What does it mean to live a life free from the chains of guilt and shame imposed by an unobserved conscience? Rick Hughes delves into this poignant question by exposing the dangers of ignoring spiritual and legal authority. Learn about the transformative power of grace and the necessity of purifying one’s soul through obedience and sincere love. This episode challenges believers to assess their lives, reorient their hearts, and embrace a new life in the royal family of God.
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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Thank you, Jack, and good morning, and welcome to The Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, inviting you to stick around for a few minutes. As Jack already told you, 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration, education, and we do that without any type of manipulation. That means we’re not appealing to you for any money. We’re not trying to get you to join up, fess it up, give it up, nothing like that. We just want you to listen. Listen as I try to verify and identify the plan of God for your life. And if I can do that, you’re free to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s really up to you. But we have, this Flatline plays across America in 110 cities every Sunday morning, same time, in your town, same place. And it’s our prayer that you continue to do so. We asked a few weeks ago, if you’re listening, let us know. And many, many, many people have written in or sent emails and said, we’re listening. In our city, please don’t take the show off. And we don’t want to take it off any channel. We want to play it in as many channels as we can. So thank you for letting us know that you’re out there. Today on the Flatline, we’re going to study an interesting subject. And I have to remind you to do one thing before we do. Let me remind you to always make sure you’re in fellowship. The Bible says if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and to purify us from all wrongdoing. And as a Christian, If you’re trying to grow spiritually and listening to the Word of God taught with unconfessed sin in your life, it won’t work. Why? Because you quench the Holy Spirit and you grieve the Holy Spirit by not confessing your sin. So anytime you’re trying to study the Bible, always make sure you look inside first and make sure there’s no unconfessed sin in your life. Now we’re going to study today how to self-destruct. How to self-destruct. That’s a bad-sounding title, I know, but every day and every night it seems somebody’s murdered in major cities across this country. Open rebellion to the rule of law in America is amazing. Home invasions, drive-by shootings, road rage, airplane assaults, the list goes on and on and on, and it seems that many of our citizens have no restraints on their emotions at all. The question is, why does this happen? How can someone murder another person and not even feel guilty about it and have no remorse about it? Our people’s hearts so hardened that they don’t even consider the consequences of taking the life of another person. According to the FBI statistics, there were 21,570 murders in America in the year 2000, 2020. And for your information, the first murder ever recorded in history was the murder of Abel by Cain, his brother, who killed him in jealousy in Genesis 4, chapter 8. And this may surprise you. It may surprise you to know that Moses committed murder as a young Jew living in Egypt. If you don’t believe that, read Exodus 2, 11 through 14. Now that may say one thing to you. God can forgive a murderer, and he can. God can forgive anybody for anything. And so keep that in mind. Moses was a great man of God, and he committed murder in the early part of his life before he understood what was going on. So the number 21,570 murders is shocking. but it’s indicative of the hardness of the heart of many people in this great nation. So let me read to you a simple passage out of Ephesians that will explain why things like this happen. Ephesians chapter four, verse 17 through 20. This I say, therefore, and I testify in the Lord. This is the Apostle Paul writing to the church at Ephesus. This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord that you do not walk as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart. who being past feelings have given themselves over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greed. But you have not learned this from Christ. Now, let me break that down for you. This I say, therefore, in testifying the Lord that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk. That’s a Greek word that means to live your life. And Paul is saying, don’t emulate the life of the unbeliever. Don’t emulate the life of the disadvantaged person that doesn’t know crisis savior. So don’t live like the Gentiles live in the vacuum of their mind. And the word vanity in the King James Bible is actually a Greek word for emptiness or a vacuum. I remember one time coming home and my daughter, my younger daughter, had a hard-boiled egg peeled and she said, watch this, Dad, and she put up some paper down in a bottle and lit the paper on fire and set the hard-boiled egg over the neck of the bottle where the opening would be. As that paper burned all the oxygen up inside that bottle, it looked like an invisible finger pushed that egg down into that bottle, and that was air pressure. That’s pressure in the atmosphere. And once there was a vacuum in the bottle, then the egg popped right in there. That’s what this means. People have a vacuum in their mind. In other words, if they don’t have any divine viewpoint, and all that is not there, then Satan can throw things into their mind very easy, and they get trapped and lured like that. So Paul said, don’t live your life like Gentiles live their life with nothing in their mind, an empty mind, not thinking, not comprehending, not paying attention, certainly no biblical wisdom. Verse 18, Ephesians 4 goes on to say, having their understanding darkened, that means they have no norms and no standards. They are alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them. There it is, lack of understanding. Because