Join us as Rick Hughes explores the intricate balance between knowing God and understanding God, and why it’s pivotal for your spiritual journey. Discover how a well-qualified pastor can lead you to maturity and what criteria you should use in selecting a spiritual leader. Rick emphasizes the need for teaching that surpasses mere inspiration and challenges listeners to seek deeper biblical truths that promote genuine growth.
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.
SPEAKER 01 :
good morning and welcome to the flatline i’m your host rick hughes and for the next few minutes please stick around we won’t hassle you or anything just some inspiration some motivation some education always done without any type of manipulation the show is about helping you to verify and identify god’s plan for your life and if i can do that then you always have the freedom and the privacy to orient and adjust to the plan should you decide to do so. But you know, we always teach about the flat line, the forward line of troops, the main line of resistance in your soul, made up of those 10 wonderful problem-solving devices, beginning with this problem-solving device of rebound. And that’s when we confess our known sins to God, 1 John 1, 9, then the filling of the Holy Spirit, In Ephesians 5, 18, where we’re mandated to be filled with the Spirit, using the faith to rest in real, and that’s where we’re mandated to grow by faith and live by faith. Grace orientation, biblical orientation, having a personal sense of destiny, developing personal love for God and impersonal love for others. sharing the happiness of God and being occupied with Christ. We’ve taught extensively on all 10 of these unique problem-solving devices, and we have a book about it. It’s free. It’s never anything on this show. It’s never charged for not one thing. So if you’d like to have the book, just contact us. We’ll send you the book, Christian Problem Solving. All 10 of them are listed there, and we can also include a problem-solving bookmarker that helps you Put it in your Bible. Keep your place in your Bible if you need it. But many years ago when I accepted Christ as my Savior, I had a lot of questions. I didn’t grow up in the church. I didn’t have any church background, so I had a lot of questions. And as I grew, I sought the Lord’s direction in my life and talked to several influential men who tried to direct me into their way of thinking, and it didn’t work. They just couldn’t make me into the person they wanted to make me into. They tried to make me into something I was not. And that’s what organized religion will do for you. They’ll try to make you into something you’re not, where you’ll Run around and talk like you would not normally talk or act like you would not normally act. You have to put on a routine. That’s not what being a Christian is. Eventually… The Holy Spirit of God directed me to a really wonderful pastor, a well-qualified pastor. He was a no-nonsense type of guy who reminded me of my college football coach at Alabama, Coach Paul Bear Bryant. Tough guy, Bear Bryant was, and so was this pastor, but fair, both of them were. And both of them were the best in the land, I promise you. So I stuck with this pastor. And I knew he would lead me correctly, and he did from 1968 even still to this day. He’s been gone a long time now. He’s with the Lord, but I still have all the access to his information that he taught. So this is what I always hope to do for you, to direct you to that sort of pastor, the man for you. And so you can get under him, and his job will be to teach you and make you rich in God’s word. And with that spiritual wealth, you’ll be dangerous to the enemy. but you’ll be equipped to see his scams, his temptations, and the ways that he seeks to ruin your life. So you’ve listened to me talk about this many times, and I want to direct a show to it today. What is a well-qualified pastor? The need for you to have a well-qualified pastor. I get notes from people saying, I live in this city, and I’ve heard you talk about that. Where is a well-qualified pastor in my city? And so many times I say, I don’t know. I’m not familiar with your city. I’m not familiar with your churches. But I will direct them to someone that I know that will make information available to them free of charge. But the reason is that so many men in the pulpit today are not actually teaching their flock. So many men are not actually teaching their flock. And organized religion today has moved into, it seems to be, some sort of entertainment, motivational, inspirational type messages. If I quote Randall J. Stevens of Culture and Entertainment and Religion in America, he said this. Randall J. Stevens, Culture and Entertainment and Religion in America. He said, in the late 20th and early 21st century, combinations of religion and entertainment included Muslim rap music, Christian rock music, Jewish folk music, and much more. And a great deal of this innovation coincided with the rise of the performance-driven megachurch and the