SPEAKER 02 : 0:08

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.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:23

Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, I’d like to ask you to stay tuned. Stay with me. A few minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education. And if you listened before, you know we do it without any manipulation. No solicitation. Just 30 minutes of education. That’s all. My job is to verify and identify the plan of God for your life. Your job, if you decide to accept it, is orient and adjust to the plan. But the plan always starts with the good news that Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, has redeemed you and me out of our slave market of sin. Our debt to God has been paid, and we are free now from the penalty of death, and we’re free from the power of sin in our life. By receiving Jesus Christ as our Savior, we, in effect, accept the offering Christ made on our behalf. And that offering was a free gift from God, compliments of God’s grace. The Bible says in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, for by grace are you saved through faith. It’s a gift of God and not of works, lest any man would brag about it. No one can brag about it because Titus 3, 5 says, not by works of righteousness, which we did, But according to his mercy, he saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which he shed on us abundantly through Christ our Lord. So that’s us. That’s you. That’s me. Having received Christ as Savior. Last week, we talked about eternal security, how you could know for sure that you’re saved, how nobody’s going to take it away from you. We went through a lot of different verses and a lot of different things and It was great to get some correspondence from listeners that said thank you, that it cleared up a question they had. But let me remind you that you’re not going to lose the free gift that God gave you. If you could lose it, then you had to do something to earn it. If you had to do something to earn it, it’s not free. Look at it this way, if you gotta do something to keep it, then you had to do something to get it. It’s a free gift from God. When you receive Christ as your Savior, When you put your faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ, his death, burial, and his resurrection, then you are planted into God’s royal family. And he’s not going to kick you out. He’s not going to disown you. And Jesus said that my Father is greater than all, and no man can pluck you out of my Father’s hand. Paul wrote and said, even if we believe not, yet God still abides faithful for he cannot deny himself. But there is something that I want to bring to your attention. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you’ve accepted him as your savior, then you may be experiencing some trying times in your life and it may not be for what you think it is. It’s something in the Bible called divine discipline. And it’s always good to understand this. It’s always good to know this. Because sometimes the difficulties and the pain that we experience, the suffering we go through, is God putting discipline into our lives. Let me give you a definition of divine discipline. Divine discipline is the sum total of God’s punitive action taken by his justice. And he always does it in grace because he loves you. He does it to correct us, sometimes to punish us, to encourage us, to train us, to motivate us to live his plan. When we get out of fellowship, some people call it backsliding. I call it going into reversionism. In other words, you revert and go backwards. But when you get out of fellowship through sin, then we bring suffering into our own lives. And if we don’t use the most common problem-solving device of rebound, problem-solving device number one, if we continue in our state of carnality, reversionism as we call it, then we’re going to suffer. We’re going to go under divine discipline. All this is taught in Hebrews 12. And I want you to think about this for a minute in regards to your own life and things you may be going through. In Hebrews 12, the Bible clearly says, And beginning in verse 5, Have you forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto sons? My son, the writer of Hebrews said, Despise thou not the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked of him. For whom the Lord loves, he chastens. and he scourges every son whom he receives if you endure chastening god deals with you as with his sons for what son is he whom the father does not chasten but if you are without discipline or chastisement of which all are partakers then you are a bastard and that’s in the bible by the way so don’t faint you are a bastard and not a son Furthermore, we’ve had fathers of our flesh who corrected us and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the father of spirits and live? This is teaching divine discipline. Divine discipline always comes in three stages. Stage one of divine discipline is called the warning stage. This is where God will warn you that you’re out of line and he will seek to get your attention. It might not be the painful stage. But it’s the warning stage. Stage two is the painful stage. That’s the intense stage. And this is when the father has to take you out behind the woodshed to get your attention. And that’s not fun. And stage three is the dying stage. And this is called the son of the death. where the believer who is incorrigible and incorrectible, God can and does have the option to remove him and bring him on to heaven before he screws up the life of everybody else he’s in contact with. So when we get out of fellowship through sin, then we bring suffering on ourself if we don’t rebound and recover from the sin. And I want you to make a note that divine discipline must be distinguished from the laws of volitional responsibility. You know, the law of volitional responsibility said, as a man soweth, so he reaps. You may have suffering in your life from self-imposed, self-induced, self-indulged