SPEAKER 01 : 0:08

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 02 : 0:23

Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick around. It won’t be long, only about 30 minutes of inspiration, some motivation, some education. and always without any type of manipulation because we don’t con people. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re not going to ask you for money. We simply want to give you some information that will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life. If I can do that, then you have the freedom and the privacy to orient and adjust to the plan, but that’s up to you. You may be a new listener to the Flatline because we’ve added a lot of new radio stations recently. And I hope you are. I think we’ve added like 35 new stations in the last month. What a joy it is to be bringing this message across so many states across America. What a great honor and a great privilege God gives me to do this. Let me remind you of one thing. It’s rickhughesministries.org. That’s who you’re listening to, Rick Hughes. You can find me at rickhughesministries.org. Our radio show is called The Flot Line, F-L-O-T, and flot is a military term for forward line of troops. What we’re going to teach you on this radio show is that you can have a main line of resistance in your soul to stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. Therefore, we’ll tell you that adversity is always inevitable, yes, but stress is optional. Because adversity is what circumstances do to you, but stress is what you, in fact, do to yourself. So if you learn what’s on the flat line with 10 unique problem-solving devices that my pastor taught me years ago, then you can utilize these resources to stop this stress from coming into your life. In other words, there’s a way to live that you don’t have to worry. There’s a way to live that you don’t have to be bitter. There’s a way to live that you don’t have to be fearful. And that’s by having a main line of resistance in your soul. I would like to tell you that we do podcast our radio show, And now we have over 2 million plays on the podcast. You can always find us on Apple iPod or Spotify or Podbean or some of the other podcast menus. Just type in The Flot Line, F-L-O-T, and you’ll find podcast radio shows going back to 2019. And they’re all there for you to listen to if you want to. You can also go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, and listen there as well. We have a new book coming out. I’d like to make it available to you. It’s free of charge. It’s called Family, an Enduring Legacy. Family, an Enduring Legacy. I think you’ll really enjoy it. If you go to our website, you’ll see all the many books we offer. But this is the newest one coming out, Family and Enduring Legacy. And I hope that you will take advantage of that. If you do call and order something from our 800 line, which is 800-831-0718, 800-831-0718, please be sure you speak slowly. and distinctly so that I can hear what you’re saying and write the address down and get back in touch with you. Sometimes people leave heard messages and I can’t understand what they’re saying, especially the street or the name. Okay? Now what I want to do, this radio show, this is show 1077, that’s 1077 Sundays that we’ve been broadcasting the Flatline across the United States of America and in the Philippines. In this show, you’re going to hear me refer to something called Bible doctrine. I know it’s a term you’re not used to hearing. You may hear me use a lot of terms you’re not used to hearing. What we’d like to do is teach mechanics of the Christian life, how the Christian life works, and not just use cliches. Like if you just say, turn it over to Jesus, brother. Well, what in the heck does that mean? What’s the mechanics to do that? let the lord have it brother what does that mean so what i want to do is use the mechanics and show you the mechanics of how the christian life actually works so that you don’t wind up doing all the right things in the wrong way so in this particular show you will hear me refer to bible doctrine you might think i’m referring to a list of beliefs that are often hung on the wall at the local church That is not what I’m referring to. I am speaking of the whole content of Scripture found in the Holy Bible. Bible doctrine is the entire realm of God’s truth presented in categories and concepts that define God, man, sin, salvation, the spiritual life, and even eschatology. As my pastor used to tell me years ago, doctrine is drawn from the content of the Holy Scriptures. both Old Testament and New Testament. And doctrine is the sum total of divine viewpoint of life, such as the doctrine of God, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of sin. It’s a way that we can isolate these terms and put them where you can understand what it’s referring to. But no believer can be effective as a witness for the Lord Jesus Christ if you do not understand basic Bible doctrine, such as the doctrine of salvation or the doctrine of eternal security. So let’s make this plain. Doctrinal orientation, which is what I’m talking about today, which is a definite problem-solving device, is you learning, thinking, and applying the doctrines of God, the doctrines of the Word of God to your daily life. And those doctrines that you learn and apply become the basis for what’s called the faith rest drill, problem solving device number three. Now let’s give you a verse of scripture that verifies this. In 2 Timothy 2.15, the Bible says, study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. In this particular verse, we see the command for Timothy to study the things that Paul wrote in order that he not be embarrassed by teaching wrong doctrine. He was ordered to rightly divide the word of truth, not wrongly divide or teach it wrong. Religious division is caused by those who get Scripture mixed up and teach it incorrectly. Unfortunately, the