In this engaging episode, we unravel the mysteries surrounding invisible heroes in the spiritual realm. Rick elucidates the roles of faithfulness and loyalty in glorifying God and how common tasks, done with a heart for the Lord, can transform us into heroes of faith. Using biblical references, Rick challenges listeners to reflect on their lives, encouraging a deeper alignment with God’s plans over seeking external validation.
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.
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Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. F-L-O-T, Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stay with me. It’s a short show, only about 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education, and no manipulation because we’re not trying to con you, not trying to raise money, not trying to sell you something. But we are trying to give you something, give you information that will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life if you choose. And if you choose, we hope that you will orient and adjust to that plan. Don’t forget that God gave you two ends, one of them you sit on and one of them you think with. And success in your life is going to depend on which one of those you use. As they say, heads you win, tails you lose. So listen up, learn up, and apply it into your life, and hopefully God will be glorified through it all. It’s my privilege to come to your home, come to your car, wherever you are listening. Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time. We want to talk about invisible heroes, invisible heroes today. I believe it’s possible that you may be one of those invisible heroes. Unfortunately, today’s generation seems to be fascinated with social exposure. Through media sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you might not even know what that is if you don’t pay attention to the internet even professional bass anglers now have what’s called a starlink connection to their boat so that they can broadcast all day every day the tournament they’re in and show you every cast they make it’s called an all-day feed and i’m sure that most folks are unaware these sites pay money to those individuals who have high viewer numbers that’s why the producer of the content will always ask you to hit the subscriber button or hit the like button. The more likes or the more subscribers, the more money they make. Most of you who listen to this broadcast do not subscribe to any social media, but I keep up with certain individuals who maintain YouTube channels, especially fishermen who compete at the national level. I do this because it allows me to enjoy the great outdoors without ever having to leave my desk or my chair. Those guys or ladies that I watch are visible, but I’m rather invisible since I don’t post video content. We do podcast our radio shows, you know that, and currently you may be listening over one of the podcast channels. We have over a thousand shows available to be heard, and those who know, those who help organize this, tell me we’ve had almost two million plays according to the current analytics. That’s two million downloads or two million plays of our show, The Flotline. I don’t know what has propelled these folks to have to be noticed, these people that are social media people, what’s causing them the need to be acknowledged or why they need to share every detail of their private life. But I want to assure you of one thing. God is watching and wanting you and me to become mature believers so we can glorify him. The thing we have to understand is that we don’t have to have a visible ministry to bring maximum glorification to God. The Bible clearly says in 1 Corinthians 10, 31, whatever you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. Even your daily tasks can bring him glory. Having dinner can bring him glory. Do you pray before your meals? Do you bow your head and thank God for the food and ask him to sanctify it so you don’t get sick over it? When you take a drink, do you thank God for what he’s given you to keep you alive and well? Everything you do, you do for the glory of God. And it’s repeated again in Colossians 3.23. Whatever you do, whatever you do, it says, do it heartily. The word heartily is the word psuche. And that’s what we know as a soul. Do it from the seat of your feelings, your desires, your affections. Do it heartily as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance for you serve the Lord Jesus Christ. So whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, again in Colossians 3.23, whatever you do it, do it heartily with all effort, with all affection, with all desires. As you face this day, remember that you are here for a reason. So even though you might not understand what God’s plan entails for you currently, if you will go forth with great enthusiasm and great expectations, he will reveal and lead you in his will. You may be up in years, like me, getting up there, and you may live a relatively quiet life, but every breath you take can glorify your Lord if you are a mature believer. You heard that, if you are a mature believer. Your faithfulness to be a mature believer is a testimony to God’s love, which he has showered on you this day so you can serve him. This is because you are being observed by God and the angels 24-7. You didn’t realize that. You don’t have a YouTube channel. You don’t have a Starlink. You don’t have a Facebook page. But you have an angelic page, and they’re watching everything you do. Proverbs 15-3, the eyes of the Lord are in every place watching you, keeping watch over you, keeping watch on the evil and on the good. And in 2 Chronicles 16, 9, for the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to him. You