In this enlightening episode of The Flatline, Rick Hughes invites you to explore the profound layers of worship and its importance in the life of a believer. Discover how virtue, humility, and personal responsibility play vital roles in developing a strong spiritual foundation. Whether you’re a seasoned Christian or new believer, this episode challenges superficial relations with God, urging a deeper exploration and practical application of biblical principles.
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 FLOT line. FLOT, F-L-O-T, FLOT line. I’m Rick Hughes, the host, and I’d like to welcome you for the next few minutes. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education. And we do not have any type of manipulation because we’re not trying to con anybody. We’re not soliciting money, we’re not trying to raise funds, we’re just simply trying to give you information. Information that will help you verify and identify God’s plan for your life and if you want to orient and adjust to that plan, you have the freedom, you have the privacy to do it. But remember this, God gave you two ends. One of those ends you think with called your head and the other one you sit on called your tail. And success in life will depend on which one you use. Heads you’re going to win and tails you’re going to lose. You have to learn to think. You have to learn to execute. You have to learn to make good decisions because bad decisions limit future options. The Flatline is about establishing a main line of resistance in your soul based on what you think. It’s teaching 10 unique problem-solving devices found in the Bible. And if you learn them and use them, then you will be able to stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. That’s why we always say adversity is inevitable, but stress is optional. So I want to talk to you today about something that’s critical for you to understand, critical for me to understand. When I became a Christian, I was 22 years old. Prior to that time, I never went to church. I didn’t know anybody that went to church. None of my friends went to church. None of the football players that I played football with at college or high school went to church. The only time I can really remember going to church was when the center on the football team was accidentally killed and the coach took the whole team to church. Of course, we were shocked and we didn’t know what to say or do, but church was not part of my life. My mom didn’t go to church, my grandparents didn’t go to church, and so I didn’t go to church. A lot of people do. I didn’t start going to church until after I had accepted Christ as my savior at the age of 22. And that happened in a wonderful way. Hopefully you’ve heard that story, but I don’t have time to go into it right now. But it happened in August of 1967 when I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and received him as my savior. And I got into a good church where a pastor was teaching the Bible and I learned God’s word and learned how to execute the Christian life. But the question I want to ask you is do you go to church and why? Why do you go to church? What’s the reason? You know, this show plays on Sunday morning and a lot of people that are listening to me may wind up in church eventually or may not go. Maybe this is your church. I had a person in California call me safe church. I guess he meant that you could listen to me and not get judged by other people. But every Sunday morning, millions of individuals get dressed and get ready and get up, get dressed, go to church, unless it’s Easter, then it’s about 20 million. But for many people, it’s just kind of a ritual, you know, without any real reality to it. Some go to establish some contacts for their business and some go for the sake of their children, hoping to get their children in a good program. And some go expecting to show some sort of appreciation to God for his mercy and blessings in their life. But yes, the Bible does indeed mandate that we go to church. It mandates assembling ourselves together for the express purpose of giving gratitude to God. and to receive instruction from the Bible. Hebrews 10, 25, do not forsake your own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near. And that’s the day of the Lord Jesus Christ returning for you. That’s the exit resurrection called the rapture of the church. But some people go to church and they call it worship. And that’s kind of debatable, but… We are in union with Christ, and thus we are royal priests. We represent our own self before God. We don’t need a priest to represent us before God. We are believer priests. And part of the concept of church is the privacy of the priesthood. And that demands that people in church keep their nose out of your business. Therefore, the Bible says in Matthew 7, don’t judge unless you be judged, because if you judge, you stick your nose in somebody else’s business, then you’re going to get judged by God himself. God does not allow judging. And in a local church, you should have the privacy to go and sit and listen and leave without anyone making any demands on you or anyone imposing any rituals on you. So the privacy of the priesthood, you are a believer priest, it demands that you use your own soul. Now remember, you have a soul. You’re made up of a body and a soul, and if you’re a Christian, you have a born-again human spirit. But that soul has mentality, volition, conscious, and self-consciousness, which means you have the ability to think, logic, reason. You have the ability to choose and decide. You have a conscience inside of you that tells you the different norms and standards that you function under in your life. And you have a self-consciousness that works even if you’re sleeping at night. Or you can look in a yearbook and look at your picture and say, hey, that’s me right there. You have self-consciousness. You’re aware of yourself. So the privacy of the priesthood demands that you use your own soul as a base of operation for your very own spiritual life. Because there’s no problem in life greater than the 10 problem-solving devices that I’m teaching you. If you learn them, and you use them, then you can handle any problem that you come upon in your life. We did write a new book. It is available now. It’s coming out within the next week or so. We’d be happy