Dive into a thought-provoking discussion on ‘The Flatline’ as Rick Hughes explores the fundamental divine institutions that serve as the pillars for human existence. Discover how freedom, marriage, family, and nationalism are deeply interconnected and how they guide our daily lives. Rick shares insights on making sound decisions based on Biblical wisdom and the consequences of emotional or irrational choices, urging listeners to stay grounded in faith-based thinking.
Welcome to the Flatline with your host, Rick Hughes. For the next 30 minutes, you’ll be inspired, motivated, educated, but never manipulated. Now, your host, Rick Hughes.
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Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stay with me. It won’t be long, just a short 30 minutes, but some motivation, some inspiration, some education with no manipulation, no con jobs, not asking for money, not trying to get you to join anything. We just want to give you some information that will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life if you’re interested. And if you are, you can orient and adjust to the plan with the information that I give you. But we’ve been running the Flotline now for 17 years all across the United States. We broadcast in 112 cities every Sunday morning, as you’re hearing us this morning. And welcome to Cleveland. Cleveland has come on board with the Flotline. And so thank you for having us in the great city of Cleveland. i want to give you a couple of announcements before we get started we have two more new books that we’re making available to you remember these books are always free we do not charge for anything if you want it write for it on through the website request it and it’s free because i’ve always believed if god’s in it god will pay for it and we don’t try to sell anything and uh we also have some transcripts of our radio shows for the year 2021 Every radio show we ever did, we put them into a book format, and you can read them in transcripts all the way from 2018 to 2021. Many of you find reading is a better effective way to study on your own pace, and I know you’ll like these transcripts. They’re great, great resources for those of you who don’t use computers. 52 lessons from 2021, 52 lessons from 2018 in book format if you want them. Just contact me through the website, rickhughesministries.org, or you can call 800-831-0718. or write to me at P.O. Box 100 in the mighty city of Cropwell, Alabama, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054. Of course, our website is simply rickhughesministries.org. Again, all of our material is free, no charge. Our new books are available, Practicing in Christianity, which deals with learning how to be a spiritual superstar, one of God’s champions. Learn how to use the information there. A new book on Bible promises and principles that I think you’ll enjoy, a much smaller version of what we’ve had in the past. And special thanks to all our graphic people. Up in College Station, Texas, Miss Melody that designs all of this. Remember, you can listen on your phone or your computer by podcast. All of our Flatline shows from 2012 are podcast. In the podcast library, over 500 lessons and transcripts of each lessons are linked. You can find the podcast shows on the podcast platforms like Apple, iPod, or Spotify, Breaker, Anchor, any of these that we have. Okay? All right, enough of the announcements. Three minutes worth of that stuff. Okay, you ready to take a look at the Word of God this morning? We want to study the consequences of bad decisions, the consequences of bad decisions. I have a bumper sticker, and that bumper sticker says, bad decisions limit future options. If you want one, let us know. We’ll send it to you. Bad decisions limit future options. And you’ve heard me say that on this show. That principle is true in every area of life. Every decision we make, that decision is based on either what we think or based on what we feel, which is an emotional thing. So making decisions based on what you feel is simply you making an emotional choice. Usually that’s an irrational response to some appealing situation. And even in adversity, you can react with emotion or respond with faith-based divine viewpoint thinking. But making a decision based on what you think is assuming that you are thinking the truth, not thinking the lie. So in order to make good decisions in life, we must have an inventory of divine viewpoint. This inventory of divine viewpoint in the Bible is called wisdom, and it is acquired from instruction. Wisdom comes from instruction. Whose instruction come from? Comes from the Holy Spirit using God’s word normally as taught by a well-qualified pastor. not some off-the-wall philosopher who was all human viewpoint or humanism or his idea of what you should do. Go to the Word of God and you’ll find the truth. Proverbs 5.23 says he will die from lack of instruction. That’s the adulterer that Solomon is talking about to his son in that passage. So there has to be instruction. That instruction has to be from the Word of God. Listen to Jeremiah 17.5. Thus saith the Lord, cursed is the man that trusteth in man and makes flesh his arm and whose heart departs from the Lord. On the contrary, here is the divine source of information needed. to have a wonderful life. Listen to Jeremiah again, 17, seven and eight. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord as faith rests and whose hope is in the Lord. There’s the faith rest drill. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters and that spreadeth out her roots by the river and shall not see when heat comes, but her leaves shall be green, and shall not be careful in the years of drought, neither shall she cease from yielding fruit. So you want to have a wonderful life? Plant yourself by the waters and the waters of the word of God. In case you’re wondering if God knows every decision that you make, you know, you make a thousand decisions a day. Yes, he does. Jeremiah 17, 10. I, the Lord, search the heart. I try the rains even to give every man according to his ways and according to the fruit of his being. This refers to the omniscience of God who knows even the secret desires of our hearts. Psalm 19, 14, let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight. Oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer. So he knows everything you’re thinking. The instructions given in the scriptures are designed to bless your life, not curse you. The word of God is designed to give you a wonderful, fulfilling, meaningful life. Proverbs 19, 20, listen to advice and accept instruction so that you can have wisdom in the future. That’s what we started out with. How to not make bad decisions. Get some biblical wisdom from instruction. Listen to advice and accept instruction that you may gain wisdom in the future. Proverbs 19, 20. And 2 Timothy 3, 16 tells you all scripture from the cover to cover is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. So biblical instructions taught by a well-qualified pastor outline the path to happiness in time as well as the security of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Decisions based on scripture are your keys to happiness. But first, we must grasp this, what God designed is a system. And when we follow that system, it will produce happiness for all members of the human race. That system we know as the divine institutions, and they point the way to happiness in time even if the person is not a Christian, if he’s not a believer, if he’s an unbeliever. The divine institutions are revealed in Scripture throughout the Mosaic Law from Codex I to Codex III. And what you have to remember is the rule of law must be followed for any type of privacy or any type of freedom to exist. If there’s no rule of law, then privacy and freedom don’t exist. And those of you that live in cities that have experienced riots when the police are not able to do their job, you understand your loss of privacy and your loss of freedom when the rule of law doesn’t exist. But God has ordained these divine institutions in four categories. This is how the human race is preserved and perpetuated as an extension of the angelic conflict. They are freedom, marriage, family, nationalism. Again, freedom, volitional freedom, marriage, family, and nationalism. The divine institutions are created for people like you and me. God started the human race with only one person, Adam, and every divine institution is composed of people. So divine institution number one, volitional freedom, freedom to choose. God designed you to be free. He did not make you into a little automaton, a little robot. God designed you to be free to choose your own destiny. In the Garden of Eden, he gave Adam a choice to choose his own destiny. Listen to the choice in Genesis 2.15. And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree in the garden you may eat freely, but, here’s the test, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of that one. For the day that you eat, thereof you will die. So he had a choice. He used his volition and he decided to go against what God told him. You also are free to choose your own destiny. Choose, use your volition to choose your destiny. You can choose for Jesus Christ or you can choose against Jesus Christ. Again, God gives you the freedom to choose. In John 3, 17, God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him, that’s the Lord Jesus Christ, is not condemned. That’s taken off of you. Christ paid your sin. He paid the debt. But he that believes not, that’s your volitional decision, is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. You are free to choose for or against God’s plan. God gives you that choice, just like he gave Adam the choice. Adam made a bad decision. Convinced by Eve that she had been tricked and deceived, he went ahead and partook of the fruit. So let’s look into this one now. Divine institution number two. What is that? That’s marriage. God took Adam from divine institution number one, volitional freedom, to divine institution number two, marriage, by creating the perfect counterpart for him. That first marriage was performed by the Lord Jesus Christ himself in the Garden of Eden when he brought the right woman to the right man. The word called monogamy is a permanent relationship between one man and one woman, and it is ordained by God to remind mankind that he has from the beginning a design for them. It’s called right man, right woman. And whoever you are, there is the right person for you. 1 Corinthians 7, 2, nevertheless to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Verse 3, 1 Corinthians 7, let the husband render to the wife due benevolence, and also the wife to the husband. Verse 4, the wife hath not power over her own body, but the husband, and likewise the husband hath not power over his body, but the wife. God never told any husband to be a bully. God never told any husband to boss his wife around. But in the end, any responsibility, it boils down to the man. God’s going to hold the man responsible. So your decisions in regard to who you marry are critical in determining your future happiness. 2 Corinthians 6, verse 14. Be ye not unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. For what fellowship does righteousness have with unrighteousness, and what communion does light have with darkness? We find the first decision in making a partner, marrying someone, is are they a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ? Have they accepted him as their Savior? If you decide to get married and you marry an unbeliever, you’re violating that principle that God set up. The principle is this, that God wants believers to marry believers because you don’t have fellowship. You don’t think alike. There’s no way you can think alike if you’re not on the same page, and marriage is about thinking alike. It’s a great life of communication and talking with one another, worshiping together, experiencing great things together with children. You have to be on the same page. Divine institution number three is the family. God has provided certain divine laws, such as the authority of the parents to protect for, care for, nourish, provide, train, discipline children. Why? So they can be prepared for life. So parental authority is the way of preparing children for a normal life. If they