FAMILY Part 6
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 1006 aired on December 1, 2024
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes. For the next few
minutes, please stick around. My goal is to verify and identify God’s plan for your life. Then you
can orient and adjust to the plan if you want to. It’s your decision and remember, bad decisions
limit future options. God gave you two ends, one to sit with and one to think with. Success in
your life will depend on which one you use. Heads you win. Tails you lose. In the last few
shows, I mentioned we will drop a few stations and look for some to add. I’ve really been
humbled by all the responses that have come in by email, calls and mail. Many have said,
“Please, don’t quit broadcasting in my town.” I assure you we have been very cautious in making
these decisions. I’ll state again, it is not because of finances. That’s not the point. God has
faithfully provided all of our financial needs since we started this journey 20 years ago. These
decisions are based on lack of interest in a town where this show plays. This means there are no
requests coming in for materials and no contact from listeners. If you are in one of these
locations, you can still access the show even if we go off the air on your local radio station by
going to our website on the internet. Click on the tab that says FLOT Line, you can hear every
show we’ve ever done. They are all posted there on our website for your listening, 24 hours a
day. You can also access the shows through podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
These are free apps that can be downloaded on your cell phone or your tablet. So if you want to
listen, you can do it one of these two ways. Thank you for all of you that have contacted us and
said please don’t drop it in my city. We are taking this into consideration. Today we will wrap up
our study FAMILY. If you just tuned in, let me bring you up to speed so you’ll understand what
I’m talking about. In the beginning of this series I told you the family is one of God’s divine
institutions. Remember, there are four divine institutions that God has established for the orderly
function of the human race. These four divine institutions apply to Christians as well as non-
Christians regardless of race or gender. While dealing with the family I began the study using
FAMILY as an acrostic. For example, F stands for fathers who are essential in the family. We
studied A that stands for authority and authority orientation which is critical in raising your
children. With the letter M we studied mothers and their essential role in the family. We also took
the letter I and related it to intercessory prayer, which is the job of each family member praying
for one another. We took the L and related it to God’s logistical grace provisions for all members
of the human race including family members. Today we’ll wrap up the study of the acrostic
FAMILY by looking at the letter Y. What does Y stand for? I’m going to use Y to stand for your
spiritual life. I heard our outgoing President say in a recent speech that we are in a struggle for
the soul of America. I guess he was referring to the Democratic Party being in a struggle for the
soul of America. I wondered what he meant by those words and what he was implying. Here is
my conclusion. I know that every individual has a soul, there is no doubt about this. It’s the
invisible immortal part of your personal makeup. For example, your body will die. I’ve
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conducted many funerals and watched many people die but their souls live on forever and
hopefully in a resurrection body, hopefully enjoying eternity with their Heavenly Father. Your
soul possesses volition, which is your ability to choose. You choose to listen to this radio show.
You can change the channel or turn off the radio but if you’re listening, you used your volition.
You chose it. Your soul has mentality and this is your ability to think, logic, reason, comprehend
and conclude. Your soul has a conscience and this is where you house all of your norms and
standards, what’s right and what’s wrong, freedom, privacy, patriotism and things like this. This
is exactly what parents are supposed to plant, good norms and standards in the lives of their
young people. Your soul has a self-consciousness and this is awareness of one’s appearance and
one’s actions. In other words, you can go stand in front of a mirror with 5 other people and you
can pick yourself out. You have self-consciousness. The mentality of the soul is where we are
supposed to have insight, discernment and understanding. These are three critical things in your
life you must have if you’re going to make good decisions. The question I want to ask is how do
you dumb down the soul of an individual? The answer is simple. Change the way they think. If
you can change the way they think, you can infiltrate a person’s mentality and then you can
control their decisions. Progressive politics in our nation is an attempt to change the way young
people think. It begins with a public lie. If you tell it often enough, if you tell it long enough,
people will begin to believe it. By the way, this is a tactic of the devil. It’s his specialty. In John
8:44 our Lord Jesus Christ said these words to the religious crowd, the scribes, the Pharisees and
the Sadducees, that were persecuting Him,
“You are of your father the devil, and you want to do
the desires of your father. He
[Satan]
was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in
the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own
nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
Lying is a type of manipulation. When our Lord
said in John 8:32,
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,”
He wasn’t
talking about, “You shall know a lie and the lie will deceive you and entrap you.” Truth frees
you. Our Lord Jesus Christ was implying that by understanding who He is and by putting your
trust in Him for your eternal salvation, then you will be redeemed from sin and free from satanic
deception. Listen to John 8:12,
“Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the Light of the
world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.’”
