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550-Why-are-You-Suffering-p2-transcript.pdf
Why Are You Suffering – Part 2
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 550 aired on March 6, 2016
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
moments I would like to ask you to stay tuned because it will be some time of motivation,
inspiration, education, and we will do this with no manipulation. We will not play any games
with you. We will not try to hustle you. We’re not going ask you for money. We’re not going to
ask you to join up, fess up, give up, nothing like this. This show is strictly about giving you
something and that’s accurate information, information that it’s our desire will help you verify as
well as identify the plan of God for your life. If you’re able to do this, then you can always orient
and adjust to the plan. This show does not offer useless speculation, we offer accurate
information from the canon of Scripture, the Bible. That’s right, it’s a show about the Bible but
no one’s jumping up and down over here like a one legged shortstop, we’re just giving you some
information. It’s amazing as I hear from so many of you from California all the way to New
York, so many of you listening and thanking me for giving this simple information. You’re
responding to the things that I’m saying and it’s always my pleasure and my joy to send you the
books that we offer free of charge, or any additional Bible studies that you would like to have.
My objective is to see you,
“Grow in grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ.”
My objective is to see you become a mature believer so that you glorify God to the
maximum in your life. That’s my objective, I’d like to be able to count on you to be a member of
the pivot, the small group of mature believers that will deliver a nation in times of disaster. That’s
what I’m looking for. I’m looking for true hunger, true positive volition, people that are not
satisfied with just hearing ritual when there’s no reality to it, people that don’t want to be just a
caricature of Christ but they want to re-present Christ. For you to do this, you have to learn to
think like He thinks, I’m not making this up. Yes, you must learn to think like He thinks. That’s
why the Bible tells you to,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus,”
Philippians
2:5. I didn’t make this up, there it is in Romans 12:3,
“Stop thinking of yourself in terms of
arrogance beyond what you should think but think in terms of humility as God has assigned to
each one of us a standard of thinking from His Word.”
Jesus Christ our Lord said in Matthew
11:28-29,
“Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take My
yoke upon you and learn of Me, My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
The only way you’re
ever going to be able to identify how Jesus Christ our Lord thought is to learn from the Scripture
what He said, what He did, and how He reacted and how He was motivated and how He handled
things. As you do this, then you begin to replicate His thinking in your mind and that’s called
divine viewpoint. The world is full of human viewpoint, especially in time of political intrigue
and a political election season. There’s so much human viewpoint floating around that it’s
nauseating. But divine viewpoint is a different outlook on things. As you learn God’s Word and
as you begin to see things from the perspective of divine viewpoint, then there is a total
difference in the way you treat others, in the way you react to situations in your life. You become
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much more relaxed and you begin to reflect Christ through you. We have been studying last
week, if you listened then, we launched off on a topic called suffering. We went into suffering
and we’re going to continue this today. Why do people suffer?
Basically there are two reasons
why people suffer. People suffer because of divine discipline and people also suffer because
of blessing.
God lets people suffer for divine discipline. In other words they’re suffering because
of their own bad decisions or they’re suffering because He’s testing them, teaching them
something. Remember, the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 10:13,
“There is no temptation
[or no
testing]
overtaken you that is not common to man,”
and God does this to refine us, to help us to
grow, to learn. But Job 14:1 clearly says,
“Man that is born of a woman has a few days and he’s
full of trouble.”
Most of this trouble comes from bad decisions, and so we are warned in
Hebrews 12:6,
“Whom the Lord loves, He chastens,”
or the word
paideuo,
He paddles us. And
then in Hebrews 12:6 going on,
“For those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines and He scourges
every son that He receives.”
We are the children of God. If you believed in Jesus Christ, you are
His child. You are God’s child, you’ve been adopted into the family of God through faith alone in
Christ alone and just as a parent would administer discipline in order to teach authority
orientation, then your Heavenly Father will do the same thing to you and me when we break
fellowship with Him by being disobedient to His mandates. Then He disciplines us and the
objective of discipline is to cause us to rebound, problem-solving device number one. Rebound,
if you don’t know what this means, it means that,
“If we confess our sin
[1 John 1:9]
He is
faithful and just to forgive us and purify us from all of our wrongdoing.”
