Doctrinal Orientation Review
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 537 aired on December 13, 2015
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes I’m going to ask you to stay with me. It will be a time of motivation, some inspiration,
some education, and we do it without any manipulation. That’s right, we don’t try to con you,
we’re not trying to lure you into something, we’re certainly not going to ask you for any money,
we’re not going to solicit you to join anything. This show is simply to give you some
information, not human speculation but accurate information, information that comes from the
Bible. That’s right, it is a show about the Bible but wait a minute, don’t turn me off yet. We’re not
going to jump up and down and holler and rant and rave, but we are going to give you some
information that will help you verify and perhaps even identify the plan of God for your life. If
you’re interested, then you always have the freedom and the privacy to orient and adjust to the
plan. This show the FLOT Line is always growing, always changing, always moving. Remember
the FLOT Line is a series of 10 unique problem-solving devices, something that my pastor Bob
Thieme taught me many, many years ago. These 10 problem-solving devices make up a forward
line of troops that helps you to stop the outside sources of adversity before they become the
inside source of stress. Remember that adversity is inevitable in life, but stress is optional and as
a Christian you have the most unique assets in the world. No one in the world has the assets that
you have. The Christian life is a very unique supernatural life, it’s called a spiritual life. When
you live your spiritual life under the filling of God the Holy Spirit and metabolize the Word of
God so you operate under the mechanics taught in the Word of God, then you acquire the mind
of Christ. You have the mind of Christ, you think like He thinks and you’re able to live and exist
in the devil’s domain and actually go to a place in your life where you don’t worry, where you
don’t have to be afraid, where you never have to be angry and you never have to be bitter, where
you have complete trust and faith in God’s provisions and plan and promises for your life. It’s a
wonderful supernatural life, but it can only be lived under the filling of the Holy Spirit.
Remember, Paul said in Ephesians that you have been indwelt by God the Holy Spirit so anyone
that’s a Christian today listening to me know that God the Holy Spirit lives in you. Paul wrote
about this in 1 Corinthians when he said,
“Don’t you know that your body is the temple of God
the Holy Spirit?”
The objective of the Holy Spirit living in you is to empower you so you can
have victory over your sin nature.
Anyone who’s not a Christian doesn’t have any way to
overcome the sin nature. They simply have a body and they have a soul and that’s all they have.
Not you. You have a body, you have a soul, and you have a re-born human spirit that’s indwelt by
God the Holy Spirit. Yes, God the Holy Spirit lives inside of your dead human spirit. Your human
spirit is born again and you’re spiritually alive. A person that’s not a Christian is not spiritually
alive, he does not have the Holy Spirit living in him, he’s dead spiritually. You are alive
spiritually and now you have options. You have the option to allow God the Holy Spirit to
control your life as you are mandated in Ephesians 5:18 to be filled with the Spirit. You’re
537-Doctrinal-Orientation-Review-transcript.pdf
mandated in Galatians to walk in the Spirit and this is where the power comes from because the
Holy Spirit, John 16, will lead you and guide you into all truth. Here’s something I’ve learned
that’s very interesting. If the Holy Spirit is suppose to lead you and guide you into all truth and
you are living a lie, you are living something that’s not true, then obviously He didn’t lead you
there. You led yourself there and if it gets into the area of false doctrine, things that aren’t true
doctrinally, then the Holy Spirit could not possibly have led you there because John 16 says He
will not lead you into a lie, He will only lead you into truth. Now we have to figure out who is
living in the lie because the Holy Spirit is not a liar and so here’s where the conflict comes in. If
you are filled with the Spirit and if you learn God’s Word consistently, then you are able to
replicate the life of Christ and reproduce the image of Christ inside of you so that when people
see you, they see Christ. They see the way He thought, they see the way He acted, they see His
temperament, they see His intentionality, His personality in you. That’s why Philippians says,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus,”
Philippians 2:5. When we study these 10
problem-solving devices, make no mistake about it, these are things that our Lord Jesus Christ
lived by. He lived by these things and He passed these things on to us. Did the Lord Jesus Christ
ever have to rebound, problem-solving device number one? No, because He never sinned. Did
He use the filling of the Holy Spirit? Yes, look at Matthew 4, He was led by the Spirit into the
wilderness to be tempted. Did He use the faith-rest drill? Yes, He quoted Scripture when He was
being tempted, Matthew 4. Was He oriented to God’s Word? Yes, He constantly quoted Scripture.
