Castaway Believer – Part 7
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 559 aired on May 8, 2016
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes I’d like to invite you to stay with me. It’ll be about 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration,
some education, and all done without any type of manipulation. We’re not trying to sell you
anything. We’re certainly not going to ask you for anything. This show is about giving you
something and that’s accurate information. It is my prayer that this information will help you
verify and identify the plan of God for your life. If you’re able to do this, then my prayer is that
you will orient and adjust to the plan. Thank you for listening. It’s always my pleasure to bring
this radio show to you each and every Sunday on this local radio station and I do enjoy hearing
from you. I hear from listeners quite often. As we select new cities, new venues to expand this
ministry, if you would like for us to continue in your city, don’t hesitate to drop us a note and let
us know that you’re listening. It always helps me when contract time comes up and we have to
sign a new contract to decide where we’re going to go, who’s listening, who’s paying attention,
and who’s getting something out of this. You can always reach us on the website and you can
email us or you can drop us a line in the mail. I’m not asking you for money. Don’t do that but if
you would like to say, “We’re listening and would like for you to continue to keep the show in
our city,” let us know. We have been talking for the last six shows about being a castaway
believer. The castaway believer is the believer the Lord has to set aside because he didn’t finish
the race. This is something that Paul warned about in 1 Corinthians 9:27 when he talked about
how he himself could be set aside. He was trying to motivate the Corinthian believers to reach
spiritual maturity and not be so distracted by all the details of life that surrounded them. There
were so many things going on and they were constantly distracted. This was a problem church
for Paul to deal with and so he writes this using an athletic metaphor about running and finishing
the race. This is what we’ve been talking about and I would like to finish this series today. Here
are some principles I want to give you before we go too much farther.
Each one of us is a
walking grenade. We have the ability to implode. We have the ability to destroy ourselves and
this is because we have a sin nature. Sometimes you may seem like two different people. You
may seem like a good person sometimes and then you may surprise yourself and you may say, “I
can’t believe I did that.” This is always hard if you have a lot of arrogance and you do something
that you didn’t think you were capable of doing, then you have such guilt that you never get over
it. Guilt can be a terrible sin used by Satan to manipulate the believer to go sit in the corner and
feel sorry for himself because of what he did. I can only tell you this, that if you committed some
sin and you’re still alive when the dust clears, then God is not through with you yet. My advice
would be to confess the sin, get up off the ground, move on forward, and don’t look back. We are
all walking grenades when we don’t have discipline.
When we don’t discipline ourselves, then
what we wind up doing is assassinating our spiritual lives.
We wind up being assassins of
ourselves. All we have to do is let Satan appeal to our weaknesses whether it’s a genetic
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weakness that we are born with or some sort of flaw that we acquire. We let him appeal to this
and if we don’t have self-discipline, then we can succumb to the temptations of the sin nature
every time. The spiritual life is really about two things – it’s about self-discipline and it’s about
volition.
You must have self-discipline to say no to the sin nature when it raises its head and
tries to control you.
This is what Satan will use to manipulate you. He sends out the temptations
to the sin nature. The sin nature begins to make you aware of it. Let’s be honest about it, Satan is
not omnipresent. He can only be in one place at one time. He’s a created being. God is
omnipresent so God is in Alabama where I’m located and He is where you’re located in
California, Texas, Wyoming, Arizona or wherever you may be, God is there at the same time,
He’s omnipresent. When we talk about Satan tempting us, let’s remember there are three
enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil. The flesh is the sin nature and to be quite honest,
most of the time we never get victory over the flesh. If you get victory over the flesh and if
you’re able to avoid the distractions of the world, then maybe Satan might pay some attention to
you but why would he even pay attention to you if you’re so busy assassinating yourself that he
doesn’t have to worry about it. The bottom line is you have the ability to trash your spiritual life
before you ever finish the race. This is what Paul was concerned about, believers in Corinth
trashing their spiritual life. I think you spell trash, T.R.A.S.H. Let me give you a little breakdown
of what I put together concerning what trash is.
How do you TRASH your spiritual life?
Well
first of all, truth.
You distort Truth.
You make the Christian spiritual life the source of legalism
and this is one way truth can be distorted, grace versus legalism. This is what many people don’t
understand. The Christian life is not a series of legalistic maneuvers that appeal to you and make
you approbate God. In other words, by saying I’m a good Christian because I don’t drink, I don’t
smoke, I don’t dance, and I don’t say bad words, I’m a good Christian. This is not what makes a
good Christian. These may be things that good Christians do but what makes a good Christian is
when you follow the protocol plan of God. A good Christian is a Christian who is consistently
filled with the Holy Spirit and a good Christian is a Christian who is growing in the grace and the
knowledge of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and is able to represent Jesus Christ. He begins to
be Christ-like.
