In today’s episode, Rick Hughes invites listeners to explore the divine strategies necessary for overcoming the manipulations of evil and maintaining a life aligned with God’s plan. He offers insights into the role emotions play in influencing our decisions and the importance of understanding the dual nature of our human and spiritual makeup. Discover practical advice on how to fortify your mind against adversarial forces and live a victorious Christian life.
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 Flotline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. And for the next few minutes, I give you a cordial invitation to stay with us. It’s a simple show, just 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, always done without any type of manipulation. And that means we don’t solicit money. We don’t solicit membership. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re just trying to give you something. And that is some information. Information that possibly may help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life. And if you’re able to do that, then maybe you may want to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. But my job is to get it right, to be accurate, not to manipulate you, but to make it clear. Your job, well, you’ve got a life to live, a whole life to live in front of you. And there’s so many decisions that you have to make. And I pray that the information from the Word of God I give you would be an encouragement to you. First of all, that you might find a local church where there’s a qualified pastor that teaches you God’s Word. And secondly, that you would apply the things you learned from that pastor into your life so that you could have an objective outlook about life and using the Word of God to guide you and many principles found in the Word of God to guide you through life’s many journeys. You know, this show is always there to remind you about biblical truths and hopefully introduce you to a new way of studying life. a new way of learning God’s Word, and it starts with the good news, the best news I ever heard, that Jesus Christ, God’s anointed Son, died for me, that he took my place on the cross, that he paid for my sin, that my debt to God had been paid, and I’m now free from the penalty of sin, and hopefully you are as well. And so by receiving Christ as your Savior, you have the opportunity to, in effect, start a new life over. Because the Bible says, if any man’s in Christ, he’s a new creation. Old things are passed away and all things become new. And that’s a fantastic thing. Compliments of the grace of God. That’s what the Bible says. For by grace you are saved through faith. And that not of yourselves is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should brag about it. There’s no reason for anyone to say, I hope I’m going to heaven or I’m trying to go to heaven or I want to go to heaven. You can say, I know I’m going to heaven. How do I say that? Why? Because the Bible says in 1 John 5, these things are written so that you might know that you have eternal life. God’s not a liar. The Bible says, whosoever should call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. If you do that, demonstrating your faith in prayer and simply going to the Father and saying, I believe Jesus Christ is your son and I’d like to receive him as my savior. A simple prayer of faith like that is all that it takes. Because the Bible clearly again says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. John 3, 16, a verse you’ve known all your life. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Believed, that’s the verb counterpart to faith. Faith is the Greek word pistos and believe is the Greek word pistouo being the verb. It’s the same word. It takes faith, and faith is believing. Once you put your faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross, understanding that he died for you, and not only that, but the most fantastic thing is he resurrected. If he didn’t resurrect, then I guess none of it would even be true, but he did. He walked out of the grave alive, and that demonstrates to you and to me that that there is life after death that jesus christ did conquer death and that he guarantees we will have a resurrection body also where there’s no more pain no more tear no more sorrow and the old things will be passed away and all things will become you can you imagine yourself I don’t know, maybe like me, you feel a little stiff and achy, but you can imagine yourself in a new body that doesn’t hurt anymore, a new body that minus a sin nature, a resurrection body, the body you will live in forever and ever and ever, a body like unto that body, Jesus Christ our Lord. So think about it. It’s an amazing thing. Now, today we want to go into a subject that I think may be interesting to you. Recently, I was in Houston, Texas, speaking in a local church called Baraka Church, Houston, Texas, and I taught a series called The Door to Doom. And we’ve covered some of that on this radio show. And by the way, that series is always videoed. So if you’d like to have a DVD of the series Door to Doom taught at Baraka Church, you In Houston, Texas, if you simply email me at our website, that’s rickhughesministries.org, we’ll be glad to send it to you at no charge whatsoever. Now, we’re going to study something today that was part of that study in Houston. It’s called the emotions. Letting your emotions control your life is one dangerous thing. As a matter of fact, we’re all one decision away from destroying our lives. We can make one decision in your life that can affect you forever and ever as long as you’re on this planet. And so you have to make sure that the decisions that you make are not manipulated and not induced by emotions, but that you make those decisions based on what you think, not based on what you feel. And then when you think, you