In an era where historical interpretation influences the present, explore the deep-seated spiritual roots of the United States with Rick Hughes. Delve into the story of how America’s forefathers sought independence through faith and how subsequent evangelists like Billy Sunday and D.L. Moody spearheaded revival and renewal. This episode examines how shifts in American culture and authority impact our ongoing narrative, challenging listeners to seek wisdom and divine insight amid current societal changes.
Welcome to the Flatline with your host, Rick Hughes. For the next 30 minutes, you’ll be inspired, motivated, educated, but never manipulated. Now, your host, Rick Hughes.
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Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, I’d like to ask you to stick around. 30 short minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and all done with no manipulation. The only thing we ever try to do on this radio show is give you accurate information. That information will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life if you’re interested. And if in case you are, you can always orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. But my job is to get it accurate and give you the accurate information. I would like to remind you that we do have transcriptions of all of our messages, and we have put into print recently three volumes of transcripts from the year 2019, and those are all available free of charge through the ministry. That’s 52 flatline messages put into three different books. And you can read that. I like that because the written word sticks around when the word of the radio or television goes away if you don’t have a radio or television. But anyhow, those are available. We always make those transcriptions available. And that’s for you if you’d like to have that, as well as our other material. You can always go to rickhughesministries.org. Rick Hughes ministries.org and see the books that we’ve written and they’re all free. We don’t charge for anything because we’ve always believed as I learned that from my very own pastor, that if God’s in it, he will pay for it. If I have to run around and hustle up money and beg for support, then God’s not in it. That’s me trying to raise the money. So we broadcast now currently about 30 radio shows across America every Sunday morning. I don’t know where you are and where you’re listening, but thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for tuning in, and remember, God gave you two ends, one you can think with, one you can sit on, and success in your life is going to depend on which one of those you use. Heads, you will win, and tails, you will lose. And remember, bad decisions limit future options. If you make enough bad decisions, you’re going to wind up with no options left. So today we want to talk about the tracks of history. The tracks of history. You’ll be listening to this show in probably, let’s see, April, January, March, April, May. You’ll be listening to this show in May, I guess, of the year 2020. Here it is, April, and I’m recording it a little earlier, but we want to talk about the tracks of history. And it doesn’t take a genius to read trends of history, if you look at the trends of going on in the history of the United States of America, not the world, just our country. If you try to read the trends of history, it doesn’t take a genius or require any sort of smarts to understand where we’ve been, where we’re going, and you can see it unfolding before your eyes. Over 200 years ago, we began to be a great nation with the War of Independence. You remember, 13 North American colonies of Great Britain declared themselves independent and called themselves the United States of America. And these United States did not seek to overthrow the government of Great Britain. They simply just wanted to be separated and to be a free nation out from underneath their control. So they refused to pay taxes imposed by the British Parliament. which the United States claimed was a taxation without any representation, and that resulted in the War for Independence. So in 1793, the Treaty of Paris ended the war and recognized the sovereignty of the United States of America. Now, it’s a well-known fact, this won’t catch you by surprise, that many of our founding fathers were believers in the lord jesus christ and found much encouragement from the scriptures in fact the bible has always been the basis for cultural and moral direction for many of america’s trusted leaders including the current president and this is what he said at the national prayer breakfast our current president donald trump said in america we don’t punish prayer We don’t tear down crosses. We don’t ban symbols of faith. And we don’t muzzle pastors. In America, we celebrate faith. We cherish religion. And we hold our values in prayer. And we praise our sites to the glory of God. That’s from Donald Trump. Other men have said great things like Robert E. Lee once said, I can only say that I am nothing but a poor sinner trusting in Christ alone for salvation. And he also said, I prefer the Bible to any other book. There’s enough in that to satisfy the most ardent thirst for knowledge and to open the way to true wisdom and to teach the only road to salvation is and eternal happiness. It’s not above human comprehension, and it’s sufficient to satisfy all its desires. Those are the words of Robert E. Lee. John Quincy Adams, President of the United States, 1825, said the first and almost the only book deserving of universal attention is the Bible. He said, I speak as a man of the world, and I say to you, search the scriptures. Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States in 1869 as he was dying of cancer, wrote in his memoirs, not for prestige, but so as not to leave his family in debt. So he wrote his memoirs to sell so his family wouldn’t be in debt anymore. And he finished it in time, and the royalties saved his family from financial ruin. But this is what Ulysses S. Grant wrote. Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties. Write its precepts in your heart and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this book, we are indebted for the progress made, and to this we must look as our guide in the future. You know, after that civil war in 1861 to 1865, God raised up some mighty evangelists Men you may have never heard of, like D.L. Moody, who was converted in 1855 at the age of 17. Moody preached all across America, all across England, all across Scotland. And in America, he would often have crowds that numbered in the thousands. His last sermon was given in Kansas City, Missouri, 1899. The Moody Bible Institute and the church remain in Chicago even today in honor of him and his great ministry. But after Moody died, came another famous evangelist in the United States named Billy Sunday. Billy Sunday lived and preached from 1862 to 1935. He was an ex-professional baseball player who converted Christ and entered into the ministry and held campaigns in America’s largest cities and held the largest crowds of any evangelist before the advent of electronic sound systems. That means no PA system. Over the course of his ministry, it’s estimated he preached to more than 100 million people face-to-face and most without electronic sound systems. He was a conservative evangelist who believed in the inerrancy of the scriptures. He believed in the virgin birth. He believed in the substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection, as well as the imminent return of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was Billy Sunday. And then after him, in 1918, William Franklin Graham, a Southern Baptist evangelist, who became known internationally proclaiming the work of Christ on the cross for the remission of sin. According to his staff, more than three million people responded to his invitation. More than 400 crusades in 185 countries, the first one being in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended by thousands when he was only 29 years old. In South Korea, he attracted more than one million listeners to a single preaching service in South Korea. He also appeared in China in 1988 and in North Korea in 1992. And then revival began to sweep through America’s youth from the early 60s through the 70s in organizations like Campus Crusade, Young Life, Youth for Christ, Navigators, all had an amazing result. The reason I bring all this up to you is to show that these events demonstrated the unprecedented period of Christian revival from the 1860s to the mid-1980s, but there was a big change in the American culture, a shift in American culture. Primarily, the worship of gifts and not the giver. The worship of gifts and not the giver. After the conflicts of World War I and World War II, then Korea, eventually Vietnam, many of the young people in America began to reject authority figures and sought a culture of free love with no responsibility. By the way, rejection of authority is an indicator of personal and national destruction. So if you have a son or a daughter or a grandchild that can’t handle authority, you’ve got trouble brewing. And the question I have to ask you is do they react or respond when you discipline them? how do they handle unfair decisions at school or at work because the secret to living a long wonderful life is authority orientation as taught in ephesians 6 1-4 children obey your parents honor your father and mother so to be well with you and you’ll live a long time ephesians 6 1-4 You know, when this attitude began to change in America, Satan took advantage of the shift and raised up his own cosmic evangelists. And of all things, a woman named Madeline Murray O’Hare, founder of the American Atheist and publisher of American Atheist Magazine, best known for her lawsuit which led to the Supreme Court decision prohibiting officially sponsored prayer in public schools. In 1964, Life magazine referred to her as the most hated woman in America. And her demise was not very pretty. She was kidnapped and murdered by three men who sought money she had hidden, along with her son, John, and along with her granddaughter, Robin. They were kidnapped, killed, dismembered, cut up with large knives. stuffed into 55-gallon drums and buried at Camp Woods. Eventually, Texas authorities discovered the human bones and discovered that it was indeed her. So she was murdered, robbed, and murdered, and that’s how her life ended. But this was just the beginning of Satan’s initiative. So by attacking the family and then beginning to promote a culture of no responsibility and forcing all Bible readings and all prayers out of public schools, We were well on our way to a different nation than our forefathers had known. And in the early days of my ministry, from 1971, 72, 73, 74, 75, I spoke in hundreds of public schools, and there was never a problem. And we led many young people to Christ, and it was a wonderful opportunity and a wonderful time to do that. So no longer can you do that. Yes, I still get to speak in schools, but they’re private schools. not Christian schools, but private academies. And I pray that after the coronavirus effect has died down, the private schools will be able to get back to business because still they will allow you to come in and talk to their students about the plan of God. So this was the beginning of Satan’s initiative. And the question that we face now is are we gonna change course after all this is over? and recover, or will we continue down the road to who knows where? The road to moral and spiritual collapse. You know, people turn to God in times of fear, in times of worry like we’re having today. Oh, what’s going to happen? I don’t want to get the virus. I don’t want to die. Oh, God, please help me. But when all of that goes away, it doesn’t take long for people to settle back into their old routines of enjoying the gifts and forgetting the giver. But every day we hear another piece of information that sounds like the establishment concepts this country was founded upon are unraveling bit by bit. I’m not a politician. I don’t pretend to