Diversion After Conversion – Part 2
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 595 aired on January 22, 2017
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m Rick Hughes the host. Every Sunday
morning you hear us on this radio station and I tell you please stay tuned for 30 minutes of
motivation, inspiration, education, always done without manipulation. This means we don’t play
games, we don’t con people. We’re not soliciting money. We’re not trying to get you to join up,
fess up, give up, nothing like this. We are just trying to help you orient and adjust to the plan of
God, trying to verify it, identify it so you can see and understand it. Hopefully then you can flip
the switch and use your volition to orient and adjust to this plan. You can find the phenomenal
life that awaits you in Christ Jesus. Thank you for listening. Remember The FLOT Line is all
about establishing a main line of resistance in your soul built around 10 unique problem-solving
devices that stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside sources of
stress. We know that adversity is inevitable but stress is always optional because adversity is
what circumstances do to us but stress is in fact what we do to ourselves. The Christian life is the
most unique life in the world and it is a life free of stress. It’s a life where you never have to
worry, you never have to be afraid, you never have to live in guilt, you never have to have
bitterness or antagonism. It’s a wonderful way to live and it’s the life Christ lived. Our Lord lived
it. He demonstrated it. He was the prototype. He was the first “Christian.” He lived the life that
He passed on to the disciples and they taught us about it and now we can live this life as well. On
our last radio show we started talking about diversion after conversion.
Diversion is you turning
aside from your course, diverting your mind from focusing on your spiritual life.
It’s you
taking a detour from your spiritual direction, which should be growing to spiritual maturity, and
going down the My Way Highway. Diversion is something that distracts you from the more
important issues in your life. We talked about how wealth could be a distraction. Love could be a
distraction. Promotion, success, achievement, all of these things can distract you. We’re looking
at Paul writing in Philippians 1:20 where he said,
“According to my earnest expectation and my
hope that in nothing shall I be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always and so now also,
Christ shall be magnified in my body whether it be by life or by death.”
We’re dissecting this
verse for you, to break it down to see how Paul deals with diversion. We started off with looking
at the words,
“My earnest expectation.”
We saw the Greek word
apokaradokia
is translated
“earnest expectation.”
It means intense anticipation. Paul had a personal sense of destiny. A
personal sense of destiny is problem-solving device #6 on the FLOT line of your soul. If you
have our book
Christian Problem Solving
you can read about it. We’ve talked about it many
times and just to review a little bit, a personal sense of destiny requires you to understand the
plan of God and how to utilize God’s provisions for you. I said to you last week that you would
never know God’s plan for your life unless you learn some theology. Christian faith without basic
theology is usually just an exercise in emotionalism and we’re not talking about being emotional.
Emotions are fine. I enjoy a lot of things such as movies, fishing and scenery. I enjoy emotion,
595-Diversion-After-Conversion-p2-transcript.pdf
but emotions don’t rule my life and no Christian should let emotions rule his life. Emotions are
the bona fide appreciator of the soul, but not the dictator. You must live based on what you think,
not what you feel, and emotions are based on feelings. A personal sense of destiny that Paul
anticipates is not an emotional thing. It’s a provision from God that he knows is real. If you have
this provision in your soul, if you understand your personal sense of destiny, then you will
remember that Christ came into this world and had a personal sense of destiny. He knew what
His destiny was from the day that He came and that was to go to the cross and be the
substitutionary death for our sins. In Matthew 16:21 He told the disciples,
“From that time on
Jesus began to teach His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things at the
hands of the elders, the chief priests, and the experts in the law and be killed and on the third day
be raised.”
I would call this a personal sense of destiny. He knew what was going to happen in
His life. He told the disciples what was going to happen in His life. As believers we have the
option to fulfill God’s plan for our lives.
If we use the spiritual skills that He provides, we can
find our personal sense of destiny.
We can have our earnest expectation, the one that Paul
spoke of in this passage. In Matthew 22:5 Jesus gave an illustration of a king that threw a party
but this was really about Him, about His Father, and how the Jews had rejected Him. In this
illustration He said these words,
“They paid no attention and they went their way, one to his own
farm and another to his own business,”
ignoring the invitation of the king to come into the
family, ignoring the invitation of the king to come to the party. Many people ignore the invitation
that God gives through His Son Jesus Christ. Paul said,
“According to my earnest expectation.”
