In this enlightening episode of The Flatline, host Rick Hughes delves into the core teachings that inspire and motivate believers to align with God’s plan without succumbing to external pressures. Explore profound topics like the essence of spiritual maturity, understanding the 10 problem-solving devices, and the importance of divine viewpoint in navigating life’s challenges. Hughes also highlights the subtle dangers of arrogance and how it can derail spiritual progress, urging listeners to maintain clear, lucid thinking through the teachings of scripture.
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, stay with me. It’s 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration, education, and no manipulation, which means we don’t con people. We’re not trying to get any money from you. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We are trying to give you the word of God, hoping that we can verify and identify God’s plan for your life. And if we can do that, then you always have the freedom and the privacy to orient and adjust to that plan, and I pray that you will. Before we get started in our show today, let me remind you of several of our books that are available called Practicing Your Christianity and Crash Course in Christianity, two of our books that are great, tremendous books describing how the spiritual life works for the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. And these are free books. You can always go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, not Richard Hughes. That’s a different person. rickhughesministries.org. And you can see our books there. You can see the things you can order free of charge. You can even listen to some of our books read to you by Jack Steele, our announcer, over the internet. So I hope you’ll take advantage of that. Let us hear from you. You know, we couldn’t do these shows if the Lord didn’t provide our means, and he’s done that faithfully all these years. I think this is show 972, 972 Sundays we’ve been on the air. All that time we’ve never asked people for money, we’ve never sold anything, never solicited funds. The Lord has always provided it through his people as they are motivated to give. Thank you for that. So are you ready to jump in today? A lot of things to talk about. I can’t even begin to discuss what I’d like to say on the radio because we’re living in some pretty strange times. But one of the things my associates and I deal with every week is what can I present to you during this particular radio broadcast? And it’s true that I spent a lot of nights praying about this and asking the Holy Spirit to guide me, show me what he wants me to bring to you as I begin to bring you a different topic every Sunday morning. And I try to prepare the message that he wants me to give to you. So lately, if you’ve been listening, we’ve been examining the spiritual life. We’ve tried to familiarize you with the importance of growing to spiritual maturity. We’ve tried to impress upon you how you can reflect Christ in your daily life. And if you’re familiar with the Flatline, the 10 problem-solving devices, reflecting Christ in your daily life is occupation with Jesus Christ or problem-solving device number 10. Please don’t forget this show is called the Flatline and it’s founded on those 10 problem-solving devices that my pastor taught me years ago that make the main line of resistance in your soul. And the whole thing for the spiritual life is to keep the outside source of adversity from ever becoming any type of inside source of stress. That’s why the Christian life is such a unique life you live. Unfortunately, many pastors don’t teach it. Many churches go through ritual without reality, and that’s such a shame. And I get letters and emails from people constantly saying, where can I find a well-qualified pastor? Where can I find someone that can teach me the Bible? And sometimes I don’t know in your particular city, but I can always refer you to someone that I know over the internet that you can listen to their sermons as their streaming video sermons are presented several times a week. And that’s the way that I study. I don’t live in that particular town where my pastor is, but I listen to the streaming video lessons from the pulpit and take notes. So think about that. Now the greatest danger to each one of us, I’m gonna tell you, don’t be shocked, It’s the complex of arrogance and the related sins that go along with that. Arrogance, very seldom talked about. So when any Christian fails to recognize arrogance in their decision-making process, it’s almost inevitable they have a defect, and they will have problems resulting in, eventually, if they don’t get it straight, mental disorders. A mental defect in the spiritual life. What do I mean by that? What is a mental defect in the spiritual life? It’s a source of emotional difficulty and usually results in some sort of hang-up. These hang-ups can be an obstacle to normal living. We know these obstacles or these hang-ups as a flaw, an F-L-A-W. A flaw which simply means that you have a highly sensitive area which can actually cause me or you or them to become neurotic. That means abnormally sensitive or obsessive or anxious. I know a lot of Christians like this. I’ve met Christians like this. They have hangups about certain things, certain individual sins, certain individual people, and they have hangups about it. But one thing you can count on A mental hang-up in your spiritual life or a flaw will neutralize you and you will never be able to represent the Lord Jesus Christ. It will cause you to become unproductive, unproductive spiritually, or simply put, cause you to fail to ever, ever reach spiritual maturity, which is the objective of every believer, to grow to be a spiritually mature individual, glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ through your life. So it all starts with one area that I’d like to highlight to you today called hypersensitivity. If you don’t recognize that and control that, it’ll lead to judging people. It