forms of misery, things that you did, decisions that you made, bad decisions that you made. and they destroyed the future options in your life, and they may bring about tremendous misery that you manufactured yourself, and you have to take the responsibility for that. This may not be divine discipline, but the discomfort and the misery and the unhappiness may only last for a short period of time, but you can get out of it. You can recover, you can reconsider what you did, you can even relocate if it’s necessary. But sometimes your suffering is a result of your own bad, rotten, crummy decisions that you will make. But divine discipline, if you continue to continue in your sin, and if you don’t own up to that sin, if you don’t confess that sin, then the Father will bring divine discipline into your life. And the first would be the warning stage. This may be where you’re listening to a pastor in a church and you’ll think, you know, somebody told that preacher all about me. Somebody told that preacher what I’m doing. Somebody let him in on my secrets. No, they did not. That’s God the Holy Spirit speaking to you. It’s God the Holy Spirit giving you a warning It’s not the preacher doesn’t know you. He hasn’t snooped into your business. It’s God, the Holy Spirit, alerting you to the fact that you have not pulled the wool over God’s eyes, that he knows exactly what you’re doing. You may be carrying on some sort of nefarious thing behind someone else’s back. Maybe you have a business and you’re siphoning a little money out of there and you think nobody knows about it. Maybe you’re having an affair. You think nobody knows about it. Maybe you’re lying to someone. You think no one knows about it. It is tax season, you know, You may have a tendency to want to lie to the federal government so you don’t have to pay as many taxes. Listen, God knows everything. He’s omniscient. He’s all-knowing. So when you persist in hiding sin in your life, you’re going to be warned by it. You’re going to be warned by God. It may be a road sign. It may be a book you’re reading. It may be a movie you’re watching, or it may be a pastor you’re listening to. But God the Holy Spirit will use that person, that individual, that sign, that book to let you know you are out of line. You need to recover. You need to get back with it. And problem-solving device number one is the rebound technique. Rebound is taught in 1 John 1.9, and we haven’t talked about that in a while. But 1 John 1.9 said, if we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sins. and to purify us from all our wrongdoing. And the big word is if. We go back to volitional responsibility. If we confess. And confess is a word that used in the Greek New Testament is not really found in English. It’s a compound word. compound word being homo the same and legale to say to say the same now we use homo in the english language homosexual and uh but this is not that word this word is confess if we say the same in other words god wants you to own up to what you’re doing he wants you to admit it to him Quit trying to hide it. Quit trying to sneak around and think he doesn’t know about it. If you go to him and admit it, the Bible says he will be faithful, means he’ll do it every time. He’s just. He doesn’t compromise his righteousness by doing this. He’s faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from all of your wrongdoing. What a wonderful way to take a spiritual bath. What a wonderful way to get yourself cleansed But if you don’t do that, if you continue to persist in your secrecy and hiding things, then you’re going to come under intense discipline. And that is not going to be fun. Proverbs 3.12, for whom the Lord loves, he judges by punitive action. Therefore, like a father to a son in whom he delights. And just as a father may have to take his son out behind the woodshed, God may have to take you there. And the whole reason is to break your arrogance. Because it is your arrogance that keeps you from admitting your sin. You know, arrogance always goes through self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption, and eventually self-destruction if you don’t get a hold of it. And you have an arrogant tendency because of your relationship to Adam’s original sin. You have a sin nature. That sin nature doesn’t want to obey. And so when a little child, for example, mom and dad says, don’t do that, son, and he does it anyhow, that’s his little arrogant sin nature. Nobody taught him to be disrespectful. Nobody taught him to lie to his parents. Did you do that, son? No, I didn’t do that. He just lied. And so you have to use discipline to correct the arrogant tendencies. If you don’t use discipline, then your child gets no orientation to authority and they wind up anti-authority in their life. Discipline is critical. And the same thing is true with God. He uses discipline to give you a different attitude. You can have genuine humility or you can have enforced humility. Genuine humility is you doing the right thing in the right way. Enforced humility is when God has to come knocking on the door and take you out behind the woodshed to make sure you do the right thing in the right way. The punishment or the punitive action from God is designed to train you, to teach you, so that you stay off of the my way highway, so that you stay out of your sin and Because if you don’t, then you’re going to crash and burn in your physical life. You’re not going to be able to redeem the time that God has given you. You’re not going to be able to enjoy the protocol plan of God and the phenomenal things God has for you because you got into your own personal area of sin. And there are three things we face as Christians. We face sin. we face the devil, the world, and the flesh. And all three of those can lead you into sin in your life. So if we go back to Hebrews 12, the Bible tells us those that God loves, it’s not a matter of God not loving you. It’s a matter that God does love you, and he’s trying to stop you before you destroy your life or destroy someone else’s life. You’re a believer, and he loves you. He loves you and demonstrated that in John 3, 16. