Dearly beloved, I beseech you as a sojourner and as a pilgrim to abstain from fleshly lust or thoughts which war against your soul. There is a battle for your soul, for the mentality of your soul, for the volitional decisions you make in your soul. And your soul not only functions in the time continuum right now, but the neat thing about it is it will function in eternity since you carry You’re thinking with you into eternity. You don’t carry this body. It’s going to go back into the ground, turn into dust again. But your soul and your spirit will get a resurrection body and you will carry your thoughts with you. But you won’t be sad. The Bible says there’ll be no more tears, no more sorrow, no more pain. The old things will be passed away. But you will remember and you will carry those things you’ve learned with you. That’s how we appreciate what happens when we get there. So the soul is made up of mentality. The soul has volition, the chooser, the choice. The soul is a conscience inside of you. You can look in the mirror and recognize yourself. And the soul has a self-consciousness. so what is your soul you might ask well it’s the invisible immortal part of you that god created in his image that’s what your soul is so remember the soul life that you have is not in your blood You know, they talk about blood here. The typical male has five and a half liters of blood. And if it’s a major trauma, I was reading recently about a helicopter pilot in St. Louis that flew a lot of medical emergency rescues and a great book, great read, and about the medical traumas that they worked with. In a medical trauma, it’s not uncommon for the doctors and the hospitals to give 15 units of blood since in the 120 days, the body can make new red blood cells. If you get all your blood taken out and you bleed out and they put all new blood in you, your soul’s still there. Also remember, the soul is not the seat of your emotions. No, it’s not. Your emotions could be altered or even removed by destroying certain parts of your brain. Thus, here we go, man can only certainly create biological life by copulation, man and a woman copulate and conceive, but only God can impute the soul to that biological life. Man and woman don’t make the soul, God does. So in the end, the sin-infected body will be destroyed, but the soul and the spirit of the born-again believer are delivered into a new body at the resurrection. So Psalm 34, 22, the Lord redeems the soul of his servants, and none of them who trust in him shall ever be desolate, abandoned, or forgotten. In Mark 8, 36 and 37, what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Since the mentality of your soul is the command post of your body, the way you think is what you do, then you must be sure you make decisions based on the very best information you can get. You know, when people get sick, they search the Internet to get the best doctors, to get the best information possible. to find the best medicines you must be sure you’re making decisions in your life based on the very best information possible because the Bible says in Proverbs 23 7 as you think in your heart so you are everything that you are started with a thought and that thought became a decision and that decision became a process You are a victim of your thoughts, and the cosmic system seeks to influence your thinking every day. There’s an attack on your mind every day through social media, through anything that, television, radio, whatever, the internet, trying to control what you think, getting you to think human viewpoint, getting you to think in a new way. In our society today, it’s a progressive way of thinking. getting you to be inclusive in all your thoughts and to buy into the process that everybody should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race, gender, creed. And that’s true. God loves everybody equally and fairly. But if you get down to the bottom line of what is sin and what is not sin, we cannot respect those who live in sin and flaunt it before God. It’s impossible. So the soul is the command post of the body. and we have to make sure we’re making decision based on the best information which is the bible now there’s a lot of information out there and a lot of people say well hey this is okay fred does it so it must be okay you can do it too it’s fun it’s a new way of living But then the Bible says, oh no, oh no, that is a terrible sin. That sin will destroy a nation if you get involved in it. And there are certain sins in the Bible that do have national implications. So the information that we need to live a wonderful, meaningful life is found in the Bible. The alternative information that we don’t need is found in the cosmic system. And the cosmic system is much more available than the Bible today. I mean, it hits you every day on your internet. It hits you every day on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. It hits you every day on the news and what news you’re watching. Every day there is an attack on your mind to control what you think. You don’t read the Bible every day. You should, but you don’t. You don’t open the Bible and ponder what the verses tell you every day. Sometimes you only take it to church with you on Sunday and don’t read it much then. That’s a mistake. Because in the pages of that Bible are all the principles and all the provisions that you need to have a wonderful life. To the extent that you neglect what’s in the Bible, it’s a guarantee that you will wind up miserable and wind up destroying your life. So, shame is the legacy of a fool, the Bible says in Proverbs 3.35. And in Proverbs 