Castaway Believer – Part 6
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 558 aired on May 1, 2016
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes, please stay with me
for another 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration, education, all done without any manipulation.
This means we don’t have hidden agendas. We’re not trying to con you. We’re not going to
solicit money from you. We’re not going to ask you to join anything. We’re just going to ask you
to listen up as I try to verify and identify God’s plan for your life. If I can do this, then my prayer
is that you will orient and adjust to the plan that God has for you. That’s what we do on this
show, we have accurate Biblical information. We stay away from human speculation which is
kind of useless. In other words, everything that we tell you is going to come out of the Bible so
we’re not going to come up with some human viewpoint of what so-and-so said. We’re going to
go to the Scripture and see what it says. If this is your first time to ever hear us, let me tell you
what the name FLOT line means. It’s a military term. We’re using a military analogy to describe
how a Christian can establish in his soul a main line of resistance, a FLOT line, a forward line of
troops. To do this he will have to learn at least 10 unique problem-solving devices taught in the
Bible. We stress these constantly on this show. These 10 problem-solving devices are nothing
new, they’ve been around for years, they are in the Word of God. If you will learn them and use
them, then you can stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside
source of stress. We all know that adversity is inevitable however not everybody realizes that
stress is optional. This is the unique thing about the Christian life. When we learn what the
Christian life is, if we follow the protocol that God sets forth, then we can live a life free of stress
which means we never have to worry. We never have to be afraid. We never have to second-
guess ourselves. We never have to be bitter. We never have to be angry. See, these are actually
sins. There is a way to live without committing a lot of mental attitude sins. Sin always comes in
three areas – something you think, something you say, or something you do. To be honest about
it, most people commit mental attitude sins unless you’re on a sports talk radio show. There are a
lot of sins of the tongue on sports talk, I hear this all the time. People begin to malign coaches, to
malign players, and to malign other people that happen to listen to sports talk radio. It turns out
to be a big gossip session. People sin in many different ways. As you learn about sin and you
learn how to recover from sin, you learn problem-solving device #1 on the FLOT line of your
soul, this is rebound. This is where we recover when we fail. If you draw a V on a piece of paper,
the top left-hand side would be to recognize when you sin. The bottom of the V would be to
rebound the sin and the top right hand side would be to recover your spiritual life. These are the
3-R’s to the Christian life: recognize, rebound and recover.
When we sin, even with the mental
attitude sins, we must recognize it as a sin, rebound it as a sin, and recover our spiritual
momentum.
This is why rebound is essential. If you haven’t learned this, you need to learn it. 1
John 1:9 is clear where it says,
“If we confess our sin, then He is faithful and just to forgive us
and to purify us from all wrongdoing.”
This isn’t the only place it is said in the Bible. Psalm
558-Castaway-Believer-p6-transcript.pdf
32:4-5 repeats it essentially the same way in the Old Testament. Whenever we sin we quench the
Holy Spirit and we grieve the Holy Spirit.
It is impossible to execute, to live, to follow the
protocol plan of God with the Holy Spirit quenched and grieved in your life. That’s why Jesus
Christ our Lord and Savior gave Him to you, to empower you, to guide you, to lead you into
truth. If you have quenched Him by sin and you have grieved Him, then how can He do His job?
The only way you can recover the filling of the Holy Spirit is to use rebound.
We are mandated
in Ephesians 5:18 to
“Be filled with the Spirit.”
We are told in Ephesians 1:13 that,
“We are
sealed by the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption.”
You were sealed with the Holy Spirit the
moment you believed in Christ but the moment you committed your first sin, you quenched the
Holy Spirit. You didn’t lose Him, He is still there, but He has been grieved. You cannot have
fellowship with God as long as you are carnal, as long as you are in the flesh, as long as you
have unconfessed sin in your life, these are all the same thing. You are out of fellowship and so
rebound is essential. As we go through the study that I’ve been doing with you for several weeks
now, we’ve been talking about the castaway believer.
The castaway believer is the believer that
God has to set aside because he fails to do the job.
King Saul was set aside in favor of David
because Saul failed the plan of God and others that we will talk about in this study. People have
flaws.
A flawed believer is a person who has some sort of fragmentation in his soul. Instead
of having self-discipline which we need to have, we wind up having self-fragmentation and
it contradicts God’s plan. God doesn’t want us to be this way.
He wants us to be in the plan.
