Dive into the essence of the spiritual life in this enlightening episode of The Flatline with Rick Hughes. From the outset, Rick clarifies the misconceptions about spirituality, distinguishing it from the superficial holiness displayed by many. He introduces listeners to the royal family concept, an identity bestowed upon believers through salvation, uncovering the rich tapestry of spiritual truths and doctrinal principles taught by Christ. As the session unfolds, Rick takes us back to Christ’s teachings in John and provides insights into the spiritual life Jesus demonstrated, especially during His temptations. This narrative not only highlights Christ’s impeccable obedience but
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 02 :
Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and I’d like to invite you to stick around for a few minutes, 30 minutes of motivation, education, inspiration, with absolutely no manipulation. That’s right, we’re not playing games, not trying to raise money, we’re not trying to get you to sign up, join up, fess up, nothing like that. My job is simply to verify and identify the plan of God for your life Hopefully, your job will be to orient and adjust to the plan if you want to do that. But God gave us two ends, one end we sit with, one end we think with, and success in our life will depend on which one of those we use. Heads, we win. Tails, we lose. So think about it. The Flatline is designed to give you accurate information, not useless speculation. And I’ve just gone through a series on the Flatline called These Things. This is what the Lord Jesus Christ said in John 15, 11. These things I’ve given to you so that my joy may be in you. your joy may be complete these things refers to the spiritual life they were going to have to have once the Lord Jesus Christ left he taught him a lot of different doctrines from John chapter 13 once they completed the Last Supper he began to show them these things what’s between John 13 and And John 15, 11 is these things. He taught them how to rebound or confess their sin by the illustration of foot washing. He identified the traitor that was there among them. He gave them the new commandment in John 13, 34, and that’s to use impersonal love, one of our problem-solving devices. He talked about humility and how Peter had to learn humility. He went on to develop occupation with himself in John 14, 1. He taught eternal security. He taught the gospel truth. He taught the hypostatic union. He taught the importance of Christian service. He taught the importance of prayer and praying in his name, not in the name of God, but in the name of Christ. He taught virtue love. He mentioned how the Holy Spirit was going to come. He talked about so many doctrines, having a relaxed mental attitude and that how Satan would attack them. And then he said, lastly, in John 15, 14, he wanted them to be his friend. The spiritual life includes all these things I’m talking to you about. And I want to introduce you to that term this morning. I know I just went through a lot of things quickly, but let me back up just for a minute. Let me introduce you to the term, the spiritual life. And what is the true meaning of the spiritual life for you and I? The term the spiritual life does not mean someone is acting very holy like a saint. We’ve all been around those imposters who act like they’re holy. They call everybody brother and they call everybody sister and they act very holy and they would never say anything of color and never watch a movie that’s any greater than a G or anything like that. Wouldn’t go shop at some store where they sell beer because they’re spiritual. That’s not the spiritual life. That sometimes can be a lot of legalism and sometimes it can be genuine, but most of the time it’s just religious legalism. So the spiritual life that I’m talking about is totally different. This is the life of the royal family of God. And if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, meaning you have trusted him to save you, you’ve accepted Christ as your personal savior, this means you are now in the royal family of God. And you are in what’s called the church age or the dispensation of grace, the church. And this is a very unique time in the history of the Bible. Actually, none of the Old Testament prophets foresaw it at all. They just saw the second advent of Christ coming back eventually. But when Paul came along and Paul began to develop the mystery doctrines in Ephesians, the Philippians, Colossians, Galatians, and he taught the mystery doctrine of Christ in you, the hope of glory. We’ll talk about that today. So the spiritual life is the life the royal family lives while they are in the dispensation of the church. It doesn’t mean you go around and act holy all the time. It means you live a life according to the plan that God laid out. Now, the prototype spiritual life was lived by none other than the Lord Jesus Christ himself while he was here in his humanity. Remember, he was hypostatic union, God and man in one body forever. He was the God-man. But you have to understand that his impeccability, he never sinned, but as God, he wasn’t able to sin. So as God, he was not able to sin, but as man, he did not sin. And he never used his own deity to sustain his humanity. That’s called the doctrine of kenosis. He did not use his deity to sustain his humanity. What I’m saying is he could have called 10,000 angels to destroy the world and set him free on the cross, but he didn’t do that. As the song says, he died alone for you and me. So he set out the prototype spiritual life and demonstrated it to his disciples and taught them what it was between John 13 and John 15. So he’s the only one qualified to offer a sacrifice for sin. He was qualified because he was born perfect and by the way he lived his human life, living the prototype, prototype, the first spiritual life with temptations beyond anything we’ll ever face or anything that we’ll ever know and he remained perfect. One of the greatest temptations that you can read about that he faced was in Matthew chapter four when he was led by the serpent into the wilderness to be tempted and led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And you might remember, let me see if I can pull this Bible a little closer so that my glasses can focus on this. Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. That is God putting him on the witness stand. God allowing his human nature to be tested. And so to be tested, he had to fast 40 days and 40 nights. And afterwards he was hungry. He was in a very weakened state, the Bible says. As I turned the page, and when the tempter came, which is Satan, a.k.a. the devil, he said to him, if you be the son of God, I command that you turn these stones to bread. Do a miracle. Now, people always want the miracle, and Satan’s asking Jesus to prove his divine nature. That would have been a sin of arrogance and he would have reacted and Jesus didn’t do that. Our Lord said, I can’t do that. He said, it is written in the word, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. So principle is the divine nature does not rescue the human nature. So then the devil took him up into the holy city and set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said, if you are the son of God, cast yourself down. For it is written that he shall give his angels charge concerning you, and in their hands they shall bear you up, lest at any time you dash your foot against a stone. Same temptation, different form, trying to get Christ to operate apart from God’s word. This is a temptation you’ve never faced, I’ve never faced. This is face to face with Satan. And it is written again, the Lord said, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. And again, the devil took him into an exceedingly high mountain and knowing him, showing him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of those kingdoms. And he said, I will give you all of these if you will bow down and worship me. Trying to, again, tempt Jesus to ignore God’s plan and follow him. But Jesus said, Be gone, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him. This is a temptation you and I have never known. I’ll set this Bible back down now. We’ve never known this kind of temptation. This is face to face with the devil. But you will in your advanced, in your spiritual life. As you grow spiritually, you will go through a momentum testing. and eventually you may face evidence testing. In your spiritual life, this is when God would call you to the witness stand and Satan will cross-examine you as happened with the life of Job. He was cross-examined and found to be faithful. But the only one qualified to offer these sacrifice for sin was Christ because he operated under the filling of the Holy Spirit and he used the same problem-solving devices that we use with the exception of problem-solving device number one, rebound. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to confess his sin, and he did not have to be occupied with Christ, problem-solving device number 10, since he was Christ. But the lifestyle he lived was a demonstration to you and me of how we are to live in the devil’s world, as we are assaulted every day by the cosmic system and by the desires of the flesh. So learning spiritual skills gives us the ability to be independent of human solutions in life. Now what are some of those spiritual skills? Well this is how the spiritual life operates. If you don’t know this you can’t live the spiritual life. First of all, you have the filling of the Holy Spirit. That’s problem-solving device number two. The filling of the Holy Spirit overcomes the old sin nature’s temptation. We have a flesh. We have a sin nature. And the only way we can defeat that flesh, as the Bible says, walk in the Spirit and you won’t fulfill the lust of the flesh. So one of the spiritual skills we must learn is problem-solving device number one, rebound. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us so that we can then be filled with the Holy Spirit. And secondly, we must learn how to operate under the faith rest drill, standing on the promises of God. That’s important. You can’t live the spiritual life without the faith rest drill. And the Bible clearly says faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So if you take the filling of the Holy Spirit plus the faith thrust drill, plus learning and applying God’s word into your life, you develop those 10 problem-solving devices. And this gives us the ability to be independent of any human solutions in life. So the spiritual life that I’m talking about, this invisible lifestyle, begins at salvation when the dead human spirit is indwelled by God the Holy Spirit, making you and me spiritually alive. We’re born again, not physically. That’s what tripped Nicodemus up. He didn’t quite understand that. And the Lord said, I’m surprised you don’t know this, Nic. But that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Now no lost person, any person that’s not a believer, no lost person can have a spiritual life. It’s impossible since they only have a dead human spirit. They are spiritually dead while you and I are spiritually alive. That happened the moment God the Holy Spirit indwelled our dead human spirit and we were born again. He came to live in us and we were born again, not physically but spiritually, a spiritual birth. demands a spiritual life. Now, an unbeliever may claim to be spiritual by some sort of transcendental meditation or some sort of yoga exercise, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about that spiritual type stuff they’re talking about. We’re talking about the spiritual life that God gives you at salvation to carry you through your time in the devil’s world. What you and I possess is the greatest reality in a relationship to God that’s ever existed in the history of the world. We have Christ living in us. We have the Holy Spirit living in us. We have God the Father living in us. We have all the problem-solving devices available to us. So we live our spiritual life in the compartments of our soul. You have a soul, I have a soul. Our soul has mentality, volition, conscious, self-consciousness, and what we think is reflected in how we live. In other words, what’s in our soul is reflected by what’s in our life. Proverbs 23, seven, as a man thinketh, so he is. Your spiritual life is lived between your ears, in your brain, in your mentality. It’s demonstrated in your body as you apply doctrine