Notice
again in John 8:23-24,
“And He was saying to them, ‘You are from below, I am from above; you
are of this world, I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for
unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.’”
If you are redeemed from the slave
market of sin, if you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, no longer do you have to walk
in darkness which is the lie. No longer do you have to be deceived. You have the Light of life,
the Light of the Word of God in your soul that gives you insight, discernment and understanding.
Your spiritual life is what we’re talking about, the critical piece for the family. The spiritual life
of each individual in the family, the father, the mother, the siblings, the youth, the brothers, the
sisters begins the moment they believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior. The Biblical term is being
born again. Once you make the decision, you begin a new life.
“He who believes in Him is not
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judged; he who does not believe has been judged already”
(John 3:18). Jesus Christ our Lord
and Savior told Nicodemus personally in John 3:7 that he needed to be born again. What exactly
does born again mean? What is He talking about? Again 2 Corinthians 5:17,
“Therefore if
anyone is in Christ
[this is what happens when you get saved]
, he is a new creature; the old
things passed away; behold, new things have come.”
When I received Christ as my Savior back
in 1967, I didn’t change outside. I still looked the same, the same big ugly guy I always was, but
inside something changed. Inside I had a new life in Christ. I had a dead human spirit that was
made alive. I was born physically alive but spiritually dead. By receiving Christ as my Savior I
was made spiritually alive. This is when my spiritual life began. The moment I believed in Christ
and accepted Him as my Savior, I became a trichotomoss person. I have a body. I have a soul that
lives forever and I have a human spirit indwelled by God the Holy Spirit that allows me to have a
relationship with God the Father. This new life requires a new way of thinking. In other words,
now that I am a Christian, now that Christ lives in me, now that my human spirit is made alive by
means of the Holy Spirit, I have to learn how to think like Christ and not think the lie. The
Apostle Paul wrote in Philippians 2:5,
“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ
Jesus.”
In other words, you have to learn to think like He thought and humility was His mindset.
There may be things you believed in your life in the past but now, once you accept Christ as your
Savior, you have to recover from that retarded way of thinking. You have the spiritual life, your
spiritual life, a new way of living, the new you inside. No one will see it on the outside but God
will recognize it because John 4:24 says,
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must
worship in spirit and truth.”
This new spiritual life requires you learn how to function in it.
What are your assets? What are the abilities you now possess? What is this new spiritual life?
Hopefully we will be able to have a book out about this very soon. My friends and I are working
on this book about your spiritual life so that you will be able to comprehend it, understand it and
pass it on to other people if you’d like to. It begins with a new way of thinking, learning how to
think. This is why we have mandates like 2 Peter 3:18. It’s a command from God through the
Apostle Peter,
“Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
This is
not a request. It’s a mandate. Grow is a verb and we know from the Greek morphology that it is a
present active imperative verb. He is not asking believers to grow. He’s telling them to grow.
Grow in what? A prepositional phrase,
“In the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ.”
Here’s what you can get from this. If you’re not growing, you’re sinning. How
would you know if you’re growing? Are you learning anything? Are you learning any new
Biblical concepts? Are you studying the Scripture? You shouldn’t go a week or two living the
same life. You are supposed to learn. Look at an infant. They learn how to crawl. They learn how
to walk. They learn how to talk. They learn how to eat. They learn how to stand. They learn how
to whatever. You have to learn spiritual things and this is why you are told by the Apostle Peter,
“Grow up as a Christian. Learn about grace.” What do you know about grace? Saving grace,
living grace, dying grace and surpassing grace are all grace provisions. What do you know about
our Lord Jesus Christ? He is undiminished deity and true humanity in one body forever. We call
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this the hypostatic union.