When we rebound, we
are getting back in fellowship, where we got out of fellowship by committing the sin. If you’re
out of fellowship by having unconfessed sin in your life, even your prayers will not be answered
until you get back in fellowship. How do I know this? Because the Bible says,
“If I regard
iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”
If you’re praying and hoping God’s going to
answer your prayer and yet you have unconfessed sin in your life and you’re aware of this, then
you’re praying in the energy of the flesh, not in the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans tells us it’s
the Holy Spirit that intercedes for us in prayer. How could He intercede for you if you have
quenched the Holy Spirit and you have grieved the Holy Spirit? This is the fallacy of organized
religion. The pastor may call on some deacon to pray. It may be a very wordy prayer and a very
wonderful sounding prayer but if this deacon has sin in his life that he hasn’t dealt with, he hasn’t
admitted it to God, then this prayer may sound eloquent but it’s not going to go any higher than
the ceiling and the same is true for you and for me. We must remember this, that God does
discipline us sometimes and it’s always for our advantage to focus on ourselves and get back in
fellowship where we belong. Now there’s also suffering for blessing and we’re told in 1 Peter
2:21,
“For you have been called for this purpose since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you
an example for you to follow in His steps.”
Leaving us an example is the Greek word
hupogrammos.
It’s actually a template or writing template that a student would lay on a piece of
paper and copy the words, learning how to write. We have a template and this template is Jesus
Christ. When we are filled with the Spirit, we are cut into His image. He suffered for us and we
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will suffer for Him. He warned the disciples, He told the disciples that they were going to suffer.
Of course this doesn’t exactly sound like a lot of fun but in Luke 14:27,
“And whosoever does
not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.”
There is a warning and anyone
who decides to follow Jesus Christ will be persecuted and it is especially true today. If you are a
believer in Jesus Christ, you will be persecuted. First of all, you have an obscene enemy, Satan,
the fallen angel. He’s going to do all that he can to distract you and discourage you and defeat
you but on top of this, you have the conflict with the world and you have the enemy called the
flesh that will be after you as well. Basically you have three enemies, the world, the flesh, and
the devil. The flesh, well this can destroy you, the world can distract you, and Satan, he’s a
master deceiver. He will deceive you and so you’re going to have difficulty as a believer in Jesus
Christ. Because Christ suffered, you also will suffer. He even told those disciples that their
families would turn against them.
“Father would turn against son, mother would turn against
daughter,”
this is all there in the Scripture. But He also said He would give us rest if we would
learn of Him, if we would come to Him and learn of Him. This means that we have to learn to
live life like He lived life, so keep this in mind. Yes, He was the God-man. Yes, He was
undiminished deity and true humanity in one body forever as man, not God.
As man, He
suffered the same things you and I may suffer, and He handled it the same way you and I
can handle it. He was the prototype Christian.
There was never a Christian before Christ
came. We are Christians, Christ-like people and we can defeat the enemy the same way He did.
He was filled with the Spirit, Matthew 4 tells us this, when He was tested in the wilderness. The
Holy Spirit led Him, the Holy Spirit sustained Him and He used His Father’s Word, Matthew 4
again, using the faith-rest drill.
Two basic doctrines that you must understand are the filling
of the Holy Spirit and the faith-rest drill. If you don’t understand these two doctrines, you
will never live the Christian life to its fullest.
You will never be victorious as a Christian.
You’ll always stumble and fall in the dark with the blind leading the blind, trying your best to do
good works to make God happy. Your good works called human good will simply be burned up
at the Judgment Seat of Christ because they do not meet the criteria for divine good. You must
learn what the Scripture says and how you are to live your life. So why do we have human
suffering? That’s the first question today. Because we are sinners, because Satan is the ruler of
this world, and it is inevitable that we all will come under the law of volitional responsibility. I’m
going to say it again, listen carefully, the law of volitional responsibility. I cannot tell you how
many people that I talk to say they are miserable. They are on their second or third marriage,
they’re having adversity through divorce, they’re having financial problems, they’re having
health problems, they’re having many problems.
It’s the law of volitional responsibility, when
we sow the wind, we reap the whirlwind. 90% of the suffering in this world, no one’s taken
a survey it’s just my opinion, comes from self-induced misery.
You have the ability to make
yourself miserable because you will mismanage your health, you will mismanage your
finances, or you will mismanage your relationships with other people. You will not learn
God’s Word.
You won’t take time to learn it. You won’t take time to use it and what good does it
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do you if you learn it and don’t use it? In order to metabolize the Word of God as your pastor
teaches it from the pulpit, you must be under the filling of the Holy Spirit and if in fact you are,
once you understand it and comprehend it, then by faith you must apply it. You have to have
enough courage to walk by faith. This takes courage, courage to walk by faith. We all have the
law of volitional responsibility and we are in the angelic conflict.
Under this law of volitional
responsibility we will commit sins. We will make bad decisions and these decisions will
cause us to suffer and so this type of suffering comes from our own volition even though we
may do it in ignorance sometimes.