He constantly told the Pharisees and the scribes what the Bible said and told His disciples what
the Bible said about them and what the Old Testament said about Him. Yes,
Jesus Christ knew
Scripture
and here is our mandate from the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 2:15.
This is the
problem-solving device called Biblical or doctrinal orientation.
Today we are reviewing these
for you. I want you to remember them. We have a book that lists all of these Christian problem-
solving devices so you can have it in front of you, put it in your Bible, and use it.
2 Timothy
2:15,
“Study
[the Bible]
to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be
ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth.”
These are Paul’s words to Timothy, one of his
protégés and this is what he told him and we can apply this to our life also. We start off with a
verb and that’s the verb study, and in the morphology of the Greek New Testament that is an
aorist active imperative. The imperative is the mood of command.
So as believers in Jesus
Christ we are commanded to study God’s Word.
The word
spoudazo,
S.P.O.U.D.A.Z.O.,
means study, “Study to show ourselves approved,” so if you can be approved then you could also
be disapproved. Disapproving would be you getting into something that’s not correct, you going
down the My Way Highway under control of your sin nature and God the Holy Spirit would
convince you or convict you of this. You are to
“Study to show yourself approved unto God by
rightly dividing the Word of truth.”
Rightly dividing is a word that we use in our English
language, it’s the word
orthotomeo,
O.R.T.H.O.T.O.M.E.O., that’s the Greek word and it means
to cut straight. We have orthodontists that will make your teeth straight. Orthodontist comes from
orthotomeo,
it means to set straight, and rightly dividing means to teach Scripture accurately.
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“Timothy, you are to teach Scripture accurately.” Every pastor is under this command, to study to
show himself approved unto God, rightly dividing the Word of truth. Can Bible study cause
division? The answer is yes. People study for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. Some teach
with a hidden agenda. Some build a clique. Some teach from ignorance, not really knowing what
the languages say. Some claim that they have extra Biblical revelation and there’s no way that
this could ever happen according to the last chapter of the book of Revelation. If God told us to
be careful, if God told us to get it straight, then God must have known that a pastor could
possibly mess it up. You can mess it up. Yes, we could get it wrong and the Bible tells us in
1
Corinthians 14:3,
“God is not the author of confusion.”
The very strong Greek negative
ouk
,
God is not,
ouk,
He is not the author of confusion. Confusion means instability or disorder or
disturbance. Any teaching of God’s Word that causes confusion, instability, disorder, disturbance,
distraction, usually is wrong. Now you know, when the Bible says God is not the author of
confusion in 1 Corinthians 14:33 it goes on to say,
“But of peace as in all the churches of the
saints.”
The Bible says we are all to be one mind together in Ephesians 4. When we are not one
mind, when somebody believes one thing and somebody else believes something else, we cannot
both be right. Somebody is wrong.
The Holy Spirit is the author of truth, He leads us into
truth.
Sometimes it’s interesting to find people who say, “The Holy Spirit led me here at one
point in my life but now the Holy Spirit’s leading me over here.” So what they’re saying is the
Holy Spirit now changed His mind and the Holy Spirit doesn’t want them to believe what they
use to believe, but He wants him to believe something different now. By the way, the very next
verse from 1 Corinthians 14:33 says,
“Let your women keep silent in the church.”
Unfortunately,
sometimes that’s where a lot of the problems originate. The Bible never contradicts itself. God is
not unfair. God does not get emotional, not like you and I do. God doesn’t have emotions. We
have emotions. God doesn’t operate under emotions. Now I know you’re saying, “Well I know in
the Bible where it says, ‘God loved Jacob but He hated Esau.’” Yes it does say this but
sometimes you need to know the difference between an anthropomorphism and an
anthropopathism. This is not God having emotion, what you’re reading in this passage. God
doesn’t operate on emotion. God is absolutely justice. God is absolutely righteousness. God made
and created all things and so God doesn’t clap His hands and get happy when you do the right
thing and when you do the wrong thing, God is not sitting there with a frown on His face, upset
at you. I cannot always presume to speak for God, it is not my job except to quote Scripture.
That’s the mind of Christ.
Doctrinal orientation, 2 Peter 3:18, the Bible says we are to
“Grow
in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
We had one verb in that
last passage that said we are to study. Now we have another verb here that says we are to grow.
