Join Rick Hughes on The FLOTline as he explores how to navigate life’s challenges using the ten unique problem-solving devices derived from the scriptures. Discover why stress is optional and how a life dedicated to Christian principles can be free from fear and guilt. Embrace a journey of faith, as Rick shares insights from Biblical figures who overcame their past mistakes and found joy in God’s plan for their future.
Welcome to the FLOTline 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 FLOTline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick around. short time of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education, and no manipulation because we don’t play games. We’re not trying to con you. We’re not asking you for money. We’re not trying to solicit support. We’re not trying to sell you anything. As a matter of fact, we want to give you something. We want to give you the word of God. We want to give you accurate information, not human speculation, but accurate information from the scriptures that will help you verify and identify God’s plan for your life. And if I can do that, then you have the freedom and the opportunity to orient and adjust to the plan. But the FLOT line, the Forward Line of Troops, F-L-O-T, is a military acronym talking about how you can learn God’s 10 unique problem-solving devices and store them in your soul so that you can stop the outside sources of adversity and before they ever become the inside source of stress. You’ve heard me say adversity is inevitable, stress is optional, and the Christian life is a stress-free life. It’s a life of no worry, no fear, no guilt, no shame. It’s a wonderful way to live, and learning those 10 unique problem-solving devices that my pastor, in fact, taught me many years ago is the key to living the Christian life and living it in the fullest that you can. Jesus Christ our Lord said, I’ve taught you these things in John 15, 11, so that your joy may be full. My joy could be in you and your joy could be full speaking to the disciples. And that’s exactly what God wants you to do. Have a full, meaningful, wonderful life based on divine viewpoint, based on his word and what it says. Before we get started today, let me remind you, we have a lot of printed material that’s absolutely free. We have gone to the trouble of transcribing all of our radio shows from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. These are transcribed into books for you to read. So each book would contain 52 radio shows, and you can read the radio show. Just read the transcript word for word as we set it. And it’s a good opportunity to take some Bible notes and highlight them and learn them and apply them into your life. It doesn’t do you any good just to hear the Bible if you don’t apply the Bible. That’s how you grow. You hear it and you apply it into your life. You metabolize it. So those are available along with the new books we’ve printed on Practicing Your Christianity, a reprint of that older book. And Crash Course in Christianity, a reprint of another book. And we changed it up a little bit. We also have Life’s Toughest Years, dealing with teenagers and the things that they go through. We have a divine pardon that we use in prison ministry, and that’s available to you free of charge, and many, many bookmarks. You can find all of these things on our website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org. Unfortunately, there’s another person named richardhughesministries.org, and that is not me. That’s someone else. We are rickhughesministries.org. There you can find a list of our books and a list of all of the FLOTline radio shows and where the shows all play, every city they’re in and what time they play on, 100 plus cities across America every Sunday morning. We also podcast our radio show. We’re quickly approaching 900,000 downloads, 900,000 plays online. on our podcast. So thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time. If we can help, you can always call 800-831-0718, 800-831-0718. But let me remind you, I’m not a counselor. I’m an evangelist. My opportunity and my job is to give you the good news the great news that Jesus Christ paid for your sin. He came and died in your place, took your place, so that you might have an eternal relationship with God. And what a wonderful gift that is for you. Now, what we want to talk about today is something very critical. I want to remind you of don’t let the mistakes you made in the past determine the life you’re going to live in the future. Did you hear that? Don’t let the mistakes you made in the past determine the life you’re going to live in the future. I want to take you to the book of Philippians and read something that Paul wrote in the book of Philippians. Remember Paul the Apostle’s background? He was a strict legalist, a Pharisee, a persecutor of Christians, and he had a face-to-face confrontation with the Lord Jesus Christ and was converted. And he’s the author of many of the New Testament books, including Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Timothy, 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Paul the Apostle made a lot of mistakes in his early life, and so have you, and so have I. We both are not proud of ourselves in the past, probably, and I know you probably aren’t proud of some of the things you’ve done in the past. It’s a good thing when we get to heaven that God doesn’t have a movie projector selling popcorn, letting everybody watch all the stupid things we did, or we would sure be embarrassed. But we’ve made mistakes, and we cannot let those things in the past determine what we have in the future. So here’s the way Paul put it in Philippians 3, 13 and 14. Brethren, he said, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, I forget those things that are behind, and I reach forward to those things which are ahead. I press towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. So he’s talking about his new life goals. He came out of an old life, a Pharisee, a life of persecution of the Christians and into the new life and his new life goals. I press forward towards the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. He wants to hear God say, well done, my good and faithful servant. I have a question to ask you. What are your