to send it to you free of charge. It’s called Christian Problem Solving, and it lists all 10 of these problem-solving devices and the mechanics of how they work. You understand? Good deal. So the primary purpose of assembling for worship is for you to be provided the privacy of your priesthood so you can learn God’s word without any sort of distraction. And it’s only the accurate communication of the word of God to an assembled group of believers that fulfills the principle of the privacy of the priesthood, which is for the accumulation of wisdom, wisdom of God. which comes when you hear the Word of God and metabolize that into your stream of consciousness. That gives you an inventory in your soul so you can counsel your own self. You don’t need someone else to counsel you. That’s one of the signs that you’re becoming a mature believer. You don’t have to run to the preacher and say, Preacher, what should I do about this? Preacher, what should I do about that? Unless you’re just someone who demands attention all the time, and Lord knows many churches have those sort of people. So you must be able to counsel your own self. And then you are a believer priest. And in the local church, in the assembly of the local church, you get the information you need to live your spiritual life in your soul, in the thinking of your soul, so that you can glorify God with everything you think, say, and do. But you cannot worship God if you don’t know him. Now, there’s something called cosmic worship, the cosmic system, the cosmos. This is the devil’s world. And it’s full of satanic lies. And those lies require the individual who believes it to make his very own volitional decision, part of his soul. He has to decide. What does he decide? Now, listen to Romans 1.25, and this will give you some insights. Here’s a group of people that have decided that the Bible is not for them. They don’t have to obey what the Bible says, especially in the area of immorality. Listen to Romans 1.25. For they, that’s the immoral people, exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and they worshiped, there’s our word worship, they worshiped and served the creature, that’s aka the devil, rather than the Creator, God the Father, who is blessed forever. So you can worship what the devil wants you to believe, or you could worship what the Bible tells you. You could worship human viewpoint, or you can worship divine viewpoint. But you cannot worship God if you don’t know him, and that’s the big lie that I want to approach to you today and get with you and kind of talk about today, because here it is. It’s a big lie that says you can go to a 30-minute Sunday school class and then get what you need to grow before you come in the sanctuary to worship. Who in the world could grow to spiritual maturity on a meal of rice once a week? You must grow spiritually. The Bible tells you to grow spiritually, and it requires a lifetime commitment from you. 2 Peter 3.18, grow in grace and knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You’re not growing very fast if all you’re getting is a 30-minute Sunday school class teaching the Bible, whatever it’s about, and then going into the main auditorium for worship service, whatever that’s about. The learning of the protocol plan of God requires you to have some content, not emotion. And many, many times, worship in the assembly is based on emotion. Content has to be acquired. It doesn’t assimilate in your soul automatically. Therefore, 2 Timothy 2.15 says, study to show yourself approved to God. Study, that’s a mandate from God. Study is a mandate from God. To show yourself approved to God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. Question, if you needeth not to be ashamed, can you be ashamed? And the answer is yes. You’ll be ashamed at the evaluation throne of the Lord Jesus Christ when you realize you screwed up and you had the greatest opportunity in the world to glorify him and you didn’t do it. rightly divided to the word of truth, what does that mean? It means it can wrongly be divided also. And that’s where it’s important that you have a well-qualified pastor teaching you the word of God from the original languages in a way that’s not emotional. Because emotions are not thinking, they’re simply reacting. Emotions don’t acquire anything. They appreciate in response to circumstances, but they don’t learn. For example, have you ever heard your pastor talk about your spiritual life? Have you ever heard the term spiritual life? Has your pastor ever made a difference between your physical life and your spiritual life? Or has he ever made a difference between your physical birth and your spiritual birth? Why do I ask that question? Because John 4.24 says God is a spirit. And those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Now, if you are not born again, if you haven’t received Christ as your savior, you have a dead human spirit, you’re dead spiritually. And it’s impossible to worship God being dead spiritually because God is a spirit and you must worship him in your spirit. So when you’re born again, you have a spiritual birthday. Any man’s in Christ, he’s a new creation. All things are passed away and all things become new, spiritually alive, made spiritually alive. And we worship him in truth. Now remember the Lord Jesus Christ said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man can come to the Father but by me. So the only way to worship God is to come through Jesus Christ and to be born again and then to become occupied with Christ or learn God’s word and apply it into your life. But without a spiritual birth, salvation, you can have no capacity to worship God. Please remember that. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the personification of truth and it’s only through Christ that we come to know God. or that we have the capacity to appreciate all God’s provided for you. But danger, danger, danger, religion has a false sense of worship because organized religion demands you give what you do not have. But under the principle of true worship, you can only give to God what you actually possess. what can you give him you can give him honor you can give him respect you can give him your time and you can give him concentration on his word but all forms of worship are a concentration test again all forms of worship are a concentration test and they should be a reflection of what your values what are your motives What’s your mental attitude in your life? What’s your spiritual status quo right now? Do you have a sense of destiny as a mature believer? I mean, this is what’s important for you. These things should be reinforced in worship. Your values have to be learned and established and believed and lived. Your motives has to be judged by God and you have to have the right motives and the right intentions. Your mental attitude in life cannot afford to be angry, bitter, resentful. God is looking for a mental attitude of appreciation, capacity for life, capacity for love, et cetera. So your spiritual status quo and your personal sense of destiny as a mature believer is based on all these things. Worship requires you having some humility. And humility inevitably can go in two different directions, obviously. It can go towards human interaction, or it could go towards God, which leads to worship. So virtue, virtue, which means a behavior that’s morally good, morally excellent, virtue and humility and worship are the ingredients which lead you to fall in love with your God. As virtue becomes stabilized, your obedience, remember the Bible said, if you love me, you will obey me and my mandates are not hard, 1 John 5, 3. So as your personal virtue, your motivational virtue, personal love for God, as it becomes stabilized, it will produce a confidence and a worship towards God and then give you courage and morality towards man in any circumstance you may face. But virtue is a lifestyle of obedience, and as you grow, as you learn, as you apply, then you have confidence and worship towards God and courage and morality to man in any circumstances you may face in your life. So technically, worship is the expression of the believer’s personal love for God. Do you love God? That’s the question. And you may say, well, sure, I love God. Really? Let’s go back to 1 John 5, 3. If you love me, you’ll obey me, and my mandates are not hard. Really, you love God? Uh-huh. How’s your lifestyle going there? It’s expression of your personal love for God being called virtue, virtue-dependent, virtue-love. Love for God is virtue-dependent. You can’t love God if you don’t have virtue. And virtue is obedience. There’s no possible way for you to love, no possible way for you to worship God who has perfect holiness without having some sort of inherent virtue, permanent, essential, established virtue in your life. So remember that. That comes from learning God’s word, applying God’s word, and using God’s word and growing to be a mature believer so that you establish virtue. Now, there are three types of worship. One is called respect. That’s a feeling of deep admiration based on the quality of the person that you’re thinking about. As a believer, you can only respect the Lord through understanding his thinking. If you don’t understand how the Lord Jesus Christ thought, you can’t respect him. And 1 Corinthians 2.16 says the Bible is the mind of Christ. We’re told in Philippians 2, 5, a verse you’ve heard me quote thousands of times, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. You’ve heard me quote 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. You can only respect the Lord through understanding how he thinks. He thinks in humility, in terms of humility. And so respect for God is the beginning of virtue. It’s the beginning of your love for God. You cannot, listen, I’m gonna make this clear for you. You cannot instantly fall in love with God. I remember when I accepted Christ, I was thrilled. but I didn’t know God. I knew I’d been saved. I knew that Christ had come to live in me, but I didn’t know very much at all. I had not experienced very much at all in my Christian life. I was only a young Christian, a week old in Christ, and there was so much to learn and still much more to learn even today. So respect, you can’t instantly fall in love with God. It’s a process. And it demands the base of virtue and integrity in our lives. So if we’re going to love God, we must respect God to start with. And that’s a type of virtue. Even in virtue-dependent love, we respect with our mentality, not our emotions. We respect God with our behavior, not obedience, not our emotions. I’m not talking about looking up at some cloud and crying tears and saying, oh, I love Jesus, as many people do. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about occupation with Christ where you have come to know him and respect him because of his great virtue and integrity towards you. Another type of worship is called reverence. And this is merely respect that’s grown. Reverence is growing respect. It’s the difference between this. The difference between respect and reverence is a matter of concentration, a matter of recall from the things you’ve learned in the past. If you can do that, That’s why you need a Bible. That’s why you need to take notes. That’s why you need to write things down. That’s why it pays to hear it again and again and again because the rate of forgetting is much quicker than the rate of learning, I assure you. So respect for God is the worship of the immature positive believer. He’s not grown yet. I mean, he’s been saved, but he hasn’t learned a whole lot, but he respects God. But the mature believer who’s now grown and has tremendous virtue, that’s reverence, and that’s the reverence and the worship of the mature believer. So you got all different people in the church. You got those that are young Christians and those that are mature believers. Maybe, hopefully, the young Christians have respect and the mature believers have great reverence. And then there’s a third way to worship is called honor. And this is great esteem, and it’s the highest type of worship you can give to God, to honor God. So there are the three stages of this virtue love for God, respect, reverence, and honor. And you cannot, again, you cannot give any of these to God if you don’t possess them yourself. Giving God honor is reserved for what the Bible calls friends of God. At every stage of your spiritual life and spiritual growth, you have gratitude and thanksgiving related to your frame of reference. But you are limited in your personal love for God by your stage of spiritual growth. Again, how can you love God, respect God, honor God if