be a politician. But I don’t think we can endure the gutting of our military, the ignoring of immigration laws and borders or American politics that pursue a course of progressive idealism and redistribution of wealth by means of entitlement programs. I mean, all you’ve got to do is watch a simple late night show, watch the man on the street interview about American politics and discover that many young people, many college age kids, students that should know better, are in the clear majority, and they are uninformed, unintelligent, and easily swayed by the public lie. I like to say so many of them are drinking the Kool-Aid, and this is an old saying, drinking the Kool-Aid. Well, are we going to survive it? A friend of mine, my pastor, as a matter of fact, wrote a book in 1993 called In Whom Do You Trust? The True Hope of a Nation. This book was published about the time when the average American was hoping that a newly elected president named Bill Clinton would bring a better future and happiness by providing security and prosperity that would eventually lead to personal happiness. And that book that he wrote detailed the cycles of civilization described by Clarence Mannion, who was the Dean of Notre Dame School of Law from 1941 to 1952. And that cycle is from bondage to bondage. You can order that book if you’d like to. You can always order it by going to R.B. Thame Jr. Bible Ministries on the Internet of Thame Ministries on the Internet and order In Whom Do You Trust? True Hope of the Nation. So the only hope to break this cycle of bondage to bondage comes from the spiritual life of mature believers like yourself, I hope, those who live in the client nation, the United States of America. If you’re a believer, your job is to handle matters wisely. Listen to Proverbs 16, 20. He that handles a matter wisely shall find good, and whosoever trusts in the Lord will be happy. Whoever handles a matter, the word dabar, the Hebrew word dabar, and you say, why do I need to know about that? Well, it means something that you think, something that you say, or something that you do that requires a volitional decision. God gave you a volition. And every decision you make, every critical decision you make, you’re responsible for those decisions. So when it talks about whoever handles a matter wisely, means that when you think, say, or do something that requires a volitional decision, Now, let me give you a principles about this. The question is this, what is your frame of reference? What is your anchor point in your life? Is it human viewpoint or is it divine viewpoint? If you eliminate divine viewpoint from the public arena, then all you simply have is the blind leading the blind. And that’s what’s going on in politics today. A lot of the blind leading the blind because no divine viewpoint is being observed or even considered. two all decisions that we make in life must be governed by the scriptures that’s what we call bible doctrine so you if you make a decision you’re either going to make it based on what you know or what you feel either based on the content of your soul or based on the drive of your emotions one of the two so all decisions you make in life must be governed by the scriptures three But human viewpoint, human thinking, this is not Bible doctrine. And this is why the Bible tells us we have to renovate the way we think in 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 signed to each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. That’s what the Father wants for you, a different way of thinking that you renovate your thinking, that you don’t think like the world thinks. so the Bible’s clear about that. When you react to unfair situations rather than responding, notice the difference, react or respond. If you react to unfair situations rather than responding, then you obviously are not using the Bible or Bible doctrine. For example, do you complain to others about the way you’re being treated? Do you? Are you looking for some sympathy? Are you wanting to have a little pity party because somebody rained on your parade or whatever happened to you? You’re tired of it and you don’t like it and so you’re going to complain about it. You are reacting to an unfair situation. It doesn’t have to be fair. It could be unfair. But if you get angry and bitter and react, you’re not thinking Bible doctrine. you see it takes a humility profile to forgive and forget and the bible says let this mind be in you it was also in christ jesus who humbled himself and made himself of no reputation there’s a humility profile it takes that if you’re going to forgive people and forget what they did That’s the function of impersonal love as you can read about it in Ephesians 4, 31 through 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. That’s a biblical concept in the Bible. So if you have this supernatural asset of impersonal love, which is a problem-solving device, then you can handle any exigencies that come into your life, any exigencies that come your way. So let me go back to Proverbs 16, 20. Again, listen. He that handles the matter wisely shall find good. Wisely is the Hebrew word sakal, and it means to be very prudent. to give attention to or to have comprehension the word prudent means to be practical or exercise good judgment to use caution or to be wise or judicious so here’s some principles on being prudent it means you got to have some wisdom and the first principle you have to remember is we are not born wise we have to acquire wisdom We must. Because if you don’t acquire wisdom, you never understand divine viewpoint. You may wind up knowing God, but you’ll never understand the gods you know without some wisdom. So Proverbs 2.10 tells you this. When wisdom enters your heart. there it is and knowledge is pleasant to your soul then discretion will preserve you and understanding will keep you we call that the fantastic for wisdom knowledge discretion and understanding all wisdom starts with knowledge and this verse says when knowledge is what pleasant to your soul do you enjoy learning god’s word