Internet today is a fertile ground for Satan to mislead people. I see preachers coming on Facebook or Instagram all the time, and they have an agenda, and what they teach and what they say is not even close to what the Bible says. So it’s very easy to get misled if you depend on these sort of people. But this is one very good reason why it’s so necessary for you to have a well-qualified pastor. so that you can understand what the Bible’s talking about. This pastor needs to understand the original languages of scripture. I mean, it wasn’t written in English, it was written in Greek, Koine Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. So you’re not going to grow spiritually if you’re being fed false doctrine. And the internet, as I said, is the garden of false doctrine, especially religious groups who try to deceive you by teaching false truth. Another great verse I’d like to quote for you is found in Peter’s writing to the church, and this is in 2 Peter 3.18. But grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Once again, we have a direct order not to, not a suggestion, it’s a direct order, grow. There are different stages that Christians go through. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that, but when I first got saved, I was a baby Christian. I didn’t know very much. And then you become, if you get a great pastor and you sit under the teaching of the Word of God and you start taking notes and learning, you move up to be an adolescent Christian, like a sophomore, and then eventually become a mature believer. What’s the difference, you might ask? Well, the baby Christian is newly saved, and even though saved for years, sometimes they never grow spiritually, they never grew up spiritually. It’s possible for you to be saved for 20 years and still be a baby Christian. because you never grew up spiritually. You never learned any Bible doctrine. The adolescent Christian is a sophomore believer, but he’s advancing at least consistently towards maturity. And that mature believer, he’s the person that’s built a flat line in his soul, and he’s the person who’s replicating the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. So I’m asking you to consider this morning, which one of these are you? In 1 Corinthians 3, one and two, Paul wrote, and I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ Jesus, because I fed you with milk and not with meat, For hither or to you were not able to bear it, neither yet now will you be able. In Hebrews 6.1, the writer of Hebrews, whoever it was, said, therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on into maturity, not laying again the foundations of repentance from dead works and of faith towards God. So you can be a baby Christian and might have been saved for many years, but the objective of the Christian life is to grow to be a mature believer so that you can replicate the thinking of Christ. A believer such as yourself or me with doctrinal orientation has what I call a built-in inventory of Scripture in his stream of consciousness, and he can recall the appropriate Bible doctrine when he needs to stand on his faith. You know, Satan’s always seeking to minimize the importance of Bible doctrine to the believer so that he will be ineffective in his Christian service and fail in executing the plan of God. There are at least three ways that I can identify that Christians reject Bible doctrine. The first one is they refuse to hear the teaching of Bible doctrine on a consistent basis. They don’t go to church. They don’t listen. They don’t hear. They don’t take advantage of any place to get some good teaching. And so they refuse to learn, refuse to hear it. Second way that the believer rejects Bible doctrine is you hear it but you don’t apply it. You go to church, you hear the preacher teach something correct, and you leave and forget about it and don’t apply it into your life. And thirdly, you believe the doctrine, but you don’t recall it when you need it. Those are three ways you reject Bible doctrine. You refuse to hear it, You hear it, but you refuse to apply it, or you hear it, but you don’t recall it when you need it. So the only way to understand and utilize Bible doctrine is to have a complete change in the way you think. You’ve got to change your mind. And the Bible addresses that in Romans 12 too, where it says, “…be not conformed to this world.” but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. In Romans 12, 3, For I say through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly according as God has dealt to every man a measure of faith. So the mature believer has to learn how to think, change his thinking, and that’s what Bible doctrine does. When you learn the word of God and you put it in the thinking of your soul, It changes the way you think, and you no longer think in terms of fear and failure and worry and doubt. You think in terms of confidence and trust and faith. So in these verses that I quoted, Romans 12.2 and Romans 12.3, we find the doctrine of God’s will for your life. Do you hear that? So that you can know what is the good, the acceptable, and the perfect will of God. We also find the doctrine of humility. Don’t think of yourself more arrogant, more than you ought to think, but think humbly or soberly as God has dealt to each one of us a measure of faith. That’s in the second verse, Romans 12, three. So when a qualified pastor teaches line upon line, word upon word, precept upon precept, then he is able to identify the doctrine that God wants you to understand. For example, you know John 3.16, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Well, in that one verse, we have the doctrine of God, the doctrine of love, the doctrine of the son, There’s three doctrines right there. God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life, the doctrine of eternal life. So if you take John 3.16 and break it down, I could literally teach