In this episode of The Flatline, Rick Hughes delves into the core principles that define a believer’s spiritual journey. Discover the 10 problem-solving devices designed to enhance your spiritual IQ and navigate the challenges of life. Through the lens of God’s Word, Rick educates listeners on how to block adversity from morphing into internal stress, emphasizing that while adversity is unavoidable, stress is a choice. The highlight of this episode is the exploration of God’s loving discipline, as Rick guides us through scriptures that remind us of the divine wisdom encapsulated in God’s reproof. He intricately explains how God’s
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.
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Good morning and welcome to The Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, you have a cordial invitation to stick around. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, all without any manipulation. The Flatline is about learning God’s tremendous problem-solving devices. If you do that, if you can verify and identify those 10 things we talk about, then you can orient and adjust and use them in your life and stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress because adversity, as you know, is inevitable, but stress is optional. You’ve heard me say it before, God gave you two ends, one of them you sit with, one of them you think with. You better learn which one to use because it’s heads you win, tails you lose. And this show is going to give you information, no emotion, not playing with your emotions. We’re here to give you some information because you got a brain just like me. Now, some people have a higher IQ than I do, maybe lower IQ than me, but some people just middle of the rotors like me. But in God’s wonderful plan, human IQ is never an issue. The human IQ that we have can be supplemented by learning God’s Word and staying filled with the Holy Spirit, and then we develop a spiritual IQ. Yes, if you use Rebound, problem-solving device number one, to make sure that you deal with your known sin, that guarantees that you can stay filled with the Holy Spirit. And then if you take the Word of God that you learn under a well-qualified pastor in your local church as he teaches you God’s Word and you apply it into your life and then use your volition to apply it, you know, you can say positive volition or negative volition. Yes, I will do it. No, I won’t do it. But if you apply what you learn from your pastor, then you can have some spiritual IQ in your life, which I call spiritual x-ray vision. You have discernment, you have understanding, you have wisdom, and that’s what wisdom does. It gives you spiritual x-ray vision so that you can see what people don’t see. You can understand the deceptions and the delusions that Satan throws your way. So please, let’s stick with me. Listen up, learn, and apply into your life. As I told you before, these shows are all podcasts on our podcast platforms, and that’s Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts or Anchor Podcasts. All are there listed as The Flot Line, F-L-O-T. And we always have transcripts of all of these radio shows, all during the year 2019. We now have completed three volumes of transcripts. Every radio show that I taught, 52 shows in the year of 2019 is in print in three different volumes. If you’d like a copy, it’s free. We’ll be glad to send it to you. All you have to do is contact us through the website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org. Let us know and we’ll send it right on out to you. Today we want to talk about something that’s very important to us. All of us need to understand this and learn this. I’m going to give you three verses and listen carefully. You may have to apply these to your life. I hope not. But it deals with how the love of God, because we have been studying how God loves you. We’ve done six lessons on that. So this is going to deal with how the love of God administers discipline to us. How the love of God administers discipline to us. Beginning in Revelation 3.19, those whom I love, I reprove and discipline. Therefore be zealous and repent. A lot of people can’t handle that word repent because there’s several different words, metanoeo, metamelema, metanoia, three different Greek words for repent. But repent basically means to change your mind, change the way you think. Your spiritual life is lived in your soul, and in your soul is your mentality. And the Bible says, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. That’s dealing with how you think. The Bible also says this. The Bible says, stop thinking of self in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think. But think in terms of sanity as God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. That’s Romans 12, 3 in a modified expanded translation. So when we say repent, it means to change the way you think. Those that I love, I reprove. That’s the discipline that God puts into our life. I reprove and I discipline. Therefore, hurry up, be zealous, do this quickly, and change what you’re thinking. In Psalm 7.9b, part of that verse, Psalm 7, verse 9, the b part of the verse, for the righteous God tries the hearts and minds, parentheses, of each one of us. The righteous God tries the heart and minds of each one of us. So there’s nothing you can hide from God. He can see what’s in your mind. He can see what’s in your heart. Now listen carefully. In the New Testament, the mind is called the nous, the N-O-U-S, and the heart is called the cardia, K-A-R-D-I-A, cardia. So the nous is where the information assimilates when your pastor teaches it to you. And the card is where it needs to go because it’s never wisdom till it gets into your heart. Just because you heard it and understood it doesn’t mean you’ve applied it yet. And so God is looking at you to see what’s in your heart and what you’re listening to, what you’re learning, what you can apply. And that’s the critical thing. He’s always checking us out. The justice of God is always checking us out. In Hebrews 12, five through 11 says, And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons. My sons, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by him. That