into your life, but it actually takes place between those ears in your thoughts, in your mind, in your soul, in your consciousness. So when you live in a time continuum like we do here in time, we live in what’s called an arena of consequences. There are consequences to all of our decisions. Bad decisions limit future options. So the spiritual life is a shield in that arena, and that shield protects us as we march through Satan’s cosmic system towards the ultimate objective, which is us being face to face with our Lord and savior, the anointed son of God, Jesus Christ. The Bible clearly says in Galatians 5, 16, walk in the spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh. And the Bible tells us that, that there’s the power to overcome the flesh. The Bible says in 1 John 4, for he who is in you is greater than he who’s in the world. Again, a mentioning of the Holy Spirit to overcome anything Satan throws your way. And then we have the uniqueness of the Word of God, the Bible. Not that thing you throw in your back window when you’re going to lunch after church, The thing you live by, you study by, your sword, your weapon, the word of God, Hebrews 4.12, is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword. It is alive and powerful, the word of God. It will sustain you. It will guide you. It will give you insight, discernment, understanding, and wisdom if you learn it and use it in your life. God left it for us, and those disciples had no idea they were writing a New Testament that we would live by, but that’s what it is to us. In Colossians 127, to whom God would make known what is the riches of of his glory, of this mystery among the Gentiles, and it is Christ in you, the hope of glory. That’s the spiritual life. Remember this, in the Old Testament, you had the Shekinah glory and the tabernacle. As the Jews moved toward the Promised Land and set up the tabernacle, by night the pillow of fire and by day the cloud during day and inside that temple was the shekinah glory of the presence of christ he lives in you that’s he’s in you that’s the power in the spiritual life god the father god the son god the holy spirit indwelling living in you But that spiritual life requires a spiritual IQ. God expects you to be able to think. It requires a filling of the Holy Spirit. Yes, it does. You can’t live the spiritual life out of fellowship with God. You cannot live the spiritual life with unconfessed sin in your life, or the Bible says you’ll be carnal. You’ll be in reversionism, we call it, being going backwards, not going forward. So you have to stay filled with the Holy Spirit if you’re going to live the spiritual life. but you must also have some thinking skills. And this is critical to understand. When we become believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have to learn a new vocabulary. I didn’t know any words like redemption and sanctification and imputation when I got saved. I didn’t know anything about that. I didn’t know anything about kenosis or hypostatic union or grace apparatus for perception. I had to learn a new vocabulary. And let me compare it to something that I do all the time, bass fishing. I do a lot of bass fishing. It’s my favorite sport. And we have a lot of different techniques. So you have to learn how to fish a drop shot. You have to learn how to fish a spinnerbait. You have to learn how to fish a crankbait. You have to learn how to fish a Carolina rig, a Texas rig. I mean, you just have to learn the nomenclature of fishing so you know what you’re talking about. So if a fisherman, if you don’t fish and he tells you, I caught him on a drop shot, you have no idea what he’s talking about. Well, in the spiritual life, I had to learn a new vocabulary. a new vocabulary that referred to my life in Christ, how I lived my spiritual life. I had to understand what it meant to be redeemed and reconciled. I had to understand what it meant to be in fellowship and out of fellowship. I had to understand what it meant to grow spiritually or not grow spiritually or to be carnal and in the flesh. I had to learn a whole new vocabulary, and this took some comprehension. That’s critical in your spiritual life, comprehension. You have to learn. It’s your capacity to perceive and apply the Word of God under the filling of the Holy Spirit in your life. If you don’t, if you can’t comprehend God’s plan, you’ll never understand it. And you’re not going to get it by just sitting in church singing songs for 45 minutes and getting 10 minutes of, you can do better next week, try better. I mean, come on. God gives the gift of pastor-teacher to an individual, a man who who has the ability to study and teach and use God’s word to make you rich spiritually to give you a word treasure and you store that word treasure in your memory that’s a spiritual skill comprehension vocabulary memory center that’s where your ability to retain and recall the Word of God exist so when you have certain circumstances in your life you have to go back and recall what the Bible said What your pastor taught you about that? Where did you retain it? And the bad thing is, and it’s pitiful to say with a lot of people, and it may be that way with you, that the rate of learning does not exceed the rate of forgetting. You must not let that happen. You must not let the rate of forgetting exceed the rate of learning. Because I don’t care what you learned last year, if you don’t review it, you’ll forget it. And so there has to be stimulation in the memory center. There has to be comprehension of the Word of God under the filling of the Holy Spirit. There has to be a new vocabulary learned. There has to be problem-solving skills applied. And that’s why we have a flatline in our soul, those 10 unique problem-solving devices. And that’s a new vocabulary for you. You had to learn what are the 10 problem-solving devices. One, rebound. Two, the filling of the Holy Spirit. Three, the faith rest drill. Four, grace orientation. Five, doctrinal orientation. Six, having a personal sense of destiny. Seven, having personal love for God. Eight, using impersonal love with all mankind. Nine, sharing the happiness of God. And 10, occupation with Christ. That’s not anything new. That’s been in the Bible ever since it