“He who knew no sin was made sin for us,”
(2 Corinthians 5:21).
There is knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. There is a lot in this verse. If I just took
2 Peter 3:18 and taught this verse in a local church, to a Sunday school class or even to a
congregation, I could teach from this verse for a while. This is why we have the mandate.
Spiritual growth for the spiritual life requires that we study Scripture and we apply what we learn
if we learn anything. Why do we have to apply it? So we can replicate the life of Christ and thus
introduce the world to Him. The profile of an individual with a fully developed spiritual life is
found in Galatians 5:22-23. Check this out against your own profile, your personality traits. See
if any of this applies to you. I call it the personality traits of a mature believer or the profile of the
spiritual life.
“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience
[long-suffering]
, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
How long do you think I could teach on this
passage? We could spend a whole lot of time talking about the virtue of love, impersonal love
and personal love. A friend of mine was talking the other day about why the Lord Jesus Christ
went to the cross. Why didn’t He tell the Father, “ No, I’m not going to do it?” He did pray,
“My
Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me, yet not as I will, but as You will”
(Matthew
26:39). Why was this? Because He loved His Heavenly Father. Personal love for God is so great
that it motivates us to be obedient and He was obedient to His Heavenly Father’s will, even to
death. We could study love for a long time and joy is a mental attitude. Peace is a mental attitude.
Long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, my goodness. We could study all of this, one
word at a time, and it may take as much as a year to go through this verse and and break every
one of these traits down so we would understand what each one of them is. This is the profile
that the mature believer has in his spiritual life. Personality traits like this are a replication of
what our Lord Jesus Christ thought while He functioned in the devil’s world. They can also be
yours if, and I say if, a conditional clause, if you follow the protocol plan of God. This plan is
best observed by understanding and using the FLOT line in your soul. This is why God gives you
10 unique problem-solving devices. These encapsulate your spiritual life. Your spiritual life can’t
function without rebound, 1 John 1:9. Your spiritual life can’t function without the filling of the
Holy Spirit, Ephesians 5:18. Your spiritual life cannot function without the faith-rest drill. Your
spiritual life cannot function without orienting to grace and orienting to the Word of God, grace
orientation and doctrinal orientation. Your spiritual life cannot function without a personal sense
of destiny, understanding and knowing what God’s plan for your life is, what your spiritual gift is
and where God designed you to serve. Your spiritual life can’t function without having personal
love for God which is your motivational virtue and impersonal love for everyone which is your
functional virtue. If these things are at work in your life, you will share the happiness of God and
you will be occupied with the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the FLOT line in your soul, the 10
unique problem-solving devices. If you don’t know them, contact me to get the book
Christian
Problem Solving
. We list them all and break them all down and it’s free. Just go to my website,
click on the Books tab, go down to the bottom and order it. We will send you the book so you
will understand how each one of them works, okay? Please do this. As a parent or even a
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grandparent, you may be a grandparent like my wife and I, your job is to protect the souls of
your precious children and your grandchildren. How do we do this? We do it by planting the
Word of God in their soul’s mentality at a very young age. It may be by having them bow their
head and say the blessing. They learn that there is a God and you’re asking God to bless the food.
Why do you say the blessing? So you don’t get sick. You pray over the food for God to sanctify it
and set it apart so it doesn’t make you sick and you thank Him for what He gave you, that’s why.
We do this with our grandchildren to instill the idea that there is a God and He is in charge. Don’t
forget, the devil wants to hijack the thinking of your children and hijack the thinking of your
grandchildren and will use all available means to do this. He battles for souls. The President said,
“We are in a battle for the soul of the American people.” No we’re not. We are in a war to lift up
Christ and make Him clear to others. We are in a battle for their spiritual life, for their eternal
life. Subtle messages of TV, cartoons, internet websites and social media influence are mostly
designed to lure the spiritually retarded person into the cosmic vortex where destruction and
disaster will be guaranteed in their life. This is why 1 Peter 5:8 says,
“Be of sober spirit, be on
the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to
devour.”
