SPEAKER 02 : 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 01 : 0:23

Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, stick around. It will be a short time of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and always… No manipulation, no con games, no asking for money, no soliciting support, not trying to sell you something. We just want to give you accurate information that will help you verify and identify God’s plan for your life if you’re interested. And then if you are, you can orient and adjust to the plan once you hear what I have to say. But the FLOT line stands for the Foreign Line of Troops, F-L-O-T. That’s a military acronym for the forward line of troops or a main line of resistance. What we’re teaching on this show is there are 10 unique problem-solving devices found in the Bible that act like a main line of resistance in your soul if you learn them and you use them. And if you do, they will stop the outside sources of adversity from ever becoming the inside source of stress. That’s why we’ve always said adversity is inevitable, stress is optional. These 10 unique problem-solving devices are not original. I learned them from my pastor, and we’re passing them on to you. They’re not something that’s weird or uniquely discovered. They’ve been in the Word of God forever. And our Lord Jesus Christ used at least eight of them, we know, in his own personal life. They deal with rebound, problem-solving device number one, which is confession of known sin. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us and purify us from our wrongdoing. That helps us solve the problem of sin and sinning. And then there’s the filling of the Holy Spirit, which helps us solve the problem of our genetically formed sin nature, not living under control of the sin nature. And Ephesians 5.18 mandates, be filled with the Spirit. Then there’s a faithless drill. That’s problem-solving device number three, standing on the promises of God. Over 7,000 Bible promises for you in the Word of God. They are available for you. And we’ve even written a small book called Bible Promises and Principles that’s free. If you’d like to order that, go to our website, rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org. And you can order that book, Bible Promises and Principles, free of charge. All 7,000 promises won’t be there, but we have quite a few that identify with you that you can enjoy. reading when you need them under certain situations in your life. So then we come to grace orientation, living grace, dying grace, surpassing grace, saving grace, doctrinal orientation, which is let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus, learning to think like he thought, having a personal sense of destiny, that’s another problem-solving device, understanding why you’re here and what God’s going to do with your life. Then the virtue category, personal love for God, virtue number one, that’s your life, Vertical virtue and impersonal love for all mankind, that’s your horizontal virtue. That’s losing impersonal love for even the weirdos you can’t stand. That’s all in the Bible. I didn’t make it up. It’s there. You have to learn how to love those enemies that you don’t like. And then sharing the happiness of God, the Lord Jesus Christ told the disciples, I’ve given you these things so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be full, John 15, 11. And eventually, occupation with the person of Christ, representing Jesus Christ in your life. Those 10 problem-solving devices make up the unique flat line in your soul. And if you will learn them and use them, matter of fact, we have a book on it called Christian Problem Solving, and we list them in the book for you. If you’d like to have it, let us know. But I hope you’ll learn them and I hope you’ll come to use them. You can always contact us. through our website, rickhughesministries.org, or you can call 800-831-0718. I’m not a counselor. I’m not a pastor. I’m an evangelist. My job is to give you the good news, the good information that God’s anointed son, the Lord Jesus Christ, paid for your sin and mine. That’s why the Bible says, he that knew no sin was made sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of God through him. He paid for our sin, and when we believe in him, to as many as received him, the Bible says, to them gave he the right to be the children of God, even to them that just believe in his name, John chapter three. So if you’ve done that, if you’ve accepted Christ as your savior, that is the single most significant decision that you will ever make in your entire life, because it guarantees you a personal relationship with God. Now today, for the Christian, those of you that are believers, Maybe you’re getting a little older, maybe like me, some of us getting up in age, and so there are issues that we have to deal with. I don’t know about you, but my issue sometimes is anger. I was watching a basketball game today, and my team was not playing well, and I got angry. What’s wrong with those idiots? What’s wrong? Why can’t they play better than that? And then you slap on the side of the couch. Or you might get angry at a football game when your team’s not performing well, or maybe you get angry in traffic. Maybe you get angry with your spouse. Maybe you get angry with your children. Anger is a terrible thing, and you have to learn, as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you should never, ever, ever have anger in your life. There’s a difference between righteous indignation and anger, and we’ll show that to you, but anger is a terrible problem for believers because it gets them out of fellowship. It’s a mental attitude sin. The Greek words in the Bible for anger are several. It’s always translated anger, anger, anger, but the first one is called pikria, P-I-K-R-I-A. And you may say, why are you