In this episode, Rick Hughes explores the struggles and victories in living a Christian life. With anecdotes from his own experiences, he emphasizes the importance of learning, studying, and applying biblical principles. Gain insight into the misconceptions about the Christian life and how understanding the role of the Holy Spirit can aid in personal and spiritual growth. Rick challenges listeners to fully engage with their faith and take proactive steps in their spiritual journey.
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 02 :
Good morning and welcome to another edition of the Flatline, F-L-O-T. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. I’d like to invite you to stick around for a few minutes. I promise we won’t bore you. We’re not going to solicit money. We’re not going to ask you to join anything. This radio show is simply to give you some accurate information that will help you verify as well as identify what God’s plan for your life is. And if you want to orient and adjust to that plan, then you’re free to do so. You’re a free American. You have the right to do what you want to do. My job is to be accurate, to give you good, accurate information. Your job is to process that information, figure out what you’re gonna do with it, because God gave us two ends. That’s right, two ends, one you sit on and one you think with, and success in your life and my life depends on which one of those we use. Heads, we’ll win. Tails, well, we’re gonna lose. So the Bible is very clear that we have to learn God’s plan. In 2 Peter 3.18, growing the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is a wonderful verse to tell us that we got to grow up. We got to learn how to function in the plan. One cannot understand God unless he is able to concentrate. I mean, any child with attention deficit disorder has a hard time concentrating on a single subject. And many Christians have the same inability to pay attention, to focus, to concentrate because they got so many things going on in their life. You know, if I could talk to you from my heart and just be honest with you, I remember when I accepted Christ as my Savior. It was the summer of 1967, and I wasn’t thinking about much of anything except girls and cars and football and stuff that ordinary teenagers think about. I was a young man. I was 22 at the time, so I wasn’t exactly a teenager. I had been to the University of Alabama on a football scholarship and abandoned that scholarship, walked away and quit after my first year, which was a pretty dumb thing to do. I had the talent and the ability to play, but I didn’t have the mental attitude to stick with it. And I got into sort of a frantic search for happiness, trying to find it in all the wrong places, and eventually I dated a young lady who took me to church, and eventually after church I met a man who gave the gospel to me and And I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. I prayed that night. I asked God to save me. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t understand the whole deal, what was going on. Maybe you’ve done this in your life. I knew nothing about the Bible. I didn’t even own a Bible. I mean, I knew it was black. I mean, everybody had a black Bible. I thought it was black. But I didn’t know anything about it and I didn’t know what was in store for me. I had no idea what I needed to learn and no idea of what I needed to do with my life and I wasn’t even thinking about those things. I was just thinking about what happened to me and telling my friends about what happened to me and was able to lead a couple of my friends to Christ that were ballplayers that played with me and noticed a difference in my life. I had to make some decisions about education, and I did go back to school, went back to a Bible college, began to get involved with Youth for Christ International. And the next thing that I knew, I was giving my testimony or telling people how I got saved and something about my background. And I did not know that that was going to lead into a life of being in the ministry. I did not know I had the spiritual gift of evangelism. I did not know anything. I was being drug along, not drifting, I was being drug along by various Christians who had various ideas about what I should and shouldn’t do. Most of them I didn’t like. It wasn’t me. You know, have you ever had anybody try to fit you into a mold that you don’t belong into. And I can remember going on a couple of young conferences with evangelists telling me I need to go out on the street corner and pass out tracts and tell people they’re going to hell if they don’t believe in Christ. And I didn’t get along with that. And I can just remember a lot of things that people told me. If you’re going to be a good Christian now, son, you just can’t do those things anymore. Like what? Well, I can’t do this, can’t do that. And I said, well, what can you do? Well, you can go bowling and sing in the choir. Well, I don’t like to bowl and I can’t sing, so that didn’t sound like much of an exciting Christian life to me. And I remember so many things that happened where people disowned me because they didn’t like that I didn’t fit into their parameters. I didn’t do the things they wanted me to do. And one of those things was that I was so confused about what the Christian life should be. I knew I was saved, I knew I was a Christian, and I wanted to experience everything about it that I could, but I didn’t understand, and I got a lot of different viewpoints about do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that. Maybe you’ve been through that in your life. Maybe if you sat down right now and took a piece of paper and you had to write, what does it take to be a successful Christian for God? You couldn’t do it because I could not at that time. I didn’t have any idea whatsoever. I had a Bible and I would read the Bible and I read the book of John and I