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 : 0:26

Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, stick around. It’s going to be about 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education. And as usual, no manipulation. We don’t con people. We’re not asking for money. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re not asking you to join anything. All we’re asking you to do is listen. Listen as I try to verify and identify the plan of God for your life. And if in fact I can do that, then I hope you will orient and adjust to that plan. But that’s up to you because you have your own volition. Volition, V-O-L-I-T-I-O-N. That means you are the decider. You are the chooser. You make your choices. And you can choose whether you want to follow God’s plan or you can choose whether you want to follow your plan. It’s up to you. One thing you have to learn about life and living in life as we live it today is there’s adversity everywhere. And one of the reasons we teach the 10 problem-solving devices is because adversity is inevitable, but stress yet is optional. The believer does not have to live under stress and anxiety-type sins. It’s not necessary. There’s a better way to live. It is called the Christian life, and it was demonstrated to us by our Lord Jesus Christ himself in his humanity while he walked this earth. So as we talk about adversity and what adversity is, I want to remind you that anxiety and adversity are always there, but stress is always optional. So again, let me quote what you’ve heard me quote many times. Adversity is inevitable, but stress is optional. Adversity is what circumstances do to you and stress is what you do to yourself. So there are two ways to handle unknown medical conditions. For example, I use this as an illustration. If you have a medical condition, you can go to the doctor and the doctor can prescribe meds and take these meds and hopefully you’ll get better. Some people don’t like to do that. Some people like the holistic approach. And so they go the holistic, take a lot of vitamins, take a lot of this, take a lot of that. And that’s something that a lot of people do quite often. Now, if you compare that to physical life and spiritual life, let me say that the spiritual life is like a holistic approach. It’s something that’s not conventional. It’s a different way to live. It’s a way that people are not used to living. It’s a change of the way you think. And why? Because anxious people are vulnerable to being arrogant. Here’s what the Lord Jesus Christ said in Matthew 11, 28 and 29, a verse you’ve heard me quote many times. He said, come unto me, all of you that are becoming weary and burdened down. There’s your anxiety, stress level. Come unto me, all of you that are becoming weary and burdened down, and I will give you rest. That’s a divine promise. He said, take my yoke and learn from me because I’m humble and lowly in heart. And then you will find rest for your soul. So it’s possible for you to find a restful, relaxed mental attitude by learning the ways of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you’re weary and burdened down with anxiety, if you’re weary and burdened down with adversity, there’s a better way to live. That means that if you will take on the mindset of Jesus Christ, you will find relief from overbearing burdens in your life. Where does the Bible say that? Well, in Philippians 2, 5, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. This is telling you to learn to think like he thought. This refers to thinking divine viewpoint as opposed to human viewpoint, the spiritual life as opposed to the physical life, in other words. So Satan will use the fear of death to intimidate individuals. We know that. Hebrews 2, 14 and 15 tells us that. Since the children have flesh and blood, he too, that’s Christ, shared in their humanity so that by his death, He may break the power of the one who holds the power of death, that is the devil. And listen, verse 15, Hebrews 2, listen carefully. And free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of dying or death. This attitude of divine viewpoint, thinking like the mind of Christ, produces an exoteric harmony understood. Well, exoteric means you’re understood by a small number that really have interest. That’s the Christian. So this attitude of divine viewpoint produces exoteric harmony, and that’s a wonderful thing to have, harmony with the Lord Jesus Christ. And the Bible mandates that we should never be anxious for anything. If you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, do not ever be anxious. Why can I say that? Philippians 2, 6, do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God. If you will live by that, what it says right there, if you will live by Philippians 4, 6, then you will find Philippians 4, 7 kicks in. So let me read them together. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God, and then the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. There’s a wonderful, wonderful promise. You don’t have to be anxious. You can have the peace of God which will guard your heart and your mind, your cardia and your noose, keep you from worrying, keep you from being upset, keep you from being full of anxiety. You see, anxiety anticipates something bad. But if you have a personal sense of destiny, one of our problem solving devices, which we call problem solving device number six, if you have that personal sense of destiny, well, that anticipates something good. And the good, obviously, is you’re going to heaven. Even if you do pass away, you’re going to heaven. You’re going to be promoted to a better place. But anxiety in life always thinks about something bad going to happen because it’s an all-encompassing force that anticipates a curse or some sort of failure, some sort of calamity for itself or for those close to them while it does not define exactly what it is. Now, you may have anxiety. You may be going through that. I spoke with a dear, precious friend of mine just the other day in the middle of night, worrying, crying, full of anxiety over what? I don’t know. I just have this dreaded feeling in my life. It’s this all-compassing, encompassing, powerful force. And it’s like you think something bad’s going to happen to you or that you’re going to fail at something or you’re going to have some sort of calamity. That’s what anxiety does. It’s pre-traumatic syndrome producing stress-related sins. You don’t have to live like that. That’s why Jesus said in John 16, 33, I told you these things. so that in me, in me, in me, that’s in Christ, you may have peace. Does that sound like anxiety? Does that sound like worry? I mean, we can’t help the adversity, but we don’t have to convert it to anxiety. You may have peace. He went on to say in John 16, 33, in this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world. You see, anxiety, when you convert adversity into anxiety, it explodes in your soul like a grenade and fragments into various mental attitude sins. And when that happens to you, you become incapable of handling even the slightest pressure in your life. And if you fail to advance in the spiritual life, you don’t grow spiritually as you’ve been told to, then you can be defeated by even the smallest difficulty. That’s why the Bible says, study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. That’s why I tell you to get under a well-qualified pastor. That’s why I tell you to start taking in the word of God every day. with a Bible and a notebook, sitting under a pastor, listening to what he teaches you. And he needs to be a squared away pastor, not some flake, somebody that knows what he’s talking about, that understands the languages and the background of the New Testament and the Old Testament. When you sit under someone like that and when you study on a consistent basis every day, then you’re not failing to advance. You will be advancing and you will not be defeated by the smallest difficulties of life. So come on, tell me the truth. Have you been defeated by small difficulties in your life? Have they caused you to worry and be stressed out and be full of anxiety? Listen to what Jeremiah wrote about these little small difficulties. He said in Jeremiah 12, 5, if you’ve raced with men on foot and they wore you out, how can you compete with the horses? And if you stumbled in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan? See the analogy? If you can’t handle the little things, how are you going to handle the big things when they come along? So that’s why you have to have a personal sense of destiny. Problem-solving device number six. Do you know what it is? Have you read about it? Have you gotten our book on Christian problem solving and looked at this personal sense of destiny? God’s plan for you, Jeremiah 29, 11. I know the plans I have for you, God says, and it’s not to hurt you. It’s to promote you, to give you blessing. So when you have that personal sense of destiny, it mitigates against the anxiety in your life and alleviates the tyrannical tension that anxiety can give you. Look, our Lord Jesus Christ never, ever, ever had any neurotic anxiety. And there’s nothing, there’s no such thing as normal anxiety. That’s not normal. Our Lord did have moments of tension, but he never had neurotic anxiety. He always remained calm. But you and I, we live in a culture of neurotic anxiety. The world is full of it, and we live outside the bubble of anxiety. We don’t have to live in the bubble anymore. We can live outside the bubble of anxiety by using 1 John 1, 9. Stay in fellowship. Let the Holy Spirit control your life. And the Bible says the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace and longsuffering and gentleness and goodness and meekness and mercy. And listen. I don’t care how much anxiety is going on around you, political anxiety, personal anxiety. You don’t have to live in that bubble. You can live in fellowship with God through the filling of the Holy Spirit, and you can have great happiness and great joy by understanding your personal sense of destiny. But anxiety, you having anxiety, that’s like you having an indecisiveness in your life or an unsettled indefiniteness brought about because of some sort of garbage, maybe even in your subconscious mind. If you have it, its symptoms are usually indecision and purposelessness, and they stem from some sort of trauma like death or divorce or even some sort of adversity. Don’t have to let anxiety rule your life and come over you like a dark cloud in a storm. Those sort of traumas can cause great upheaval in your life and produce a tentative spirit and even an unwillingness to proceed with life itself. Here’s what the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 119 verse 71. He said, it’s good for me to be afflicted so that I may learn your decrees. In other words, I’m glad to have tests. It’s testing. Why? So I will learn your decrees. When you have no place else to go, then maybe you’ll go to the Bible and learn what God says. Or you can just live miserable for the rest of your life and beat your brains out against a brick wall, never solving any of your problems. In Romans 5, three through five, Paul wrote, not only so, but we glory, we glory in our sufferings. Why does he say that? Well, he said it because he said, we know our suffering produces perseverance. And then when we have perseverance, it produces