Join host Rick Hughes as he delves into the profound teachings of the Apostle Paul, exploring contentment, faith, and the core principles of spiritual growth. This episode of The Flatline focuses on understanding God’s plan for your life, the significance of learning and digesting spiritual truths, and how humility and teachability transform our Christian journey. Avoiding the pitfalls of arrogance and self-justification, Rick guides listeners through the labyrinth of misleading traits and philosophies with wisdom and clarity.
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.
SPEAKER 01 :
Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick around. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and all done without any types of manipulation because we’re not conning anybody. We’re not trying to raise money. We’re certainly not trying to sell you anything. We’re not going to ask you to join anything. What I would like to ask you to do is to listen. Listen as I try to verify and identify God’s plan for your life. If that’s possible and I can do that, then you can orient and adjust to the plan if you’d like to. But thank you for listening to The Flatline. This is show 993 Sundays that we’ve been on the air. I’m very grateful for God’s grace provisions that made all of this possible. And I’m very grateful to all of you that are listening today. Thank you, wherever you may be. From the East Coast to the West Coast, thank you so very much for listening. Let me say that if you are a Christian, what you’re about to hear this morning is something that only Christians the Holy Spirit can help you digest. If you’re a Christian, what you’re about to hear is something that only the Holy Spirit can help you digest. So I remind you that if you have unconfessed sin in your life, you are in fact quenching the ability of the Holy Spirit to do his job. You may be having a relationship with God that’s entirely possible, but not in fellowship with God due to that unconfessed sin. So please, before trying to digest spiritual phenomena like I’m about to give you, make sure you’re not quenching the Holy Spirit’s power to help you metabolize this information by using the rebound process found in 1 John 1.9. It’s our problem-solving device number one. It solves the problem of sin. Sin quenches and grieves the Holy Spirit, and he cannot do his job if you have unconfessed sin in your life. and trying to understand and listen and apply what I give you with unconfessed sin in your life just simply won’t work. So 1 John 1, 9 says, if we will confess our sin, if is a third-class condition, then he, that’s God, will be faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I remind you of that. Anytime you hear the Word of God taught, you need to be in fellowship so the Holy Spirit can help make the transfer into your human spirit and you can apply it into your life. You know, the importance of learning Scripture is unparalleled in your life and in my life as well. Listen to Philippians 4, 11. Not that I speak in regards to need, Paul the apostle said, for I have learned in whatever state I’m in to be content. I hope you heard what the key words in that passage were. For I have learned. There it is, I have learned. In this passage, the apostle Paul writes that contentment, the wonderful thing we all would like to have, is a learned attitude. Again, listen to the verse. Not that I speak in regards to need, for I have learned in whatever state I’m in to be content, satisfied, happy. Now remember that he’s imprisoned in Rome and he’s awaiting trial. He was confronted with execution because he was preaching the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he writes back to the church at Philippi in regards to a monetary gift that was being delivered by Epaphroditus. That was a delegate of the Christian community in Philippi. Matter of fact, Paul had left him a lot, called him a brother, a fellow worker, and a fellow soldier in Philippians 2.25. So during the visit, he became ill, and he almost died, by the way. That’s Epaphroditus. But he recovered, and he returned to Philippi with his letter that Paul wrote to take back to the church. In this letter, Paul emphasizes the fact that the life of the believer is not based on external circumstances, but rather on internal peace and joy, which are learned attitudes, not normal for the unbeliever. So how does one learn spiritual disciplines required to execute the Christian life under extreme adverse circumstances? Unfortunately, one must sometimes unlearn the lies they were taught before they can learn the truth of God’s word. What I’m saying is you gotta unlearn some things before you can learn other things. So let’s start with that word I have learned whatever state I’m in to be content. The word learned is a Greek word called manthano, M-A-N-T-H-A-N-O, manthano. And that means to increase in knowledge or to be informed. Paul learned not to suffer anxiety by experiencing and by learning the information that he’s giving to them. So he learned not to suffer anxiety by his experiences, and they are learning from Paul’s letter to them. So you got two people learning. Paul learned through the experiences he went through, and they’re learning by what he’s writing to them. Jesus called his disciples mathetes, which are learners. That’s the word learners. It comes from the word manthano. You and I are instructed to be learners in 2 Timothy 2.15. Study to show yourself approved unto God at work when it needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. If you’re listening to me and you’re staying with me the whole 30 minutes of this show, hopefully you’re learning something. If you can rightly divide the word of truth, it ought to be pretty obvious that you can wrongly divide the word of truth just as easy. So the pastor teacher, if he’s well qualified, he must learn how to rightly interpret the scriptures before he can teach you accurately. It’s unfortunate that a lot of seminaries don’t major in this skill as much as they