giving me that? Because the Bible was not written in English. The New Testament was written in Greek and originally in the Koine Greek dialect, the Koine Greek dialect. The Old Testament written in Hebrew and Aramaic. So when we go back and look at these words, we go back to the original words to see what they were, and pikria is a word for anger, and it’s translated in the Bible, bitterness, bitterness. It’s a hatred that can grow in your mind and consume you. Down here in the south, we have something called kudzu, and kudzu grows all over the side of the hill, consume a hill, consume a tree, cover everything up, and that’s what bitterness does. it will rot your bones out. Hebrews 12.1, the Bible says, looking diligently lest any man fail the grace of God and a root of bitterness, picria, spring up and trouble you and thereby many be defiled. Many be defiled. What does that mean? It means that bitterness is contagious. So if you’re bitter, if you’re angry, if you have a problem and usually will run your mouth about it to someone else and contaminate other people with your bitterness. So looking diligently lest any man fail the grace of God. What does that mean? You don’t use the problem solving devices that God gave you. You let your mental attitude sins come out of your sin nature and take you over your emotions to get out of control and you become very angry and very bitter. Bitterness is picria. But there’s another word in the Greek New Testament, and that word is translated wrath, W-R-A-T-H, wrath. The original Greek word is thumos, T-H-U-M-O-S, thumos. And that is hot anger, fierceness, passion, emotional rage, turbulent emotions. I always equate that with a thunderstorm, thumos, a thunderstorm, thundering around. People get thumos, they just explode like a thunderstorm. And there is another word for anger in the Bible, and that word is orge, O-R-G-E, orge. And it, in fact, is translated anger. It’s the strongest of all passions, the Bible says. So I’ve identified three different types of anger for you this morning. Picaria translated bitterness, fumas translated wrath, and orge translated anger. I’m giving you this study because I spoke with a listener recently that said they were going to anger management. And I thought about that and I thought, what is anger management? There are two types of solutions to what you’re going through. There’s divine viewpoint and there’s human viewpoint. Divine viewpoint will tell you how to handle anger from the concepts taught in the word of God. Human viewpoint may tell you how to handle anger taught from the concepts of man’s philosophy. We’re interested in divine viewpoint. Does the Bible say anything about this anger? Does it mandate us to stay out of it? Yes, yes, yes. Ephesians 4, 30 and 31. It starts off by saying, grieve not the Holy Spirit of God. So first of all, you know if you grieve the Spirit of God, you are sinning. You are quenching the Holy Spirit. You’re out of fellowship with God, and it’s time to rebound when you’re out of fellowship with God. When you sin, you must rebound, or you will become under discipline from God the Holy Spirit. Those whom I love, I discipline, the Lord says in Hebrews 12. If you don’t want discipline, when you know you sin, rebound the sin, confess it, and name it to God. This passage says grieve not. It’s a mandate. It’s an imperative. It’s not a request. the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you’re sealed into the day of redemption. That means you’re not gonna lose your salvation. You’re locked in. And listen to verse 31 of Ephesians chapter four. Let all bitterness, let all wrath, let all anger, there’s your three words I gave you, and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you along with all of your malice. So the Bible is telling you, don’t live like that. And I want to give these words to you. Let all bitterness, picaria, let all wrath, what was that word, thumos, let all anger, orge, be put away from you, along with clamor and evil speaking. Clamor is an interesting word in the original languages of the Greek New Testament. It’s what we call an onomatopoeia. Now, if I told you that and my English teacher in high school heard me say that, she’d think I was cheating on the test, because I wouldn’t have a clue what an onomatopoeia was. But it simply means that the word sounds like what it is. And the Greek word for her clamor is a word pronounced krauge, K-R-A-U-G-E. And it simply means an outcrying, or the word sounds like the sounding of the crow, for example. If a crow is in the woods and it’ll crawl and make that crawl sound, yeah, you’ve heard crows before. That’s what clamor is. So when a person gets mad, when a person gets full of bitterness, when a person gets full of orgy and thumos, they run around barking at everybody like a crow, clamoring, speaking, slandering, maligning, criticizing, trying to get attention. And that’s called evil speaking. So how does it say it? Let all bitterness, all wrath, all anger, all clamor, and all evil speaking. What is the word for evil speaking? In the original New Testament, it is the Greek word blasphemia. Blasphemia, B-L-A-S-P-H-E-M-I-A. It’s the sin of slander. It’s the sin of maligning. It’s the sin of accusations against someone. So now, here we are. You don’t like X and Y doesn’t like X, so Y is mad at X and Y is bitter and Y is angry and Y is boiling over and Y is going around barking at everybody, telling everybody what you don’t like and why you don’t like it and slandering and maligning and running down this person and accusing them of something. And then the Bible says, let it be put away from you along with all your malice. Malice is a Greek word pronounced kakia, K-A-K-I-A, kakia. And that means your desire to injure or harm a person. So we need to get some principles on this. I think it’ll help you understand