means that God may have to sometimes take us to the woodshed to get our attention. Sometimes that happens because we get out of fellowship with God. We’ll talk about that here as we go through this. Verse 6, Hebrews 12, 6, For those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines, and he scourges every son he receives. It is for discipline that you endure because God deals with you as with a son. For what son is there with whom the father does not discipline? Verse 8, but if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not really a son. But furthermore, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time, as it seemed best to them. But he disciplines us for our good, so that we may share his holiness. And there’s talking about the difference between our earthly father and our heavenly father. Those that God loves, he disciplines. So it is possible. It may be probable that what you’re going through right now, what you think is bad luck, what you think is a run of bad luck may actually be discipline. It may be God dropping the hammer on you to get your attention. All discipline, all discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful. That’s verse 11. Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So it’s not fun to go under discipline, but it’s imperative that we have it to get our attention. God must get our attention sometimes because we sometimes wander off down the my way highway and he does the discipline to get us back. Proverbs 15, 10 says, grievous punishment is for him who forsakes the way, but he who hates reproof will die. So listen carefully. He will discipline us. What son is there whom the father does not discipline? All of us get disciplined as children of God. He scourges every son whom he receives. It’s the discipline that we endure. So there’s warning discipline when God has to get your attention. It may be from reading a verse in the Bible. It may be from seeing a sign on the side of the road. It may be from hearing a preacher on the TV or radio. But somehow or another, the Holy Spirit reaches out and gets your attention. And then you can respond to that by confessing your sin. Or you can ignore that and keep going merrily down the my way highway using your volition to quench and grieve the Holy Spirit. And if that warning doesn’t work, then the intense discipline comes, the scourging. Sometimes he’s just going to have to take you out behind the woodshed to get your attention and give you an attitude adjustment. And if that doesn’t work, well, this verse goes on to say, grievous punishment is for him who forsakes the way, but he who hates the reproof of God shall die. There is something called dying discipline. And this is when God’s not able to get your attention. This is when you’re so much wrapped up in your own arrogance and your own self-righteousness that you’re not listening, not paying attention, and you don’t care. So just like your earthly father disciplined us, God disciplines you. And listen again carefully. Furthermore, this is verse 9, Hebrews 12. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers discipline us, and we respected them. Now listen. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? Did you hear that? And live. And then I go back to Proverbs 15, 10. Grievous punishment is for him who forsakes the way, but the one who hates reproof will die. There’s the difference, living and dying. It’s possible that you can check yourself out way too soon because of your arrogance and not responding to the discipline of God and becoming hardened in your heart. So let’s get you some principles down that hopefully will help explain what I’m talking about here today. One, when we believe in Jesus Christ, God’s anointed son, we enter into a post-salvation spiritual life. That’s after we get saved. And that mandates for us that we are to love God and love our fellow man. That’s what the Bible talks about. Love God and love your neighbor. So you have to have virtue love, personal love for God, and impersonal love for your neighbors. That’s part of the problem-solving devices. Problem-solving device number six and seven. Personal, well, actually seven and eight. Personal love for God is number seven. Impersonal love for all is number eight. By the way, there’s a bookmark with all of these problem-solving devices on it. If you’d like to get it, just write to us. We’ll send you… as many as you need, and you can stick it in your Bible to find your place every now and then. But it helps you remember what those 10 problem-solving devices are. And we need to do a review on that for you, probably. But when we believe in Christ, we enter into this post-salvation spiritual life. which mandates that we have love. And all believers, all of us are beneficiaries of God’s love, you and me together. And because God’s love did not reject us. Remember John 3, 16, God so loved the world, all of us. But what we do, we reject the love of God. His love doesn’t reject us. We reject it. When we reject the spiritual life, we’re rejecting the love of God. You know, the Bible says, cursed is a man who trusteth in man. That’s rejecting the spiritual life. And the Bible talks about you having this artificial wisdom in Proverbs 3, 7. The wisdom, the fool thinks he’s smarter than God, rejecting the spiritual life. If we reject the spiritual life, we’re rejecting the love of God because this is something he gave you. This is how he prepares you and equips you to live in the devil’s world. So if you reject the spiritual life, what’s gonna happen? If you’re a Christian and you reject the spiritual life, you’re going to come under the divine discipline. So here’s the principle. One, if you have known sin in your life and you haven’t confessed that sin to God, you may be out of fellowship with God. Number two, If you’re a Christian and you’re not growing consistently in God’s word, taking it in and learning it, you may be out of fellowship with God. Remember 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 a mandate. That’s a requirement. That’s not a request. Growing the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is a mandate, a requirement, not a request. So if you’re not growing, if you’re not