Paul talked about this,
“No longer me but Christ in me“
(Galatians 2:20).
“
Christ in you the hope of glory”
(Colossians 1:27).
He wants people to see Christ in him and
this is what you want but legalism or ritual without reality is what religion brings and it distorts
truth. Ritual without reality is meaningless and so many people file into their local church on
Sunday morning and go through the ritual and there is no reality to it. They really don’t know
what they’re doing. They are just going, they are dressing up, they are faithful to go, they are
faithful to give their money, they are faithful to sing in the choir, they are faithful to do whatever
the pastor needs, but they are not growing and they know it. They are settled into the ritual never
thinking about the reality of it. This is what the writer of Hebrews talked about. He said, “I’d like
to tell you a lot of things but you’re not capable of handling it right now because you are just like
a baby that needs a bottle. If I tried to give you a steak, you would choke on it” (Hebrews
5:11-14). I’ve been guilty of this many times myself speaking to organized religion and other
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places where I give too much information and this can choke people. The Christian spiritual life
is a supernatural life. It requires a supernatural power to live it.
The spiritual life requires the
power of God the Holy Spirit and it requires the Word of God, the Bible, which is alive and
powerful. You cannot live the Christian life without the combination of these two giving you
a balance in your soul.
It is nothing about giving up something for God. If you think for one
minute that you’re going to approbate God by giving up something, you have got another thing
coming. Isaiah 55:8 says that,
“My ways are much higher than your ways.”
God says, “I don’t
think like you think.” We think in terms of all of this emotional thing and giving up stuff. This is
not the way God operates. When God wants to look at you, He doesn’t look at what you give up.
He looks at what you’re thinking because you are a product of what you think. If you think
giving up some sin is going to get you closer to God, it is not going to happen this way. What’s
going to get you closer to God is if you do what He says to do,
“Study to show thyself approved
unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth”
(2
Timothy 2:15). Ephesians 5:18 says,
“Be filled with the Spirit.”
This is what’s going to get you
closer to God, obeying the mandates of the Bible, not giving up something that you think is
wrong or might not be wrong. It depends on whether or not it’s even in the Bible.
A lot of people
assign a lot of sins to things that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible.
When truth gets distorted,
we begin to trash our spiritual life. Another thing, R, Rebound is minimized.
Rebound is
problem-solving device #1. This is how we recover fellowship with God when we sin, remember
this. 1 John 1:9 is our key verse for rebound. It says,
“If we confess our sin, He is faithful and
just to forgive us and purify us from all wrongdoing.”
When we minimize rebound, then we don’t
have any victory over sin. We don’t recover from sin. Victory over sin and recovery from sin
requires the filling of the Holy Spirit and spiritual growth eventually, under what we call the
4C’s. This is where the pastor communicates, the Holy Spirit captures, your mind comprehends,
and you comply, the 4Cs. The Holy Spirit communicates information through the pastor. The
Holy Spirit captures the information. He puts it into your mind so that you can comprehend it
and then in your heart you comply with the information. If you’re not going through this, if you
minimize rebound, if you fail to confess your sin to God, you are not growing. Let me show you
how dumb this is. What if you sinned at 8:30 AM in the morning driving into work or getting the
kids off to school or whatever is going on, and you wait until 10 PM before you go to bed and
then you decide to confess your sin. What you have just done is you have spent all day out of
fellowship with God, isolated, alone, assassinating your spiritual life, quenching the Holy Spirit
and Satan got a good laugh out of it. Now it’s time to go to bed. Now you want to get back in
fellowship with God so you want to confess your sins of the day. Well don’t you think you should
have done it at 8:31 after you sinned at 8:30? What good is it going to do you to sleep under the
filling of the Holy Spirit and live under the control of your sin nature? It doesn’t make sense. So
we must have a well-maintained regiment of identifying sin and dealing with sin immediately
when it happens, not later in the day and not tomorrow. When you know you’ve sinned, you must
rebound immediately because when you sin, you do immediately grieve the Holy Spirit and
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immediately you quench His power. Immediately you are isolated and alone in front of the
enemy without the armor of God. You cannot afford to distort truth. You cannot afford to
minimize rebound. That’s the T and the R of the TRASH. Then the letter A, this stands for
authority.