You know, artificial intelligence is arrogance and ignorance
combined together. A.I., arrogance and ignorance combined together equals artificial
intelligence. You have the ability to be a suffering machine because you in your arrogance will
not listen to what God says and you will be ignorant of any problem-solving devices that are
available to you. You can suffer psychologically and you can suffer spiritually. Psychological
suffering comes from the bad judgments that you make and the sins you’re involved in and
spiritual suffering comes from negative volition. What do I mean by negative volition? I mean
you are not interested in learning God’s Word, you’re not interested in hearing God’s Word. You
may go to church and if the preacher preaches over 20 minutes you’re totally bored and you’re
ready to get out of there and go to the nearest restaurant and eat lunch and sometimes to be quite
frank and honest, I don’t blame you. They’re not worth listening to because they don’t have
anything to teach you other than three points and a poem and a little funny ditty story and is this
it? Come on. I’ve had students tell me in schools that I’ve spoken in, tell me “I’ve learned more
listening to you this week than I have my whole life in Sunday school.” What are they being
taught? I know what they’re being taught, nothing. God didn’t ordain the church to be the
entertainment center for kids. It is there to teach them something. Many of the kids that I meet as
I speak in many private schools are hungry to learn something.
Spiritual suffering, well this
comes from your own negative volition. If you are negative to God’s Word, you’re not
willing to take the time to study God’s Word consistently, you’re not willing to sit under the
authority of a pastor who knows what he’s talking about, it’s inevitable that you will come
under the power and the influence of Satan in the cosmic system. He will win you over.
He’ll send a cosmic evangelist your way to convince you that you need to go do something
and then you will be regretting it for the rest of your life.
The cosmic system is out there. It’s
a vortex that spins constantly around and around and around and a lot of people are drawn into
this thing, sucked into this cosmic vortex because they go down the My Way Highway. They’re
Christians, they are believers in Jesus Christ, but they get chewed up and spit out and their lives
count for nothing. I cannot think of anything worse than to spend your whole life doing
something that in the end absolutely makes no difference anyhow. What about you? Is this you?
Is your life counting for something? Are you having some sort of impact for Jesus Christ in your
life? Do you even know God’s Word and could you accurately present it to someone if they asked
you? Don’t tell me, “That’s for the preacher to do.” No, no, no. For the Bible says you are to
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,”
2 Peter 3:18. The
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Bible says you are to,
“Study to show yourself approved unto God.”
That’s not the preacher,
that’s you.
You must be well adjusted in regard to the Word of God. If not, you will come
under the power and the influence of the cosmic system and you will suffer under the law of
volitional responsibility.
You will suffer under punitive discipline which is designed to correct
you, pull you out of the muck and the mire that you got yourself into. You will have self-induced
misery. And when God finally adds all the divine discipline on top of this, then you will be just
sick of yourself. You know, if you get to the point where you become a danger to yourself and to
the human race, that’s pretty miserable and yet so many people, even believers, are like this
today.
On the other side of the coin there’s this suffering for blessing and this is where the
believer is always challenged to use God’s problem-solving devices.
Do you know them, all
ten of them? They make up what’s called the FLOT line of your soul, 10 unique problem-solving
devices. If you don’t have the book on it, write me, I’ll send it to you immediately. You should
know rebound. You should know the filling of the Spirit. You should know the faith-rest drill.
You should know grace orientation and doctrinal orientation. You should understand your
personal sense of destiny. You should know personal love for God and impersonal love for
others. You should know sharing the happiness of God and you should know occupation with
Christ. These are all Biblical doctrines. It’s not something new, they have been in the canon of
Scripture, always there. They’re just put together here in a way that you can understand how they
form a defensive perimeter in your soul to stop the outside sources of adversity before they
become the inside sources of stress. When you’re under suffering for blessing it’s a challenge. It’s
a challenge for you to grow and to use the faith-rest drill and it’s directly related to you fulfilling
the protocol plan of God. Now when you’re suffering for blessing, it can be what we call, and my
pastor labeled it this way many years ago, it can be called providential preventative suffering.
This is a silly illustration but you’ll get the idea. You’re driving down the road and you have a flat
tire and you’ve got to be somewhere in a hurry and now you’re stranded on the side of the road.
Now you’ve got to get out in the heat. Now you’ve got to change the tire. You’re
inconvenienced, you’re upset, you’re angry, and then once you get the tire back on and drive two
or three miles ahead, there’s a huge wreck and you think to yourself, “I could have been in that
had I not had this flat tire.” That’s a sort of providential preventative suffering, where God
providentially stopped you from making a bad decision.