don’t orient to authority now, they won’t be able to orient to authority later. It starts with the authority of the parents. It goes to the authority of the principal. It goes to the authority of the police officer. It goes to the authority even of the pastor. So parental authority must be taught and it prepares your child for a normal life. Anybody who can’t respect authority cannot live a normal life because of their own arrogance. They will always see themselves as not responsible. They’ll always try to point the blame to someone else and they’ll never take responsibility for their own bad decisions. So they have to have respect for authority. And that means if you tell them don’t, they don’t. If you have to tell them don’t 25 times and they still do it anyhow, you’re not doing a very good job. Permissiveness on the parents destroys this. You can’t bribe your children into obeying. The Bible says bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We’ll see that here. So there has to be a recognition of authority in the home and orientation to principles in the home. So the highest expression of parental love under divine institution number three, the family, is that children must be trained to respect the privacy, the property, the rights of others and not to abuse the freedom and have respect for authority. This is the way Paul wrote it in Ephesians 6. Children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may be well with you, and you may live a long time on this earth. Oh, write that one down now. So you can have a wonderful life and live a long time on this earth. And you fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Those two words, nurture and admonition. Nousia and paideia, the two Greek words. One of them means to put something in their mind and one of them means to put something on the behind. So authority is taught by putting something in their mind and sometimes on the behind. No one likes to have to discipline children, but sometimes it’s necessary. I certainly got my share of discipline, not necessarily from my mother because I grew up in a single household where I had no father. But at school, I certainly learned this principle from my coach and the board’s advisor. I got some of my behind a lot of times. As a matter of fact, if we made any else in our report card, the coach would already line the football team up. And we’d get three licks for every elf we got. That was not fun. So we had to learn to obey the coach when he said study and pass so you’d be eligible to play. That’s important. So that’s the highest expression of parental love, teaching discipline to your children so that when they get older, they are not undisciplined when they get older they will respect the authority of the police respect the authority of the pastor even in the local church respect the authority of the principal in school you can’t live without authority that stop sign stop does not mean skid tires on pavement it means stop that’s a law that’s authority If you run the stop sign and don’t stop, or if you skid your tires on the pavement, you’re going to get a ticket because you can’t handle the authority of a little stop sign. Divine institution number four is nationalism. If the entire human race were under one rule prior to the millennial reign of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, then it would indeed self-destruct. That’s why God designed individual nations so we don’t self-destruct. Internationalism is outlawed as being evil by the word of God. God never designed this world to be one language, one race, one anything. He distributed us around. So to perpetuate the human race and to bring history to the logical conclusion, God designed the nation to protect the freedom and the rights of X number of people on the planet. We call this nationalism. One language should be recognized in a nation, not much in languages. So if you live in America and you’re an American, you need to learn to speak American. However, we’ve gotten away from that. Now we want to speak Spanish and we want to speak everything else and we want people to live here and they don’t have to learn English. That’s not good. The biblical proof that nationalism is authorized by God is found in the scriptures in Acts 17, 26 through 28. And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. and have determined the times before appointed, and the boundaries of their habitation, boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if happily they might. flee after him and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. For in him we live and we move and we have our own being as certain also of your own, poets have said, for we are also his offspring. So what did that verse tell you? He’s made of one blood, all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth and to determine the times before appointed and the boundaries of their habitation. So God, decided who’s going to live in the Middle East and what they’re going to look like, who’s going to live in the West and what they’re going to look like. And this life is not designed for us all to be one race, one people, one language, one monetary system. But that’s exactly what the Antichrist will seek to do once he comes into power during the tribulation. Now it’s clear that satanic diversion from these four divine institutions will bring about the downfall of any nation, including our own nation. So we have to understand these four areas are under attack in the USA today, in our own country, and the political leaders of our times apparently don’t recognize these divine institutions today. or don’t care. So freedom, volitional freedom, whenever some politician attempts to take away your freedom and says, well, you can’t do this or you can’t do that. We’re going to take away this. We’re going to take away that. It’s going to make everybody safer. It’s going to make everybody better. It’s going to make everybody sweeter. Since when did some politician decide what you can and can’t do? But that’s what they are always up to, trying to manipulate the human race. So they take away your freedom. It started with you had to wear a seatbelt. If you don’t wear a seatbelt, you get a ticket. Got to wear a seatbelt. Can’t kill yourself. Not allowed. It’s against the law to kill yourself. Put that seatbelt on, dummy. And there’s nothing wrong with a seatbelt. I wear seatbelt every day, but what’s wrong is the mandate requiring it. And then we’re going to take this away. We’re going to take that away. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. Always about your freedoms. A lot of people are so weird about this. They don’t even want to be on the internet. They don’t want a cell phone. They don’t want to lose their freedom by people snooping into their privacy and their business. But all four areas are under attack today in our own country. The attack of your individual freedom is a daily political quest. The attack of marriage has been going on since the free love movement of the 70s. I mean, who needs marriage commitment today, right? Everybody needs marriage commitment. God ordained marriage as a legitimate way to train and raise children. God didn’t ordain you to live single with your mate because you love each other. We don’t really need to get married. There’s no commitment when you live like that. Even the attack of same-sex marriage destroys the concept of one man, one woman monogamy. God did not authorize two men or two women to be married. That’s not what the Bible’s talking about. So the attack on the family, the attack on parental authority, broken lives, broken marriages. I mean, the divorce rate in America is unbelievable. A lot of our celebrities have been married several times. children with no fathers present, the attack on nationalism with the shift to international independence. It’s all going on in America today. Every divine institution, these four, volition, marriage, family, nationalism, every one of those relates to the human race in general, not just for me and you, not just for Christians. I mean, the believer is always given higher standards, yes. But these four divine institutions are for people in general. So the human race can be preserved. That’s why we have the four divine institutions. God created the perfect woman and ordained marriage. One male, one female joined together in holy matrimony. And that divine institution is a monogamous status quo and the authority is the man. The family is composed of the family and children and the ultimate authority is the man. But the woman is included as a parent. So all mandates for the family are directed towards the man. He has to take responsibility. He has to step up to the plate. He has to do what he’s supposed to do as a father. And that’s why we read that passage in Ephesians. Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath. But if we back up, it said, children, obey your parents in the Lord. And this is interesting. We were told your parents and children, in one case, the Bible puts them together. In another case, it says, honor your father and your mother. What does that mean? Well, sometimes parents get divorced. It happens. and then the bible says as long as a child is under the roof he is to be obedient to the authority of the parents and the parents have to teach that and when the parents get older sometimes they even divorce the child still has to honor the father and the mother they’re not put together in that verse they’re separated So there’s no way that you are ever to have any anger or resentfulness or bad attitude toward a parent that got divorced. That’s that’s that bitterness would root you out and destroy you. I could be bitter about my situation. I never met my father my whole life. I don’t even know who he is to tell you the truth. But if I met him, I wouldn’t bust him in the mouth. I’d say, yes, sir, no, sir, good to meet you, sir. That’s respect for authority, not because of the person that he is, but because of the ordained way God set it up in the human race. All mandates are there. The national entity, America, is people living within boundaries. with a common language separating one unit from another unit so that one group would not overrun and destroy the other group or create some system of tyranny in the country. So this is the way God set it up. It’s wonderful when you understand this, when you can understand these divine institutions, then you can make decisions based on God’s word, decisions based on truth because you’ve been instructed. Remember, go back to Proverbs 5.23, he will die from lack of instruction. And that’s what the Bible says, Jeremiah 17.5, cursed is the man that trusteth in man and makes flesh his arm and whose heart departs from the Lord. Where do you get your answers? From the word of God. That’s what we do here. We give you the word of God. We don’t try to manipulate you. We don’t try to corner you. We try to give you truth and let you decide. It starts with your number one important decision. which is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you’ve never done that, you must. You must accept Christ as your Savior. God made that provision for you. And you can do that here today simply by bowing your head and praying. Because the Bible says, whosoever should call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. So in the privacy of your car, your home, you can simply ask God the Father to save you. You can tell him you’re believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and you’re willing to accept him as your Savior, and that’s simple. You don’t have to join up, fess up, give up. You just have to believe. Believe, the Bible says, in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. Let us hear from you. We enjoy getting notes and letters from you. Anytime, we always try to get back with you and respond to that. Thank you for listening today. We’ll be back next week, same time, same place, with some different information. But I’m so glad you stuck around. So until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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Thank you for listening to The Floodline with your host, Rick Hughes. If you’d like to contact Rick, please write to him at P.O. Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054, or online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