have two choices. You can think human viewpoint or you can think divine viewpoint. Human viewpoint is you writing to one of those newspaper columnists and saying, what do you think I should do? And divine viewpoint is you going to the Bible and asking God, what should I do? And the obvious answer is I’d rather trust God than a newspaper columnist. So here we are. We’re on one decision away from destroying our lives. And the Bible clearly says in Romans 6, 12, do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies. And I remember a guy giving a message on this saying, it ain’t going to rain no more. But he used the word R-A-I-N. And this word is R-E-I-G-N, rain, control you. Do not let sin control you. This is what Paul the apostle wrote in Romans 6, 12, because he said, we’re dead to sin. We all have a sin nature. Every one of us do. You do. I do. We were born with it. We got it from Adam. The Bible clearly 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, and the wages of sin is death. To guarantee we’re born with a sin nature, who taught that baby how to lie? Who taught that baby how to get mad, angry, and throw a fit? It’s just part of the sin nature. No one sat down and taught that young person how to be jealous. It’s part of the sin nature. And either you control the sin nature or the sin nature will control you. And we know this for a fact. We know for a fact that Satan will manipulate your sin nature. So let’s assume you are a Christian. Let’s assume you have believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as your Savior. You put your faith in the finished work of Christ on that cross. You believe that he died for your sin and resurrected from the grave, and you’ve expressed that faith through God in prayer, and you are a born-again Christian. Now, that puts you in a minority. You’re considered to be a weirdo, one of those Bible thumpers by the certain elements of our society that don’t look upon Christians too fondly. But I think it didn’t make any difference to you probably. So you’re a Christian. You’re a born-again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you’re not ashamed to say it. So you have to understand there’s a war going on for your thoughts. That’s why the Bible says we have three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil. And clearly in Galatians, the Bible says the flesh wars against the spirit, and the spirit wars against the flesh. And clearly in Ephesians 6, we’re told to put on the armor of God so we can stand against the strategy of the devil who wars against us. And so we have the world, the flesh, and the devil. There’s a battle going on in your life 24-7 for who will control your thoughts. You are a product of your thoughts, your decisions, your actions. Everything that you do, everything that I do begins with a thought. And that thought becomes an attitude. And then if we let that attitude grow, it becomes an action in our life. So we have to be careful with our thoughts. That’s where it all starts. and we have to protect our minds so that we’re not led into wrong thinking. So let me give you some principles on how Satan seeks to manipulate you. How does the enemy, aka the devil, we know him as Satan, how does he seek to manipulate you? And this is what the Bible says. Clearly, it’s here in the scripture. Number one, he seeks to lead your mind astray. remember you are made up of thoughts you have a mind so let’s get this down you have a you have a body yes you do and you have a soul yes you do and if you are born again christian you have a living human spirit where god the holy spirit indwells you in your soul You have mentality, and this is part of your conscience. So in the mentality of your soul, as the Bible says, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. That’s referring to your mentality. When the Bible says in Romans 12, three, 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. We’re talking about your mind. You are what you think. Proverbs 23 tells us that. You’re not what you think you are. You are what you think. You are the sum total of your thoughts. So the first principle in regards to how Satan would seek to manipulate you is he would try to lead your mind astray. Lead your mind astray. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 11.3, But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by means of his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and the purity of devotion to Christ. So what did he do with Eve? He deceived Eve. He led her mind astray. He appealed to her arrogance. And this is very dangerous. We all have a trend towards arrogance in our life. Arrogance is identified with self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption, and eventually self-destruction. If you justify why it’s okay to commit something that you know is a sin, you are aware that it’s a sin. That doesn’t mean you’re not a Christian. It means you have a battle like everybody else. And if you justify it, Satan will, in fact, lead you astray from the simplicity of the believer who lives in Christ. It’s a very simple lifestyle. We have the filling of the Holy Spirit and we have the dynamics of the word of God. And when we operate under the filling of the Holy Spirit and put the word of God in our soul, we have the most fantastic life the world has ever seen called the Christian life. That is not the life Satan wants for you. He wants to control you, manipulate you eventually. The Bible says he’s a roaring lion. He likes to go around devouring people. He would like to destroy you. But the Bible also says greater is he that is in you than he is in the world. So remember. God is not going to let Satan take you out, but you may open yourself up to satanic infiltration as he seeks to manipulate your mind. You cannot allow that to happen. If your mind is concentrating on the word of God, then you have