Listen, if you love God your personal love for God motivates you to obey God. 1 John 5:3 says,
“This is the love of God, that we keep His mandates and they are not a hard thing to do”
[they
are not burdensome]. Jesus told us in Matthew 11:30,
“My mandates are easy and My burden is
light.”
His destiny for me and His destiny for you is so much greater than anything that we could
ever ask for, anything we can anticipate or even imagine. We have invisible assets. They were
given to us to fulfill the plan of God in our life. If we don’t learn what they are, if we don’t utilize
them, then we are guaranteed that we will never live our life to our full potential. The worst thing
that could ever happen to you is you come to your grave frustrated over the failed opportunities
in your life. On occasion we wish for hardships to be removed so our lives would be easier but
last week I mentioned where Paul talked about this in 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 and said he had a
thorn in his flesh.
“And I asked the Lord to take it away three times and every time the Lord said,
’No, I will not’ and He said,
‘
My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in
your weaknesses.”
Thus Paul said,
“Most gladly then I will glory in my afflictions so that God’s
power will rest on me.”
Back to Philippians 1:20,
“According to my earnest expectation and my
hope that in nothing shall I be ashamed.”
The word
elpis
is not the word we use for hope. It’s a
different word meaning confident expectations.
When you have a personal sense of destiny
you have confident expectations and these morph into absolute expectations about your
eternal destiny, absolute expectations about your spiritual destiny. The unbeliever
unfortunately has no hope.
“There is no hope without God in the world”
(Ephesians 2:12).
595-Diversion-After-Conversion-p2-transcript.pdf
Paul said
“In nothing shall I be ashamed.”
He didn’t want to be ashamed. He didn’t want to be
disfigured or dishonored,
aischuno
is the Greek word. This is a shame that causes regret. We can
have shame in our life. There is a shame from something we did where guilt overwhelms us.
Some people will have shame at the appearance of Christ, 1 John 2:28,
“And now little children,
abide in Him that when He shall appear, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before
Him at His coming.”
If there’s any one thing you don’t want to hear, you don’t want to hear the
Lord say, “Have a seat. I’ll get to you in a few thousand years.” There are people that will be in
heaven and there are people that will have eternal life but they will never hear
“Well done My
good and faithful servant”
(Matthew 25:21). They got diverted. The diversion was too great after
their conversion. They never learned God’s protocol plan. They never fulfilled their personal
sense of destiny. They never had any absolute expectations about what their life should be about
and they were like a dog chasing his tail in circles. Paul said,
“In nothing do I want to be
ashamed, but with all boldness, as always and so now also, Christ shall be magnified in my body
whether it be by my life or by my death.”
Parresia
is the Greek word for
“with all boldness”
and
it means openly confident, fearless, outspoken. Listen, this is not judging people. Judging people
is a sin but standing bold with the truth of the Scripture is not a sin, it’s an awesome thing. In
Matthew 7:1-5 we find the triple compound discipline that a believer gets into when he judges
another person. It’s a very interesting passage, maybe you should read it. Write it down and read
it later.
“Judge not lest you be judged. For with what judgment you judge it will be measured
back to you again.”
Basically what the passage is saying is if you stick your nose in someone
else’s business you’re going to get discipline for this. Even if they did something wrong and you
evaluate them and judge them and don’t let the Lord handle it, you step in and you play God,
then their discipline will be taken off of them and given to you. If you judge you’re going to have
their discipline and your discipline and self-induced misery and this is triple compound suffering.
The worst thing any believer can do is to stick their nose in the life of another believer and judge
them. Someone goes through a divorce, someone goes through some hardship and you take sides
and you begin to claim the other person was guilty or this person is guilty and “I know what
went on,” you don’t have a clue. You’re not qualified to judge anybody. Only the Lord knows so
stay out of other people’s business. You can be bold, yes, Paul spoke openly of Jesus Christ in
every venue that he visited. In the synagogues he spoke boldly about Christ. Listen to Acts 9:20,
“And immediately after his conversion he preached Christ in the synagogues that He, Jesus, is
the Son of God.”
Paul carried the message of faith alone to the Gentiles. In Acts 13:46,
“Then
Paul and Barnabas grew bold and they said to the Jews who opposed his message, ‘It was
necessary that the Word of God should first have been spoken to you, but seeing that you put it
from you, and you judge yourself unworthy of eternal life, lo we turn to the Gentiles.’”