proliferation of religious organizations that catered to athletes and drew on sports imagery and symbolism for their causes. The need for more teaching and less preaching So preaching without solid teaching leads to emotional response, but we don’t want to have strict intellectualism as well. So you’ve heard me talk about this. You’ve heard me talk about the need for solid, sound, biblical Bible teaching. And you may have heard me quote Jeremiah 9, 24, where the Bible says, let him who boasts, boast about this. that he understands me and knows me, and that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth, for I delight in these things, says the Lord. And I have told you there’s a difference between knowing God and understanding God. I hope you realize that. because your salvation is based on knowing God through the work of His Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. But your spiritual life, that’s the second stage here, is based on understanding God or learning the principles and the provisions He’s provided for you so that you can begin to replicate the thinking of Christ. That’s what Philippians 2, 5 tells you. Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. Or Romans 12, 3, stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think. But think in terms of humility as God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. So let me give you some principles about well-qualified pastors and what you should look for. A well-qualified pastor, first of all, will understand God’s protocol plan. That means that a right thing has to be done in a right way. Because the right thing done in a wrong way is still wrong. And a wrong thing done in a right way is wrong. So what is the right thing in a right way? Well, it means that if you’re going to pray, for example, you cannot pray with known sin in your life because your prayer won’t be answered. How do I get to that? Because the Bible said, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. The only prayer God’s going to hear from a sinner to begin with is the prayer of salvation. Lord Jesus, I want to be saved. I believe you died for me. I accept you as my savior. That’s a prayer that’ll always be heard. But as a Christian, when you come to the Father and you pray and you have unconfessed sin in your life, the Holy Spirit is quenched and the Holy Spirit is grieved and he cannot do his job because the Bible says his job is to intercede for us in prayer. He can’t do it if he’s quenched in greed because of our sin. So you have to understand that. Understanding God, understanding his plan, understanding the protocol plan of God. A well-qualified pastor, point one, will teach you how you cannot allow yourself to do right things in a wrong way. Because those right things done in the wrong way, like tithing or going to church, all good things to do, but they can wind up being human good and burned up at the judgment seat of Christ if you do them in the wrong way. There’s nothing wrong with giving to your church. There’s nothing wrong with singing in the choir. There’s nothing wrong with going on a mission trip. There’s nothing wrong with witnessing. All of these things God expects out of you, but you can do them in the wrong way, and they wind up being human good. Energy of the flesh, and that’s when you quench the Holy Spirit and do these things with no sin in your life. A well-qualified pastor will warn you about that. He’ll teach you the protocol plan of God. He may not call it that. Just as I was speaking with a new friend last week, I said, I may not tell you anything you haven’t heard before, but I may put it in a way you’ve never heard it put before. And that’s my objective, to make you think. So a well-qualified pastor will help you understand God’s protocol plan, too. A well-qualified pastor can teach exegetically or topically. The question is, do you know the difference? Exegetically is line upon line, word upon word. I mean, as it goes, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. So you would start out with theos, ho theos, cosmos, the God, agapao, so loved the cosmos, the world. he’ll break it down, line upon line. And then you can develop the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the world, the doctrine of love, and maybe spend 10 hours on each one of those. So exegetically, studying line upon line, we call it the ICE technique, the ICE technique, categorical, exegetically, and isagogically. These are all big words I had to learn. Don’t faint. I had to learn them too. But topically, a person can teach topically maybe on a sin. Maybe some pastor’s gonna teach on some specific sin or some specific topic and that’s a topical sermon. But the sermons that help us to grow are the ones that are exegetically taught where we go line by line, word by word, verse by verse. And a well-qualified pastor will have a working knowledge of the original languages, point three. He might not be an expert in Greek and Hebrew, but at least he knows how to go back to the languages, find out what the