will lead to being vindictive about people and vindictive in your behavior. And it may be even you isolating yourself and becoming full of self-pity. Both judging and self-pity are sins the Bible talks about and they have to be confessed. As a matter of fact, the Bible warns you in Romans chapter 7, don’t judge lest you be judged. Because with the measure you measure, it’s going to be measured back to you again. So if you hope to stay filled with the Holy Spirit, and I hope you do, if you hope to grow to maturity, and I’m praying that you will, then your hypersensitivity has to be checked at the door. And the only way you can do that is to use divine viewpoint. That’s using forgiveness and applying impersonal love in any area that you deal with. Using forgiveness and applying impersonal love, especially when dealing with other people that make you upset. Listen to Ephesians 4.32. Be kind. Be compassionate to one another. forgiving each other, just as Christ, in God’s sake, forgave you. And then in 1 Peter 4, 8, above all things, love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sins. And I’m going to tell you right now, if there’s someone that you can’t stand in your church, someone you can’t stand in your social organization, someone you can’t stand in your school or at job, you’re being hypersensitive. You have to check that with divine viewpoint. And that means you have to learn how to use impersonal love, problem-solving device, wonderful problem-solving device, where you love someone based on who you are, not based on who they are. Please think about that. Because if we fail to recognize our own sins, well, then we’re in trouble. If we fail to recognize our own sins, our own arrogance, then that’s when you quench the Holy Spirit. And if that happens, you can move into pride very quickly. There’s nothing worse than a prideful believer who’s hypersensitive or who has some sort of unrealistic self-image about his importance or her importance in the plan of God. I think this attitude could further complicate things for anyone involved by creating spiritual competition even in your local church. Now, only the word of God can allow you to see yourself as you really are, and that’s what’s important about the Bible. That’s why we study the Bible. It’s like a mirror. It reflects what we really are. Listen to James 1.23. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and after looking at himself goes away and forgets what he saw. The word of God is a mirror. It will highlight your flaws. It’ll show you where you’re hypersensitive. It will show you where your arrogance is located, and you have to deal with that if you’re ever going to advance spiritually and represent Jesus Christ to your family and to your generation. But when we refuse to orient to reality, then that’s when we become irrational. That’s when we begin to be divorced from the reality of life. Thus, any believer who should be stable having the mind of Christ becomes actually unstable. And it’s usually because of the emotional complex of sins. Listen to 1 Corinthians 2.16. For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? We have the mind of Christ. We have the mind of Christ. We have to be able to use that. We should be stable having the mind of Christ. That’s divine viewpoint. And that’s why Philippians 2, 5 said, let this mind be in you. It was also in Christ Jesus. I’ve quoted that verse thousands of times. Another verse I’ve quoted thousands of times in Romans 12, 1, 2, and 3, where it says, stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think. but think in terms of humility as God has assigned each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. So if you’re going to get out of that irrational, arrogant complex and become oriented to reality of life, you’ve got to have the mind of Christ, which means scripture, the Bible. The Bible is the mind of Christ. That’s what 1 Corinthians 2.16 tells you. And whenever your pastor teaches you the scripture, he’s revealing to you the way the Lord Jesus Christ thought. You know, one of the amazing traits of the mature spiritual life is clear, lucid thinking. Clear, lucid thinking. No fear from adverse circumstances. None of that. Clear, lucid thinking. Because of the divine promises in the Bible, and you can use them in the faith rest drill. You should know what that is. The mature believer is not easily recruited by the lure of the world’s cosmic evangelists. And he’s going to try to recruit you into some kind of financial scheme or some sort of political crusade or one of the many other lures that Satan would use to sidetrack you from ever advancing to becoming a mature believer. The one thing you need to learn right away in the Christian life is friendship should never be more important than the word of God. And I have lost friends because they don’t agree with me concerning what the word of God teaches and they compromise the scriptures. Now listen, let me just ask you a serious question. If you were the devil, I mean, Paul Harvey asked this years ago, but I’m telling you it’s a little different here. If you were the devil, what would you do to wreck your spiritual life? What would you do to wreck your spiritual advance? Well, let me show you what he does. Notice Ephesians 6, 10 through 12. Finally, my brethren, talking to believers, Paul’s writing to the church at Ephesus. Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Be strong is an imperative mood. It’s not a request. Be strong in the Lord. It comes from two sources. The source of the word of God in your soul and the filling of the Holy Spirit. and put on the whole armor of God, every piece of it, so that you may be able to stand against the strategy of the devil. This is a military analogy now. Paul’s using an analogy of the Roman soldier in the Christian life, and it says here, stand against the strategy of the devil. He has a strategy. He has a plot, he has a plan to defeat you. And it’s all listed in verse 12 of Ephesians 6. Get your Bible and read it. It says we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood. We wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, and against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. That passage I just read to you, Ephesians 6, 10 through 12, clearly is written to warn any one of us that are advancing to maturity of Satan’s ability to sidetrack us, to prevent us from ever reaching spiritual maturity where we can actually give God maximum glorification. That’s what his objective is. He can’t stop you from being saved. You’re already saved. You’ve already accepted Christ, but he can sure divert your attention away from the importance of learning the Scripture and inquiring the mind of Christ. The strategy of the devil, that word says. I want to put on the armor of God so you can stand against the strategy of the devil. The wiles of the devil. The Greek language in that particular passage is methodea ho diabolos. Methodea ho diabolos. But what is methodea? What is that methodea? It’s a reference to Satan’s strategy. the strategy to defeat you and your spiritual advances method, what he’s going to do. However, it’s interesting. It’s a compound word and it uses the word Metta, meaning an association with, and the word had duo to journey a duo means to journey. So simply put this word together and is talking about the road to your spiritual life or the road, your spiritual failure. It’s not just one act. It’s a journey. It’s a journey that Satan gets you into and it takes you down a dead-end street. It may take weeks or it may take months because of your tragic flaw. What do I mean? I mean because of your emotional weakness, your self-pity. Because of that, you may never even realize what’s happening or what’s going on in your life. the methods of Satan to end your journey so that you don’t reach spiritual maturity. Now, the Lord showed us in this passage that Satan employs a tremendous organization, and that organization is made up of fallen angels, ones who possess different rank and different responsibilities, all of which have the same objective, that’s to distract or to feed us in the arena of the angelic conflict. And Paul lists them as principalities. He called them powers, rulers of darkness, and the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenlies. Now don’t be discouraged because of that. Don’t let that upset you. Here is our verse we stand behind, 1 John 4, 4. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them because he that is in you is greater than he that is in the world. I don’t care what kind of strategy Satan employs towards you. If you stick with the word of God and stay filled with the Holy Spirit, you can defeat him and you can become the person God intends you to be, a mature believer. Because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. And Christ in you is the hope of glory. This divine provision of 1 John 4, 4 is another demonstration of the unfailing love of God towards you. The unfailing love of God to his children, the ones that are living in the devil’s world. We have to live here. We got saved. We didn’t go to heaven as soon as we got saved. We’re still here. Philippians 3.20 tells us, our citizenship is in heaven from which we eagerly await the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. So we’re not citizens of the earth. We’re sojourners. We’re strangers. We’re just passing through. And who run us, heaven is our home. That’s where we’re headed. So even though you and I are currently living behind enemy lines, do you hear that? Living behind enemy lines, we have not been forsaken by God and we have not been forgotten by God. Romans 8.35 says this, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, or peril, or sword? For as it is written, Paul wrote, for your sake we are killed all day long. We are accounted as sheep to the slaughter. Yet in all of these things we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us. And here comes the powerful verse, listen. For I am persuaded, what? Romans 8, 38, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. There’s a solution to what I read to you in Ephesians 6 right there. I don’t care what Satan employs while you’re behind enemy lines. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. That’s what he made it clear there. You need to get that in your mind, and you need to arm yourself while you’re behind enemy lines with the filling of the Holy Spirit and with the maximum amount of Scripture circulating in your stream of consciousness. Keep this in mind, would you do it for me? Love, L-O-V-E, that’s not a one-way street. Love is not a one-way street. God loves you, yes, we know that. But what does God expect out of you? What about it? The Bible says that God demonstrated his love for us. God demonstrated his love for us and that God sent his son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the wonderful thing about his love being demonstrated. God sent his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to take our place. He sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him. Again, 1 John 4, 9, in this is the love of God manifested towards us that God sent his only begotten son into the world that we might live through him. So I’m gonna ask you a question. How can you demonstrate you love God? He loves you, there’s no doubt about that. So how can you demonstrate you love him? Listen to 1 John 4, 20. John wrote it this way. If someone says, I love God, And yet he hates his brother. He’s a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And in 1 John 5, 3, again, John said, this is the love of God that we keep his mandates. And his mandates are not heavy. They’re not hard. They’re not grievous. Now, you say you love God. Do you obey him? Do you obey him? How do you demonstrate you love God? By growing in grace. When the Bible says study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, that doesn’t mean about once a month you get your Bible down and read a verse. I mean, the last time I looked, we have to eat daily, don’t we? Every