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life. He loves you. He loved you enough to send his son, and he loves you enough not to let you self-destruct. That’s why the discipline’s there. That may be why you’re going through the suffering you’re going through today. I talked to a young man yesterday who made a statement to me. He said, I think I know why I’m suffering so much. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I know God called me to be in the ministry and I turned it down. And he said, I did my own thing, and I think that’s what’s happening to me, why I’m under so much discipline, suffering in his life. I don’t know. That’s between him and God. I can’t make that shot. But I can tell you this. I have seen Christians, people that I know are born-again Christians, who turned their back on God and went down the my-way highway, and they suffered mightily and they died prematurely because they would never rebound, they would never recover. In their arrogance, they would never admit that they had done something wrong. And the end result was a wasted life, a painful life, a miserable life, and that may be where you are today. You see, the purpose of divine discipline is to motivate you To recover, get back in fellowship with God. Because as a member of the royal family of God, if you’re not in fellowship, you can’t execute his plan. Being in fellowship means that you are controlled by the Holy Spirit. And the Bible warns you, don’t quench the Holy Spirit, don’t grieve the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells you in Ephesians 1.13, you’ve been indwelled by the Holy Spirit. And there’s a mission. Jesus said, I’m going to send him so he can guide you and teach you and tutor you. And that’s the ministry of the Holy Spirit. But he cannot do it with unconfessed sin in your life. Unconfessed sin in your life quenches the Holy Spirit. Unconfessed sin in your life grieves the Holy Spirit. Don’t tell me you can’t keep up with all your sins. I can hear you. I can’t keep up with all my sins. Well, who can? Once you start sinning, it’s like chain smoking. You do one sin after another sin after another sin after another sin. Listen to the verse again. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us and to purify us from all wrongdoing, even the ones you don’t remember. That’s how good God is. But you have to at least admit the one you’re aware of. If we confess, if we say the same, homo legeo, the same, legeo, to say, homo legeo, to say the same, tell him what you did. I lied. I cheated on my taxes. I cheated on my wife. I did this. I did that. He’s faithful and just to forgive you. Don’t go to the front of the church and do it. It’s nobody else’s business. some pastor tries to get you to come up from the church and confess your sin to the congregation leave get out of there that’s manipulation and that’s not in the bible you go to god and you confess your sin to god and he will be faithful to forgive you and you have to grow spiritually so you can overcome those temptations because if you don’t grow spiritually If you don’t get some spiritual muscle, some spiritual assets in your life, then you’re going to fall right back into the same lust patterns that got you where you are to start with. So intense discipline is going to suffer. You’re going to hurt. It’s painful. And then there is the sin unto death. The sin unto death is when a believer actually goes out way too soon. Way too soon. And you can see it. For example, in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, Paul had to deal with an individual in a church at Corinth who got under the sin unto death. I think I’ll turn over and read it to you so you can see it for yourself. You can read it for yourself. 1 Corinthians 5 and verses 1 through 5. He says this. It is reported commonly… that there is fornication among you and such fornication as is not even named among the Gentiles. Even the Gentiles, the goy, the Gentiles don’t do this. A man has his father’s wife. This is sexual immorality where a young man is fornicating with his stepmother. And it says you are puffed up, verse 2, and have not rather mourned that he that did this deed would be taken away from among you. For I, Paul said, as an apostle, verily as absent in the body, but present in spirit, have judged this already as though I were present. And I judge the one that did this. And in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you’re gathered together, and with my spirit and the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, deliver this man unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh. That’s death. But listen to the rest of it. Listen carefully. So that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. He’s going to die the sin unto death, but he’s going to be in heaven. You see, 1 Corinthians talks about a foundation. No other foundation can we lay than the foundation which is Jesus Christ. You know, if you build a house and put it on a concrete foundation, the house can burn up, but the foundation will still be there. The foundational faith of faith alone in Christ alone is never going to be destroyed by your sin. Your physical life may destroy it. You’ll destroy yourself by your own arrogance, by your self-deception and self-absorption. But the foundation, once you put your faith in Christ, is never going to go away. You’re not going to lose that. But just think about what you are going to lose. You’re going to lose rewards. You’re going to lose time. You’re not going to leave a legacy of an invisible hero. You’re not going to leave a legacy of a person or an individual that contributed to their family in a fantastic way. You’re going to leave a legacy of a loser, a loser in time and a loser in eternity. losing eternal rewards and losing time because you couldn’t stay out of sin. It’s an age-old problem. It’s nothing new. We all have to fight and deal with this every day in our life. Divine discipline is warning from God. that we are out of bounds. It’s not executing God’s plan. It’s us getting under the cosmic system that Satan has. And then the boundaries of God’s plans begin to be defined in nebulous terms where you don’t really know it. God has a plan for your life. And let me tell you what that plan is. First of all, for you to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the single greatest decision you could ever make. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, Acts 16, 31. Secondly, once you believe in Christ, what comes next? What am I supposed to do? And that’s where the Bible says, grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Where the Bible says, study to show thyself approved unto God. a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. That’s where the Bible says, come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I’ll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn, learn of me. My yoke is easy, my burden’s light. Study, grow, learn. Unless you learn how to execute the protocol plan of God, you will wind up never advancing to maturity in your life. God wants you to be a mature believer. He wants you to grow in grace and be a believer that glorifies Jesus Christ to the maximum, actually replicating the life of Christ by means of your life. And if you don’t learn God’s word, you cannot do that. It’s impossible for you to do that. And that’s why the Bible clearly teaches this. Listen to Hebrews 5. Hebrews 5.11, I have a lot of things to say and they’re hard to be uttered because you’re dull of listening. This is the person in church that can’t stay awake. The person that can’t keep his nose out of other people’s business even sometimes. And he says, the writer says, for when the time you ought to be a teacher, you now have gone back to someone needs to teach you again the basic principles of God and you are much like a baby that needs a bottle of milk and can’t handle a steak, can’t handle solid food. Listen, if you’re going to glorify God, you gotta be able to eat the meat. You gotta be able to eat the solid food. You gotta be able to take something other than three songs and a hymn and a poem. You gotta be able to submit yourself to the well-qualified pastor that can teach you the in-depth things of God. He goes on in Hebrews says, for everyone that uses milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness. He’s just a baby. But solid food belongs to them that are of full age Those who by use of reason have determined the difference between evil and good. And you have to understand that. If you don’t grow up as a believer in Jesus Christ, if you walk the fence in fellowship, out of fellowship, in fellowship, out of fellowship, you’ll stay under discipline your whole life. God will constantly be knocking at the door, constantly disciplining you because he can’t keep your attention. And that’s a sad thing to say, but can God keep your attention? Or do you have one of those wandering minds that you can never sit still? Or have you sold out what could be the most fantastic life in this world because you have some hobby or some interest that’s more important to you than fulfilling the plan of God? How could you do that? You think that’s the most important thing in your life? You’re kidding yourself. And therefore, if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ and you chase the dream down the my way highway, you’re gonna get a lot of discipline. You’re gonna have a lot of knocking at the door with God warning you and telling you and even taking you behind the woodshed so that you suffer. You haven’t even began to suffer yet. Not that he’s mad at you, not that he hates you, he loves you. This whole thing about discipline is to spare you something much worse in the future. If he can just get your attention, wouldn’t you do that with your own children? When you say, don’t touch that fire, don’t put your hand in that fire. If you put your hand in that fire, you’re going to get burned. And the kid says, I’m going to put my hand in the fire anyhow. I don’t believe you. And that’s what you’re doing. God’s warned you, stop. He’s telling you through this message, stop. And you’re still so hardheaded. You’re saying, I’m just going to put my hand in the fire because I want to. All right, you’ve heard it, you’ve been warned. This is why you’re having the difficulties you’re having. This is why you’re going through the suffering you’re going through, because you walked away from the plan of God, you never grew up spiritually, You’re still a baby in Jesus Christ. Yes, you’re saved. Yes, you’re going to heaven. But you are not living the life God designed you to live. And sooner or later, you’re going to have to wake up and realize that. When will you do it? When will you confess your sin to God? When will you seek after a well-qualified pastor that could teach you God’s word and help you to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Every day you put it off, every day you wait is another day you lose. And that’s why the Bible tells you to keep redeeming the time, to keep growing in grace. I don’t know how much time God gives any of us, not you, not me, not anybody. But as long as you wake up this morning and you have a breath, you have an opportunity to get with it, to get with God’s plan and to get off the my way highway because it’s a dead end in your life. You’re trying to make it work, but it won’t work. It never will work. It’s not God’s plan for your life. And that’s why the discipline will get harder and more intense. And unless you recover, you will be checking out of here way too soon. I promise you. I hope you’re listening, and I hope you’re learning. All of this is designed to get you back to where you belong in fellowship with God and growing in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Floodline.

SPEAKER 02 : 27:11

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.