1.5, a man of understanding will attain wise counsel. So the objective of the devil, a.k.a. the enemy, is to brainwash us, neutralize us, and just shut us down so we cannot be an effective witness for the Lord Jesus Christ. And how does he do that? Well, if he can get you to act on the wrong information, then he can get you to represent his plan instead of God’s plan. God’s plan in the divine institutions, freedom, family, marriage, and nationalism. Satan’s plan comes along. You buy into it. You reject the concept of marriage. You believe in freely living together without getting married, or you believe in man-man, woman-woman marriage sort of deal. It’s not what the Bible teaches, but you justify it because your friends did it, and they told you it’s okay. And you have no idea of the impact that it has on this nation. So if Satan can get you to act on the wrong information, then he can get you to represent his plan instead of God’s plan. His plan is a lie. It’s based in a lie. The devil is a liar. The Lord Jesus Christ said that. He’s a liar and a murderer from the beginning. And yet he has a system and he has a plan. It’s called the doctrine of demons in the Bible. He even has his own preachers. And there are many churches today that are filled with pastors and pastorettes of Satan. Pastors and pastorettes of Satan who are teaching false doctrine. And yet people buy into it. They believe it. And that’s their choice. So the first step is usually to influence you by means of your friends. Influence you by means of your contemporaries. Since you’re usually concerned about what people think about you. And these types of people are the cosmic evangelists that recruit you for Satan’s cosmic system. And it’s called evil in the Bible. You are being recruited daily. In good old USA Today, there’s a lot of recruiting. Yes, by social media, as I said. The mainstream media pushes diversity and inclusion as a new way of thinking. And anyone who doesn’t conform to this new way of progressive thinking as a racist or a sexist or a bigot, that’s the way they attack you. But it’s true that Jesus Christ, God’s anointed son, died for all members of the human race. Everybody. And the scriptures verify it, 2 Peter 3, 9. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing for any, not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance or to change their mind about Christ. But it’s also true that justice of God observes the sin of man and holds him accountable. In the following case, Peter is dealing with false prophets, people who deny the Lord Jesus Christ and take advantage of unsuspecting listeners. False prophets among the children of Israel and false prophets in the body of Christ. and they bring in destructive heresies, and they deny Christ. And this is a reference to the legalists who abused their power and took advantage of the early church in the times of Peter. Here’s what Peter said about that. False prophets arose among the people, just as there will be among you false prophets. These false prophets will infiltrate your midst. They’ll slip in among you and you won’t even know they’re there. And they will do it with destructive heresy. That’s cosmic system lies, the evil that Satan propagates. Even in the point of denying the master that bought them. And as a result, they will bring swift destruction on themselves. and many, that’s their recruits, will follow their debauched lifestyles. Because of these false teachers, 2 Peter 2, 1 through 19, because of these false teachers, the way of truth will be slandered, and in their greed, they will exploit you with deceptive words. Their condemnation has been pronounced long ago and is not sitting idly by, and their destruction is not asleep. For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but threw them into hell and locked them up with chains in utter darkness, to be kept until the judgment, and if he did not spare the ancient world, but did protect Noah, a herald of righteousness, along with seven others, then if God brought a flood on an ungodly world, and if he turned to ashes, The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Peter writes about it, when he condemned them to destruction, having appointed them to serve as an example to future generations who were ungodly. And if he rescued Lot to future generations of the ungodly, and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, in anguish over the debauched lifestyle of the lawless men. For while he lived among them day after day, that righteous man was tormented a lot in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds that he saw and heard. If so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from their trials and to reserve the unrighteous for punishment at the day of judgment. especially those who indulge their fleshly desires and who despise authority. Brazen, insolent, not afraid to assault the glorious ones, yet even angels who are much more powerful do not bring slanderous judgment against them before the Lord. These men, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, do not understand who they’re insulting, and consequently, in their destruction, they will be destroyed. There’s a warning from Peter. This is what’s coming down the pipe. This is what America’s facing. It is my prayer that you will grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. You will learn God’s word, stand on it, use it, and believe it. I trust you will. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flock Line.
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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.