should of interpreting the scriptures. They major in a lot of other things like pastoral counseling and all this other goofy stuff. But there are a lot of ways to learn. One is by experience and one is by instruction. For example, you may have told your child, don’t touch that hot oven because it’ll burn you. but they touched it anyways and of course they got burned and that’s learning the hard way, learning by experience. It’s also true in the scriptures that Christians are instructed not to do certain things because if they do those things, they’re gonna get burned. But many of us disregard the warning and we do it anyhow. We have to learn the hard way, not the easy way. For example, Paul warned the believers in Ephesus about certain individuals they should avoid. This is a warning, he said in 2 Timothy 3, 1 through 5, as he wrote back to Timothy to the church at Ephesus. But know this, he said, and he’s going to give them a warning of what they should avoid, that in the last days, perilous times will come. This is 2 Timothy 3, 1 through 5. men will be lovers of themselves lovers of money bolsters proud blasphemers disobedient to parents unthankful unholy unloving unforgiving slanderers without self-control brutal despisers of good traitors headstrong haughty lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of god having a form of godliness but denying its power, from such these sort of people turn away, don’t associate with them. So you and I are given a warning in this passage. Stay away from lovers of self. Stay away from lovers of money. Stay away from boasters. Stay away from proud people, blasphemers, people that are disobedient to their parents and unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, people who slander, people who have no self-control, people that are brutal and despisers of good. Headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure. And then he said having a false form of godliness. That’s quite an extensive list of personality traits of these losers. They are unbelieving and unfaithful people that characterize those who live in the last days. And if we happen to be in the last days, I don’t know, no one knows, but if that’s true, these are the sort of people that we are being associated with. Sounds like a lot of politicians to tell you the truth. It’s quite an extensive list. Many of these traits could be the resume of some of our political leaders today. But failing to learn by instruction always results in getting burned. It’s for this reason that this happens is to put our confidence in our, the reason this happens is because we put our confidence in our own ability and our own mindset. We think we know better. We think we can discern good and evil, not realizing we’ve been deceived by the master deceiver, which is Satan himself. These types of individuals are a distraction to your spiritual life, and if you associate with them, it’s a mistake, and you will eventually learn the hard way, not the easy way, that these sort of people These sort of people are users. They are users. They will use you and then lose you since they have no loyalty to anybody except themselves. It said lovers of self. That ought to give you a hint right there. Lovers of money. That ought to tell you what they’re after. Boasters. That ought to tell you what their personality is like. Proud, unholy, unloving, unforgiving people. You get hanging around these sort of people, and this is what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to get burned. Now, if you go back and read Proverbs, you’ll save yourself a lot of heartache. In Proverbs 3, 1 through 2, My son, do not forget my law, but let your heart keep my commands. For a length of days and long life and peace they will add to you. Learning God’s mandates and obeying God’s mandates gives you and I the ability to have a full and a wonderful life. Do not forget my law. Now listen, how can you forget what you didn’t learn? Obviously they learned it and they are told not to forget it. So oftentimes it has to be refreshed and repetition is how you do that. So don’t forget my laws and don’t fail to keep my mandates if you want to live a long life and have peace. Learning God’s mandates, obeying God’s mandates gives us the ability to have a very full and a very wonderful life. Let me give you a little hint here. Humility is teachability. The self-centered arrogant individual is not teachable, and that’s because of their own blind arrogance. Their own self-justification excuses their blatant misbehavior in favor of whatever devious lifestyle they indulge in. That’s the trait of the arrogant individual. He’s self-centered. Self-justification is his trait. He justifies why he’s right, and why you’re wrong, why he’s right and why God’s wrong, why he’s right and the Bible’s wrong. And he justifies his sin through arrogance. And he deceives himself into thinking that he’s something when he’s not. So this self-justification can then excuse their blatant misbehavior in favor of whatever devious lifestyle they choose to indulge in. Sometimes in order to learn truth and follow divine instructions, we have to understand the lie that we’ve previously been taught. And this is where organized religion has to be confronted. Because in organized religion, Satan is a master manipulator. Salvation by works, spirituality by works, spirituality by emotional motivation, crusader arrogance, all demand that we clean up the devil’s world. and all our ways to distract you from ever growing in grace and thinking in grace and living in grace. because organized religion will emphasize what you must earn in order to get to heaven. It’s not possible, not even possible. So the master manipulator, which is AKA the devil himself, uses religion to confuse and to distract people from the truth. In Romans 16, 17, listen to what Paul wrote here. Now I urge you, brethren, Note those who cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you learned and avoid them. So the master manipulator that Paul faced here were the