Join Rick Hughes in this episode of The Flatline as he delves deep into understanding the ‘real you’—the soul. Rick explores the concept of scar tissue in the soul, emotions as appreciators but not components of the soul, and the impact of vanity and ignorance on spiritual growth. This insightful discussion equips listeners with the biblical wisdom necessary to navigate life’s moral landscape and enhance their spiritual life.
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 flood line i’m your host rick hughes and for the next few minutes please stick around just a short 27 28 minutes of some information motivation a whole lot of education but without any type of manipulation which means we don’t con you for money we’re not trying to sell you anything we’re not trying to hustle up membership we just want to give you biblical information that will help you orient and adjust to the plan of god if you choose to do so You have to make your own decisions and your own choices in life, and you can only hope you have the right information. Bad information can limit future options, and bad decisions destroys you in your life somewhere down the road. But on the Flatline, we’re constantly developing new printed material for you, and we have come out with a new book called Christian Problem Solving. This will identify all 10 problem-solving devices taught to me by my pastor many years ago. and be in a short form of a book that will be free for you. If you’d like to go ahead and order it, we’ll get it in sometime mid-June or 1st of June, and we’ll mail it out to you as soon as we get it in. So you just have to contact us through the website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org, not Richard Hughes Ministries. That is not me. It’s rickhughesministries.org. And you can order the book there if you’d like to or any other material that we have. But we’ve done a significant revision of that book on Christian problem solving, and we’ve also redone the book on divine pardon for incarcerated people and their loved ones. If you’d like to get a copy of that, let us know. We’re also working on another book called Understanding Your Soul, which is out of print. The last few radio shows that I’ve done for you are in regards to understanding your soul, especially when we’ve been talking about the real you. Who is the real you? And we’d like to continue that today if we can. I hope you’ll stick around. I think you’ll enjoy what we have to say today. Now listen to this carefully. We’re gonna talk about scar tissue in your soul. I get letters, a lot of letters from people I love reading about them. I love hearing from you. Please don’t quit writing those letters. Let me know if this show is helping you in any way or if we’re getting you to write, Pastor, where you can study and grow and learn. But many have seen, many have learned, and many have corrected the course in their life. And I’m very glad to hear about that. We get a lot of phone calls as well. But let me remind you, I’m not a counselor. We’re not a benevolent society. Just Rick Hughes Ministries. I’m a simple evangelist and we give information. That’s all we have to offer you. So you’re welcome to call 800-831-0718 and 800-831-0718 anytime you’d like to order a book. or if you’d like to know how you can personally receive Christ as your Savior, which this shows about that. You being occupied with Christ, coming to know Him as your Lord and Savior. Now we want to talk about today something that we’ll eventually put in print, and that’s the scar tissue on your soul. how you mess up your soul. I’m giving you this information. I want to give a little quote here. This is something that I came up with. I want you to listen carefully. Here it is, quote, you cannot grow if you do not know. You cannot grow if you do not know. My objective is to let you know your opportunities and the plan of God so that you can grow in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So remember this, your soul, the inside you, the invisible you, the real you, not the outside, not what people look at, what God sees. The soul consists of mentality, which is the ability to think, volition, which is the ability to choose, conscience, which houses their norms and standards, and self-consciousness, which is the ability to identify self. Emotions are not part of the soul, although a lot of people like to say they are. They are not part of the soul, but they definitely are the great appreciator of the soul. And in some cases, those emotions can get distorted. This is very dangerous for a Christian to let his emotions get distorted or even burned out so that the individual has no feeling, no feeling of remorse, no feeling of right from wrong, No appreciation of beauty or the things of God because the emotions are destroyed. Emotions are very dangerous. It’s a wonderful thing. I love a beautiful sunset on the lake and the sun’s going down or sunrise in the morning if I’m speeding down the lake in a bass boat. I haven’t done much of that lately. But I love to get out and fish at night, see the full moon, and my emotions get stimulated when I see the beautiful creation that God has made. But you can actually destroy your emotions by putting scar tissue in your soul. So let me give you an example. An example of a soul whose mentality, the mentality of the soul, is so scarred up from involvement in a forbidden sin, so much so, that the mentality does not feel guilt anymore and does not have the capacity to even appreciate the blessings that God has bestowed upon them. Remember, exposure to sin and evil starts early. by social indoctrination and electronic means in the lives of our young people. And this is something we have to be very careful about. Satan is out to capture the minds of our kids. He wants them to drink the Kool-Aid. But God has given a lot of blessings, and we have to be able to identify those blessings and understand that. But here’s what Paul wrote. Listen about this, how you destroy your ability to appreciate what God has done for you. Ephesians 4, 17 through 19, this I say therefore, Paul wrote this to the church at Ephesus, and I testify in the Lord, prepositional phrase that’s coming from God, that you do not live like Gentiles live in the vanity of their mind, and that’s the key word there, vanity of their mind. And then he said in verse 18, chapter four of Ephesians, having the understanding darkened. That’s the result of the vanity in the mind. Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance, that means you’ve been dumbed down, and that’s exactly what’s happening to kids today, being dumbed down, through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness, blindness of their heart. And the word is not really blindness. That’s not the word at all. It’s a different word. It does not mean blind. It’s the word hardness, the hardness of their heart. When your heart gets hard, listen to verse 19. Here’s what I was talking about. Who now are past feelings, and they have betrayed themselves into lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greed. Past feelings means there’s no remorse. So listen to these key words in this passage written by the Apostle Paul to the church at Ephesus. Many of those people that he wrote this to were Gentile converts who had heard Paul’s gospel message and in fact truly believed in Christ. Listen, this is what he wrote in Ephesians 2, 11 and 12. Wherefore, remember that ye being in time past were Gentiles in the flesh, who are called the uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision, Jews, in the flesh made by the hand. So he said that at that time you were without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope without God in the world. So he’s writing back to those Gentiles in Ephesus who have come into the church, who’ve been saved, and who are being lured out to get involved in things they don’t need to be involved in. In this passage, he uses the phrase vanity of the mind. That word vanity is a Greek word in the Greek New Testament pronounced mataiotes, mataiotes, and it’s a word for an empty space or a void. So what he’s telling them is that their Gentile counterparts have no brakes in the mentality of their soul. No brakes, B-R-A-K-E-S, brakes like brakes on a car. They have no brakes in the mentality of their soul. And he went on to say that since they follow no rules of order in their conscience, they live in a world of darkness. They don’t understand of what they’re even doing to themselves. This sort of ignorance of divine intent has alienated them from God’s protection and God’s blessing and caused their hearts to be calloused so that they feel no guilt, no shame, they have no fulfillment in life. It’s just a never-ending frantic search for happiness. That’s what scar tissue does. If you reject God’s provision, And you become very impatient. You can see that in Exodus 17, one through seven, when they came out of the slavery of Egypt and they got frustrated at Moses and they turned on Moses. They rejected God’s provision. Psalm 95, 8, you can get a hard heart. It comes in bitterness and gratitude, panic, complaining. That’s exactly what they did in Egypt, those that came out in Exodus 17, 1 through 7. So Paul went on to write back to those Ephesian Gentiles, you didn’t learn this from Christ. If you’ve heard him and have been taught by him, as is the truth in Jesus. And Paul proclaims, this is not the lifestyle that Christ taught, not this lifestyle. This same soul damage, soul damage, the mentality of the soul is taken over by the emotions. This same soul damage can occur in your life if you fall victim to Satan’s deceptions or the world’s appeal to your fleshly desires. So because of that, we’re warned in scripture to remain alert to our enemy’s devices. In 1 Peter 5, 8, listen to what Peter wrote. Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion walks about seeking who he can devour. And then notice Proverbs 4.23, keep your heart with all diligence for out of the heart are the issues of life. Or even 1 Corinthians 16.13, watch, stand in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. So essentially we are warned to guard our thinking, not be trapped in our emotions, be careful of our objectives. Now, you better buckle your seat belts when I tell you this, because this is going to shock you. Do you want to know what will distract you from spiritual growth quicker than anything else in your life? The answer is politics. Politics. If I talk about politics on this show, the phone lights up. If I talk about politics, people will want to hear that. But if you talk about the things of the Christian life and the sacrifices of the Christian life, they’re not interested sometimes. Politics gets people fired up. You don’t like the direction our nation’s headed. You get emotionally frustrated at the current administration and you want some justice or you want some revenge. This political bitterness will destroy your spiritual advance and you will forget about growing in grace and instead you’ll focus on changing the personnel in office, thinking the other guy, if he can get elected, he could change our course. Remember this, God is still in control and he said these words. Vengeance is mine, Romans 12, 17 through 19. Recompense no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably. And then in verse 19, vengeance is mine, I will repay. Only what’s in your soul can correct the course of nation and this nation and the future of this nation. I’m going to say it again. Listen carefully. Only what’s in your soul, not my soul, your soul can correct the course of this nation and its failure. Not a politician, not a man, you. In 2 Corinthians, 2 Chronicles 7.14, here’s what the scriptures say, a verse you should be familiar with. If my people, which are called by my name, my people, my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then, then I’ll hear from heaven and and then I will forgive their sin and heal their land. Notice, humble themselves and pray. The comparison between humility and arrogance is not taught from very many pulpits in America today. So our Lord made it very clear that we are to serve rather than be served. In Luke 22, 24, there was strife among the disciples about which one of them should be accounted the greatest. And the Lord said to them, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and they that exercise authority over them are called benefactors. But you shall not be so. Do you get that? You shall not be so, but he that is the greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he that is the chief as he that is the server. In Philippians 2, 3, and 4, let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem others better than themselves. So humility is an attitude of honor, integrity that places virtue, values above egocentric desires. True humility is really what we call spiritual strength, the strength of the soul’s mentality. It’s not a weakness and it’s certainly not being humiliated, but it’s rather a way of thinking and living that people don’t understand because human pride has to be set aside in order to adjust to life and live respectfully alongside other believers. or even unbelievers. But one thing is for sure, humility is not inherent from birth. You must be learned. So the mentality of the soul does not automatically think in terms of humility. That’s why parents have to teach children to respect authority. Coaches must train athletes to respect team efforts, not individual showmanship. Police must enforce humility when laws are broken. And pastors must teach humility through expounding of the scriptures. That’s why James 4.10 says, humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up. The soul that has no humility is on the fast track to self-destruction. That person respects nobody but himself and the unrealistic self-image that he possesses is a door to doom in his life because his unchecked arrogance will always follow prescribed course in his mentality. It starts with self-justification, it moves to self-deception, and finally into self-absorption, and those three attitudes always lead to self-destruction. So God is not going to ignore your unchecked arrogance if you’re a believer. He will apply gentle discipline to begin with, and then if that doesn’t work, he will bring strong discipline with pain, all designed to wake you up before you actually self-destruct. In Romans 8, 11, and 12, likewise reckon you also yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God through Christ Jesus our Lord. And in Romans, in verse 12, in that passage in Romans 6, do not let sin reign in your mortal body. Don’t let it make a slave out of you so that you would obey the lust thereof. This is how you acquire genetic, how you acquire flaws in your life, by being enslaved to your sin nature. These verses are a challenge to your soul’s volition. As part of the soul, the mentality, the volition, the conscience, the self-consciousness, But listen, there’s no magical prayer you can utter that’ll take away all the power of the sin nature, nor take away the lure of the world. The victory over sin and its lure only comes by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit and consistent spiritual growth. That’s why Galatians 5.16 says, walk in the Spirit and you won’t fulfill the lust of the flesh. So consistent rebound, 1 John 1.9, after you sin and after you fall, that’s how you walk in the Spirit. And this is simply how you stay filled with the Spirit or controlled by the Spirit. But no one’s going to get victory over sin they don’t recognize. So spiritual growth forces you to see things you’ve never seen. That’s why Hebrews 4.12 says, The Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder the soul and the spirit and the joints and the marrow, and is a critic of thoughts and intents of the heart. The word of God will cut into your soul and show you things you never saw before. But there is a danger. The Bible says there’s a danger to being double-minded. In James 1.8, a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. It’s not the word mind, noose. It’s not the word heart, cardia. It’s a different word. It’s translated, minded. The double-minded is the Greek word dysoukos or dipsoukos. And this word is a descriptive adjective from two different words, duo meaning two and soukos meaning the soul. Soukos is translated 58 times in the New Testament as the soul. Like for example, in Matthew 22, 37, Jesus said, you will love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. And so it’s possible to have a double-minded person, two souls. The question arises, it doesn’t mean he has two souls, it just means that he’s double-minded. The question arises, what exactly is a double-minded man, or what’s a two-souled individual, I call him? Because whatever that is, whatever it is, it causes him to be unstable. He’s unstable in all of his ways, the Greek word there, meaning inconsistent. He’s unstable and inconsistent in all of his ways. The passage in James 1, 5 through 8 is talking about the believer who lacks wisdom. The believer who asks God for clarity but not without faith. This lack of faith or complete trust is one reason your prayers are not answered, Matthew 21, 22. A lack of faith is doubting God. So to receive God’s wisdom or essentially his direction and trials, you must ask in faith and not doubt and not second guess what God tells you. But there is another application that I see in this passage, and that’s a person living a double life, a person who lives a double life. Listen carefully. This is a true story. Many years ago, I had a supporter and a friend who was doing just that very thing. He was, in fact, a very serious Bible student. He was an ardent witness for Christ, as well as being a faithful supporter of my ministry, this ministry. But there was a problem. He was living two lives. I didn’t know it. His friends didn’t know it. His family didn’t know it. But on one side, he appeared to love the word of God and his Lord Jesus Christ. But on the other hand, in his investment business, he was running a Ponzi scheme that stole over $100 million from his investors. This was, of course, devastating news for those of us who knew him because today he’s in prison. and he will be there for many, many more years. But the question arises, how can you live two different lives? How do you do that? How can you live two different lives? Clearly, he was double-minded, or two-souled. On one hand, his mentality justified why it