He wants us to have self-discipline, so let me identify two things for you. I was speaking one
time at a home for women where they are recovering from certain sins in their life and one
person was an alcoholic. She thought it was something that, well I don’t know what she thought
to tell you the truth. I couldn’t quite figure it out but I had to explain it to her like this. We have
genetic flaws, flaws or weaknesses that we are born with because of the cell structure of the sin
nature. If you have a genetic flaw, it’s not necessarily your sin nature that caused it. You are born
with it. People under spiritual death are born with certain flaws and certain tendencies. These
become manifest when pressures or temptations come into their life and they can often reveal
themselves through these impulsive actions rather than the deliberate action of staying filled with
the Holy Spirit. A genetic flaw could be a propensity toward alcoholism for example. Maybe
your parents were alcoholics and you know that you could be an alcoholic so you know you
should not drink. That’s a genetic flaw. An acquired flaw may be something totally different. An
acquired flaw is a flaw that we, through our own volition, acquire.
Most acquired flaws are
directly related to the deliberate conscious function of our volition.
For example, I would say
that drug addiction, sexual addiction, and various addictions are flaws that we acquire. Lying can
be a flaw that we acquire and these are volitional decisions that we make. Both genetic flaws and
acquired flaws can lead to sin. If you follow the genetic flaw and let it get out of control, you will
get under sin. The acquired flaw is usually acquired while you’re in sin. Both genetic flaws and
acquired flaws can be detrimental to your spiritual life if you don’t exercise self-control.
This is
the key to living the spiritual life, self-control.
There’s no camp you can go to and throw a stick
558-Castaway-Believer-p6-transcript.pdf
on a fire, there’s no one-shot decision you can make at a spring revival that is going to make you
the kind of Christian you would like to be.
The only thing that is going to make you the kind
of Christian you would like to be is when you use your volition to control your sin nature.
You must say, “No, I’m not going to let it do that,” or “Yes, I will do that.” If you do it, if you do
follow the lust of the flesh, if you do follow the call of the world or the deception of Satan, then
you have to make a decision whether you’re willing to admit it’s wrong or not. Many people that
follow deceptive doctrines of Satan will never admit they are wrong and so they wind up being
put on the shelf, being set aside because they misrepresent God. I will demonstrate it to you in a
little while, this is exactly what happened to one very prominent person in the Bible who
misrepresented God. If you want to avoid being disapproved by God, if you don’t want to be
proven worthless and placed aside, then you have to learn how to live the Christian life or else
you will be set aside. You will be declared
adokimeo,
you will be declared worthless, you will be
declared someone who God cannot use. Let’s name some things here that will help you.
Adokimos
means the set aside believer. If you don’t want to be set aside by God, first of all
realize your position.
Realize who you are and the importance of counting the cost,
evaluating, before you undertake any project that could be a distraction.
Here’s the question.
You get involved in things from time to time, will this project or will this person distract you
from growing spiritually? Distractions are real and if you hook up with the wrong person or you
get involved in the wrong project, then your spiritual life goes to the back burner. To tell you the
truth, hobbies can be a real distraction. Some people that I know get into fishing. Some people
get into guns. Some people get into other sports activities and whatever these activities may be,
hiking, bowling, boating, whatever, it can become so great a demand on your time that you don’t
have time to study God’s Word. You begin to substitute each morning a little 15 minute devotion
and you think that’s growing spiritually. It is not. This is like eating an appetizer. This is not a
meal. If you want to grow spiritually, you must sit under the ministry of a qualified pastor and
listen to him teach you. You’ve got to have a Bible. You’ve got to have a notebook. It’s essential
that you sit down, listen, learn, and apply God’s Word to your life. If you’re so busy doing other
things and you’re not counting the cost, you are not seeing what’s happening to you. This is
taught in Luke 14:25-35. My pastor recently taught something about this, the mandate to count
the cost and the mandate to consider the strength of the opposition. The question we have to ask
ourselves is this, are we spiritually mature enough to assume the responsibility that someone
wants to place on us because it’s going to be a distraction? Here’s a key to help you understand
these things. Listen to what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in
1 Corinthians 7:35,
“I say this for
your own benefit, not to put a restraint on you but to promote what is appropriate and to
secure undistracted devotion to the Lord.”
This is Paul’s advice on marriage to the Corinthians.
Remember, the world will distract you, Satan will deceive you, and if you follow your sin
nature and allow it to control you, it will destroy you.
If you want to be the person that God
can use, you must realize your position in Christ and not be distracted and you have to
reclaim your affections.