Gnostics and the Judaizers who followed in his ministry trying to get people to turn away from what he was teaching. In the New Testament, the Judaizers were what we call a group of Jewish Christians who were insisting that their co-religionists should follow the Mosaic Law and that Gentiles convert to Christianity must first of all be circumcised. So Paul had to put up with these sort of Judaizers. And then the other side, you had the Gnostics he had to deal with. So if someone comes to know Christ, the Judaizers would say, all right, now you gotta follow the law of Moses and you gotta be circumcised. Listen to Colossians 2.8. Beware, look out, beware lest anyone cheat you. through philosophy, that’s the Gnosticism, and empty deceit, that’s the Judaizers, according to the traditions of men, not according to the basic principles of the Word of God. According to the basic principles of the world, he says, not according to what Christ taught. So you have to be careful that you cannot get cheated through philosophy and empty deceit. You must be careful about that. In both of these verses where Paul read you Romans 16, 17 and Colossians 2, 8, again Colossians 2, 8, beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit. In these two verses we’re warned not to fall for the lies of the cosmic recruiter, the person who seeks to mislead your thinking. Our Lord made it plain to the disciples that they would face tremendous opposition in their own ministry as they attempted to spread the gospel after he left. In John 16, two, here’s what he told them, and this probably made them break out in a cold sweat. He said in John 16, two, they will put you out of the synagogue, yes, The time is coming that whoever kills you will think he’s offering God a favor or doing God a good service. That’s what’s coming down the road for those disciples. And they certainly experienced martyrdom, every one of them did, except for John, who wound up on the Isle of Patmos. So what I offer you on this particular show called The Flatline is just truth from the Scriptures. not some sort of emotional motivation, not some sort of solicitation, but truth from the scriptures. We don’t offer gimmicks and games, no appeals for money, nothing for sale, just truth from the living word of God. living word of God. Hebrews 4.12, for the word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of the soul and the spirit and to the joints and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. The word of God is alive and powerful. When you put it into your soul, when you learn it, when you use it, it whittles you into what shape God wants you to be. God is a master whittler and he does it through his word in your soul. Being taught truth, obeying truth, listening to what the scriptures tell you, that’s two different things. Being taught the truth and then obeying the truth is two different things. some call it the difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge that’s one way they put it but the actual word used in the original writings are the word gnosis g-n-o-s-i-s and the word epinosis these words both mean knowledge but one means full knowledge epi is a preposition meaning full and gnosis is the word knowledge so you can have gnosis and it doesn’t do you any good if it’s not epinosis. That’s the difference between knowledge and full knowledge. It’s the difference between hearing it and keeping it. In Proverbs 13, 16, the Bible says, every prudent man acts with knowledge, but a fool lays open to his folly. If you’re going to live your life according to God’s wonderful plan, you must have some knowledge. And the only way you’re going to get that knowledge is to learn it. And the only way you’re going to learn it is by means of the God, the Holy Spirit, whom the Lord Jesus Christ said he would send to you as a private tutor, a counselor for you, and he will teach it to you. So when you, as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, have the opportunity to listen to the instruction of the Word of God, you have to be filled with the Holy Spirit. You can’t quench and grieve him and expect to learn anything. He can’t do his job if you’ve done that. Then once you hear it, all it is is gnosis. You understand it. Okay, I went to church, I heard it, I understood it, and I left, and I went to eat, and I forgot it. But if you don’t apply it into your life, it never can become epinosis, full knowledge. Full knowledge is the completion of the act of learning. You hear it, you learn it, you apply it into your life. That’s the way it has to go. So let me give you some principles here. The knowledge of the operational skills of the spiritual life produces many amazing results. And they are amazing, I promise you. When you learn to live the spiritual life, you learn to have comprehension. Comprehension is the first of these operational skills. The mature believer can comprehend what’s going on around him. This comes through the filling of the Holy Spirit and it makes us all equal. in the ability to comprehend Bible doctrine, because spiritual maturity is not limited to human IQ. You might not be the brightest bulb in the tank, but if you have the filling of the Holy Spirit, you can learn the Word of God just as easy as a genius can, because it’s learning and applying, and applying is your volition, but the learning is the ministry of the Holy Spirit to act in a wonderful way to help you metabolize the information. And so regardless of your IQ, you can comprehend God’s plan and God’s will for your life. That’s one of the operational skills of the spiritual life, and what a wonderful skill it is. And then there’s the operational skill of memory, and that’s the mental capacity to retain in the stream of consciousness and also to recall, hear those two words, retain and recall the word of God, the metabolized word of God that you learned, anything you learned for specific circumstances in your life. So you have some situation come up in your life and you say, you know, what would God have me do