day you look forward to some kind of great food to munch on and eat and get up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, maybe even a snack at night. The word of God is your food. You have to feed on the word of God. And that demonstrates you love God when you obey God. When you have his word, you love it and you feed on it and you obey him. They’re not hard. Psalm 119 verse one and two, listen carefully. This gives us the instructions we need to have if we want to be happy while we’re behind the enemy’s lines. Behind the enemy lines refers to being on planet Earth during the angelic conflict. Again, this is not our home. We don’t belong here. We’re sojourners. We’re just passing through. So while we’re behind enemy lines, what are we supposed to do? Listen to Psalm 119 verse one and two. Blessed are the undefiled in the way, those who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart. That word blessed is another word for happiness. And it says, happiness belongs to those that are undefiled in the way. That means, what does it mean for you? It means you stay filled with the Holy Spirit. You don’t let sin knock you off your horse. If you do sin and you do fail, and you will, don’t shock yourself, you will, then confess your sin, rebound, problem-solving device number one, and get back on the horse and keep going. There’s nothing worse than a quitter. I think there’s nothing worse that you could do as a believer than fail and then sit there and feel sorry for yourself and say, God doesn’t love me. I failed. I did a boo-boo. If God was through with you, he would take you on home. The fact that you’re still here, still occupying space, still breathing air, he’s not through with you. Get up, confess your sin, move on, rebound, and take in the word of God on a daily basis. Notice three words in this passage. Those who walk. What does that mean? It means you obey his mandates. You keep and you seek his word. Those who walk in the law of God. Those who keep his testimonies. Those who seek with their whole heart. Walk, keep, and seek. I did a study one time called Seekers, Not Just Peepers. Unfortunately, many believers are not seeking. They just want to take a peep at it. Are you a seeker or a peeper? Because the key to growing spiritually, the key to being the mature spiritual individual God wants you to do, God wants you to be so you can replicate Christ, is to stay off the my way highway. And the secret to staying off the my way highway is found in these verses I’m about to give you. If you haven’t learned anything else, learn these three verses. Psalm 119 verse 11, Psalm 119 verse 15, and Psalm 119 verse 16. This is the key to being a successful believer. This is what you must do if you want to glorify God to the max. Remember what Psalm 119, 1 and 2 said? Happiness are those who are undefiled, not messed up with sin, not soiled with sin, who walk, who keep, who seek. All right, now listen to this. Here it is. This is what it means to walk, keep, and seek right here. Psalm 119, verse 11. Your word did I hide in my heart that I might not sin against you. Well, how can you hide it if you don’t have it? How can you learn it if you don’t have it? Hide it in my heart means to put it in my frame of reference, to be in my memory center so I can recall it lately when I need it. How can you recall what you don’t have? So when you learn the scriptures and you have divine wisdom, divine insight, divine understanding, and you might not sin against God, what does that mean? I mean, sometimes it’s kind of tricky. This is what Satan’s good at with the cosmic evangelist while you’re behind the enemy lines. Lure you into some sort of sin you don’t realize is a sin. Like crusader arrogance, for example. God did not send you to straighten out the devil’s world. That’s not your job. Your job is to lift up Glorify the Lord Jesus Christ to the maximum. My scriptures say this word, Psalm 119 verse 11 in my Bible, your word I hid in my heart so that I would not sin against you. Now listen to verse 15. I will meditate. Oh, I got it in my heart and I’m gonna think about it. I will meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways. This means you’re gonna discover and discuss the Bible. You’re gonna discover what God has for you. This is where the Holy Spirit comes in. He can enlighten you. He can bring things to your mind. So if you have a scripture and you pray over it like some of these scriptures I’ve been giving you today and say, Father, what does this mean? Show me how it fits into my life. Show me what you want me to do, Lord. Meditate and contemplate. That’s the secret to this Christian life. You meditate in God’s word, contemplate your ways because you’ve hidden his word in your heart. And then what happens? Psalm 119 verse 16. I will delight myself in your law, your statues, and I will not forget your word. Wow. Three wonderful things. I hid your word in my heart. I meditate on your precepts. I contemplate your ways. And I am delighted myself in your statues. I will not forget it. Think about that. This is what you must have if you’re going to stay out of the arrogance. If you’re going to get away from those emotional flaws that so easily distract you. If you’re ever going to grow to be the person God intends you to be, this is critical for you to understand. My, I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention. I would love to hear from you. If you’re listening and you haven’t ever contacted us before, send us an email through rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org. That’s our email address. And you can send us an email. Let me know you’re listening. Let me know you’re being encouraged. It’s a great source of encouragement to me when I know you’re there and I know you’re listening. Okay? All right, now next week we’ll be back, same time, same place. Pray for us as we put something else together for you. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you so very much 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.