do you enjoy it you know a lot of people enjoy certain sweets so i remember watching a politician recently who was home during the coronavirus and she showed her refrigerator and all the chocolate she had in there she loved chocolate well a lot of us love chocolate caramel and coconut all these things But do you love the Word of God? Do you go after the Word of God? Do you seek the Word of God in your life? That’s the key here. When wisdom enters your heart and knowledge becomes pleasant, do you want it? Do you want more of it? You see, when you get knowledge, that’s information. And when you cycle the information into your heart, it becomes wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge acted upon. Wisdom is knowledge that’s been learned and stored in the framework of your soul. So when wisdom enters your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, your heart is the, there’s two things the Bible talks about, your mind and your heart. It’s one thing to go to church and to listen to the pastor and to learn what he’s hearing, what he’s saying, and to have knowledge of it, that it goes into your mind where it’s called in the Bible gnosis or knowledge. But it doesn’t do you any good until you apply it or you cycle it over to your heart, which is then it’s called epinosis or epi being full and knowledge being gnosis. So there’s a difference between hearing it and keeping it. And that’s when the Lord Jesus Christ said, happiness belongs to those people who hear my Father’s word and keep it in Luke 11, 27 and 28. Hearing it is not keeping it, but hearing and keeping produces wisdom. So once you have wisdom in your heart that comes from knowledge of Bible doctrine, then you have discretion. And the Bible says discretion will preserve you. And then you have understanding. Understanding will keep you. This is what I call spiritual x-ray vision. We all have it if we’re believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a wonderful thing. It doesn’t have anything to do with your high IQ. It doesn’t mean that. This is the invisible ministry of the Holy Spirit taking the power of the living Word of God that begins to be wisdom in your soul. And the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God, gives you phenomenal discernment and insight through the eyes of Scripture. Thus you have what I call spiritual x-ray vision. And that can save you a lot of mistakes. So when wisdom enters your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, then discretion will preserve you and understanding will keep you. Preserve you, the Hebrew word shamar means to guard you. Guard you from what? From yourself, obviously. and keep you, the Hebrew word notsar, meaning to protect or maintain your position. You are your own worst enemy. That’s the problem. So the first bit of wisdom we all have to understand is like this. There is a distinct difference between knowing God and understanding God. That’s why the Bible says in Jeremiah 9, 24, let him who glorifies glory in this, that he understands me and knows me. that I am the Lord exercising love and kindness and judgment and righteousness in the earth for these are the things that I delight in, saith the Lord. So the Christian life, the Christian life we talk about on this radio show is a supernatural lifestyle and it can only be executed by means of God the Holy Spirit using Bible doctrine of the Word of God. Listen, Superman doesn’t have anything on you. You’ve got all these supernatural assets. As a believer, you have a Bible. As a believer, you have the indwelling and the filling of the Holy Spirit. As a believer, you have a right pastor to teach the Word of God to you. This is the supernatural life. So it’s possible that you could know God through Jesus Christ as appointed son, but it’s also possible that you would not understand the God you know. That’s possible. So every decision you make has to be based on either human wisdom, what dear Ann says or dear Abby, or it’s based on biblical insight. Every decision. And the difference amounts to this. There is a judgment seat of Christ in 1 Corinthians 3, 11 through 16. And your decisions will be evaluated and you’ll be rewarded based on those divine good productions. So the difference between the mature believer And the less than mature believer is obvious when it comes to making decisions. Because the immature believer simply guesses. He’s guessing. What is God’s will? And he has those famous last words, well, I prayed about it, I prayed about it. It’s just a guess. The immature believer winds up being impetuous, anxious, judgmental, and minus impersonal love assets. But the mature believer, the one we’re talking about, the one with wisdom, discernment, knowledge, insight, and understanding, he’s gonna be deliberate, relaxed, and using those problem-solving devices. That’s what he’s gonna be. That must be you. As we go through the tracks of history and continue on this study, you’ve got to stay on track. You’ve got to stick to course. You know, you’ve heard me say there’s a train wreck coming. I can hear the whistle blowing now. If you look down the tracks, that’s what’s happening in America today. not only in our country, but obviously other countries as well. But I’m concerned about us. How is this affecting us? And how is this crisis affecting you? And what will be the America that comes out of it? Are you going to stick with the wheel tracks of righteousness? Are you going to follow the tracks laid down by the Lord Jesus Christ? Are you going to go off on your own, my way, highway? I don’t know. But if you’re a mature believer, your decisions will be deliberate, they will be relaxed, and you will use those problem-solving devices God’s given to you. There’s a lot more to say about this, and I’ll come back to it next week. So please stick around. Please join me and write to me if you need to. RickHughesMinistries.org is our website. RickHughesMinistries.org. You can always correspond with us there. Until next week, this is Rick 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.