of the hardness of their heart, and it’s translated blindness in the King James, but it’s hard, a heart, porosis is the Greek word, porosis, P-O-R-O-S-I-S, and it means a callousness. It’s possible that your heart can be scarred over and become calloused. And if it does, if someone’s heart becomes so calloused, so scarred over, how could you tell it’s like that? Listen to verse 19. Who being past feelings, that means no guilt and no shame anymore. who being past feelings have given themselves over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greed. In other words, they can’t get enough of it, they love it, and they’re going to keep doing it. And the Bible goes on to say in verse 20, you did not learn this from Christ. In Matthew 11, 29 and 30, Jesus said, take my yoke upon you and learn of me. My yoke is easy, my burden is light. This is not what the Lord Jesus Christ taught. This is the lifestyle of the disadvantaged unbeliever. And Paul is telling them not to emulate that because they have nothing in their mind. The unbeliever has a lifestyle that is learned through observation and indoctrination with the world. The lifestyle of the flesh is an addictive narcotic to those who are in that frantic search for happiness. So Paul warns the believers in Ephesus not to emulate this lifestyle since it requires a distorted and disturbed mindset, an empty mind, a vacuum mind, nothing there. He calls it vanity on the mind. Vanity is the Greek word metiotes and it means emptiness. So the unbeliever Paul described can’t even think for himself, cannot conceptualize for himself. He’s essentially brain dead, being led around like a puppet on a string. That’s what happens when you ignore the word of God. You got to make decisions based on one or two things, either what the Bible says, divine viewpoint, or what the world says, human viewpoint, which Satan has been able to influence greatly, and we call it evil. So what’s your basis for making a decision? And here, if there’s emptiness in the mind, if you’re brain dead, then obviously you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid and you’re going to believe whatever the devil tells you to believe. So Paul goes on to say, that because of this emptiness in their hearts, excuse me, in their mind, that because of the emptiness in their mind, their hearts have scarred over and they no longer feel any guilt. They no longer feel any shame. In fact, they are now greedy for sinful activity and will stop at nothing to get what they want. That’s a heart of scar tissue. It has no remorse and no shame. Now, it’s possible you’ve got scar tissue. You want to take a test and find out? Let me ask you this question. If you, oh, let’s say, if you’ve got to do your taxes and the government says you’re going to owe X amount of money and you don’t report what you made and you lie about your taxes, does that make you feel bad? Do you feel guilty? Do you feel shame? Or do you justify it by saying, well, they steal money from me anyhow? If you were walking down the hall at school as a teenager or down the hall at office on the job and you found a $100 bill laying there and it’s not yours, would you pick it up and say it’s my lucky day and put it in your pocket and walk away? Or would you go try to find who it belongs to? What I’m asking you is now, do you justify cheating on your taxes? Do you keep what is not yours? The final words of the Lord Jesus Christ were clear when Paul quoted it. You did not learn this lifestyle from Christ. That’s what he said. So whenever a person receives the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, he begins a new life, a different life. In 2 Corinthians 5, 17, if any man’s in Christ, he’s a new creature. Old things are passed away, and behold, all things become new. So the new life in Christ is antithetical to life in the cosmos diabolicus, or what we call the devil’s world. It’s a new life. It’s a new culture, a new lifestyle. You know, most of the time you’ll begin to search out new Christian friends since their lifestyle is more like yours and the lifestyle of your lost friends now is going to be offensive to you. However, make no mistake about what I’m about to tell you. This new lifestyle, this new culture that God has brought you into, it’s called the royal family of God. It requires some things from you. God has some demands from you. Just like the lost world has its own devious agenda that requires exposure and indoctrination into the call of the world, you now must familiarize yourself with the demands that God puts on you. And God’s demands are seen in every verb in the New Testament. Every verb is written in the imperative mood, which is called the mood of command. That’s God telling you what to do. For example, 1 Thessalonians 5, 16 through 18. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Now, any imperative mood verb there is a command from God. And the first one is the word rejoice. That’s a verb. It’s a present active imperative. It means it’s a command. It’s not a request. It’s a command. Rejoice always, C-H-A-I-R-O, C-H-A-I-R-O. And that’s a word for happiness, to have the happiness of God. And remember what the Bible says, happiness belongs to those people who hear my Father’s word and keep it. As the Lord Jesus Christ even said in Matthew 15, 11, I’ve told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full. So there never is a time that we are to complain, to gripe, to moan. Rejoice always. Quit your moaning. Quit your gritching. Quit doing anything like that. There it is, straight up in the Bible. I didn’t make it up. There it is. That’s a mandate. And then pray without ceasing, another imperative mood verb. It’s a present tense, means there never is a time you’re not to pray without ceasing. So God expects you to pray. You remember we talked about, and we even have a bookmark on it. If you don’t have the bookmarks, just call me or write me or drop me a note on the website and we’ll send you 10 reasons why your prayers might not be answered. I hate to think that you’re praying and not getting answers. There’s got to be a reason why. So we’ll send you this and you can look it over and study it in the Bible on your own. So rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing. And then here’s another mandate in everything. Give thanks. You could rest. Oh, and everything. Give thanks. You could rest. Oh, that’s the Greek word. Imperative mood. No complaining, no griping. There it is again. And everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. God’s will. I was watching to a guy the other day talking about how to know God’s will. Can you know God’s will? Yes, yes, yes, you can know God’s will. It starts off with the 10 problem-solving devices. I can assure you there are 10 things right there that are the will of God for you to understand and know and use in your life. So there are a lot of verbs like this in the Bible. Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Spirit. That’s a mandate. And 2 Peter 3.18, grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. That’s a mandate. Here’s a question for you. If God tells you to do something, in the Bible clearly in these verses I’ve read to you and you don’t do it, what’s that called? Well, it doesn’t take a genius to remember that’s called sin. If God tells me to do something and I don’t do it, then I’m disobeying God and that’s sin. So the Christian life, is a lifestyle of learning. All these verbs, you have to learn. These are our marching orders, they’re not requests. We have to learn how to live the Christian life. And it requires us to do some things that a lost person would never consider doing to begin with. That’s why the Christian life is so unique. What am I talking about? What would it require us to do that unbelievers would not do well here’s one matthew 5 43 you’ve heard it said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy but i’m telling you love your enemies and bless those who curse you and do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you now if you’re into politics and you’re getting maligned and criticized and people been talking about you and slandering you, there’s an opportunity for you. Bless those who curse you. Love your enemies. Now that’s not a request, that’s a mandate. Can you handle that? Do you understand impersonal love and personal love for God? Two different things. Personal love for God and impersonal love for all mankind. Those are two problem-solving devices. I hope you know them. If you don’t, get a hold of me. Let me send you the book on Christian Problem Solving. No charge. We’ll get it right on out to you immediately. And you can study up and read up on your own about that. But if you don’t understand the problem-solving devices of God, Some mandate like the one I just read you there, Matthew 5, 43, that’s impossible. Love your enemies. I’m telling you, love your enemies. Bless the ones that curse you. That’s not in your human nature to do that, and that’s why the Christian life is not based on human nature. It’s based on the filling of the Holy Spirit and the content of the Word of God in your soul. So without an understanding of those 10 problem-solving devices, that verse right there is impossible to do, fortunately. The Holy Spirit can lead you to understand impersonal love by means of the personal application of Scripture in your life. So the Holy Spirit can lead you to understand impersonal love, one of our problem-solving devices, by means of a personal application of Scripture in your life. But you cannot apply what you don’t know. And here’s something you should know because of the political climate in America, Romans 13, one through three. You should know this. Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. That’s the rule of law. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authority resists the ordinances of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to do good works, but they’re terror to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Then do what is good, and you’ll have praise from the same. Now, that’s a pretty important verse. Remember here, let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. That’s the rule of law. No authority exists except apart from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Now what’s your stand on politics about that? Here’s again where the Holy Spirit has to lead you to understand what the Bible’s teaching you. You can’t apply what you don’t know. According to this verse, the present leadership in this country, whoever it might be, is not appointed by man, but it is allowed by God and for a very specific reason. Again, according to this verse, The present leadership in this country is not appointed by man, but allowed by God and for a very specific reason. And so God didn’t send you to overthrow the government. God didn’t send you to straighten this country out. God asked you to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And the Lord Jesus Christ said, let your light shine and you need to be the salt of the earth. Stay out of politics. God can handle politics. He put people there for a reason. The reason may be to discipline us, and the reason may be to bless us. I don’t know. That’s God’s will. But that’s where we have to remember what the Scripture says. So any believer like you or me who refuses to acknowledge and refuses to abandon these sort of addictive sins will find ourselves building scar tissue just like the unbeliever builds scar tissue when they’re under God’s discipline. So we read you that verse to begin with, when you want to live your life like the Gentiles live their life in the hardness of their heart. That’s the scar tissue. The heart gets hardened over. And that’s what happens when you commit sins over and over and over again. Your heart gets hard. So that’s what the Bible’s telling us here. You’ve got to acknowledge your sin. You got to abandon the addictive sins or you’ll be building scar tissue in your soul and your heart will get hard. And you’ll feel no guilt. You’ll feel no shame. You’ll find yourself drifting away. You’ll find yourself in the ocean of doubt, I promise you. So this is what you need to remember. Listen carefully to 1 Timothy 4, 1 and 2. The Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron. To sear the conscience is the word I want you to