on that verse for a couple of months, just going through and picking out the doctrines. So learning by doctrine or by categories helps you recall these biblical principles when you need help or you need understanding. The Christian life, as we talk about it, demands precisely correct procedure in order to bring maximum glorification to God. So learning the plan of God, the protocol plan of God, we call it, that’s our first required task so we don’t wind up doing all those right things but in the wrong way. The Flatline in Your Souls mentality is based on 10 specific Bible doctrines that will give you the ability to glorify God to the maximum. Each one of those 10 problem-solving devices represents a specific doctrine you must understand if you hope to grow to be a mature spiritual life and glorify God to the maximum, which I hope you will do. For example, problem-solving device number one is the doctrine of rebounds. It’s a rebound that teaches you how to recover from sin. You may call it something else. But when you sin, what do you do with it? Rebound is recovered from that sin. Maintain fellowship with God the Father. This doctrine of rebound, problem-solving device number one, is developed from 1 John 1, 9 and also Psalm 32, 4 and 5. It deals with confession of sin to God alone. According to 1 Peter 2, 5 through 9, all Christians are members of the royal priesthood. Thus, we can go directly to the throne of God and confess our personal sins. We do not, I repeat, we do not need someone else to go to God for us. We can go and confess our own sins since we are a believer priest. And when we sin, we quench the Holy Spirit. We grieve the Holy Spirit according to Ephesians 4.30 and 1 Thessalonians 5.19. This act of individual rebellion breaks fellowship with God in time. It does not sever your relationship with God in eternity. In other words, when you sin, you don’t have to get saved again after every sin you commit. This is what the Lord Jesus Christ was teaching the disciples in John 13 when he washed the feet of the disciples. If it’s true, and it is, that personal sin breaks fellowship with God by quenching and grieving the Holy Spirit, then it stands to reason that we must rebound or recover from our sin as soon as we realize our failures. Don’t wait until you go to bed at night to confess a sin you committed early that morning. That just means you’re going to live out of fellowship all day and sleep in fellowship all night, and that’s just plain dumb. Without understanding the doctrine of rebound, you will never, ever be victorious in your daily walk with God. So let me give you a few principles to chew on here this morning. One, doctrinal orientation is based on Bible doctrines circulating in the stream of consciousness of your soul. Your soul has mentality. Your soul has volition. Your soul has consciousness and self-consciousness. So when you learn the word of God, you store it in the mentality of your soul and hopefully it’ll circulate there so when you need it, you can call it up if you learned it. And number two, the basis for understanding all information regards to the spiritual life is obviously found in the scripture. So there’s no substitute for Bible doctrine circulating in your stream of consciousness. Three, we can only learn and function with reference to God’s will through knowledge of Bible doctrine. If you don’t have some doctrine, you’re not gonna know what to do, how to live, what to say. Four, doctrinal orientation is based on a correct understanding of the inspiration of scripture. Inspiration of Scripture. What does that mean? Well, 2 Timothy 3, 16, 17 says, All Scripture, all Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be capable, equipped for every good work. Five, the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration states this, that God so supernaturally directed the human writers of scripture that without waiving their intelligence, their individuality, their personal feelings, their literary style, or any other human factor of expression, his complete and coherent message to mankind was recorded with perfect accuracy in the original languages of Scripture. Those very words bearing the authority of divine authorship. Six, doctrinal orientation is the problem-solving device applied to the problems of life. Seven, in order to be a doctrinally oriented believer, one must not be only a hearer of the word, but he also has to be a doer of the word. The original Greek language, point eight, of the New Testament recognizes this difference between a hearer and a doer by using two different Greek words. The first Greek word is pronounced gnosis and spelled G-N-O-S-I-S. And we get an English word from that called knowledge. The second word is epinosis, and they have a preposition epi with it, which means full knowledge. So there’s a difference between knowledge and full knowledge. That’s the way the Greeks defined it. Nine, the doer of the word is related to having a doctrinal orientation or metabolized Bible doctrine on the floodline of his soul, deployed and used. He’s a doer, not just a hearer. 