Christian Casualties
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 601 aired on March 3, 2017
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes I would like to ask you to please give me a hearing. Stay with me, 30 minutes is all it
will be. Just a few minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and we do this
without any type of manipulation because we don’t try to manipulate people. We’re not trying to
con anyone. We’re not soliciting finances. We’re not selling memberships. It is simply a show
about giving you accurate information that I hope will verify and identify God’s plan for you. If
this is true, then you can orient and adjust to the plan should you desire to do so. My job is
always to get it accurate, not to speculate, not to give human speculation but divine revelation
from the Scripture, the Word of God, the canon of Scripture. Thank you for listening. Thank you
for all of those who write. I love hearing from you. It’s awesome when I get letters or emails. You
can always do this by the way by going to the website or you can just write us a letter. Don’t send
money. We’re not asking for money but if you would like to write in regard to what you are
learning or how the Lord is blessing you, we would love to hear it from you. I really love when
people tell me that for the first time in their life they’re beginning to grow spiritually, they’re
looking for a qualified pastor that can teach them the Bible. Sometimes people write and ask, “Is
there a pastor in my town?” I don’t always know but I can refer them to friends of mine who are
great pastors who have all of their material available on MP3 or DVD and it’s all free, they don’t
charge anything, and books all free. I know and have great confidence, great trust in these men
and we can refer you to them. Thank you for listening. Thank you for encouraging me by
sending letters and notes. It’s always great to hear from you. I want to talk to you today about
Christian casualties. Many of you have children or grandchildren or maybe a spouse that at one
time was in fact interested in God and living for the Lord. Now this seems to have gone away.
They’re casualties, they’ve gone down the My Way Highway. They failed to learn and execute
God’s plan and the Bible actually calls these sort of people, in Proverbs 1:1-5, stupid. They’re
naïve, they’ve walked away from the great gift God gives on direction to live your life and how
to have a wonderful life. The Bible is clear about this, even beginning as a child. These things are
written, Ephesians 6:1-3 is clear about it,
“Children, obey your parents. Honor your father and
mother so you can have a long wonderful life.”
Yet, by rebelling against authority in the home
and rebelling against authority in life, people shorten their lives every day. They don’t have to if
they would just listen to the plan of God but some people are not going to do this.
Some people
are so arrogant that they’re going to allow their sin nature, their sin infused human nature,
to control them.
Remember we got this sin nature from Adam. Romans 5:12 says,
“For by one
man sin came into the world, and death by sin and now death has passed on all for all have
sinned.” “The wages of sin is death”
(Romans 6:23). We are born spiritually dead the minute
Adam’s original sin is imputed to us. Thus John 3:7 says we have to be born again. If we want to
have fellowship with God, the human spirit that’s dead by associating with Adam’s original sin
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has to be born again. This occurs in John 3:16 where it clearly says,
“God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have
everlasting life.”
Being born again is receiving Christ as your Savior and this is why 2
Corinthians 5:21 says,
“He that knew no sin was made sin for us so that we could be made the
righteousness of God through Him.”
Having a new life in Christ is an amazing thing.
It
happened to me when I was 22 years old. I finally heard the good news. I finally heard that I
could begin my life again. I finally heard that Jesus Christ had paid for my sin and I could have
eternal life with Him. Not that I went around looking for this, I never really paid much attention
to God but when I heard it that night, it made clear sense. That night God the Holy Spirit pulled
back the window shades of my soul and let me see myself as I really was. I knew I was a sinner. I
knew I would go to hell if I died. I didn’t want to, I wanted to have eternal life with God. I never
was angry at God. I just always ignored God. That’s the night my life changed. We all sin. We all
fail. I compare it to a football game. No one is perfect. Everybody gets blocked, knocked down,
fumbles the ball, whatever but you recover. You get up and you get back in the game.
We have
three enemies that attempt to defeat us: the world, the flesh, and the devil.
These three
enemies are always out to get us. So we have to remember God’s plan in our life.
If we want
to talk about a Christian casualty, let’s talk about what happens when a person is captured by
their own arrogance and gets into what I call perpetual carnality. Remember this, let’s get this
straight. If you are in fellowship with God, you are spiritual. If you are out of fellowship with
God, you are carnal. Sin gets you out of fellowship with God. If you rebound, problem-solving
device #1, and confess your sin to God, then you get back in fellowship or back into a spiritual
relationship with God. Spirituality is not maturity. Billy Graham cannot be any more spiritual
than you or me but he may be more mature. Same thing for your pastor.