Both of these verbs are in the imperative mood in the Greek New Testament. Both
spoudazo
and
this word,
auxano,
both are imperative moods. This means to grow and to increase and to
become greater. To become greater in what? The passage says,
“Grow in the grace,”
so we need
to learn about our grace blessings and our grace assets.
“And in the knowledge of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ,”
this is what a lot of people don’t understand.
Learning about the Lord
537-Doctrinal-Orientation-Review-transcript.pdf
Jesus Christ is one of the most critical things you could do because your life is molded and
motivated by Him, molded after Him and motivated by Him.
When we’re talking about
grace, well first of all we have saving grace. The Bible tells us,
“For by grace are you saved
through faith and it’s a gift of God not of works lest someone should brag about it.”
Saving grace
is in Ephesians 2:8-9. We also have living grace in Colossians 1:16 where God handles all of the
logistics you need. Matthew 6 talks about this. If you will seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness, He said He would add all the logistics you need to survive in the devil’s world.
There’s also dying grace. In Job 5:19-27 you are promised as a mature believer, if you’re growing
in grace, that God will not pluck you like an ear of corn before you are completely ripe. God will
not take you too soon. The Bible also tells us that if you as a believer get out of fellowship with
God, under control of your sin nature, and you do not confess the sin and recover from the sin
that you can move into warning discipline, intense discipline, and yes even dying discipline. 1
Corinthians 5:1-5 talks about dying discipline, you can read it for yourself. Hebrews 12:6-10
talks about dying discipline, you can read it for yourself. As our Heavenly Father on occasion
does, some believers He takes them home sooner than they should go. He doesn’t send them to
hell, you don’t lose your salvation, God doesn’t take it back. But you do not finish your time on
this earth because you did not redeem the time, you didn’t spend that time as God intended for
you. You got out of His will, you got out of fellowship, and you suffered and you died
prematurely. One of the promises of Ephesians is,
“Children obey your parents. Honor your
father and your mother that it may be well with you and you may live a long life on this earth.”
Right there in these verses is connected the principle to living a long time and that’s coming to
respect the authority of your parents. Without authority orientation many young people die way
too soon. The Bible is clear about this,
“That it may be well with you and you can live a long
time on this earth.”
There are a lot of ways you can shorten your life. You can shorten your life
by the sin unto death. You can shorten your life when you mismanage your health and abuse your
body. Just yesterday morning I managed to sneak away for little bit of fishing. I saw a young
lady in a fast food place and it was obvious she was on drugs and it was obvious what was going
on in her life and it was pitiful. There was no way you could help her. I mean you could give her
money, she would just go buy drugs. She was not willing to change and many, many people
abuse their body through drugs, through alcohol, and you can abuse your body by eating too
many chickens too, by overeating, the sin of gluttony. We all have to watch this one don’t we?
We can abuse our bodies and sometimes move into the sin unto death by running with the wrong
crowd and some stupid idiot you get to hanging out with makes a stupid decision and it costs you
your life. I had this happen to me in high school driving with a friend one night. He decided he
wanted to go around a curve about 100 miles an hour and see if his car could handle this. Well
we didn’t crash, we made the curve but not at 100 because I was slamming my foot on top of his
foot on the brake, and as soon as I got the thing stopped, I got out of the car. We are to
“Grow in
the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
There are two words for
knowledge in the Bible and this is something a lot of people miss. In the Greek New Testament
537-Doctrinal-Orientation-Review-transcript.pdf
there is the word
gnosis
, G.N.O.S.I.S. and then there’s also another word
epignosis
,
E.P.I.G.N.O.S.I.S. The difference in these two words is the difference between hearing and
keeping. When you have
gnosis
you have heard something, you understood it, but it hasn’t
helped you. When you have
epignosis, epi
is a preposition meaning full, when you have
epignosis,
you heard it, you understood it, and you applied it. See the difference? A lot of people,
the Bible says,
“A little bit of knowledge puffeth up.”
I’ve heard people quote this verse. That’s
right, if all you have is knowledge with no application, then you wind up being an arrogant cluck
because you think you’re smarter than everybody else.