about this? If you have memory, if you have the mental capacity to retain it, This is what the Holy Spirit does, and you can recall it, retain and recall that information. But here’s the true thing. The rate of learning God’s Word has to exceed the rate of forgetting. If you’re forgetting more than what you’re learning, you’re going backwards. And that means that just taking in the Word of God once every couple of weeks doesn’t help you. You’re not going anywhere if you’re not learning and relearning and applying into your life The rate of learning has to exceed the rate of forgetting. Here’s another operational skill in your spiritual life. It’s called problem solving. All problem-solving devices are manufactured out of the epinosis doctrine in your stream of consciousness. I know I said a lot there, but the epinosis, not just the gnosis, but all of these problem-solving devices come from epinosis doctrine in your stream of consciousness, and we’ll talk about that in another show. The problem-solving devices that God gives you, we call them the flotline, They are a grace gift from our God which replaces any human viewpoint, any human solution, any psychology, and any defense mechanism. It’s a completely different way of living, and that’s using the flat line in your soul. So the flat line is not some sort of human viewpoint solution. It’s not psychology. It’s the word of God. And it’s called the mind of Christ. Think like the mind of Christ thought. That’s what we’re told to do. So another comprehension skill, another thing that’s amazing is decision making. you’ll be able to make decisions that’s an operational skill of the spiritual life that’s your ability and your power to understand the issues in your life and to classify the solution and the course of action that you must take to classify the solution and the course of action that you must take so that you can make the right decision and do the will of god as revealed in the scriptures So we have to first of all understand the facts related to the Word of God before we can exercise our volition to make good decisions from our position of strength. Position of strength is a filling of the Holy Spirit. So if we’re filled with the Holy Spirit and we understand the Word of God, we have some epinosis in our soul, then we can make the right decision. Without that, you’re just taking your best shot. You’re saying, well, I think this is what I should do. And I hear all these excuses. Well, I prayed about it. Well, your prayer probably not even getting answered. I prayed about it, brother. Well, how do you know your prayer is being answered? Were you even in fellowship? Did you try to go to God and pray because you had unconfessed sin in your life? It doesn’t work that way. If God wants to speak to you, he’s gonna speak to you from the scripture. If he’s gonna whittle your life away, it’s the scripture. The word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword. That’s the whittling away. He’s gonna cut you till he gets you into what he wants you to be. So you have to have the ability to make decisions. You have to have the ability to solve problems. You have to have the ability to recall information in your soul and to retain it, and you have to have the comprehension to do it through the filling of the Holy Spirit. And then we come to what’s a wonderful thing, which is called awareness. Awareness is having the knowledge in our stream of consciousness so that we are informed, we’re alert, we’re knowledgeable about other people, other situations and circumstances. There’s no wisdom in life without the thinking skills of awareness, and that is developed through the problem-solving devices in your soul. Awareness avoids all of these arrogant traps that you can fall into if you are aware of what the Bible says. So our Lord gave you explicit instructions in Matthew 11, 28, and 29. Listen carefully. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and, uh-oh, listen, listen, take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I’m meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for yourself. This is what the Word of God is there for. This is why you have a Bible. It’s God’s written instructions for you, and you must learn it. As you learn it and put it in your soul, it’s alive and it’s powerful. It’s sharper than a two-edged sword. So the word of God will whittle you away into the person that God wants you to be, like a master whittler would take a piece of wood and carve something out of it. God will bake you into the person he wants you to be as the word of God in your soul is alive and powerful doing its job. Think about that. Acquiring the mind of Christ will do what for you? It will free you from the chains of fear. It’ll free you from anxiety. It’ll free you from doubt. It’ll free you from depression. But it does not happen just by some simple prayer. It requires instruction and discipline along with the consistency to apply what you learn. So are you listening to me today? I’ve given you some great information. No games, just how you have to have comprehension, memory, problem solving, decision making, awareness. All of these things are available through your spiritual life. And that only comes through the content of the Word of God in your soul. And the only way you’re going to get the Word of God in your soul is to learn it. That’s why Paul said, I have learned whatsoever shape I’m in to be content. And as I said, you can learn the easy way or you can learn the hard way. That depends on whether you’re hard-headed or whether you have some respect for the authority of the Scriptures. Because if you don’t respect the Scriptures, you obviously are going to learn the hard way. And you’re going to get burnt many times before you ever find any happiness in your life. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. I hope you’ll come back same time next week. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Floodline.
SPEAKER 02 :
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.