Spirituality is based on
the filling of the Holy Spirit and maturity is based on the content and the execution of the
Word of God in your life.
Carnality can be temporary, for an hour, it can be perpetual where
you keep going back and back and back, or it can be permanent where you get out of fellowship
with God and you just stay there. You don’t recover. Any believer who fails to follow orders and
does not refrain from letting the sin nature control his life is going to be in serious trouble with
God. What are some of the orders? Let me give them to you. I learned this from a friend of mine
who has a military background, the commander’s intent, listen to God’s intent. 1 Peter 5:8,
“Be
sober, be vigilant, because Satan seeks to neutralize and destroy you.”
In 2 Corinthians 2:11 is
another command in regard to Satan.
“Do not let the devil get an advantage over you.”
Then in
Ephesians 4:27, another command,
“Do not give place to the devil.”
We have three commands I
can identify right there to follow orders. Now, we’re talking about the devil. He’s not
omnipresent. He’s not like God. God is in Memphis and in Atlanta at the same time, Satan is not.
He’s a created being and can only be one place at one time. We’re talking about Satan, we’re
talking about his plan, his logic and the way that he seeks to divert Christians by distracting them
and discouraging them. As far as Lucifer himself messing around with you or me, since he can
only be in one place at one time, I’m sure he has much bigger targets to work on. We know there
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are fallen angels and they are called demons. We know that they can tempt us, test us, and try us
but we know 1 John 4:4 says,
“Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.”
We are
to be smart in regard to Satan’s plan. This is why Paul told us to
“Put on the armor of God so we
can stand against the strategy of the devil”
(Ephesians 6:11). If we arm ourselves with God’s
plan, if we learn God’s Word, we do not have to wind up a Christian casualty.
Many
Christian casualties are those people who do not learn God’s Word. They don’t learn the problem-
solving devices. They don’t learn to think under the terms of divine viewpoint. They get full of
self-pity. They get full of arrogance and then self-destruct and go off down the My Way
Highway. In regard to the lure of the world there are some other orders here. For example in 1
Corinthians 1:20,
“The wisdom of this world is foolishness,”
don’t buy into it. In Romans 12:2,
“Don’t be conformed to this world,”
don’t fall into this trap. In 1 John 2:15,
“Do not love the
world.”
In regard to your flesh, the Bible is clear about this, here’s the commander’s intent.
Galatians 5:17,
“The flesh wars against the Spirit, the Spirit wars against the flesh.”
In Romans
13:14,
“Make no provision for the flesh.”
In Mark 7:20,
“That which comes out of the heart of
man will defile him.”
In 1 Timothy 2:22,
“Flee youthful lust.”
In 1 Peter 2:11,
“Abstain from
fleshly lust.”
We have the world, we have the flesh, and we have the devil. Most of us don’t
get past the lure of the world or the temptations of the flesh. This is normally what gets
Christians, nails them, gets them out of fellowship, and gets them into post-salvation sins.
See, once a Christian, maybe our children or our friends, when they move into perpetual
carnality, which means they’re constantly getting out of fellowship, they begin a perilous slide
down the slope of reversionism. Maybe this is a word you haven’t heard me use before. This may
explain what happened to someone you love or maybe your son or daughter. Maybe at one time
they had a close relationship with the Lord but that’s gone away, no more spiritual interest. This
is called reversionism. It’s when we turn the other way and then once we go the other way, once
we make this u-turn, we’re still a child of God but we can’t be identified as such. No one can
really tell it because they can’t distinguish the believer out of fellowship with God in
reversionism from the unbeliever who’s never known God. Reversionism is simply the act of
reverting back to the former state, going back to your former habits, going back to your former
beliefs and the practice of post-salvation sins permanently or perpetually. It’s a believer like you
or me who reverses his priorities, has the wrong affections, has the wrong attitude. This believer
goes down the My Way Highway. Often this reversionism is fueled by a change in status in life
such as falling in love or getting married, something that changes priorities and beliefs to
appease the one that you love, the one you’re occupied with. Nothing can distract a believer who
is growing any faster than a hot love affair. You get into a hot love affair and God is forgotten.