Epignosis
is what you need, it’s what I
have to have. So when we sit under a well-qualified pastor and he teaches us the Bible, God the
Holy Spirit, who is the author of truth, identifies it as truth, and then it comes into our mind, into
our thinking, into our memory center, mind, and here it’s called
gnosis
. Now once we understand
it, we either believe it by faith and apply it or we reject it by arrogance and don’t use it, we don’t
go there. If you hear it and understand it but don’t use it, it’s
gnosis
. If you hear it, understand it
by faith, it becomes
epignosis
. That’s the difference in the word knowledge,
“Grow in the grace
and the knowledge of our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ.”
My pastor has been doing a study
on the life of Christ. By the way, you can tap into this study, it’s free, it costs nothing. All you
have to do is call and order the DVDs or the MP3s. This study in the life of Christ is going on
800 hours, that’s right 800 hours. You say, “How could anybody study Jesus Christ for 800
hours?” Well I have news for you my friend. That’s just scratching the surface. So when you
study the life of Christ and the thoughts of the Lord Jesus Christ, the people that He identified
with, the decisions that He made, the people that opposed Him, what happened at the cross and
the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension, when you study His birth and His entrance
into this world and who He is and where He came from and where He went, you don’t study this
in four or five hours. The reason you study this is to learn. You see what the disciples bought into
was not what they got. They thought they were going to walk into the kingdom and they thought
they were going to be big shots in the kingdom. They wound up being wanted criminals and the
Lord Jesus Christ, the One they loved and followed, wound up being the number one criminal,
wanted guy number one and the scribes and the Pharisees stopped at nothing until they were able
to convince Pilate to crucify Him. This was the Father’s plan all along. There was only one way
you and I could go to heaven and this is that someone had to pay for our sin. We are not capable
of paying for it. That’s why the Bible says,
“There are none that are righteous, not even one.”
In
spite of what we would like to do, there is no way that an imperfect human being with a sin
nature can ever appease the justice of God because what the righteousness of God rejects, the
justice of God will judge every time. So if you would like to be as righteous as God and go to
heaven and have fellowship with God, there is only one way to do it. The Bible says,
“He that
knew no sin was made sin for us so that we may be made the righteousness of God through
Him.”
The way you get to God is through Jesus Christ and that’s why He said,
“I am the way, the
truth and the life and no man comes to the Father but by Me.”
If you want to have eternal life
you must have absolute righteousness to live and rule and reign with an absolute God, and you
537-Doctrinal-Orientation-Review-transcript.pdf
can’t manufacture this absolute righteousness because you’re flawed, you’re infected with a sin
nature. The Bible clearly says,
“For by one man sin came into the world, and death by sin and
now death has passed upon all for all have sinned and the wages of sin is death.”
How can I
become absolutely righteous? Only through Jesus Christ. When I come to the cross and I believe
in Him and receive Him as my Savior, He gives me His righteous standing and He took my sin
on Him well over 2,000 years ago. The cross is judgment. He was judged for me and when I
come to Jesus Christ and I receive Him, I have forgiveness. I am born again, made alive
spiritually. God the Holy Spirit comes to indwell me and now I’m capable of having a
relationship with God the Father, not because I’m good, not because I’ve joined up, but because
the righteousness of Christ is instilled in me. Then God can look at me, and when He sees me,
He sees the Son. He sees the righteousness of Christ because I am in the Son. I’m in the family,
I’m adopted into the family, I’m made heir to all that Christ is heir to. It’s an amazing, amazing
thing. You are to
“Study
[the Bible]
to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth
not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth,”
this is why. When you are to
“Grow in
the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,”
this is why.
When Jesus
said,
“Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, My yoke is easy and My burden is light,”
He’s
telling you that if you learn His plan, if you understand what He’s telling you, it’s not hard
to live the Christian life. It is the most stress free life in the world.
It’s a life of no worry, a life
of no problems because you can put it into the Father’s hand. The Supreme Court of Heaven is
open 24 hours a day. You don’t have to worry about suing somebody. You don’t have to worry
about getting even. You don’t have to worry about what somebody says about you. Let the Lord
handle it, He’s your Heavenly Father. Just like you would go to your parents as a child because
someone mistreated you or someone said something and your parents handled it for you, God
handles all your problems. That’s what it means to have a FLOT line, to live behind the
protective barrier that is found in God’s Word. No stress, no difficulty, no problems, no fear, no
worry, no bitterness, no anger because we have the Holy Spirit, we have God’s Word, and we are
children of the King. I hope you’re listening and I hope you’re learning. Let me hear from you. If
you’d like to, you can always contact me through the website. Until then, this is your host Rick
Hughes saying thank you for being with me today