goals? What goals do you have? I don’t care if you’re 50, 60, 70, 80. What goals do you have? God left you here for a reason. God has a plan for your life. So the principle is this, what you did in the past does not need to determine how you’re going to live your life in the future. I mean, a lot of great men in the Bible made mistakes. We can start with Moses. In Exodus chapter two, verses 11 through 12, now it came to pass in those days when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brethren and looked at their burdens and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. And so he looked this way and he looked that way. And when he saw no one was looking, he killed the Egyptian and hit him in the sand. Now there’s no way around that. That’s premeditated murder committed by young Moses. You see, Moses was angry about the way the Jewish slaves were being treated. So he took out his anger on an Egyptian guard who was abusing the slaves. Remember now Moses was a Hebrew boy who had been raised by the Pharaoh’s family. after being discovered by the daughter of the Pharaoh while hidden in the reeds along the bank of the Nile River. The neat thing about that is that Moses’ mother was chosen to nurse him the first couple of years of his life before he was returned to Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in her home. Exodus 2.10, and the child grew, and she, his mother, brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son, and so she called his name Moses, saying, because I drew him out of the water. After the act of murder, Moses fled to escape the authorities. Listen to Exodus 2.15. When the Pharaoh heard of this matter, he sought to kill Moses, but Moses fled from the face of the Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian and sat down by a well. And it was here in Midian that Moses remained for 40 years. eventually marrying and fathering two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, E-L-I-E-Z-E-R, Eliezer. So he had two sons. At the age of 80, God called Moses to return to Egypt and lead the Jewish slaves to freedom. In Exodus 3, verses 2 through 6, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. And he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but it was not on fire, And Moses said, I will turn aside and see this great sight, the bush that does not burn. And when the Lord saw he turned aside to look, God called to him from the middle of the bush and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, here am I. And he said, do not draw near this place, God said that. Take off your sandals. The place where you’re standing is holy ground. Moreover, he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. and Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look upon God. Here is a convicted felon being called by God to deliver his people from the bondage of the Pharaoh. What was so unique about Moses that God did that? And what’s unique about you? Well, the one thing that’s unique about you is your spiritual gifts, your spiritual assets, what God has given you. As a member of the royal family of God, as a member of the church age, You have some unique assets. Listen about Moses, Numbers 12, 3. The man Moses was very, very humble, more than all men who were on the face of the earth. That’s one of the things God saw in Moses, humility. Humility is a wonderful asset that our Lord Jesus Christ possessed and encouraged us. In Philippians 2, 8, the Bible says, being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even to the death of the cross. Humility is a wonderful asset, and it’s part of the Christian life. If you have the humility to come before God and admit your past mistakes and admit your past sins, I assure you he will forgive you and restore you to fellowship. But you cannot hide your failures in the past and act like you didn’t do them. Listen to David’s confession in Psalm 32, 4 through 5. For day and night your hand was heavy on me, My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you and my iniquity I did not hide. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. That takes some humility to go to God and admit your sin. Maybe you’ve done something in the past you’ve never dealt with. Maybe you’ve cheated. Maybe you’ve lied. Maybe you’ve stolen. Maybe you’ve even done worse than that. Have you ever been to the Father and admitted that sin if you’re a Christian? It’s a good thing to do to admit to the Father what you are and what you’ve done and not try to hide it. For the non-Christian, if you are not a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, the humility required is this. You must admit you’re dead in your sins and trespasses. and to be willing to receive the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior. He who knew no sin was made sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of God through him. The Bible says in John 3, 17, God did not send his son to the world to condemn the world, but the world through him might be saved. And he who believes in him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already. because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. Believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, the one who was crucified in your place, the one who was buried but three days later walked out alive and is alive today and will come and live in you. That’s an amazing, amazing asset for you. Christ in you, the hope of glory, the Bible says. What you’ve done in the past doesn’t need to determine what you’ll do in the future. Remember, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible called the Pentateuch, or the books of the law. So God used a man who had made a terrible mistake to lead the Jews out of captivity and into the promised land, plus write the first five books of the Bible. David was also a fantastic individual in the Old Testament, a person that God used in a mighty way. You remember David and Goliath and what he did, how he took a stone and killed a mighty giant? But he also committed some egregious mistakes in his own personal life. And you can read all about those in 2 Samuel 11, where he took another man’s wife and in order to cover up her pregnancy, had him murdered and killed, called Uriah the Hittite. Read about it in 2 