This is
exactly what happened. His boldness was not without cost.
Any time you boldly stand upon the
Word of God there is a cost to be paid.
Our Lord told the disciples they would have to pick up
their cross and follow Him (Matthew 16:24) indicating that as He was tortured and killed, they
probably were going to face the same thing. In fact they were all martyred except John who was
595-Diversion-After-Conversion-p2-transcript.pdf
exiled to the Isle of Patmos. Paul had his difficulties, Acts 14:19-20,
“And there came there
certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium who persuaded the people and had Paul stoned and drew
him out of the city, supposing that he was dead. Nevertheless as the disciples stood around him,
he rose up, and came back into the city and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.”
Yes, they tried to stone him and they tried to kill him. In Acts 16:16 he was thrown into prison in
Thyatira because he healed a demon-possessed fortuneteller and the owners of the woman had
him arrested and beat him with whips before they threw him into prison because he bankrupted
their business. He healed their fortuneteller and no longer could she use demons to call up the
future. Do you think if these things happened to you, you were thrown into prison, beat with a
whip, stoned, do you think you would be a little more cautious about talking and lifting up Christ
if these things happened to you? Paul wasn’t, he wasn’t concerned about it. He went right on and
said,
“In all things so now also Christ should be magnified in my body.”
Magnified,
megaluno
is
the Greek word and it means to be enlarged. What is the process for magnifying Jesus Christ in
your body? If I said to you, “I want you to magnify Christ in your body,” how would you do
this? This is a nice sounding cliché right? Here is the process.
In Philippians 1:21 Paul said,
“For me to live is Christ.”
You can live your life for yourself or you can live your life for
Him.
Paul had determined that he would live his life for Christ. You must make this decision.
Either you’re going to live for the Lord Jesus Christ or you’re going to live for yourself. This
doesn’t mean you can’t have time alone to do what you want to do. It just means that you have to
set your priorities and your priorities always have to be Jesus Christ first. We are told in
Philippians 2:5 that we are to have the mind that He had. It says,
“Let this mind be in you which
was also in Christ Jesus.”
This is one of the ways that you magnify Christ in your body, you
begin to think like He thought. He had a humility profile. He was humble and He was obedient.
These are two things you must have if you’re going to magnify Christ in your body. You must
have humility, not arrogance, and you must have obedience, not disobedience to magnify Jesus
Christ. You must be humble enough to accept God’s plan and obedient enough to obey it.
Arrogance always justifies why it’s right and everyone else is wrong. Arrogance always deludes
itself and has an unrealistic self image. This was not the way our Lord lived. He knew exactly
what His destiny was. He knew who He was and He was obedient to the Father’s plan. Do you
remember that night in the Garden of Gethsemane when He said,
“Let this cup pass from Me,
nevertheless, not My will but Thy will be done”
(Matthew 26:39)? This is the same prayer you
have to pray, “Not my will Father but Thy will. What have You destined me to do? What is my
destiny?” In Philippians 3:8 Paul said,
“I count all things but loss for the excellency of the
knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”
Whatever he had done in the past was nothing. Whatever
accomplishment he had in the past was nothing. We call it the
skubala
metaphor. “They were all
dung,” he said. The only thing that was important is knowing Christ Jesus is Lord, the excellency
of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. There are two words for knowledge in the Bible,
gnosis
is one
of the Greek words we use and the other is
epignosis. Epi
is a preposition which means full. So
one word
gnosis
is knowledge and the other word
epignosis
is full knowledge.
The full
595-Diversion-After-Conversion-p2-transcript.pdf
knowledge of Jesus Christ is you having obedience and humility to learn His plan, to
submit to His plan, and to allow Him to live His life through you. In other words, you
replicate Jesus Christ and re-present Him to your community.
There is only one way you can
do this and I’ll explain. In Philippians 3:14 Paul said,
“I keep pressing toward the mark for the
prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
This is a continual thing your whole life. Your
whole life you have to have one priority. If you want to magnify Jesus Christ in your body there
can only be one priority. Matthew 6:33 says,
“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and then He’ll provide anything you need.”
This is your priority, to think like
He thought under humility and obedience.