was okay to deceive individuals, and on the other hand, he appeared to be hungry for the Word of God. And the end result was a soul with no brakes, No breaks that destroyed the lives of so many people, including his own family, who had no idea what he’d been doing. This illustrates how powerful arrogance is in the mentality of a believer. Its illusion of justification is so very powerful that it will override the norms and standards of the conscience. Clearly confused, clearly disillusioned, my friend submitted to the money lust of his sin nature rather than being under the filling of the Holy Spirit. Two voices, both in his mentality, caused him to try and split his loyalties, and that just will not work. Under the cloak of guides, he appeared to be trustworthy and but the supreme court of heaven cannot be fooled since God can see the motives and the intentions of the heart. So now let’s talk about you. What about you? You in Maine, you in California, you in Texas, you in Georgia, you in Tennessee, You in Louisiana, you in Idaho, what about you? Are you living two different lives? Do you claim to be something you’re not? Do you really think God’s not aware of your divided loyalties? Do you think God doesn’t know that? I mean, maybe even your close family and your friends see through your smoke screen, but out of fear or out of whatever, they don’t want to confront you about it. Maybe they’re waiting on you to implode since they know it’s gonna happen. I would like to encourage you to step back. Encourage you to step back. Stop the charade. Confess the sin that has enslaved you from your flesh. If you’re not willing to do that, then the best I can tell you is good luck, because you’re headed for a terrible ending. And the sad thing is you will never see it coming because you have the unrealistic self-image associated with your arrogant expectations. Your time on earth is coming to an end. Eventually it’ll run out. And what you want to do is you want to arrive in heaven. You want to get there and be the kind of person God’s proud of. You don’t want to be sitting on the back row. You can’t even get the view of the Lord. I’m making a joke out of that, but… You want to, as people say all the time, you want to hear, well done, my good and faithful servant. When I went to school, we got a report card, and the last thing you wanted was an F on the report card. My football coach would always line up the football team and make us show the report card. If we had an F, we got a lick with a paddle. If we had two Fs, we got two licks. If we had three Fs, we got three licks. He’s always checking our report cards to make sure we stayed eligible because he depended on us to play football and win games. If you can’t pass your schoolwork, you can’t be eligible to play. And it wasn’t very much fun when he caught an elf on your report card. So when your time on earth is up, you’re going to have a report card. But here’s what the elves would be okay. I think it’d be great if you have three elves on your report card when you get to heaven. That sound like a conflict? No. Listen to what the Bible says. 2 Timothy 4, 7. I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept my faith. Three Fs. I have fought a good fight, and there’s an F. I finished my course, there’s an F. And I kept the faith, there’s another F. When it’s time for you to go face to face with the Lord, can you say, I fought a good fight. Did you put on the armor of God? Did you stand shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield with other believers? Did you represent Jesus Christ in your life by what you said and thought and did? Did you fight a good fight? Did you pick up the word of God, the shield of faith, as Ephesians 6 tells you? Did you finish the course? Or did you ever even get in the course? Did you ever figure out what the will of God for your life was? See, that’s the thing. When God intercepted you, he gave you a destiny. Did you ever figure out what that was? Did you finish the course? Did you run your race? Have you completed what he asked you to do? Or did you substitute your own desires? I know people like this. They wanna be famous, they wanna be celebrities, but they wanna preach too. It doesn’t work that way. You gotta have priorities. What’s your priority in your life? Was it about you? or about your sacrifice and service for the Lord Jesus Christ? Did you finish the course he gave you? And did you keep the faith? The faith is pistis. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God. This is a reference to the doctrine in your soul. Did you stick with it or did you deviate? Did you wander off down the my way highway? Did you get under the influence of some pastor that you trusted and you liked and you let him lead you astray into a different form of doctrine? Did you keep the faith you started with, the faith you learned, the doctrine you’ve learned? Have you lived by that? That’s what’ll be checked out in the future. You fought the fight, you finished the race, you kept the faith. That’s my prayer for you because that’s the kind of soul that God’s looking for, a completed soul. Not a two-souled individual, not a double-minded person, not a person that lives one thing and says another thing. And that’s where you’ve got to get this right. If that’s going on in your life, I encourage you to pray right now and to rebound that sin. To be honest, do you think nobody else is seeing it? You’re crazy. People know. You can see what’s going on in your life. Go ahead and admit the sin to God and recover before it’s too late. Because God says those that I love, I discipline, and sometimes I have to scourge them with a whip. And that’s part of divine discipline you’re not going to like. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re learning about your soul, the real you, what’s inside of you, the mentality, the conscience, the self-conscious, and the volition. And I hope you’ll stay in touch with me. We’ll come back next week, same time, same place, same station. We always appreciate your prayers, and we always appreciate hearing from you if it’s encouraging to you. 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.