it. Again, the verse, Ephesians 4, 30 and 31, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you’re sealed until the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, all wrath, all anger, all clamor, all evil speaking be put away from you along with your malice. So point one, as a mental attitude sin, anger expresses antagonism, hatred, exasperation, resentment, irrationality, and it can be mental and usually is emotional. The Greek word orgei refers to this mental anger, deep-seated mental anger, and orgei or thumos, excuse me, thumos, the Greek word thumos, is more of an emotional type explosive anger like the thunderstorm. So in Ephesians 4, 31, both these words are used and both are related to being bitter, bitter. So what does anger do to you? Well, number one, it’s a mental attitude sin. If you’re a Christian and you get angry at a politician, at a friend, at a spouse, at a child, at a boss, if you get angry, you’re gonna get out of fellowship with God And if you don’t confess your sin of anger, you will get under discipline from God and you don’t want to be there because it’s not a nice place to be. Sometimes God has to wake us up to get our attention. Why is anger not good? Because it motivates, point two, jealousy and cruelty in your life. Anger motivates jealousy and cruelty in your life. In Proverbs 27, 4, a person cannot be angry without being cruel and unfair. A person cannot be angry without being cruel and unfair. And then point three, anger is related to stupidity. Ecclesiastes 7, verse 9, do not be hasty to be angry in your mind, for anger resides in the bosom of a fool. That’s a person who’s not thinking. A person who hasn’t learned how to keep his mouth shut because there are definitely a lot of times you should keep your mouth shut and be laconic and not say things but angry people spout off stupid words and say stupid things and I know it’s happened in your life too. You’ve gotten angry and you said things you shouldn’t have said and you know it and you can’t take it back and it’s been harmful and hurtful and you’re sorry you did it. Go to God, confess the sin, And maybe try asking the person that you spouted off at to forgive you for being such an idiot. You see, point four, a person is never smart when they’re angry. This is why many stupid and embarrassing things are said in anger. If you have to deal with some problem, you must have your senses about you. So you cannot afford to lose your temper. Excuse me. Losing your temper is an indication that you’re going under emotional control of your soul, and your emotions were never designed to control your soul. God wants you to have the mind of Christ, not the emotions of Christ, Philippians 2.5. That’s the relaxed mental attitude. That’s divine viewpoint, that’s focusing on the grace of God in those 10 problem-solving devices. When you get mad, when you get angry, when you get full of emotional anger, you don’t think, you let your emotions kick in, and then you’re kind of like a washing machine with an agitator and clothes in there just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You can’t think, can’t focus. Because you’re so angry, your face is red, your blood veins are sticking out, and you want to just hit somebody. I know. I’ve been there. I understand that. Point five, anger is never an isolated sin. Anger is never an isolated sin. Proverbs 29, 22, an angry person stirs up strife, and a hot-tempered person abounds in transgression. So an angry person stirs the pot. And a hot-tempered person, the emotional person, abounds in transgression. That means they commit one sin after another sin after another sin after another sin, and they try to get other people into their sin as well. So if they’re angry, they’ll go over here to Fred and say, you know, it’s got me so, I’m so angry about this, and you should be angry about it too. And Fred goes to Ralph and says, you know, you should be angry about this, but look what they did to John. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now we have all this transgression going on. You have to learn to turn things over to the Supreme Court of Heaven. You can’t let your emotions take away your relaxed mental attitude. You’re not designed to live by anger. You’re taking time out of your life when you do that. You’re quenching the Holy Spirit. You’re grieving the Holy Spirit because you can’t control your emotions. Anger is definitely a violation of the Royal Family Honor Code. Colossians chapter three verse eight. But now you also put them aside, put everything aside, put aside anger, put aside wrath, put aside malice, put aside slander, put aside abusive speech from your mouth. That’s not a request, that’s a mandate. Does that mean you shouldn’t stand up for yourself? No, that’s not what I’m saying. The Supreme Court of Heaven can perfectly stand up for you with no problems. But if you want to take it on yourself to solve the problem and tell God, step back, God, I got this, you’re just being an idiot when you do that. You’re letting Satan manipulate you with something that you have no control over. Here’s the principle. You cannot build your happiness on someone else’s unhappiness. And that’s exactly what retaliation tries to do. When you want to retaliate, you try to make someone else unhappy so you will be happy by getting them unhappy. You never become happy by getting revenge. Revenge motivation is a terrible sin. Here’s some principles of anger my pastor taught me many years ago. I’ll give you a few that he taught me. He said, anger destroys virtue in the subject. Therefore, anger destroys the function of impersonal love. That’s problem-solving device, what? Number six. And number seven, excuse me. It destroys the problem-solving device number eight. I got it right in a minute. Number eight, impersonal love for all mankind. If you want a