You have a choice. If you are a believer and you’re not growing, you are going to
become lion bait. I don’t have to tell you what a lion does after he eats. This is what you are
going to be. You’ll wind up being a big pile of lion defication. I hope this isn’t true. But unless
you learn the Word of God, unless you sober up and are vigilant, unless you begin to understand
and apply the Word of God to your spiritual life, this is exactly what’s going to happen to you.
You’re going to die. You’re going to go to heaven. You’re going to have eternal life but you
didn’t replicate the life of Christ. You are never going to be able to represent Him to your friends.
You’re never going to be able to bring God any glory because you functioned outside the FLOT
line. You didn’t have a FLOT line. You never learned the plan of God for your life. You made up
your own plan. You did things your way. Many times I have encouraged you to get under the
ministry of a well-qualified pastor and yet you don’t do it. You say, “Well, I’ll just listen to you
on Sunday morning and I’ll get a nice little message.” This isn’t what my radio show is about.
I’m not here to give you a nice little message. I’m here to challenge you to grow up, to get with it
so that your spiritual life will take center place, so that you will be able to glorify God to the
maximum and your family will have a maximum impact in this nation. To most conservative
individuals it appears that God may have granted a reprieve to this nation by allowing a person
of their choice to be installed as the next president coming up very soon. It is the hope of many
that this person that has been elected will help us restore traditional values to our national
institutions. Perhaps these things will happen. I hope it does but I caution you not to depend on a
man or a woman to restore order or to bring change to this ailing nation. Listen to what the
Scripture says in Jeremiah 17:5,
“Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord.’”
The true solution to
the stability, the peacefulness and the prosperous function in our nation lies in your spiritual life,
in your soul’s mentality. As goes your soul, as goes your spiritual life, so goes the course of this
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nation. Perhaps you’ve heard me quote these verses that talk about God’s discipline on a nation
but I want you to listen to them again. Listen carefully and see if you can figure out why a nation
goes under divine discipline and why a nation such as ours could be destroyed. Hosea 4:1-3,
“Listen to the Word of the Lord, O sons of Israel, for the Lord has a case against the inhabitants
of the land, because there is no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge of God in the land. There
is swearing, deception, murder, stealing and adultery.
[This sounds like America.]
They employ
violence, so that bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and everyone who
lives in it languishes along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and also the fish
of the sea disappear.”
You may ask, why would these things happen to a nation like America?
The answer is found in the following verse, Hosea 4:6,
“My people
[and we believe America is
God’s land]
are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also
will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will
forget your children.”
This is why it’s critical that you have a spiritual life, so that your children
will have freedom in the future because as goes your spiritual life, so goes the freedom of this
nation. National degeneration is a result of failing to anchor your spiritual life in the Word of
God. I don’t care who we elected as our leader, if we continue to ignore the mandates to grow in
grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, then national destruction is just a
matter of time. I encourage you to make your spiritual life priority number one by staying filled
with the Holy Spirit and by getting under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor who can
shepherd your soul. If you continue to put your hope in a politician, you are going to be
disillusioned and eventually disappointed. One well-qualified, squared-away pastor-teacher is
much more valuable than any political leader, I promise you. The spiritual life of a mature
Christian re-presents Christ to those in his periphery and will bring the gospel to those who are
lost. Our ministry on this planet is not to promote a political party, but to lift up the Lord Jesus
Christ and declare God’s plan for all. Romans 10:14-15 says,
“How then will they call on Him in
whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how
will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is
written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!”
I leave you
this morning with one final thought. The impact of the spiritually mature believer can be visible
or invisible and very powerful including blessing by association to others, national blessing as a
member of the pivot which stabilizes the nation, international impact through missionary
outreach, and angelic impact by being a witness for the prosecution of Satan in his attempt to
avoid eternal damnation in the Lake of Fire. This powerful invisible impact will only be revealed
in eternity at the Judgment Seat of Christ. This is why your spiritual life is so important. Gee, I
hope you’re paying attention. My prayer is you’ll get under the ministry of a well-qualified
pastor, grow in grace and replicate the life of Christ. Thank you for listening to my series on the
family. Next week we will move into a new topic so until then, this is your host Rick Hughes
saying thank you so much for listening to The FLOT Line.