Samuel 11. This is David, a man after God’s own heart. And yet God used him in a mighty way when he dealt with his sin. We all fail. We all make horrible mistakes. Even the Apostle Peter denied knowing who Christ was during the arrest of Jesus, but he went on to have a tremendous ministry, and eventually two of his letters are contained in the Holy Scriptures. So any Christian who fails, you, me, we must use problem-solving device number one, rebound. And why? So we can overcome the guilt which Satan will use to discourage the struggling believer. Satan will use guilt to defeat you, to discourage you, to distract you. You have to learn to overcome guilt. Many years ago, my pastor taught me a series on guilt. I want to quote some of his notes to you. He said guilt can be a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some real or imagined offense, and that’s not sinful. Remorse is not sinful, but when it turns into guilt, it changes to be a different thing. Guilt is a part of the emotional complex of sins, and guilt becomes morbid self-reproach, It becomes emotional feelings of culpability for actual or even something you imagine you did. And it brings out this sense of inadequacy in your own life when that becomes very dangerous to you because it leads you to some sort of arrogant preoccupation with your own life and with the correctness of your behavior from self-righteousness. So if you’re trying to make up whatever you did by being self-righteous, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t chew, I don’t run around with those that do, I give 10% of my income to the church, I’m very holy, I’m very self-righteous, that’s not rebound. That’s you trying to correct your behavior from the past by being self-righteous. The most self-righteous people in the world are religious people who think they’re doing God a favor. The only favor you can do, God, is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to accept his son as your savior, and to take those unique problem-solving devices and apply them into your life. That’s his gift to you. He gave that to you. But this guilt that we’re talking about, this guilt is a sin, and it’s caused by you repressing that, whatever you might have done in the past. It’s caused by denial on your part and even projecting it onto someone else by manipulation. So guilt motivates many, many, many failures in the spiritual life. You don’t have to live with guilt. You may have done something horrible. You may have done something terrible. You may even be incarcerated. Understand that. But you don’t have to live with guilt. As you confess that sin to God and grow spiritually, if you’re still alive, when the dust clears, God has a plan for your life. but guilt becomes a terrible sin, mental attitude sin. When you fail to rebound, when you fail to confess those things that you’ve done and you fail to forget those things that are behind and you fail to reach forward towards the things that are before you, your spiritual life, the goals of your spiritual life, to emulate the Lord Jesus Christ, to represent him to your neighbors and to your family, and to be part of the pivot that makes up the security of the nation. Guilt is failure. Failure to use those problem-solving devices so that the conversion of outside pressures of adversity begin to be brought inside your life into your soul. And that results in a lot of painful anxieties. And to get over that, you kind of repress it, but they don’t lose their tension. They’re still there. And if you have that stress in your soul from guilt, it means that your old sin nature is in control. And if this continues for a very long period of time, you will eventually develop a scar tissue, a hard heart, and you’ll lose all of your defenses of the flat line in your soul. So you have to learn how to deal with your failure and not look back as Paul said, but press forward, look forward, don’t look back. I promise you God’s not looking back at things you did in the past. Experiences involving guilt or shame are often repressed, pushed down in the mind, and they form garbage in your subconsciousness. It appears to me that guilt is a major failure as the number one problem-solving device on the FLOTline of your soul. It’s a major failure to have the problem-solving devices on the FLOTline of your soul. You feel unworthy. Satan will tell you, go sit in the corner and cry about it. God can’t trust you. You’re not very good. Listen, do you remember athletics? I remember playing ball in school. And I got blocked. I didn’t make every tackle. I didn’t make every block. I failed, but I didn’t quit. I got up, shook the dust off my britches, shook the dust off my knees, got back in the huddle and went at it the next time. And that’s what God expects out of you, for you to get up and keep driving ahead. Do not let guilt become a sin because it will become a sin if you don’t forget those things that are behind you. If you keep bringing them up over and over, you think God didn’t forgive you? Okay, you confessed it. Now you got to confess it again and confess it again and confess it again. Once was enough. It’s what Satan is doing. Trying to tell you what a loser you are. Trying to tell you you’re no good. Trying to tell you God can’t trust you. God does trust you. God expects you to use those 10 problem-solving devices, including God. the filling of the Holy Spirit and living by the faithless drill, using grace orientation and biblical orientation, developing your personal sense of destiny along with virtue love in your life where you love God because he first loved you. And this gives you the happiness of our Lord Jesus Christ and occupation with Christ. That’s all there for you. And when you fail to use those problem-solving devices, When you convert the outside pressure of adversity to the inside pressure stressing your soul, then you have all these anxieties, all these painful anxieties. And they get repressed, they get pushed down, and they tear you up inside. So guilt causes repression as a defense or denial against fear. against worry, against anxiety, against any of the stress factors related to guilt, because it has its own line of defense mechanism. And it just merely prolongs the problem when you deny it, when you project it onto someone else. You