You cannot afford to reject Authority.
The fall of man beginning with Adam was a
rejection of the authority of God. This is what arrogance always does.
Arrogance always rejects
authority.
This is why a teacher cannot teach an arrogant student anything because if you’re
arrogant, you’re unteachable. You can’t learn anything, You may think you’re smarter than the
teacher. You may think you’re smarter than your parents. You may think you’re smarter than your
preacher. You can’t learn anything when you’re arrogant and so you reject all sorts of authority.
You’ll reject the authority of the police officer and say they’re unfair. You’ll reject the authority
of the principal and say he’s unfair. Rejection of authority leads to self-destruction. Arrogance
always rejects and reacts to authority. The wonderful thing about the other side of the coin is
humility. Humility always accepts and responds to authority. You have a choice. If the big letter
A is standing in front of you, authority, you can react to it and reject it or you can respond to it
and accept it. It’s up to you. Acceptance or rejection of authority will begin in the home. This is
what the verse in Ephesians 6:1-2 talks about,
“Children, obey your parents. Honor your father
and your mother.”
Obey and honor are two different Greek words. Obey is a Greek word
hupotasso
and it means you are under authority, it’s like a military term. Honor is the word
timao
in the Greek New Testament and this means to revere and respect your parents. Rejection of
parental authority is where arrogance gets its root. Once it has its root, well then it can destroy
you with unhappiness and disaster and the result of no human self-esteem in your life
whatsoever.
You must orient to authority to be a stable member of society.
If you can’t handle
authority, you can’t function in society. TRASH – truth distorted, rebound minimized, authority
rejected.
The S word is Sin overlooked, where we begin to minimize sin.
This is a very
dangerous precedent in our life. One type of sin that we overlook are the mental attitude sins. If
you are in the habit of just looking at the biggies, you know like fornicating, stealing, murder,
and whatever and saying, “Well you know, I don’t really get drunk and I don’t really fornicate
and I don’t really steal, so I’m not really sinning,” but there are two other areas. There are mental
attitude sins and there are sins of the tongue. The mental attitude sins are the most deceptive sins
of all. They are not even recognized sometimes much less the verbal sins. There are more sins
than just to dance, smoke, drink, and stuff. Worry is a sin. Fear is a sin. Guilt is a sin. Hatred is a
sin. Jealousy is a sin. These are not part of the Christian life. Our Lord Jesus didn’t do any of
these things, He was sinless. So as a believer in Jesus Christ, when we grow in grace, we learn
not to worry. We learn not to be afraid. We learn not to have guilt. We learn not to have
bitterness. We learn not to be implacable. These are all mental attitude sins. When we allow
ourselves to be surrounded with mental attitude sins and don’t rebound, don’t even recognize that
they are sins, then we have minimized sin in our life. You need to recognize a sin of the tongue
when you do it, for example gossip and slander. What’s the difference? Gossip is when you
repeat the truth and slander is when you repeat the lie. We are warned in Matthew 7:1-6 to keep
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our nose out of other people’s business.
The biggest problem Christians have is sticking their
nose where it doesn’t belong, judging someone, evaluating someone’s motives, assigning blame
to someone for something that they did.
God tells you repeatedly, He’s the judge. He’ll handle
it. Keep your nose out of the business of others.
He doesn’t need your assistance, it’s a terrible
sin. Minimizing sin means you fail to recognize the sins of the tongue when they pop up. Don’t
fall for it when someone says, “Oh, by the way, what do you think about old brother So and So?”
Then off you go maligning brother So and So. All you have to do is answer any question with a
question. When someone says, “What do you think about old brother So and So,” you can
respond, “What do you think about him?” In reality they’re not interested in what you think about
him. The real bottom line is they want to tell you what they think about him. Then you will hear
some real sins come out and it’s best to leave at that time. Truth distorted, rebound minimized,
authority rejected, sin overlooked, and the last letter, H. TRASH, how do you trash your spiritual
life?
You Humanize God.