The objective of your affection becomes the newfound lover and this person doesn’t believe like
you believe or doesn’t love God like you love God. I have a good close friend who just recently
married and I’m proud to say that the person he married, the lady that he married, he was able to
introduce her to having a growing relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ through consistent
study of God’s Word and they do this together. Under the ministry of their pastor they study
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together daily and what a wonderful life to be a corporate witness for Jesus Christ in the devil’s
world. If you fall in love with someone that doesn’t believe like you, someone who doesn’t care
for the Word of God like you, the end result will be distraction. Nothing can distract a believer
like this. When your sin nature gets so fired up with lust that you fail to neutralize the activities
of the sin nature, you don’t rebound, you don’t confess your sin, then you get into what I call a
frantic search for happiness. You’re trying to find happiness in all the wrong places. You’re
thinking that love will make you happy, that sex will make you happy, that marriage will make
you happy. It is not true.
Unhappy people take their unhappiness with them wherever they
go.
Your spiritual life begins to be totally ignored. You may still go to church sometimes but it
just becomes ritual with no reality to it. Your sin nature gets so fired up that you fail to neutralize
the activities of your sin nature. This reversionism that I’m talking about is related to failures in
the Christian life which result in failure to execute the protocol plan of God. Down, down, down
you go into Christian degeneracy and let me make this clear. I’m not just talking about immoral
degeneracy. There’s also a moral degenerate. The moral degenerate is the self-righteous, religious
man who will kill you in the name of God and think he’s doing God a favor. The immoral person
is the lustful person. If you want to find him, go to the bar, go to the honky-tonk, there he is. He’s
chasing immorality but the moral self-righteous one such as the Pharisees, the scribes, the
Sadducees that our Lord had to deal with, they were the killers. When we don’t rebound our
personal sins, we begin to sink into subnormal categories of personal sin. There is no spiritual
growth. We become completely negative to any sort of Bible teaching and we stall out. We get
carnal. We get reversionistic and down we go. We’re still a child of God. We’re still saved. We’re
still going to heaven but I’m telling you, your time on earth could be shortened.
Reversionism is
a process, it’s not one single act. It’s the process of reverting back to your old habits and
getting into the temptations of the sin nature and yielding to these temptations.
If you fail to
rebound sin, but you in fact justify your sin, then you will tell yourself it’s okay to follow these
sinful patterns in your life. When you do this you set up a perpetual carnality because you’re
going to allow your sin nature to always dominate your thinking. This will short-out the protocol
plan of God in your life and there will be no spiritual growth. If your sin nature is unchecked by
rebound, then you will sink into subnormal categories of personal sin. This can include a lot of
different things. Since there’s no spiritual growth in your life, there’s no ability for you to think
clearly. All you’re doing is living by human viewpoint and arrogance sets in. Self-justification
sets in, self-deception sets in, and you begin to be totally self-absorbed with whatever it is you’re
pursuing. This is why reversionism demonstrates distraction from the spiritual life and there has
to be correction. There has to be discipline, This distraction could be apathy or indifference,
wrong priorities. You can react to a lot of different things. When you react and do not rebound,
then you force the hand of God because Hebrews 12:6 says,
“Those that He loves, He will
discipline.”
Without the absolute truth of the Word of God in your soul there is no relation
to reality. If you don’t have truth in your soul, if you’re not thinking divine viewpoint, you
are irrational and you will live under the illusion of the mirror of arrogance.
Until you begin
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to think clearly, until you begin to see yourself as you really are, there can be no recovery from
sin, only a slow slide down a slippery slope of reversionisim, following the My Way Highway
until the road eventually runs out. You know this type of person, they are always going to put
wrong priorities as the key to happiness. Things like pleasure or loved ones or social life or the
details of life, they are all very important. They think these are the keys to fulfillment in life.
They can’t handle authority, they will reject the legitimate authority. They become increasingly
hypersensitive. They lose any sense of objectivity and they will eventually blame others for their
misery. As a result of this arrested spiritual development in their life, they are stalled out
spiritually. They become vulnerable to demon influence. I didn’t say demon possession, I said
demon influence, the doctrine of demons as 1 Timothy 4:1 says. Satan has a doctrine of demons.