know, God’s only looking for two things from you and from me. He’s looking for faithfulness and loyalty. As an invisible hero, we can bring God much glory by being obedient and being faithful. For example, if the scriptures give us a command, are we faithful to fulfill that command? I’m not just talking about the Ten Commandments, but rather the mandates to stay filled with the Holy Spirit and to study God’s Word on a daily basis. Listen to 2 Timothy 2.15. Be diligent. That’s faithful, obedient. Be diligent to present yourself approved to God and a workman who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. You can be ashamed when you get to the judgment seat of Christ and find out you did all the right things in the wrong way. You weren’t filled with the Holy Spirit, you weren’t controlled by the Holy Spirit, You let your sin nature run your life and you had a good side to you. You attended church and you tithed and you sang in the choir and you prayed, but you did it all out of fellowship, all in the energy of the flesh. And you will be ashamed when you see it burned up at the judgment seat of Christ as wood, hay, and stubble. So you need to rightly divide the word of truth. If you can rightly divide it, you can wrongly divide it. That’s why you have to have a well-qualified pastor to teach it to you. So this word, be diligent to present yourself approved to God. A workman does not need to be ashamed. Diligent is a Greek word for steady. And it is an imperative verb. And it means this, it’s a divine mandate, not just a divine request, because if you intend to bring God maximum glory from your life, you must be obedient to fulfill this commandment. What a shame it would be if you arrive in heaven, and then you discover you never really fulfilled God’s plan for your life. This means you must be filled with the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 5.18 tells you that. Be filled with the Spirit. And that you must have someone who is qualified to teach the Scriptures to you. The Bible is, in fact, a textbook, not a novel. I don’t care how many times you read it through. You’re not going to learn it yourself. It’s a textbook. God has equipped certain male individuals with the gift of pastor-teacher in order to correctly instruct us. So our job is to find that individual, that male pastor-teacher, and be faithful to study under him face-to-face, or maybe over the internet using streaming video, or maybe just study his writings, if that’s the best thing you can do. The point is this. That invisible heroes have a tremendous impact on their surroundings, even though the general purpose might not even know you exist. It might not even know your name. Listen, I’m not a pastor, but rather an evangelist. And my job is to recruit you to the kingdom of God and point you in the right direction. Your job in 2 Peter 3.18 says, grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So your job is to grow. Grow in grace, living grace, dying grace, surpassing grace, saving grace, and grow in knowledge, understanding, knowledge, the difference between gnosis and epinosis, the two Greek words, one meaning knowledge and one meaning full knowledge. So you have to grow in grace and in knowledge. That’s the mandate from God. So here’s a few principles I want you to remember. The invisible hero is the product of the divine dynamics that God has set out. The filling of the Holy Spirit, the scriptures, and the pastor teacher who feeds it to you. He or she may be unknown in the community, an invisible hero, but they are a source of blessing to all who are exposed to them. Two, the invisible hero has reached spiritual maturity and gives maximum glorification to God. That means they’ve gone through spiritual self-esteem, spiritual autonomy, and they’re now living in spiritual maturity. 3. Invisible God plus invisible assets plus invisible power equals an invisible hero.
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No believer can execute the protocol plan of God and become an invisible hero or glorify God apart from the teaching ministry of a well-qualified pastor. Point five, personal impact is defined as blessing to others by association, even though they might not be aware of it. Six, from these invisible heroes, mature believers, come evangelists, pastor teachers, missionaries, who extend the spiritual life of a nation like us. In point seven, a large pivot of invisible heroes, that’s a lot of mature believers, means the nation has national blessing and prosperity in spiritual affairs, as well as the function of government, law enforcement, military modus operandi, the economy, and the culture and social life of that nation. So as people grow and mature in Christ, they are a blessing to their nation in a lot of different areas. The invisible hero is also being observed by angels. There we go. Here you are being watched. This is your TikTok page in 1 Corinthians 4 and 9. For I think that God has displayed us, the apostles, last as men condemned to death. For we have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels, there it is, And to men. So not only are men watching them, he said, but we’re being watched by angels. In 1 Peter 1, 12, to them it was revealed that not to themselves, but to us they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those things who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things which angels desire to understand.” So angels are watching, watching the apostles, watching you. You can’t see them, but they got an eye on you. They learn from you. They learn from your faithfulness. They learn from your obedience. They learn from the tremendous courage you have to learn and apply the plan of God in your life. But the greatest problem that you