objective optimism and an opportunity to recognize what’s going on. but he’s very crafty, and he will deceive you just like he deceived Eve. He, the enemy, that is, a.k.a. the devil, is much smarter than you and I, and we must stay in the Word of God. We must use problem-solving device number one, rebound. When we know we’ve sinned, we have to go to God and confess that sin. Because if we don’t, then we quench the Holy Spirit. His power in our life is grieved, and we’re not able to function as we should as a believer in Jesus Christ because we’re out of fellowship with God. We wind up under discipline from God, and that’s not the way you want to live. So how does Satan seek to manipulate you? lead your mind astray number two he can plant desires in your thoughts he can plant desires in your thoughts in acts 5 3 peter said to ananias why has satan filled your heart to lie to the holy spirit and you kept back a part of this proceeds from the sale of your land Why has Satan filled your heart to life? So what we have here is Satan planting the desire in the mind of Ananias and You’ll find the Bible mentions the word heart and the Bible mentions the word mind. They are synonymous. They’re both right up there between your eyes. The mind is the thinking part and the heart is the living part here. So the heart is where we make our decisions. The mind is where we process the information. So Satan was able to manipulate us. Ananias, by putting into his heart the desire to hold back the money that he sold the property for and lie to Peter, the apostle, when he asked him, was this all of it? And he could have said no to Satan. He could have rejected that thought. He could have put that thought out of his mind. And sometime today, Satan’s going to put a thought in your mind. He’s going to interject a thought and you can make a decision. No, I’m not going down that avenue. Or you can say, okay, sure, I’ll do it. But he will manipulate your thinking by planting desires in your mind. So number one, he’ll lead your mind astray, 2 Corinthians 11, 3. He will plant desires in your mind, Acts 5, 3. Number three, he will motivate your desires astray. He’ll feed you what you want. John 8, 44. You people, the Lord Jesus Christ said, are from your father, the devil, and you want to do what your father desires you to do. He was a murderer from the beginning. He does not uphold the truth. There’s no truth in him. Whenever he lies, he speaks according to his own nature because he is in fact a liar and the father of lies. So you people are from your father, the devil, these are unbelievers, the religious crowd that persecuted our Lord and wanted him dead. And he said, you want to do what your father desires you to do. He motivated their desires. He got them on his side. He personally wanted Christ dead. He knew that once our Lord went to that cross, once he was crucified, once he walked out of that grave alive, that his time was over. He was defeated. He was done. The strategic victory of the cross is an amazing, amazing, amazing thing. So we are free from the penalty of sin, free from the death of sin. And all Satan can do now is hold on and try at his very best to impugn God’s name and impugn God’s plan by getting you to buy into his lies, motivating your desires, manipulating you, leading you astray. And what does the Bible say about all of this? Resist him. James 4, 7, submit yourself therefore to God. and resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Resist him. What does that mean, resist? Say no. No. If you look at Matthew 4, the first few verses, you will see how the Lord Jesus Christ was led into the wilderness and fasted and how Satan came to tempt him. And he said no three specific times. He didn’t say the word no, but what he did is he quoted scripture. This can be your ally, scripture. You can quote scripture when these thoughts come into your mind. You can quote scriptures when your mind is led astray. Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon thee, the Bible says, and so on. If you go to the scriptures, and there are over 7,000 promises in the Bible for you and for me, if we go to the scripture, if we know these things, if we’ve studied our Bible, if we’ve listened to our pastor teach it, and we’ve applied into our life what he taught us, Then when we have these desires put into our mind and motivated to do this, we can resist it. We can say, no, the Bible says this. No, the Bible says this. Don’t let sin reign in your mortal body any longer. I started out that, Romans 6, 12. So Satan puts a thought in your mind and Satan said, You would really be happy if you would do this, and your lust pattern, whatever it may be, whether it’s sex lust, money lust, power lust, approbation lust, ego lust, your lust pattern says, oh, yes, I like that idea. And instead of saying no, the Bible says this. You say, yes, I want to do that. Then you wind up out of fellowship with God, committing sin, quenching the Holy Spirit, grieving the Holy Spirit, and getting yourself under divine discipline. Now, James says resist him, and he will leave you alone. And point five, if you will recognize his schemes, he’s going to use the same schemes with you most of the time. Once he learns your weakness, once Satan identifies your pattern of failure in your life, that’s what he’s going to use. So the Bible says in Ephesians 6, 11, clothe yourselves with the full armor of God and so that you will be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. It’s strategy. And if you don’t know what the full armor of God is, you start with the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith, the shoes shod with the gospel preparation. I mean, this is an analogy of a Roman warrior and how he fought, picking up the word of God, the two-edged sword, the machaira, as the Romans used it to conquer the world. And this is an inspiration