The doctrine of demons can be found in organized religion, this is where it is. Their thinking
becomes clouded by the smokescreen that Satan throws up and they begin to believe all sorts of
garbage, anything to fill the void in their empty life because there’s a spiritual vacuum. It’s
interesting to watch Christians get into certain things, get into politics, get into whatever they get
into and they can spend a lot of energy, a lot of time, and a lot of money doing something that
they think God wants them to do. This inevitably is a distraction. It can be sort of jumping into
things, not taking your time to think it through, not being sure. You see, you can convince
yourself about anything and you can convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing but in the
long run, when you take a step back and look at it you go, “I wasted so much time trying to do
this.” What you thought was right, what you figured was right, but in reality it didn’t make any
difference at all.
If you want to spend time doing something, lift up Jesus Christ, the Son of
God. He can change the hearts and lives of people.
As long as people have a sin nature,
you’re not going to change anybody.
I don’t care what political system you put them under. I
don’t care what type of government you put them under, they still have the sin nature. Until they
receive Christ as Savior and learn how to let the Holy Spirit control their life, you’re not going to
change their actions. There’s always going to be jealousy, hostility, implacability, vindictiveness,
and you can try all you want to fix it. You won’t fix it. Only God’s Word can fix it when we as
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.”
When this happens, then you can begin to see what God has for you. Then your
life can be fulfilled. But as long as you reject the legitimate authority, the Word of God, and
become increasingly hypersensitive, lose your objectivity, you’re always going to blame other
people for your misery. You’re always going to blame someone else. You’re always going to point
a finger at someone else and like a friend told me one time, when you point a finger at someone
else, there are three fingers pointing back at you. Try it. Just make a fist and point a finger and
look at the three pointed right back at you. When you arrest your spiritual growth, when you stall
out spiritually, you become vulnerable to demon influence, you get clouded by the smokescreen,
you accept false doctrine as a result of rejecting the true doctrine. This is all seen, Paul talks
about this to Timothy, in 1 Timothy 4:1.
“But the Spirit says that in the latter periods of time
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[this is between the First and the Second Advent of Christ]
some believers will become apostate
from doctrine, paying attention to deceitful spirits and concentrating on doctrines of demons.”
This rejection of truth and this cosmic involvement with the satanic doctrine will lead you into a
frantic search for happiness where 2 Timothy 3:4 says,
“They are lovers of pleasure rather than
lovers of God.”
Success, money, friends, sex, material things, they can all be an empty life.
These are the ways you try to fill up your life. You will spend money you don’t have to buy
things you don’t need to impress people that you don’t even like, it’s pitiful. If you’re not happy
with what you have now, you’re not going to be happy or content with what you might have in
the future because unhappy people, as I said earlier, take their unhappiness with them wherever
they go.
If you don’t have the capacity to love and enjoy life now, then you don’t have any
contentment in your life. Without contentment, there is no capacity because your happiness
doesn’t have anything to do with people or circumstances.
It is not what you have or you
don’t have. It’s what Luke 11:28 says,
“Happiness belongs to those people who hear My Father’s
Word and who keep it.”
The pastor’s job is to instruct us. The Holy Spirit’s job is to make it clear.
We are to assimilate the information and apply the information.
Hearing and keeping the Word
of God is the key to happiness in your life.
This is why Hebrews 13:5 says,
“Let your lifestyle
be free from the love of money, be content with what you have, for He Himself has said, ‘I will
never leave you. I will never forsake you.’”
The reversionist may walk away from God but God
will just love him from behind. It’s never too late to confess your sin. It’s never too late to get
back in fellowship but it’s our own arrogance that keeps us from doing this. We don’t like to
admit we are wrong. We don’t like to admit we fail, but until we do this, we cannot grow up
spiritually and we cannot untangle ourselves from the mess that we created by getting involved
in the affairs of the world. We are called to a different life. It’s a unique life. It’s a spiritual life.
It’s a supernatural life and it’s a life that Satan will oppose with all that he has. I hope you’re
listening. I hope you’re paying attention and I hope you will continue to listen. If you have any
questions, feel free to contact me through the website. Until next Sunday thank you for listening
to The FLOT Line