and I have in our life is arrogance. Arrogance is the greatest hindrance we have to becoming an invisible hero. You know what arrogance is, self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption, and then eventually self-destruction. So the arrogant individual, maybe he’s even a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, will justify why it’s okay for him or her to commit certain sins. And that self-justification leads to self-deception, thinking that God’s okay with it, and he’s not. And that self-justification, self-deception leads to, what, self-absorption, to where they’re totally absorbed with it. So you have to understand that arrogance is the greatest enemy. You won’t hear preachers preach on arrogance very often. Sometimes they’ll call it pride, but that’s a different thing. Arrogance, Romans 12.3, listen to this verse. For I say through the grace which has been given to me to everyone who’s among you, stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance, beyond what you ought to think, but think in terms of sanity for the purpose of being rational without illusion. because God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. So here Paul the Apostle in Romans 12 three is telling us stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance. There’s only one way to die as a believer, and when that comes, and it will eventually, that’s to die as an invisible hero. For if we live, Romans 14, 8, we live for the Lord. If we die, we die for the Lord. Therefore, whether we live, whether we die, we are the Lord’s. That’s the attitude of the invisible hero. That’s what I want you to be. I want you to be an invisible hero because you are faithful to stay filled with the Holy Spirit. You’re faithful to study the Word of God on a daily basis under a well-qualified pastor. And you will glorify God to the maximum and be a tremendous blessing to anyone in your periphery. So we have the opportunity after we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to become these invisible heroes. Remember that during the church age, which is what we live in, there are no visible angels. We’re not in the Old Testament, so we’re not seeing angels. If somebody tells you that an angel showed up, you have to be careful about that. There are no visible angels running around, appearing to people. There are elect angels, there are falling angels, and these angels do watch our every move, watching everything that we’re doing. They’re learning from us because we’re like in an arena being observed by angels. But the invisible hero, which I want you to be, and I want to be one as well, has a tremendous influence on every facet of our lives. You know why? Because as goes your spiritual life, so goes the destiny of the nation that you live in. You’ve heard me tell you that before. As goes your spiritual life, so goes the history of your country. If you’re obedient to God’s word, if you’re faithful to God’s calling, It’s entirely possible you will be called upon to come forward at the right time. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but God will call on you. There’s a time coming. when he will bring you out of the shadows. There’s a time coming when you will have a visible impact. Right now, maybe you’re invisible, maybe you’re just, you’re living alone and you’re by yourself or you don’t have much of an audience, many friends, but you’re taking in the word of God, you’re staying filled with the Holy Spirit and your maximum glorify God in everything you do, whether you eat, whether you sleep, whether you drink, do all for the glory of God, that’s what the passage says. Gideon is spoken of in the book of Judges, chapter six through chapter eight. Gideon lived around 1252 B.C. and he was the fifth judge in the history of Israel before they arrogantly asked for a king and they got one named Saul. But Gideon was indeed an invisible hero. He was called out of obscurity to lead the Israelites to victory over the marauding Midianite army that would come and take everything the Israelites had. So not only did God use Gideon, but there were also 300 unnamed warriors who were in fact recognized by God as invisible heroes. Listen to Judges chapter seven, verse seven. The Lord said to Gideon, with the 300 men that I tapped, I will save you and give the Midianites into your hand. Tell all the others to go home. So Gideon sent the rest of the Israelite army home and kept the 300 who took over the provisions and the trumpets of the others. And it was these 300 that delivered Israel with a brilliant tactical move at night that God revealed what to do. So I want to ask you a question if you allow me to do that. I’d like to know, can God count on you? Have you been faithful and obedient to love and serve him? It may be true that you live alone. It may be true that you don’t have much exposure to the outside world. But I assure you, God knows who you are. He knows what you’re up to. And he knows when he will put you in the game, when he will call on you. Let me share with you some content of a book entitled The Twelfth Man on the Team. This was written by my pastor, R.B. Thiem, in 1969. I’ll read to you from the first page of the book. The Twelfth Man on the Team. Listen up as I read his words. On January the 1st, 1922, on the Dallas, Texas fairgrounds, where now stands the Cotton Bowl, Texas A&M College, which is now Texas A&M University, played an important football game against a prominent national team known as the Central College of Kentucky, or they called them the Praying Colonels. Center at that time was coached by a very famous coach named Uncle Charlie Moran. The underdog team that day was definitely Texas A&M, and their difficulties began to multiply immediately. By the