character. And if we have character, that’s integrity, then we have hope, and that’s confidence. In Psalm 94, 19, when my anxious thoughts multiply within me, your consolations delight my soul, or your word. In 2 Corinthians 4, 8, Paul the Apostle made an astounding statement. Listen to what he said. He said, we are troubled on every side, and yet we do not have any stress. We are perplexed, but we’re not without hope. We’re not in despair. If I correctly translated it, this verse, it reads like this. We are under affliction, but we are not under anxiety. We have no way to proceed, but we are not without a way out. I mean, that’s a powerful testimony from the Apostle Paul, a mature believer. He was not stressed out. He had no anxiety attacks. In the middle of tremendous affliction and tremendous adversity, he was totally oriented to God’s plan, God’s grace plan. Unlike Paul, many of us experience anxiety and stress due to inability to operate under pressure. If the stress is allowed to continue in your life if you don’t check it, if you don’t confess the sin of worry, confess the sin of fear, then unchecked sins like this can result in Christian psychosis. And that’s a mental illness in the life of a believer. And that’s not that unusual. Not that unusual at all. Those afflictions that you face, they’re not intended to create mental illness. But unchecked emotional sins like worry, like anger, like fear, they lead to arrogance. And the sad fact is this, that often the believer is blind to his own failures. And in his blind arrogance, self-pity, he reacts to the unjust pressure with bitterness and vindictiveness. And if left unchecked, this blind arrogance will normally lead to unreality and eventually Christian psychosis. So, I mean, you can ask God to make it go away. You can ask God in prayer to make everything nice and rosy. That’s not the key to spiritual growth. It’s the problems that give you the opportunity to grow and develop. It’s the problems that let you apply the doctrine to the situation. That’s why you have those problems. Asking God to make it go away is not the solution. There was an old football coach years ago at Florida State University named Bill Peterson. And he was there before Bobby Bowden and before Vaughn Mancha. And he used to say this. He said, let me tell you one thing. The more problems you have, the more alive you are. And he went on to say, I feel much more vital when I can face my problems and solve them. Well, it applies to you. The more problems you have, the more alive you are. And you can feel vital when you solve them. And when you bring glory to God by not being knocked off track, when you bring glory to God by handling the fear and the stress and the worry that comes into your life with a relaxed mental attitude and faith rest drill, both of them great problem-solving devices. But asking God to make it go away is not solving the problem. So the key is for you to acquire biblical information and secondly, apply the information. That’s how you handle difficult situations. That’s how you handle these pressures in your life and that’s how you keep from getting under anxiety. You’ve got to acquire the information and you must apply the information. So you have choices to make. Under affliction, under adversity, you can convert the pressure you’re facing into some sort of anxiety, or you can actually utilize the power of Christ to manufacture patience in your life. It’s up to you. Your spiritual life is your choice. This is why I tell you, you must grow spiritually. You cannot glorify God sitting around worrying. You cannot glorify God sitting around being full of fear. You’re not going to glorify God sitting around being angry and bitter about something unfair or unjust that happened to you. And if you have this sort of anxiety, Satan loves to admit you, just tell you to go sit in the corner, go over there and cry a little bit, sit in the corner and feel sorry for yourself. Make it all go away, God. Please, God, make it all go away. That’s your prayer. And God said, look, I gave it to you for a reason, to teach you something. Wake up. Get out of your shell. Quit sitting there feeling sorry for yourself. Quit letting anxiety rule your life. Use those 10 problem-solving devices that I gave you, God said. You’re in the devil’s world. What do you think is going to happen? You’re in a strategic field of combat right now. That’s why Paul said, put on the armor of God so that you can stand against the strategy of the devil. You think things are not planned out against you. Satan has a tremendous G2 force. He knows what you are. He knows what your weaknesses are. He knows how to attack you if he needs to. He might not need to. I mean, you may not be able to get past your own flesh. You might not be able to get past the temptations and the lure of the world. If that’s the case, Satan wouldn’t even bother you because he’s not omniscient, he’s not omnipresent. He can’t be in your town and my town at the same time. We have to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil. And so that requires us to have divine viewpoint thinking. That requires us to have the filling of the Holy Spirit. That requires us to use the faith rest drill. That requires us to be motivated by our personal love for God. Because 1 John 5, 3 says, if you love me, you will obey me and my mandates are not hard. That’s why Jesus said, take my yoke and learn of me because my yoke is easy and my burden is light. The tough part of your life is you’re making it tough. The tough things you’re facing is you’re creating them yourself. The solution is in front of your eyes and you’re not using it and you’re not doing it. And maybe because you’re not