to you. You must be engaged for battle. You must have on your uniform because Satan is there to battle you. He wants to defeat you, and you must recognize his schemes. Whatever your weakness is, whatever your lust pattern is, that’s what he’s going to appeal to you. Judas, one of the disciples of the Lord that betrayed him, had a lust for money, and that’s what he used to betray the Lord Jesus Christ. He put that thought in Judas’ heart. And so the sixth principle is don’t let him outwit you. Don’t let him outwit you. In 2 Corinthians 2.11, the Bible says, in order that no advantage be taken of us by Satan because we are not ignorant of his schemes. So Paul again is saying don’t be manipulated, don’t be outwitted. You know, one of the things that Satan will use is called false doctrine. That’s information that’s not true. That’s the word of God that’s twisted. You know, the Bible says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. That’s the word of God. False doctrine will say, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and give up peanuts. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and don’t ever drink another Coca-Cola. You see, whenever you take the grace of God and you add to it, you put something on the end of it like works, something you must do. Now you nullify the grace of God because you’ve added. And that’s not salvation. That’s you adding to the plan. False doctrine may sound good. It may appeal to your emotions. And this is where we’re going to go with this a little bit on your emotions. It may sound good, and it may appeal to your emotions. And, you know, a lot of times it’s, and I’m kind of sarcastic about this, so forgive me, but it’s always about the children. Oh, the children. Listen, when the Jews came out of that promised land with those 12 spies and 10 came out and said, oh, we can’t do it. We can’t take that land. There are giants in the land, and they will kill our children. It’s the children. It’s that way in the church. It’s always about the children. And then you’ll notice if you go to church, you may not have many people in church, but the first day they have the children up singing in the choir are the first day the children graduate from Sunday school. All the grandpas, all the grandmas, all the aunts, all the uncles, they’re all there with their cameras and they’re all recording the children. Isn’t that interesting? We’re always about the children. And this is an appeal to your emotions. Many a pastor has looked at an audience that showed up for the graduation of a grandson or a niece from Sunday school and wondered, where were you the rest of the year? Why wouldn’t you come then? Because it’s about the children. It’s about a lot more than the children. I speak to children constantly, but not the little children. I’m in high schools talking all the time, not public, but private, private schools. And they’re not necessarily Christian schools. They’re all across the South. They’re called academies. And they still have the doors open, still allow someone such as me to come in and give the gospel information. And it’s interesting to see the young people, the teenagers. As a matter of fact, we’re writing a book right now called Life’s Toughest Years. And it deals with being a teenager. Hopefully we’ll have it out by the end of the summer. And they are free like everything else. If you’d like one, just let us know. But this is what it is. It’s an emotional appeal to many people. They’ll get to you by talking about your children. I’ve seen people that left a great church where the pastor did a great job, taught the word of God consistently because he didn’t have enough programs for the children. And so they go over and they join some cruise ship church which has a lot more programs for the children. And they take them skating and they take them camping and they take them this and they take them that. And it’s always about the children. That’s a wonderful thing. As long as they’re being taught the Word of God consistently. And there’s nothing more important than you bringing up a child in the way that he should go That means putting some divine viewpoint in his mind so he has a chance to withstand the strategy of the devil. Your volition is very critical. It’s going to respond to both your mentality and your emotions. Proverbs 16.32 says, Patience is better than power. and controlling your emotions better than capturing an entire city. You have to learn how to not let your emotions manipulate you, not let your emotions control you. It’s critical that you do this. The conscience is the mentality of the soul. That’s where all your thoughts are stored. And the emotions are part of the physiological makeup of their body. And our job is to control the emotions, not act on them. Not act on what we feel, act on what we think. Because if you don’t control your emotions, Your emotions will control you. And teaching your children the Word of God gives them a leg up in life. They will now have some sort of objective opportunity and optimism to understand their choices better if they have the Word of God in their soul. Without knowing that, if they don’t have the Word of God, if a kid doesn’t have the Word of God, he doesn’t know what his choice is. And he will be manipulated by his emotions and controlled by aka the devil himself. So are you listening? Is it making sense? That’s my question. Are you learning? I hope so. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s show. And I hope you’ll keep coming back every Sunday, same time, same station, same place. We trust God, as always, to make this available to you and to make it where you can understand it. So thank you for listening. Tune in next week, same time, same place. This is Rick Hughes saying thank you.
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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.