studying, if you’re not advancing in the spiritual life, you’re sinning. You’re disobeying the mandates. And this discipline that God brings into our life is not because he’s mad at us. It’s because he’s disappointed in us and he loves us and he wants to keep us from self-destructing. So we have to understand the love of God is one of the most important things in our spiritual life. He’s equipped me. He preserves me. He protects me. And he disciplines me when I step in the wrong direction to get me back onto the right road. And this may be what’s happening in your life. Maybe this is why you’re having financial problems. Maybe this is why you’re having marriage problems. Maybe this is why you’re having social problems. Maybe this is why everything keeps tearing up, breaking down, going crazy, because God is trying to get your attention. Are you listening to him? Look at your life. Look at the sin in your life. Admit your sin. Go to the Father and admit it. David said, when I withheld my sin, I about dried up and died. Psalm 32, 5. But when I went to the Lord and admitted my sin, he cleansed me. In 1 John 1, 9, if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us. You can’t keep living a lie. As a Christian, you can’t keep hiding in the darkness, acting like no one knows what you’re doing. The Father knows, and the discipline is there, and that may be what you’re going through right now. So number two, yielding to the temptations of this world or the temptations of the flesh or the temptations of the devil is will result in you using your volition to go negative to the mandates of God. And when you do that, then you submit to control of your sin nature. That’s what you do. When you yield to the temptations of the world, the flesh or the devil, you use your volition, part of the format of your soul, to go negative to the love of God, the mandates he gave you. Thus you submit yourself to your sin nature controlling yourself. Paul talked about it in Romans 7.15 about the sin nature. Listen to what I read to you, 7.15 through 20. Romans, for what I am doing, I do not understand. For I am not practicing what I would like to practice, but I’m doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I don’t want to do, then I’m agreeing with the law, confessing the law is good. So now no longer am I the one doing it, but it’s sin which dwells in me. That’s the flesh. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For the willing to do good is present in me, but the doing of good is not present. For the good things that I want to do, I don’t do, but I practice the very evil things I don’t want to do. But if I’m doing the very things I don’t want to do, then it’s no longer me doing it, but the sin nature that dwells in me. There’s a battle going on inside of you. Every day there’s a battle inside of you. Your sin nature may raise its ugly head on the interstate driving to work. Your sin nature may raise its ugly head when your in-laws come around. I don’t know. It’s about to be tax season and your sin nature may raise its ugly head with that one. Or maybe politics gets you out of fellowship. But you have a sin nature. And if you submit to your sin nature, if you allow your volition to choose that, well, once your sin nature seizes control, it’ll turn to the lure of the cosmic system to fulfill its desires. Once your sin nature seizes control, it will turn to the lure of the cosmic system to fulfill its desires. The cosmic system is Satan’s world, what Satan offers you. It’s the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist. It’s out there spinning around, and it’s luring you. Come on over here. Do this. Come on over here. Try this. Here’s a good time. Here’s fun. This is what you need to be doing. And many a Christian has been sucked into this sort of stuff. Like a duck decoy. When a duck hunter’s got the decoys out and he’s quacking away and the duck flies over and sees the decoys and said, oh my, look, let’s go down and join them. And bam, they get wasted. That’s what happens to you. You get decoyed. You get diverted. Satan is really good at decoys and diversion in your life. And you can’t let the lure of the cosmic system take control of you. In Galatians 5, 17, the flesh sets its desire against the spirit. The spirit sets its desire against the flesh. And these are in opposition to one another so you may not do the things you please. This is the battle you have every day. This is the fight that goes on in your life. If you’re like me, if you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you have a sin nature, your sin nature may even be on steroids. I don’t know. I mean, that may be hopped up sin nature, but you have a sin nature. Now, some people get rid of the legalist. And I remember meeting a guy one time telling me he didn’t sin. And the time we got through talking, he was so mad at me, he was sinning. Yeah, you got to sin, nature. But you may be a legalist. You may think you’re a good person because you don’t smoke, drink, chew, or run around with those that do. Or you may be a lascivious on the other end of the totem pole. You may be a wild child and when your sin nature gets in control, there’s no telling what you’re liable to do if you drink too much or you say too much or do too much. Sin natures have different trends and different patterns. And the hardest one to see is the legalistic person. Because the self-righteous legalistic person will judge you and hammer you and control you quicker than anyone if you let him. So here we have the sin nature, the flesh controlling, wanting to control your body, the spirit wanting to control your body. What this is talking about is the way you think, your thoughts, your motives and desires. If you let the sin nature take over, it will lure you into the cosmic system with no returning probably. But if you let the Holy Spirit control you, then he will lead you and guide you as a tutor and a mentor. As Jesus Christ, our Lord said, I’m going away, but I’ll send my spirit and he’ll be your tutor. And he will guide you into truth. And so you have this Holy Spirit living in you. But if you quench him and you grieve him, he can’t do his job. That’s why you have to rebound and put him back in control