just prolong the problem. When you disassociate from it, this is how you get disorganized in your stream of consciousness. You don’t think clearly. When you repress it, you accumulate garbage in your subconsciousness. And when you deny it, then you have a false sense of perception of reality, especially about your own self and what you did. You can’t transfer your flaws, your sins, your failures to another person by vilifying them or seeking revenge. And when you reject what you did onto someone else, that’s when we begin to sign our rejecters to other people. When we begin to accuse other people of the very things that we did, the feelings of guilt which cause anxiety can be alleviated by a contrived defense mechanism or blaming other people for your shameful flaws and your shameful failures. By blaming others, and this is a terrible thing to do, by blaming others for one’s emotional sins and guilt-producing impulses, we use projection to leave ourself guiltless and even act like we’re the victim. See, if you can make the other party feel guilty and act like you’re the victim, then this is the problem and you feel less guilty. That’s the evil of manipulation of the weak to control the strong. You know what God does to deal with guilt? He punishes us. That’s what he said he would do in Hebrews 12. Those that I love, I discipline. Sometimes I scourge with a whip. Why does God punish us? To remove the guilt. Why do we punish our children? To remove the guilt. The Bible says, raise your children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Put something in their mind, and put something on their fanny, the two Greek words. Raise them in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Punishment is mandated in the Bible to remove guilt, even in our life, just as in the life of your children. Punishment from God removes the guilt from our sinful selves, too. We know we failed. We know God disciplined us, and we know God got us our attention, and he will do that. So if you’re going through some hard times right now, if nothing seems to work right, if everything you touch seems to turn to trouble, maybe the Lord is disciplining you. Maybe you’re experiencing what we call warning discipline. And if you don’t rebound, if you don’t recover from the sin, then you will move into intense discipline. And this is where the pain comes in. He scourges us with a whip. Sometimes he has to take us out behind the woodshed to get our attention. And then there’s dying discipline. And this is when you just use up your time and God says, all right, tired of fooling with you. I’m going to bring you on to heaven. You’re not doing any good down there on earth. I’m just going to take you on to heaven way too soon. Dying discipline. Believers check out way too soon. The Lord left you here. He’s not ready for you to leave yet. He has a plan for your life. You got to get over that guilt. You got to forget those things that are behind and press forward towards this new life in Christ. That means growing in grace, growing in the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I hear people say, I listen to your radio show and I’m on the way to church and I listen to your radio show. I’m glad you do. Are you growing? Are you taking notes? Are you remembering what I said? Are you writing it down and applying it into your life? growth requires metabolization you hear it you apply it and you live by it in your life that’s critical for you to understand that your spiritual life is what you think inside your soul it’s your thought that’s where you live it your soul remember i told you your soul never dies your body will die but your soul and spirit are going to go to heaven Your spiritual life is lived in your soul, in the mentality of your soul, in the volition of your soul, in the consciousness of your soul. So God gave you, as a member of the royal family, a church-age believer, your very own portfolio of assets, things that you can use in your spiritual life, like these 10 problem-solving devices. But you can’t use them if you don’t know them. If you don’t know what they are, write to me. We have a book called Christian Problem Solving. I will send it to you, and you can study it and read it. You’re not alone. You’re the only one that can live your spiritual life. You are alone in that aspect. The Lord is with you, but you and only you can live your spiritual life. Nobody else can run your spiritual life for you. That’s what legalism likes to do. That’s what some churches like to do, run your life for you. But your spiritual life is the greatest thing God ever gave you. God provided for every one of us a permanent briefing in writing that called the New Testament Epistles. And that explains the modus operandi of our spiritual life. And understand that the Word of God must be transferred from the pages of that Bible into our soul through biblical teaching before we can ever function in the spiritual life and really worship God. So you’re going to take with you to your grave everything that’s located and related to success in your soul. God has provided that for you. You and you alone are the only one who can live your spiritual life. You have a choice between being miserable or having the most fantastic happiness in the world. So perception, metabolization of the word of God is the investment of a lifetime. It’s the capital for the spiritual life. Investment in the word of God pays dividends in glory and happiness in time because only what comes from the word of God is reflected in fantastic blessings even beyond the grave. Oh, I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention because Bible doctrine is the only investment that remains profitable for you both in time and in eternity. So where do you want to live? You want to live in the past? You want to live in the mistakes you made in the past? or you want to do what Paul said, forgetting those things that are behind me, I press forward towards the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. I pray that’s you. I pray this has been instrumental and helpful for you. And I hope if you have a question, you’ll get in touch with me through the website, or you can give us a call at 800-831-0718. Until next week, 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.