word meant then. See, that’s part of the exegesis, I-C-E, isagogics, categorical exegesis. Go back to the word love, for example. When we say I love you, if the Bible says if you love me, you’ll do this. If you love me, you’ll do that. There are four words for love in the Greek New Testament, and it depends on which word it is. It’s always translated love in the English every time. And a well-qualified pastor can tell you the different words, agapao, phileo, stokeo, erao, what word is actually in this passage. So, number four, a well-qualified pastor does not need to know everybody’s name in the congregation. But he must feed that congregation and protect each member of his congregation from the wolves. Protect the sheep from the wolves that come around. Nothing worse than religious self-righteous wolves that want to devour some congregation. Five. The pastor must be motivated by personal love for God. It’s problem solving device number seven, personal love for God. That’s a great virtue in a person’s life. So he needs to be motivated by his personal love for God. And if you. If you are motivated by love of people, then you’ll never make it because your motivation doesn’t come from people. It might be good to be motivated by people in some areas, but not for some pastor in the ministry. He must not be motivated by anybody in his congregation, even though he’ll have great friends, great rapport. It’s his personal love for God that motivates him. And the reason is because it’s discouraging to watch people you know fall asleep while you’re teaching or advance slowly when other people are getting the point and growing quickly. So the pastor has to be motivated by his love for the Lord Jesus Christ, not for individual members of the congregation. And point six, most male believers with the spiritual gift of pastor-teacher are neither brilliant individuals nor even original thinkers. And quite frankly, as a pastor, they’re not required to be. They’re not required to be geniuses. but they are required to be faithful in the principle of studying and teaching and studying and teaching. 2 Timothy 2.5, Paul told Timothy, study to show yourself approved unto God. 2.15, excuse me. Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, but rightly dividing the word of truth. And so any well-qualified pastor must be a serious student of the word of God. When I do a radio show like I’m doing for you now, it takes me hours to put a 30-minute message together. When I’m doing a Bible conference in a church and maybe I’m speaking for four hours, I may spend 50 to 70 hours just putting it together. You can’t just get up in the pulpit and wing it. You have to have research. You have to dig in. You have to follow the leads of Scripture and see where it takes you. And no pastor can be a well-qualified pastor without serious study of the Word of God on a consistent basis in their life every day. you see none of us can read the bible and attain spiritual maturity on our own the bible we have is our textbook but the gift of pastor teacher is designed to communicate the specifics of that textbook the specifics of the what we call the mystery doctrine of the church this is what causes spiritual growth in our lives so the word of god must be learned under the authority of a well-qualified pastor, and that authority is vested in a spiritual gift God gives him at the moment of salvation, the gift of pastor-teacher. There are a lot of guys that have the gift of pastor-teacher that never use it. I was given the gift of evangelism when I got saved. I didn’t know it. It took me a while to figure out what was going on in my life, but you have a spiritual gift too. You and I both have spiritual gifts. And it’s a shame when we don’t use our spiritual gift. And so many times Satan’s able to distract men from ever going into the ministry, getting them distracted into various things. I think about one person in particular who told me, I’ve got the gift of pastor teacher and I’m gonna study and prepare and be a good pastor. Well, not so. Married, kids and into a big hobby and that’s the end of that. So it’s very easy to get distracted. But pastor-teacher is a spiritual gift provided by God the Holy Spirit at the point of salvation for certain male believers only, not females, male believers only. You might not like that, but that’s the best I understand. It is a gift to men only, and it’s found in all kinds of personalities. But never try to associate the gift of pastor-teacher with certain kinds of personalities. Don’t say, well, he’s a good pastor because he’s sweet or he’s a good pastor because he’s friendly or because he’s kind. You know, this person may be that sort of personality. That doesn’t make him a good pastor. What makes him a good pastor is not that he’s your friend and likes to hang out with you, but that he can separate from you and study hours every day and get up in that pulpit and and teach you God’s word correctly, line upon line, word upon word, prefix upon prefix. That’s important. So the demand for