halftime, the Aggies were not only on the short end of the score, but they were also very short of players. Coach Dana Bible, who at the time was the coach of the cadets from College Station, had not only started with an undermanned squad, but had also so many men hurt in the game that he realized in the second half, he would not be able to fill the team with only 10 men. It was a very discouraging day when a prospect for Texas A&M College lined up in the stands, but up in the stands, there was a young A&M student by the name of Cain Gill, Cain Gill, now a medical doctor in Corpus Christi, Texas. Remember, that’s 1969. King Gill had gone out for the team, and though he was too small, he maintained a tenacious mental attitude and determinedly stuck with it. So all year, in spite of the fact that he was not even accepted as a member of the team, he continued to work out with them. He learned the plays, he stayed in condition, and he kept up with the team. Finally, on this particular day, when Texas A&M squad ran short of players, Coach Bible called King Gill out of the stands and told him to get into the uniform that he was gonna play in the game. And play he did. As a result of his play, the Texas A&M team was so inspired that they actually won the game by a very close margin. And it’s a never to be forgotten event in the football annals of that school. It’s called the 12th man. So the question is, will you be prepared when God calls you out of the stands? Will you be prepared when God calls you out of the stands? You know, there’s a passage in the Old Testament where God said he looked for someone to make up the hedge and stand in the gap and he couldn’t find anybody. He’s watching you. He’s paying attention to you. I know you live alone. You may not have much impact in your community, but you can be that invisible hero that will deliver the course of the nation. one man unknown one woman unknown can deliver what’s going on in this nation i’m counting on you to be that invisible hero i’m counting on you to be that faithful person who is obedient and faithful the two things god is looking for in your life obedience and faithfulness if you’re that point if you’re that individual then you’re going to be that invisible hero that God is looking for. Don’t forget Proverbs 15, three, the eyes of the Lord are in every place keeping watch on the evil and on the good. So he’s looking for loyalty. He’s looking for faithfulness. And as an invisible hero, you will bring him much glory by being obedient to his word and faithful to fulfill what he tells you to do. So is that you? Are you faithful and obedient? When the Bible says in 2 Timothy 2.15, be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a workman that need not to be ashamed, but rightly dividing the word of truth. Are you faithful to study the word of God on a daily basis? You may wonder how you do it. Let me tell you how you do it. If you don’t have a local church where there’s a pastor teaching you, there are a lot of things you can do. You can get the books, the writings, you can write things To me, I’ll get you the materials. You can study it. All of our books are free, by the way. They don’t cost anything. And you can study that way, and they’ll point you to where there is a qualified pastor where you can get his books as well, free. Or you can listen by means of the Internet to the streaming video or streaming audio messages that well-qualified pastors teach. That’s exactly what I have to do. Since I’m not able to get to a local church, I listen by means of the internet on a daily basis, listening to my pastor teach the Word of God. It’s as though I’m there in person, but I’m not. And you can do the same thing. So you can’t make excuses and say, well, I don’t have time. Well, I can’t go. Well, it’s not available to me. Well, I’m old. I don’t care what your age is. If you’re still alive… God still has a plan for your life. And that plan is for you to have an invisible impact in your nation as an invisible hero. God’s counting on you to be that person. But it starts with your salvation. If you haven’t believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, you’re not gonna be anything. The greatest decision you could ever make is to accept Christ as your savior. You have to do that eventually. The Bible says it’s appointed that a man wants to die and after that, the judgment. Without Christ, you’re going to be in a heap of trouble. So I pray you will make that decision to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to understand that he died on the cross paying for your sins and mine, that he was buried and three days later walked out of the grave and is alive today. The wonderful thing about that is he will come and live in you. He’ll give you a new heart. He’ll make you a new man, a new individual with a new future and a new destiny. So I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention. If you’ve never trusted Christ, do it today. Make this the day of your salvation. Make this the day that you bow your head and say, Father, I believe in Jesus Christ. I’m willing to accept him as my savior right now. It’ll be the single greatest decision you ever made in your whole life. If you do that, let me know, please. I got something I’d like to send you free of charge, but I can’t unless you let me know who you are and where you live, what your address is. And I hope you’ll come back next week. I hope you’ll continue to march on to be that invisible hero that I’m speaking about so you can give maximum glorification to God in your life and everything that you do. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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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.