How would you do this? Listen to 1 John 2:15.
“Do not love the world,
558-Castaway-Believer-p6-transcript.pdf
do not love the things in the world. If anyone loves the world then the love of the Father is not in
him.”
Loving the Father is motivational virtue. God said in 1 John 5:3,
“If you love Me, you will
obey Me.”
The thing that motivates you or me to live the Christian life faithfully is our personal
love for God the Father. 1 John 4:19 says,
“We love Him because He first loved us,”
and so it’s a
type of reciprocal love. It’s a motivation, and it’s a virtue that we have. 1 John 5:3 says,
“This is
the love of God, that we keep His mandates and His mandates are not burdensome.”
Then don’t
forget Luke 12:52-53 about the divided household because more than one believer has been set
aside because he or she put the priority of their spouse over the priority of God’s Word and
learning God’s Word. If you’re married and you have a wife, you have a husband, you have
children, they demand certain amounts of your time. They demand priorities and I have heard
countless numbers of mothers say, “I just don’t have the time to study. I just don’t have the time
to sit down and listen to someone teach the Bible. I’m too busy trying to raise my children.” I
understand and to have children is a choice that we make. I have four, I understand. It is the
hardest thing in the world to make learning God’s Word priority. If you ever do it, if you ever get
the discipline to sit down, tune out all the other distractions, get a Bible and a notebook, turn on a
tape player, a DVD, or a MP3 and listen to someone teach you the Bible, you will never regret it.
You will be the person that God intended for you to be because you will grow, reclaim your
affections and recapture your thoughts.
2 Corinthians 10:5,
“We are destroying speculations
and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God and we take every thought captive
to the obedience of Christ Jesus.”
This means that you are responsible for what you think. Your
mind will wander from day to day. You may do that driving, you may find yourself drifting in
your mind, thinking about the day, thinking about the kids, thinking about the job.
You have to
to take your thoughts captive and the only way you can do this is by self-discipline.
The
worst type of believers are the daydreamers who all the time are dreaming about something and
saying they’re going to do something and it never quite comes to fruition. If you will just take
one day at a time, if you will get up in the morning and you say, “All right Father, this is a day
You have made and I will have a superabundance of happiness in it because of Your unfailing
love and mercy this morning.” If you will make sure that you rebound when you sin, and if you
will make sure that before you crash out that night, you at least somewhere, that morning or that
evening, sit down with your Bible and your notebook and listen to someone teach you God’s
Word, then you will begin to take every thought captive because you will begin to have a
Biblical inventory of ideas. You will begin to change the way you think and this is from
Philippians 2:5,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
This means change the
way you think. Romans 12:3 says,
“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.”
It’s about thinking, you live the spiritual life in your thoughts, in
your soul. You don’t live the spiritual life dressed up in an Easter outfit promenading yourself
down to church on Easter and acting like you’re something you’re not. If you’re not thinking
Biblical viewpoint, if you’re not thinking doctrine, if you’re not thinking the filling of the Spirit,
558-Castaway-Believer-p6-transcript.pdf
if you’re not recognizing sin when it comes into your life, you are going to be set aside as a
believer that God cannot use and I don’t think you want this. I think you know your life is too
valuable to be set aside.
You live your spiritual life in your thoughts.
I’m not saying God’s
going to send you to hell, this is not what I’m saying. I’m saying that God has a plan for you, He
wants to use you but it’s like the runner in the race that we have been studying. In this metaphor
Paul uses he said, “Look, even I have to keep it up. I could get disqualified myself.”
If you step
off the track, if you get distracted, you’re going to be disqualified.
You’re not going to finish
the race and you will never hear the Lord say,
“Well done, My good and faithful
servant”
(Matthew 25:23). If you live your spiritual life in your thoughts, which you should, and
these thoughts originate from the mentality of your soul, your thoughts are where you will fail or
where you succeed. Every thing you do starts with a thought and this thought is caused by a
motive. The motive leads to a thought. The thought leads to an action and that action leads to
either no sin or some sin, glorify God or not glorify God. This doesn’t mean you have to walk
around like some rabbi. This doesn’t mean you have to walk around sounding holy all day long
saying, “Hello brother, hello sister,” that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is you must walk
around filled with the Holy Spirit and you must walk around with a Biblical inventory of ideas
flowing through your stream of consciousness so that whatever happens to you that day, you
relate it to doctrine, you relate it to God’s Word. You’re able to see yourself. The Bible is a mirror
of your soul, it reflects what is in your soul. You will know who you are, your motives, your
intentions and your desires. It’s amazing to consider that our Heavenly Father in His omniscience
has the ability to see the complete thought process of our soul. You don’t believe this? 2
Chronicles 16:9,
“The eyes of the Lord move to and fro throughout the earth that He may
strongly support those whose heart is completely His.”