10 the hearer only is the believer that only has gnosis knowledge he heard it he learned it he understood it but he didn’t apply it thus he operates on human viewpoint not divine viewpoint he operates on his own arrogance rather than on the spiritual skills taught in the word of god 11, gnosis is academic understanding of Bible doctrine without any application to your life or to God or to any other members of the human race. 12, a doer of the word, that’s the one we’re looking for, he makes accurate and correct application of Bible doctrine to his experience. And this action requires one simple word called faith. So an understanding of the faith rest drill, problem solving device number three, is in fact critical. So in conclusion, I need to ask you a couple of questions. How’s your spiritual life going? By the way, we have a book that we’ve just printed this year. It’s called The Christian Spiritual Life. I felt the need to get this book printed and my team and I worked on it very hard. What does it mean to be a spiritual Christian? If you ask somebody that, how’s your spiritual life going, they get weird looks. They may think you’re talking about going to church, are you tithing, are you being faithful to attend Sunday school, do you sing in the choir? I’m talking about much more than that. The Christian spiritual life has to do with you being faithful in the word of God, learning and applying the word of God into your life, being filled with the Holy Spirit and replicating the life of Christ. So being faithful in the ritual of church attendance, that’s just half the battle. The other half is you applying what you’re hearing, assuming that you’re hearing anything at all. I don’t know. That’s up to you. So you gotta hear correct information from a well-qualified pastor. Your spiritual life is lived in your soul’s mentality. And it’s followed by physical acts of obedience. And your evaluation time is coming in eternity future. What a shame it would be to discover that you wasted so much time in your life in pursuit of personal pleasure. And you get to heaven, you have nothing to show for all the time God gave you. So if you have no spiritual skills, that simply means you have no spiritual life. That’s what we call a flawed believer, a person who was a hearer but not a doer, a person that had gnosis but did not convert it to epinosis. You do that by faith. When you hear the Word of God taught and you agree with it, that’s only half the story. The other half is to apply what you heard and live by it. If you agree with it but you don’t live by it, then you’re just getting gnosis, not epinosis. Bible doctrine in your soul is epinosis Bible doctrine. It’s the principles and the concepts taught in the scripture that you learn and apply into your life and live by on a daily basis. It’s critical that you understand this. You must understand what it means to take in the word of God on a daily basis, or to learn Bible doctrine, or we can say learn the scriptures, say it that way. I’m talking about the scriptures. I’m talking about Bible doctrine. Not just a list of beliefs, not just the doctrines of your church, but everything that’s in the scripture. Everything. And when you break it down like that, when you put it into these concepts, you can start a notebook, for example. If I were in your church and teaching you a Bible class, I’d say, get a notebook. And if we went to John 3, 16, I’d say, okay, now here’s what we got to do. For God so loved the world. Let’s start off with the doctrine of God. Doctrine of God. What can you tell me about God? Remember Jeremiah said, God said, this is what he said. Now, Jeremiah, I’m looking for people that not only know me, but people that understand me. It’s possible that you know God, but you don’t understand the God you know. If you don’t understand the God you know, then you wind up doing right things like going to church and tithing and whatever they request of you, but you do it in the wrong way. That means that you’re quenching the Holy Spirit. You’re grieving the Holy Spirit. You’re doing right things, but you’re doing them in the energy of the flesh. And those things done in the energy of the flesh do not glorify God. They simply wind up being burned at the evaluation throne in 1 Corinthians 3. And they’re called wood, hay, and stubble. That’s not what I want to happen to you. I want you to show up in heaven and I want you to hear those terms, well done, my good and my faithful servant. How can you be well done if you don’t understand doctrine? So what do you understand about God? Do you understand that he’s omnipotent, that he’s omniscient, that he’s omnipresent, that he’s eternal life, that he’s love, that he’s justice, that he’s righteousness? If we break all of those down and you get a good understanding of God, we could fill up a lot of pages in your notebook on just learning about the doctrine of God, the God you know, the God you love, the God you serve. And then God so loved the world, the doctrine of the world. What does that mean? The cosmos, the cosmic system. We know who the God of this world is. It’s Satan, a.k.a. the devil himself. And we know this is not our home. The Bible teaches us this is not our home. Our home is in heaven. The Greek word being our eternal life is not here. It’s in heaven. This will be destroyed. Peter says this earth is going to be burned up, done away with. So if you learn the doctrine of the world, we learn about what the world lures you, how it lures you. how you get attracted to the cosmic system, and how you can wind up in the cosmic vortex if you’re not careful. All of this information, you know, on their radio show, this is the way we do things. That’s what the Flatline’s about, to give you those 10 unique problem-solving devices, beginning with rebound, how to handle sin, and then beginning with the filling of the Holy Spirit, how to keep your oaths and nature under control, and then the faithless drill, how to live by faith, and then grace orientation, which we talked about last week, and doctrinal orientation, which we’re talking about today. All of these fit into your life so that you can magnify and glorify the Lord Jesus Christ to the maximum. Gee, I hope you’re listening. Love to hear from you. I love getting your letters. Feel free to contact us at 800-831-0718. If you do, speak clearly and plainly so we can be in touch with you. Or you can go to our website, rickhughesministries.org. And there you can see the various books that we offer free of charge. So thank you for listening. If this is your first time, I hope you come back next Sunday, same time, same place. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:20

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.