Bible teaching pastors in a country such as ours will diminish when apostasy comes up. People are less interested in studying the Bible. A lot of people today are more interested in politics than in the Bible, and it’s a big distraction for a lot of Christians. But the spiritual gift of pastor teacher, a well-qualified pastor, is definitely an appointed vehicle for the communication of the mystery doctrine of the church age to every believer priest like you and me. The mystery doctrine of the church, Christ in us, the hope of glory. No one ever thought that the Shekinah glory of the Old Testament would come and live inside of them. But here he is, Christ living in us, and we’re being taught by the Word of God through well-qualified pastors what that means and how we live that life. So the word in the New Testament, when you go look it up, it’s the word poimen kai didaskalos, pastor and teacher, shepherd and teacher, communicator. And it is just one word. It’s not two different gifts. It’s one gift because it’s only got one definite article in front of it. It’s not the pastor and the teacher. It’s the pastor and teacher. One gift. And his gift is to shepherd his flock and feed his flock. But no pastor can teach when he doesn’t know himself. Therefore, no pastor can lead his congregation to spiritual adulthood without providing the basis for post-salvation epistemological rehabilitation. Wow, big word. I’m going to say that again. I had to learn it. You need to learn it. No pastor can lead his congregation to spiritual adulthood, which is what he’s supposed to do, without providing the basis for post-salvation, that’s after you get saved, epistemological rehabilitation, that’s you learning scripture, scripture, scripture, scripture, which means you have a consistent perception and a consistent application of the word of God in your soul. So if you have a pastor who’s not a mature believer, how can he take you to maturity? He can only take you as far as he’s been. And it’s critical that if you sit under a pastor, he be a mature believer, that he have a working knowledge of the languages, that he be able to teach you clearly what the word says. We’re going on into more of this here in a minute, but he can’t take you any further than he’s been himself. Understand that. He can’t lead you where he hasn’t been himself. So the size of his congregation is not in any way indicative of any success or any failure on his part. Because the only person that really knows what’s going on in his life is God himself. He knows. And God knows whether that pastor’s success or whether he’s a failure. And I don’t care if he’s got 20, if he’s got 50, if he’s got 5,000. If he’s not studying and he’s not teaching, he’s not a well-qualified pastor. a well-qualified pastor is not a cruise ship director he’s not a person that always keeps things stirred up and going so everybody’s happy and have fun and do a lot of great things in the christian community he’s a man that stands in the pulpit studying studying studying and teaching teaching teaching and i will say more than 30 minutes at a time you’re not going to learn 30 minutes at a time 30 minutes on sunday morning 30 minutes on sunday night 30 minutes on Wednesday night, that’s an hour and a half a week. How can you ever send some kid to the first grade for an hour and a half a week, expect them to get out of the first grade? It’ll never happen. You are the same way. You’ve got to grow. You must take in God’s Word daily and not necessarily with your little morning devotion where you say, well, I got this book out and I read this little five-minute devotion and I’m growing. No, you’re not. You’re trying to be inspired to behave that day, but that’s not growing. You grow when you sit down, be quiet, get a notebook, get a Bible, and listen to someone expound the scriptures line upon line, word upon word, write down the whole thing. That’s how you grow. That’s exactly what I’ve been able to do in my life with my pastor. Listen daily, like an hour every day. An hour every day, listen to the teaching of the Word of God. The size of the congregation doesn’t matter, but there are only two communication gifts that are working today. No apostles, no prophets, but there are pastor teachers and there are evangelists. And I are not a pastor teacher. I are an evangelist. Pardon my French, but that’s me. I’m an evangelist. My job is to communicate the gospel outside of the local church and to locate positive volition like you and point you in the direction where you can grow spiritually. So evangelism is really a spiritual gift of communication designed to reach unbelievers. And someone like me, I don’t have any authority in a local church. It’s not my job to tell the church how to be run. I’m outside the church. The gift of pastor-teacher is designed to communicate the mystery doctrines of the church and to those who are in the church, okay? And these gifts are distributed at salvation. Now, I’ve been able to identify a few different types of pastors. One of them we