He knows what you’re thinking. He
knows what your motivations and your desires are.
If you are going to run the race and not be
set aside, you must recapture your thoughts – reclaim your affections – realize your position
in Christ – redirect your focus – and redefine your values.
This means 2 Corinthians 4:18,
“While we look
[focus]
not at the things which are seen but at the things that are not seen. For
the things which are seen are temporal things but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
It’s
simply saying keep your eyes on the prize. Don’t be distracted by temporal assets in your life.
Don’t look at your circumstances. In Matthew 8:23-27 the disciples looked at the storm and
panicked and said,
“Save us, we are perishing.”
Jesus woke up and said,
“You have little faith.”
If you look at the circumstances and not the solution, then you’re not going to keep your eyes on
the prize. You must redirect your focus and you must redefine your values. Matthew 6:19-21,
“Do not store up for yourself treasure on this earth because moth and rust will destroy it, thieves
will break in and steal it. Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust
destroy and where thieves don’t break in and steal because where your treasure is, your heart
will be there also.”
Is this telling you it’s wrong to have a big savings account or to have money
in the bank? No, it’s telling you where your priorities need to be.
Your priorities must be the
treasure of God’s Word.
The word treasure in the Greek New Testament is
thesauros,
a word
558-Castaway-Believer-p6-transcript.pdf
treasure.
Learning God’s Word makes you rich in your soul.
You have a treasure of words.
There are over 7,000 promises in the Bible and they are all there for using in the faith-rest drill.
This is where you get your strength from. If you want to find out how rich you are, just get out a
piece of paper, start writing a few of these promises, and tell yourself how many you actually
know. If you don’t know them you can’t use them, can you? You might not have the treasure you
think you have. Try it, get a piece of paper, sit down, start writing all the promises you know and
see if you can at least get to 10.
Then you must reorder your priorities.
Matthew 6:33 says,
“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these other things will be added
unto you.”
These things that the Lord Jesus Christ mentions here are the logistical grace
provisions you need to finish the race, your food, your shelter, your clothing. If you want to
finish the race, if you want to follow these things I’ve told you, never compromise what you
believe.
Never try to become contemporary. Never confuse the issue. Never capitulate what
you believe in, grace and faith alone.
Satan will always try to get you to capitulate, to back off
what you believe. People will say, “Oh, you’re just one of those Bible thumping weirdos.” Satan
is good at demonizing you. He’s good at ostracizing you because you happen to believe the
Bible. You’re not allowed to take the Bible and beat people over the head with it and tell them to
“Straighten up and fly right or you’re going to hell.” Unfortunately, this is what some pastors do,
they use the Bible as a thumper. The Bible doesn’t need me to take it and thump people over the
head with it. God the Holy Spirit can do this. My job is to love them as the Lord Jesus Christ
would love them and to give them the truth. They can make the decision without me maligning
them, slandering them, running them down, telling them what an idiot they are, or any other
thing like that. Since Satan is the adversary, he’s always seeking to deceive you and he will do it
by means of appealing to your arrogance. Listen to what 2 Corinthians 11:3 says.
“I am afraid
that as the serpent deceived Eve by means of his craftiness, your mind will also be led astray
from the simplicity and the purity of devotion to Christ.”
In 1 Timothy 2:14,
“And it was not
Adam who was deceived but the woman was deceived and she fell into transgression.”
Deceived
is an interesting word,
exapatao,
and it means to reason falsely or to be enticed. The objective of
Satan deceiving you is that he can lead you away from truth. Thus, if he can do this, he will use
you as a puppet in his appeal trial to stay out of the Lake of Fire. He doesn’t want to go to the
Lake of Fire and he will use you to get out of it if he can. The question is do you want to be his
puppet or do you want to redefine your priorities, recognize the issues, and stay faithful? Do you
want to grow? Do you want to be the person God wants you to be?
You are a product of your
volition, not your environment.
You must make the decision. You hear me every Sunday. What
are you going to do about it? When are you going to get with it? When are you going to make
this a priority and start growing spiritually as you know you should? Think about it, pray about
it, and let me know if there is any way I can encourage or help you. Until next week, this is your
host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line