willing to spend the time to learn the word of God. You want to make it go away really quick and really easy. And you’re a sucker for that sort of thing. That’s why you must take in the Word of God today, tomorrow, the next day, the next day, the next day, listening, learning, and applying the Word of God in your life, sitting under a well-qualified pastor that can teach it to you. You don’t go to church to be entertained. You don’t go to church to feel good about yourself. You go to church to learn. You go to church to learn God’s Word. You know, There’s a connection between what we think and our health. Any mental attitude, sins like fear and worry and anxiety, constant mental tension in your life, it’ll overflow eventually and affect your entire body. World War II, Korean War illustrated that when it called combat fatigue. Shell shock, some people called it. It was a neurotic disorder caused by stress involved in war. And it caused hypersensitivity to noise, to light, to movement, causing jumping, irritability, lack of sleep, nightmares. We know it as post-traumatic stress syndrome today. It’s real. It’s being in combat, seeing people die in front of you, seeing your best friend’s head turn into a bloody goo. Shell shock, disorder. How do you handle that sort of stuff if you have to do that? Only by having a strong spiritual life can you face these problems and pass these tests. Did you know in World War II, 40% of all evacuations from the battlefield were from mental duress? I mean, these warriors were exhausted and filthy and hungry, and they had death all around them. It was more than many of them could deal with. And many of these physiological problems related to what they think, related to the thought process, So how, you tell me, how do you keep sane in the middle of a war? How do you keep sane in the middle of conflict? How do you maintain your saneness when people are dying in front of you in battle? Isaiah 26.3, you will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee. Why? Because he trusts in you. Perfect peace, concentrating on God, using trust. That’s a faithless drill. Isaiah 26.3, mark it in your Bible, underline it. Thou will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee because he trusteth in thee. Do you trust in God? Or do you feel better trying to handle your problems yourself? Can you walk away from it and leave it at the Supreme Court of Heaven and say, Father, this was unfair and unjust. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m going to put it at your footsteps and I’m going to walk away. I’m not going to worry. I’m not going to be afraid. I’m not going to be angry. I’m not going to be bitter. I’m gonna live with the life you gave me. I’m gonna live under the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, mercy. Galatians 5, 22, 23, read it for yourself. Where’s yours? Are you in that list? If not, you need to get with it. You need to get with it. Because God’s plan is for you to have perfect peace in this life, not live under anxiety, not live under stress, But if you live by human viewpoint, if you give in to satanic infiltration, you can become useless and you will make yourself miserable because of that lifestyle. So if you’re gonna live a life that glorifies God to the maximum, it’s gonna require you doing some learning. Not emoting, not getting the joy, joy, joy down in your heart, thump, thump, thump, thump. It requires you learning, learning. I was watching a thing on the internet the other day, and some goofy guy was walking in the grocery store, told these people, I’ll give you $50 if you can quote a Bible verse. And every one of the people he asked, nobody could quote it. Nobody could even quote one verse. What can you quote? Out of those 7,000 promises of security in the Bible for you, how many of them do you actually know and quote to God in prayer? That’s right. Quote to God in prayer. That’s right. Say, Father, you said this, and I believe this, and I’m going to hold you to it. No weapon that is formed against you shall ever prosper, Isaiah 54, 17. You said it, Father. I’m going to hold you to it. I’m going to stand behind it. I believe you can take care of me. I’m not going to worry. I’m not going to be afraid. I’m not going to be intimidated by death. You know, James 1, 8 says a double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways. That means you’re two-sided, disukos, have two mindsets. That’s the way you are. I mean, you have, sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don’t. You have a sin nature in you and you have the Holy Spirit in you if in fact you had believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. And you must make the decision. Are you going to fuel the Holy Spirit and give him information to use? Because he uses the scripture. He uses the word. If you don’t learn it and apply it, he has no weapons to use. Oh, that flesh has always got plenty of weapons, plenty of desires, plenty of distractions. So if you’re going to live by the filling of the Spirit, you gotta give the Holy Spirit some ammunition. Therefore, you must get under the ministry of a pastor. You must learn, you must apply, and you must grow. That’s why the Bible says, grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I want you to be the person God designed you to be. Not live under anxiety, not live under worry, not live under fear of death, but live under the joy and the peace that God made for you. I sure hope you’re listening. I sure hope you’re learning. If you have a question, don’t hesitate to contact me anytime, any day, anywhere. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:15

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.