The only way you can do this is, Peter nails it in 2
Peter 3:18,
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
The
Christian life must be growth. You have to grow. You start off as a baby Christian and then you
become a student without any type of portfolio and then eventually a mature believer. You must
grow to maturity and the only way you can grow spiritually is to
“Grow in the grace and in the
knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
In other words, you’re acquiring more and
more knowledge and utilizing the grace assets that He provided for you. How do you get this
knowledge? “Grow in knowledge” how do you get it? 2 Timothy 2:15 says,
“Study to show
yourself approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the
Word of truth.”
You must learn. Matthew 11:29-30,
“Take My yoke and learn of Me. I am meek
and lowly in heart. You will find rest for your soul because My yoke is easy and My burden is
light.”
Learn, study, grow. Unless you are consistent in studying God’s Word and applying
God’s Word, you are not growing and you are not replicating Christ.
You’re not re-
presenting Christ. I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re living under the emotional thing of the
‘My Way Highway down the road for Jesus.’ This is not the Christian life. It’s a lot more than
this. It is actually Christ in you. It’s the Mystery Doctrine of the Church. No one ever thought of
this before.
“Christ in you the hope of glory”
(Colossians 1:27).
He’s not in the tabernacle. He’s
not the pillar of fire or the cloud, He’s in you. Your body is the tabernacle according to 1
Corinthians 6:19. He lives in you and He wants to be magnified through you. Therefore in
Ephesians 5:18 you are told to
“Be filled with the Spirit.”
The only way that you can do this is to
allow the Holy Spirit to shape and form your soul. Jesus said “I’m going to go away and I’m
going to send My Spirit. He will be your mentor, your tutor, and He will lead you and guide you
into all truth” (John 16:13). He’ll tell you what to say. He’ll give you the right words at the right
time but you have to allow God the Holy Spirit to fill you and control you and this is problem-
solving device #1. Rebound restores the filling of the Holy Spirit when we sin. When we sin and
when we break fellowship with God, we must rebound. 1 John 1:9,
“If we confess our sin, He is
f
ai
t
hf
ul
and
j
us
t
t
o
f
or
gi
v
e
us
and
pur
i
f
y
us
f
r
om
al
l
of
our
wr
ongdoi
ng.”
Rebound doesn’t mean
we’ll never sin again. It means we are cleansed from our sin. We, in essence, as in John 13:5-20,
have our feet washed. Jesus washes our feet from the defilement of sin when we go and confess
our sin. It’s this simple. We must be filled with the Spirit. In Galatians 4:19,
“My little children of
whom I travail in birth again, until Christ be formed in you.”
Christ must be formed in you.
595-Diversion-After-Conversion-p2-transcript.pdf
“So now also Christ should be magnified in my body whether it be by life or by death.”
You have
a body. You have a soul. You have a spirit. The body is what others can see. The body is what
people can meet and talk with and observe. Christ being formed in my body is not a holier than
thou attitude where you walk around like the Pharisees did in self-righteousness acting all holy.
People are such phonies. This attitude that I am talking about is a grace attitude. It’s an attitude of
patience. It’s an attitude of nonjudgmental forgiveness and caring. It’s an attitude of comforting,
sharing, giving, and being a person who understands impersonal as well as personal love. This
sort of person causes other people to wonder what makes you different.
When you become a
light in the darkness of this world, people are attracted to you. Paul said,
“Whether it’s by
life or by death
[the two phases we live]
for me to live is Christ and to die is
profit”
(Philippians 1:21).
The Greek word for profit is
kerdos
meaning gain an advantage. It’s
an advantage to die, to go to heaven.
“No more tears, no more sorrow, no more pain. The old
things are passed away”
(Revelation 21:4). You cannot believe what God the Father has for you
there. This is to your advantage. You don’t realize it now because we are human. We live in a
cesspool. It’s the devil’s world. It’s defiled with sin. We have defilement in our own body because
we are identified with Adam and we have Adam’s original sin, the sin nature. This is a battle in
itself. The Bible says we war against the flesh, the devil, and the world. We’re living in the
angelic conflict. Paul said,
“I want nothing more than to magnify Christ in my body.”
This is
what I want for you after your conversion, not to be diverted, not to be distracted, but to re-
present Jesus Christ and magnify Him through your body whether by life or by death. I sure hope
you’re listening and I sure hope it’s making sense to you. Until next week this is your host Rick
Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line