you don’t know him or understand him? if it’s just an emotional thing. It’s not true. So the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 14, 26, when you assemble, let all things be done for edification. Now we’re going to the worship service itself. Here we are in the main auditorium. We’re having a worship service. When you assemble, let all things be done for edification. That means spiritual growth. There are a number of ways in which you and I worship God, but they must all relate to our spiritual growth. So everything in the assembly worship should be done with a view towards this objective. What the objective is, to grow spiritually. The objective is for the communicator, the pastor, the well-qualified man up in that pulpit to communicate the word of God so you can grow and apply this into your life and develop virtue and honor and integrity. And this is what’s called a mature believer. But how in the world can you grow spiritually or come to respect and reference God if all you’re getting is 20-minute feel-good service every Sunday. Here’s a hint for you. If the song service at your church is longer than the teaching service, you’re getting gypped. If you fail to bring a Bible to class, how can you expect to remember what the pastor taught you? And if you sit there in the pew and scan your cell phone looking at Facebook during the message, you’re insulting God. In the book of Nehemiah in the eighth chapter we find Ezra the priest teaching God’s word to the Jews who had been freed from Persian captivity and returned to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and establish temple worship once again. Listen as I describe how Ezra taught the people and see if it sounds familiar. In Nehemiah 8, 1, all the people came together as one, there’s church, in the square before the water gate, and they told Ezra, the teacher of the law, to bring out the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded for Israel. Verse 2, Nehemiah 8, 2. So on the first day of the seventh month, Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. That tells you who needs to be in the auditorium. People that can understand what’s being said because those that don’t understand are a distraction to others. Verse three, he read it aloud from daybreak till noon. Woo, there’s a long worship service. From six in the morning to 12 in the afternoon. And he faced the square before the water gate in the presence of the men and the women and others who could understand. And all the people listened intently to the book of the law. They paid attention. They weren’t getting up, moving around, running across the auditorium, going back and forth to the bathroom, didn’t have crying, screaming babies in there. Nobody can learn like that. They listened attentively. In Nehemiah 8.5, Ezra opened the book and all the people could see him because he was standing above them. That’s in the pulpit. And he opened it and the people then immediately stood up And Ezra praised the Lord, the great God of all the people, lifted their hands and responded, amen and amen. And they bowed down and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. And then Nehemiah 8.8, they read from the book of the law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so the people understood what was being read. Here you go. All the people listened attentively. They all bowed down in prayer. Ezra explained what he was reading and what it meant so they could apply it into their life. And then verse 12, then all the people went away to eat and drink and to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy because they now understood the words that had been made known to them. If you don’t understand it, you can’t apply it. This is an exact pattern of how we do it today. Listen, pray, apply, and celebrate. Listen, pray, apply, and celebrate. That’s the way a church service is supposed to be. It’s not an emotional falter all. It’s not getting high on Jesus. It’s not having a worship service and conditional, you know, like traditional worship and the old time new worship and stuff like that. That’s crazy some of the stuff going on today. We need men that will stand in the pulpit and clearly delineate the word of God and teach it so that you can learn and apply it into your life. And if you can’t handle 30 minutes to an hour, something’s wrong with you. If you’re worried about what you’re cooking back home on a pot roaster, you’re worried about getting in line at Luby’s, you got a problem. Sit down, listen up, pay attention, be quiet, take your Bible, take notes, go home and read your notes and apply it into your life. This is the exact pattern of how we do it today. Listen, pray, apply, and celebrate. Now, let me remind you of something. We have this new book coming out called Christian Problem Solving. It’s a detailed study on God’s 10 problem-solving devices and the unique life of the Christian. It’s free for your asking. If you’ll write to us, we’ll get it in the mail to you ASAP. And remember the 2020 Flatline Transcripts. That’s what everything we taught last year, this is at the printer. And you can request this from our website or call us or write us And this is a transcript of every radio show I did during 2020, and we also have every radio show I did in 2019 in print. So these are a handy study aid and good to remind you of the biblical principles you’ve learned on this show. Now, I would also like to remind you that we have transcripts linked in the notes section of our daily podcast. We podcast this show, podcast, Spotify, Apple iPod, things like this, and you can get the transcripts at podcast. Just go to your podcast, type in The Flotline, and you’ll find us right there. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to bring these things to you. It’s a wonderful opportunity for me to have this radio show today. to trust God, to believe God will take care of our needs, and we believe that he will. I’d like to thank you for listening, and I pray you’ll come back next week, same time, same place. So until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for listening to The Floodline with your host, Rick Hughes. If you’d like to contact Rick, please write to him at P.O. Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054, or online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