When believers impose emotions and motivations on the love of God,
they are guilty of humanizing Him. In other words, by assigning to God emotions, by saying,
“God really loved it tonight because we had a great worship service. We worshiped Him and
praised Him, I know God enjoyed it, the preacher told us that God showed up, God was here, we
could all feel God, He was here.” Listen, God is always there. He is omnipresent. Even when you
leave the church He’s still going to be there. He’s everywhere. He’s omnipresent. So if you think
that you can get emotional and that you can appeal to God by getting emotional, you’re wrong,
you’re mistaken. It doesn’t happen this way. When you impose these sorts of things on God,
emotion and motivation, you think God is going to bless you because you tithe, you think God is
going to bless you because you gave up your smoking, and you’re convinced that now that you’re
doing these things, God’s going to bless you. The only way God will ever bless you is in due
time when He’s ready, when you can handle it. You want to know why God hasn’t given you
what you want yet? Because you can’t handle it. It would destroy you. It’s called capacity for life
and the one key word for capacity is contentment. Until you get content with what God gives
you, then He can’t give you anything more because it would destroy you. Contentment is in fact
capacity for life. Contentment is one of the characteristics of humility.
When you are content,
then the time is right for God to pour out more blessings on you because they won’t distract
you and they won’t destroy you.
When you impose emotions and you try to motivate God’s
love, you humanize God and this is an attack on His essence because you ascribe to deity human
characteristics or you distort subjects such as the love of God by defining it in terms of human
love. It is not human love. It is a totally different love. Impersonal love is the love that God had
for you in John 3:16,
“God so loved the world.”
How could a holy, righteous and perfect God
love you, an imperfect, unrighteous and horrible person?
“There are none that are righteous, no
not one”
(Romans 8:28). Isaiah 6:64 says,
“All of our righteousnesses are like a filthy rag in
God’s eyes.”
How could God possibly love me? Well, there’s only one way. He loves me and He
loves you based on His character, not mine. When Jesus Christ our Lord came into this world
and surrendered Himself to the Father’s will, willingly went to the cross, died on the cross, and
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assumed my guilt and your guilt, this was impersonal love. He was loving us based on His
character, not ours. When we come to the cross and we believe in Jesus Christ and we are
brought into God’s royal family, then there’s the personal love but until that time, we have
impersonal love. Then you can turn this right around and use it with people that you don’t even
like. You can love them impersonally. You can love them based on your character, not theirs.
Once they change, once they believe in Christ, once they have a life changing situation, maybe
you might begin to love personally if things change. Most people don’t even understand what
love is. It’s not a gushy, emotional thing. It is capacity for appreciation. In a physical relationship,
love is best demonstrated as a conversation that never runs out. What kind of conversations do
you have with your God? What do you talk about with Him? Are you able to have a conversation
with Him? In regard to recovering from sin, it’s possible that some believers spurn the advice of
the Lord and they wind up under what Hebrews 12:7-10 calls the sin unto death.
“It is for
discipline that you endure and God deals with you as with a son; for what son is there whom the
Father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become
partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not really a son. Furthermore we have had
earthly fathers discipline us and we respect them. Should we not much rather be subject to the
Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He
disciplines us for our good so that we may share in His holiness.”
When God disciplines us, it’s
always for a reason. The verse says,
“Should we not respect Him and live?”
Listen to Proverbs
15:10.
“Stern discipline is for the one who forsakes the way, but he who hates reproof will die.”
Proverbs 4:13,
“Take hold of instruction and do not let it go. Guard her for she is your life,”
that’s truth. Proverbs 6:23,
“For the commandment is a lamp and the teaching is light and
reproofs for discipline are the way of living.”
Proverbs 16:7,
“The highway of the upright is is to
depart from evil, and he who watches his way preserves his life.”
In other words, there’s a way
to shorten your life and that’s to sin, get out of fellowship with God, not rebound, and not
recover.
Under discipline you can react or respond. Humility responds with rebound, arrogance
reacts with self-justification. 1 John 5:16-17,
“If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not
leading to death, he shall ask and God will give life to those who commit sin not leading to
death. There is a sin that leads to death and I do not say that he should make a request for this,
but all unrighteousness is sin and there is a sin that does not lead to death.”
If you ever want to
read about this, you can read about it in Acts 5:1-11, Ananias and Sapphira died the sin unto
death. You can read in 1 Corinthians 5:1-5 about the young man that Paul placed under the sin
unto death. There is a sin unto death and that is not where you want to be. That’s a person who
fails to rebound, who goes through warning discipline, intense discipline, and then eventually
dying discipline. He will be in heaven. He has eternal life, but he goes way too soon. I hope this
is not you. I hope you’re not on the way out already because of your arrogance and your failure
to rebound. I hope you’re listening and learning. I hope you contact me, stay in touch. Let me
know if I can help in any way. You know our material is always available to you free of charge.
Until next week, this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line.