There’s also a type of suffering called
momentum testing
and it occurs when we start to grow spiritually, when we start taking in
God’s Word consistently and this is what I want for you. I want you to be able to sit down every
day under a well-qualified pastor with your Bible, with your notebook, turn on the MP3 or the
DVD on a daily basis, and listen to a pastor teach you God’s Word. Why do I want you to do
this? Because that’s what I do every day and I can introduce you to thousands of people that do
the same thing, study daily. As you study daily you can bank on this, that you’re going to have to
put on the armor of God because
Satan will formulate a strategy against you.
He will have
fiery missiles that he will lob at you, Ephesians 6, all designed for one thing,
to discredit you,
distract you, destroy you, discourage you,
any of these D words you want to add to it.
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Momentum testing will give you muscle on your spiritual life.
If you will focus on the
doctrine and not on the problem, focus on the solution and not the problem, then you’ll grow
spiritually. 1 Corinthians 10:13 says this is how God tests us and He always provides a way out.
Another type of suffering for blessing, and very few people that I know are really going to
get to this place, is called evidence testing.
What is evidence testing? Well, do you remember
Jesus Christ our Lord warning Peter that Satan wanted to
“Sift him like wheat?”
He said,
“Before the rooster crows in the morning you’re going to wind up denying Me three times,”
see,
this was evidence testing. Satan asked for an opportunity to test him to see if he really had what
it took and he failed the test.
“He went out,”
the Bible says in Luke 22:60,
“and wept bitterly,”
but he was not discarded. He confessed his sin and I know this because he was still a disciple.
Had he not confessed his sin, he would have gone back to being a gill netter and gone back to the
boats but he dealt with it. He was disillusioned about himself. He thought he would never turn on
his Lord, but he did. When you begin to grow spiritually, Satan will cross-examine you. You will
be called to the witness stand and you will have to give an answer as he cross-examines you,
that’s evidence testing. The angels will be watching I promise you and how will you handle the
cross-examination? If you pass evidence testing and you continue to keep your eyes on the prize
and use the faith-rest drill, see this is what our Lord went through in Matthew 4. This was
evidence testing before He ever started His ministry. If you pass this you will go into the valley
of blessing where God will begin to shower on you tremendous blessings in your life and then
hopefully you will continue up the hill to what we call Pleroma Ridge. There’s a little poem I
like, my pastor said it once, “You don’t choose your battlefield, God does this for you, but you
can plant the colors, where the colors never flew.” Planting the colors on top of Pleroma Ridge,
on top of that spiritually mature mountain is what I want you to do. Before the time comes for
you to transfer, I want you to raise the flag, the victorious flag of Jesus Christ and to hear,
“Well
done My good and faithful servant.”
This will not happen until you go through evidence testing.
It’s given to the mature believer so he can glorify God to the maximum. The grace of God has
taken suffering usually caused by our own free will and the rulership of Satan over this world
and He’s converted this into a system of suffering for blessing where we can now use our volition
in two different ways. You can use your volition to believe in Jesus Christ and receive Him as
your Savior and you can use your volition to daily, daily decide to learn and apply God’s Word
into your life. You make this decision, and you will go through some testing, you will go through
some blessing, and it’s designed to advance you in the plan of God.
Suffering for blessing is
directly related to the fulfillment of the protocol plan of God and to the tactical victory of
the believer in this angelic conflict.
And make no mistake about it, God wants you to have
victory. He wants you to be a winner. He wants you to glorify Jesus Christ to the maximum in
your life. So remember this and understand it. It’s always critical that you do. In 2 Corinthians
12:10 it lists four tests which match the testing that we go through. Paul said,
“I went through
insults, I went through distresses, I went through persecution, I went through difficulties,”
and
then he said,
“all for Christ’s sake.”
Insults,
hubris
is the word, and it means wrong coming from
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insult, injury, harm, mentally or physically. Paul was arrested and beaten on several occasions
because he represented Jesus Christ. Distresses, where he was in desperate straits, and
persecution, where he went through tribulation and difficulties. This is a metaphor for extreme
affliction. All of these things he went through. These were all part of his evidence testing and he
passed them. He said in 2 Timothy, “I’m now ready to be presented, I’ve passed all the tests, I’m
ready to go, I’ve done my job.” And I know when he walked into heaven he heard, “Well done,
well done.” That’s the question I must ask you. When this time comes for you to transfer or for
me, will we hear, “Well done?” I hope you’re thinking about it. I hope you’re listening. I hope
you’re learning. I’m here to answer your questions, all you’ve got to do is call or write. Let me
know. Until next week this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT
Line.