of your life. So again, Galatians 5, 17, the flesh sets its desire against the spirit. And the spirit against the flesh, these are battling. They’re battling every day. Who’s going to control your thoughts? And then the Bible goes on to say these are in opposition one to another so that you may not do the very things you want to do. The concept is the sin nature never, ever turns back to God. Once you let the sin nature get in control, it only ventures out deeper and deeper and deeper into sin and into evil. So in order to break the control of your sin nature, you must first recognize what’s going on. You have to recognize the trends and the patterns of your sin nature. and what you’re likely to do when you let your sin nature take control. And the only way you can do that is by the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. The only way you can break control, once you submit to the sin nature, once your volition goes negative to God, you’re trapped by the lure of the world, the flesh of the devil, and you sin, you fall into the trap. The only way to get out of it is for the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit to make you aware of what’s happened. And if he convicts you, then you have to make a decision to confess your sin and return to the spiritual life. And this is where you allow the Holy Spirit to gain control once again. And listen, you may have to do this seven or eight times a day, maybe more. until you understand what’s going on, until you get a hold of your life and your emotions and these desires that you have. This is a battle. This is what the Bible says. It’s a battle. It’s a war. It is. It’s a war for your thoughts. So once you’re convicted, you have to make the decision. I’m going to go to God. I’m going to confess my sin. I’m going to walk away from the sin. I’m going to let the Holy Spirit have control. But you know what? The sin may come back tomorrow. What do you do then? You confess it again and confess it again. Anytime you sin, you go to God and confess it. God’s not counting sins. He’s not got a bean counter out there saying, okay, now you’ve done this 23 times and I’m not going to forgive you for it anymore. That’s not true. If we confess our sin, the Bible says he’s faithful. He does it every time. He’s just. He doesn’t compromise his righteousness. He’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness every time we do it. You may sin 20 times a day and confess your sin 20 times a day, and you’ll get in and out of fellowship 20 times a day. But the idea is not to let the sin nature control your life over lengthy periods of time. You have to confess your sin. You have to get back in fellowship because if you fail to rebound, if you fail to recover, then you’re opening the door to God’s discipline because you quenched and grieved the Holy Spirit. There are some mandates in the Bible about that. In 1 Thessalonians 5, 19, don’t quench the Holy Spirit. And in Ephesians 4.30, don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you’re sealed until the day of redemption. That’s the day you walk away from death into eternity. So you can grieve the Holy Spirit and you can quench him. Quenching him means to shut off his power, like taking a garden hose and crimping it so the water can’t come out of it. Once you quench the Holy Spirit, he can’t sustain your spiritual life and you grieve him. You grieve him, you understand that? So he doesn’t cry, he doesn’t get sad, but you grieve the Holy Spirit. He recognizes he’s disappointed in you. He disapproves of what you’re doing. Every bit of punishment, every bit of discipline that comes to us as believers from the Supreme Court of Heaven is always based on God’s personal love for us. He loves you. He’s not doing this to hurt you. He’s doing this to deliver you, to get you to respond and recover. So it comes under warning discipline, it comes under intense discipline, and it comes under dying discipline. But if you fail to rebound and admit your sin, then it can result in unbearable suffering from the prolonged discipline of God. If you stay in the arrogant system long enough, you’re going to be miserable. You’re going to be miserable. You may already be miserable. And this may be the reason why. Oh, I pray that you will wake up and realize this. I pray you will take a look at yourself and see what’s going on in your life because you have an option to rebound and get restored to fellowship. And you have the option to ignore what I’m telling you and ignore that. And the warning discipline will move into your life from in warning to intense discipline. maybe even dying discipline. But you can still rebound. You can still receive forgiveness. You can still be restored to fellowship if you will admit it to your Father. It always takes God’s love to keep us in line. The material believer needs the love of God to discipline him, to keep him in line. We don’t want to live and learn. We want to learn and then live. Live and learn means you make mistakes and learn from your mistakes. It’s best not to make those mistakes, I promise you. Learn and live begins with rebound, and we are punished by God because we didn’t use the divine solution. We quenched and grieved the Holy Spirit. We’re not obeying the mandates of the spiritual life, so we’re not learning and living. We’re living and then learning the hard way. So the divine punishment from the integrity of God is administered with exactly the same divine love as is his divine blessing. God loves you. He will discipline you to correct you, to deliver you, to get you to see what’s going on in your life. I pray you’ll respond. I pray you’ll listen. I pray you see yourself. Take a look in the mirror. See what’s going on so you know who you really are. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re responding, and I hope you’ll stay in touch. Come back next Sunday, same time, same place, and learn some more and apply it into your life. That’s my prayer. I hope you’ll do that. If we can help, don’t hesitate to go to the website and drop us a note. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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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.