look at. In the latter times, their conscience will be seared with a hot iron. To sear the conscience is the word for cauterize. It’s cauterizo, the Greek word. It means to cauterize. When your conscience is seared, it’s like a cow that gets branded. It leaves a brand, a mark, a scar. The mentality of the soul is scarred with memories of failures, memories of personal flaws, just like cattle branded or seared with a hot iron, leaving the owner’s mark forever, like I told you. So you, once you blow through all of your norms and all of your standards you learned as a child from your parents or Sunday school or whatever, You blow through that and put them aside and in effect you betray your own soul by selling out to sin and selling out to evil. And then your heart becomes hardened and your heart becomes bitter. Bitterness sets in. A hard heart with bitterness is a sad thing to see. That’s why the Bible says in Proverbs 14, 30, a sound heart is the life of the flesh but envious rottens the bones. So the heart is talking about their mind. It’s not talking about the cardiac arrest thing in your chest. It’s talking about what’s in your head. You have a noose and you have a cardia, a mind and a heart in your head. It’s the beating part of your soul. And to have a healthy, sound heart means you’ve got to stay out of envy and jealousy and bitterness. So in Ephesians 4, 31, listen, here is the mandate from the Word of God. This is not a request. Let all bitterness, let all wrath, let all anger, let all clamor, let all evil speaking be put away from you along with all malice and be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Now that’s a big thing. That’s very big. Bitterness is the word picria. It means to be emotionally mad, angry, upset. Wrath, anger, thumos, orge, mad, fighting, angry, thunderous. And clamor, that’s an onomatopoeia. That’s making the sound of the verb sounds like how it’s pronounced. It’s croge, croge. It makes the sound of a crow, like a crow crowing. crawling and uh clamor is you just going what do you think of this look at that look at this look at that look at this look at that can’t believe they said that can’t believe it in this on and on and on it goes put aside your evil speaking let it be put away from you with all malice that’s the desire to hurt somebody that’s the desire to get even to bring pain influence pain And instead, Paul wrote in verse 32 of Ephesians 4, be kind one to another, kind, tenderhearted. There we go, grace orientation, treating people in grace, treating people with impersonal love. being tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ’s sake, hath forgiven you. So here’s a good question for you. Has somebody double-crossed you in the past few years, and you haven’t forgiven them, you hate them, you’re mad at them, you’re angry at them, you can’t stand them? And do they go to church with you? Do you have to look at them and see them when you’re in church? You get that redneck come up in the back of your hair, stand up and You’re angry because there’s that jerk over there that did that to me. This verse is talking about you. Put your bitterness away. Put your wrath away, all your anger away, all your evil speaking. Put it away and be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ’s sake, forgave you. Well, did he forgive you? Absolutely. Every time you rebound is how you get forgiven, and that’s where you start to eliminate the scar tissue. You got to add, get rid of the scar tissue that you’ve built up. So to add, to get rid of that, you have to let the word of God flow into your soul and it’ll wash out the pollution. The flowing of God’s word through the compartments of your conscience, all those damaged places begins to be healed. You want to hear where it is? 1 Peter 1.22. Since you have purified your soul in obeying the truth. Purified your soul in obeying the truth. That’s cleaning out the pollution of your soul. Through the Spirit, the Bible goes on to say, that’s the filling of the Holy Spirit, in sincere love, that’s impersonal love of the brethren, and love for one another. There you go. There’s how you do it. You got scar tissue building up in your soul, you want to get rid of it, then you purify your soul by obeying the truth. Take in the Word of God, learn the Word of God, apply the Word of God, grow up spiritually, and you get rid of that scar tissue. having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but of uncorruptible seed through the word of God, which lives and abides forever. That’s 1 Peter 1, 23. So we’ll close it out by saying this. If you think you have scar tissue in your soul, the first and foremost thing you should do is admit your sin to God and reclaim the filling of the Holy Spirit and start a daily routine of assimilating and metabolizing the Word of God under a well-qualified pastor. And then those scars and those memories, They’re not going to go away overnight, but in time, they will be flushed out. The Word of God will flush them out and replace your thinking with divine viewpoint, and you’ll be gone. The shame and the guilt will be gone. The hardness of your heart will be gone. And you can bank on it that Satan will try to lure you back into that. He’ll try to lure you back into your guilt. But remember, when you rebound, when you confess your sin, God blots it out forever. He does. You don’t have to confess the same sin 10 times. Once is enough. So Paul showed us how the unbelievers live. He told you don’t live like that. I gave you verses to authenticate those mandates. Now it’s up to you. I hope it’s been an interesting show. I hope it’s been a challenge to you, and I hope that you take this to heart. Because if you can cheat on your taxes and it doesn’t bother you, cheat on your spouse and it doesn’t bother you, you’ve got a problem. You’ve got a problem in your conscience. You’ve got scar tissue. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention to your life, and you only got one shot at it. Get it right. Until next Sunday, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flotline.
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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.