chart on this, we have a bookmark that lists all 10 of these problem-solving devices for you. And we can put it in your Bible and look at it. If you want that, let us know. Just contact us. We’ll send it to you. But anger destroys the virtue in a subject. Therefore, the anger destroys the function of impersonal love. Problem-solving device number eight. Here’s another one for you. Anger destroys marriage. Did you know that? Oh, you already know that, right? Ephesians 5.25, husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. It doesn’t say get mad at your wives. It doesn’t say lash out at your wives because you’re mad at them because they spent too much money or they didn’t do this or didn’t do that. Aren’t you glad God doesn’t lash out at you like that in emotion? Point three, anger, which does not destroy the virtue of the subject. Anger which does not destroy the virtue of the subject is classified as righteous displeasure or righteous indignation. We’ll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute. Righteous indignation. So if you have righteous indignation, you are not sinning. It’s a difference between being anger and having righteous indignation. So point four, anger as a sin is a violation of the royal family honor code. I mentioned that earlier. I’m going to give you a specific verse. Anger as a sin is a violation of the Royal Family Honor Code, James 2.8. If you fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, then you do well. So the royal law says as a believer, you have no right to be angry with your neighbor in spite of what they’ve done to you. Impersonal love maintains the virtue of the subject, that’s you. But sinful anger destroys the function of impersonal love in your life. Impersonal love is you loving someone based on your character, not theirs. So if you get all angry and all bothered and all bitter and all upset and get into emotional sins and mental attitude sins, then your virtue is gone. You have no virtue. And you have no impersonal love. You’re not able to love them based on who and what you are. So this is what God did for you. He loved you in spite of what you were. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. What in you was worth loving? Nothing, nothing. And yet he loved you. And this is what impersonal love can do. Now, when you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and became a member of God’s royal family, he loved you with personal love. But impersonal love is your point of contact with God to begin with before you ever get saved. So here’s the principle. When sinful anger is perpetuated, then that becomes the motivation for many different types of sins. And therefore, the Bible says never let the sun set on your anger. Never let the sun set on your anger. Ephesians 4.26, be you angry and sin not, that’s righteous indignation, but let not the sun go down upon your wrath. That’s the word we had earlier. So to be angry and sin not is righteous indignation. But too often, righteous indignation is an excuse for the function of legalism in your life or their life. You see, all unbelievers in their status quo of spiritual death are said to be under wrath of God. All believers in their status quo of spiritual death are said to be in the status quo of the wrath of God. Romans 9, 22. What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction? That’s what unbelievers are called, vessels of wrath. In Ephesians 2, 3, unbelievers are said to be by nature the children of wrath. And the future of the unbeliever is said to be in John 3, 36, under the wrath of God. God’s not mad at them. God’s not angry with them. It’s righteous indignation, which means his justice must be satisfied. So like arrogance, anger is a sin that motivates many, many other sins. It’s a way of fragmenting your life. Anger motivates emotional sins like jealousy and bitterness and vindictiveness and hatred and implacability and revenge motivation, self-pity. Anger is the other side of the coin with jealousy. And criminal activity, my gosh, if we get into the function of arrogant and the angry person, arrogance always adds wrong to wrong and sin to sin. So most people who spend their time in anger have a temporary loss of any self-esteem or any manifestation of that, and they go into no self-esteem. Here’s something interesting. Fathers are mandated not to make their children angry. Fathers, provoke not, Ephesians 6, for your child to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. The word wrath here is pronounced , and it’s , it’s a verb meaning to provoke anger, to exasperate your children. Provoking your children to anger is done by several ways, but mainly through unfair discipline or abuse. It’s true that children are under the authority of their parents, but no parent is ever to abuse that authority. But there is such a thing as righteous indignation. It’s not anger. It’s not an emotion. It’s a clear understanding of a bad situation, and righteous indignation is a response to unfair treatment. And so you have to learn how to handle that. The Bible is clear. Jesus became righteously opposed to the disciples when they forbade the children to be brought to him. And he wasn’t angry. It was an understanding of a wrong and not appreciating what they had done. And that’s seen in Mark 10, 14. He wasn’t angry at Peter in Matthew 16, 23 when he told him to get behind me, Satan. We definitely should hate sin, but we never hate the sinner. That’s why the Bible says God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. I hope that helps you with anger. There’s a lot more I could say, but I only have so much time. So please contact us if you need more information and come back next week, same time, same place. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.

SPEAKER 02 : 27:22

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.