call a cosmic pastor. What is that? Cosmos diabolicus, the devil’s world. This is a guy who’s distracted by some form of works, trying to get you involved in crusades, get you involved in social action, get you involved in politics. He may be a very moral and a very arrogant and very self-righteous individual, ignorant of God’s plan and no working knowledge of the word of God. I mean, you want to find out what kind of pastor you got? Go sit down with him and say, tell me how to be a good Christian. Just ask him that one question. Tell me how to be a good Christian. If he doesn’t tell you, you can’t be a good Christian without understanding the filling of the Holy Spirit and then he doesn’t understand the Christian life. If he tells you that you need to be good and confess your sins and tithe and you need to not cuss and not smoke and not drink, that’s not a good pastor. A good pastor understands the mechanics of spirituality. You can never be a good Christian until you are filled with the Holy Spirit, and you can never be a good Christian until you grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So a cosmic pastor is the wrong kind of pastor. Then there’s the baby pastor. or what I call the immature pastor who never really learned much doctrine in his life. He has spent most of his time in the pulpit of his church, evangelizing his own congregation every Sunday, giving a salvation message every Sunday, giving moral lectures every Sunday, speaking against certain taboos every Sunday, and he enjoys being a high-profile personality. And then there’s the adolescent pastor. This pastor can teach some truth, but he’s distracted by various forms of celebrity-ship, being a high profile, being the man of the hour. And what he’s liable to do is sell his own personality rather than the teaching of the congregation. So he’ll visit all the sick people, call on all the members of the congregation, conduct programs, and he doesn’t have time to study. He doesn’t have time to prepare. And he has an ambition that usually means I want to leave this church and go to a bigger church. Son of somebody calls me. But the mature pastor, through his faithful Bible teaching and personal study, he avoids those sorts of distractions and he prepares academically and teaches exegetically, not just topically, to his congregation and he will watch them shrink at first, I promise you, because people will go searching for someone that’ll glad hand them. But if he’ll be faithful, if he’ll teach, they’ll come and they’ll listen. What’s the results of sitting under a well-qualified pastor? Well, you’re fed Bible doctrine accurately and consistently. Nehemiah 8, 6 through 8, then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered amen and amen while lifting up their hands, they bowed low and they worshiped. And then the Levites taught them, and listen to what this says. The Levites explained the law to the people while the people remained in their place. They read from the book, from the laws of God, translating to give the sense so they understood the meaning. That’s what the pastor has to do. He has to translate the passage and give the sense so you understand what it means. You develop consistent patterns of spiritual growth when you have that daily instruction, 2 Peter 3.18, grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You’ll renovate your thinking, as in Romans 12.3, stop thinking of self in terms of arrogance beyond what you should. When you’re sitting under this sword of pastor, you become armed for the conflict. You put on the armor of God, the sword of the spirit, the shield of faith. You become an effective communicator of the gospel, pre-representing the Lord Jesus Christ, and you develop the ability to see through Satan’s smoke screen of cosmic lies. So only divine truth can advance you while the arrogance of ignorance hinders you from ever fulfilling God’s plan. Therefore, arrogantly ignorant, we call it AI, artificial intelligence, is any system of thought which hinders you from fulfilling the plan of God or advancing in the plan of God. God honors his word, and the believer who learns his word and applies it to his life will be glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 5, 5, God makes war against the arrogant, artificial intelligence, but he gives grace to the humble, that’s you. Therefore, humble yourselves under the powerful hand of God. that he may promote you at the right time. Do you have a well-qualified pastor? Are you sitting under the authority of a well-qualified pastor? Or are you involved in a showmanship church? If you are, be careful. Find somebody that’ll teach you the word of God. Contact me if you need to. I’ll help you in any way I can. But I hope you understand what I mean when I say a well-qualified pastor Now, this is Rick Hughes, your host, here at the Flatline. Hope I haven’t offended you, but I’ve made it clear. And I look forward to seeing you next week, same time, same place. Until then, 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.