was written. It’s like a guy told me one time, you didn’t tell me something I didn’t know. You just put it in a way I never heard it put before. That’s the ability that must be in the life of the pastor or the communicator to let it make sense to you, not take it out of context. So there has to be those problem-solving skills, and there must be decision-making skills. And that’s your ability to understand the issues of your life and separate out those things that are essential from those things that are non-essential. So, the spiritual life at work. Listen to what Paul talked about here. Philippians 4, 11 through 13. Not that I speak for want, for I have learned to be content. That’s the spiritual life at work. In whatever circumstances I’m in, I’m content. He went on to say, I know how to get along with the humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity. In any and every circumstance, I’ve learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. And then the real key to the spiritual life, Philippians 4.13, I can do all things through Christ who gives me the strength, who strengthens me. There it is, in operation. Philippians 4.6, again, the spiritual life in operation, be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, along with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. What a wonderful thing we have, the ability to pray and bring our situation before the Lord. So we all start at zero on the day of our salvation. And we all have the ability to advance to 100, which is maximum glorification of God, before our time on earth is up. So the spiritual life begins with you developing spiritual self-esteem. That gives you confidence in your individual life. Then you move to spiritual autonomy. And that’s you being in command of yourself, not letting other people manipulate you. You’re being spiritually independent and spiritually self-directing. From there, you move to spiritual maturity, which is the maximum effectiveness in God’s plan for you. So spiritual self-esteem gives you self-confidence in God’s plan. Spiritual autonomy gives you the ability to operate independently and stand alone. And spiritual maturity, which is maximum effectiveness in God’s plan. When you fulfill your very own spiritual life on earth, then you become a winner in time and in eternity with the highest form of blessing and prosperity that comes from God. So the glory of the world will pass away, but what you will receive will never pass away. Your destiny is eternal for sure, but you have to remember that it’s also temporal. In order for us to advance to spiritual maturity by means of our spiritual life, We have to learn the Word of God and apply the Word of God before we cross over, either by death or the rapture, into the eternal state. So while we’re here right now, you need to be focusing on your spiritual life. Paul prays for the Ephesian believers to have a fruitful spiritual life. He said, I pray that the God of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, in Ephesians 1.17, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation, in the knowledge of him, and I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you will know what is the hope or the confidence of his calling and what are the riches or the wealth of his wisdom, the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints. That means that you will have insight and understanding from the wisdom they accumulate by learning about the lifestyle of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was Paul’s prayer. A lot of people fail to achieve spiritual maturity, and they fail to become spiritually mature believers. They don’t develop their spiritual life, and that’s partially due to Satan’s counterattack, and it’s very effective because many people lack any cognition of the Word of God. They don’t go to church. They don’t sit under a qualified pastor. They don’t study the Bible. They just go through the ritual without any reality to it. And because of their failure, they don’t grow up spiritually. They don’t establish a beachhead in their spiritual life. They don’t continue the habit of faithfully studying, faithfully growing. They get distracted by their prosperity or their marriage or their family, whatever. They just never make it. They don’t live the spiritual life. It’s a shame to be in the devil’s world and have to live it in the energy of the flesh when there’s a much greater power available. We have the freedom to live the spiritual life because God the Holy Spirit indwells us. And we have the freedom as believers that no one can take away from us. People try to distract us, try to talk about us, run us down, but we’re transformed into the same spiritual life which our Lord had during his incarnation. And that’s the wonderful thing. If we live that spiritual life, we have an unfading glory that fades not away in eternity. So it’s not some religious activities. As I said, prayer doesn’t make you spiritual, but spiritual people do pray for sure. The spiritual life is not acquired by observing local taboos. The spiritual life is lived in the mentality of your soul, as I told you, where you acquire the mind of Christ, as the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 2.16. That’s the spiritual life. It occurs when you stay filled with the Spirit, learn the Word of God, and apply it into your life and have fellowship with God, rapport with God. And that’s the importance of understanding your spiritual life. You have it. It’s yours. When you think about it, it’s different than your physical life because your physical life will terminate with death, but your spiritual life will go into heaven in a resurrection body. Those things you learned and used, you’ll take to heaven with you. So please, tomorrow, today, think about living in terms of your spiritual life. Am I in fellowship? Am I growing in grace? Am I glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ with every decision that I make? It’s critical that you remember these things. I hope I’ve given you information that you can use, and I hope you’ll come back next week. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for being with me here today on the Flatline.
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