identified some things in there that sounded like me. It seemed like they applied to my life, but I just didn’t understand the Christian life and how it functioned, how it worked. It was over a year after I had become a Christian that I got under the ministry of a great pastor who And that individual began to teach me the Word of God in a very firm, stern manner. He didn’t put up with any nonsense. He said, if you’re going to learn the Word of God, I like the way we put it today. It was just like show up, shut up, and fake it till you make it. I think that’s a military term. Show up, shut up, and fake it till you make it. So I started an intense Bible study under this pastor, studying every night with a Bible, notebook, writing notes down, things I encourage you to do, This is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to listen, learn, and apply into your life. And that’s what I had to do. And as I began to grow, I experienced all kind of testing, all kind of pressure. I failed in many areas. And I look back on it and think, that’s amazing. God had a great sense of humor because if he didn’t, I probably would have been a greasy spot already. And I bet you some of you are like that as well. Thank goodness you’re not a greasy spot yet. God still has a plan for your life. So I had to learn how to deal with people. I had to learn how to deal with circumstances. I had to learn how to live the Christian life. No one had told me when I got saved and I went back to college, I went to Bible college, no one told me anything about the spiritual life. They just said, here’s the Bible, learn what’s in this book, Here’s Obadiah, here’s Jeremiah, here’s Isaiah, here’s Ezekiel, here’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, here’s Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. Okay, what’s in it? What am I supposed to do with it? And so I began to eventually sit under this well-qualified pastor who taught the ICE technique, I-C-E. That’s a good way of explaining it, ICE. It stands for Isogogical Categorical Exegetical Teaching. Isogogical Categorical Exegetical Teaching. And that means that if we took a verse like John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that we would develop each line word by word for God. Gar theos, theos is the Greek word for God. So loved, agapao, the Greek word for love. The world, cosmos. And as you begin to study like that, you go line by line, word by word, verse by verse, and then you develop categories, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of love, the doctrine of the world. This is the way my pastor taught me. Then it didn’t take long for me to start filling up notebooks and filling up pages of my Bible, learning these various doctrines which made up the framework to my spiritual life even today. So as we learned these sayings and applied these sayings, I began to understand that you can’t live the Christian life on your own. I began to understand that God, the Holy Spirit, was given to us to assist us in living the Christian life. He’s even called, as the Lord Jesus Christ called him, a tutor or a mentor for us. No one had told me that in the Bible college I went to. No one told me I needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 5.18 says, be filled with the spirit. No one told me that. No one told me Galatians 5.16, the flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit wars against the flesh. They’re contrary one to the other so that you can’t do the things that you want to do. I didn’t hear any of that. I just had this battle. I was just wrestling with myself. Even though I was a Christian, even though I knew I was going to heaven, I knew I was doing some things that weren’t right. Paul put it this way, he said, I don’t understand myself at all in Romans 7.15 because he said the things I want to do I don’t do and the things I don’t like are the things that I do. And he said it’s obvious that it’s sin in me. So I didn’t understand that even though I was a Christian, that I still had a sinful nature. Do you know that about yourself? Even though you’ve accepted Christ as your Savior, you still have a flesh. You still have a sinful nature. That’s why the Bible says we battle against the world and the flesh and the devil. And most people never get past the flesh. They don’t even get to deal with the devil. And most people have a misconception about the devil to begin with. thinking that he’s omnipresent in a lot of different places at one time, and he’s not. He’s a created being. He’s a fallen angel, and he can’t be in America and in England at the same time. He can only be one place at one time. And 99% sure he’s not knocking on your door, I guarantee you. There are other fallen angels called demons, and we call them demons, and they spread the doctrine of demons. And this is what Satan is really good at, spreading misinformation. And I got some misinformation to begin with, but as I began to wise up and listen to my pastor and learn God’s word and identify the misinformation, I began to move away from that legalism that people were trying to draw me into. You know, you can’t be a Christian, you can’t smoke, you can’t be a Christian, you can’t dance, you can’t be a Christian and you can’t go to anything but a G-rated movie. And I never understood all of that, so I understood eventually. that my Christian life is not based on what I do or don’t do. My Christian life is based on if I’m filled with the Holy Spirit and growing in God’s grace. So at any one time in my life, I was either spiritual or carnal, same as you. Right now, as you’re listening to me, you’re either spiritual or you’re carnal. You’re either in fellowship with God or you’re out of fellowship with God. There’s no in between. What makes you out of fellowship with God is obvious. It’s sin. Sin takes you out of fellowship with God. When we sin, we break that rapport we have with God. We quench the Holy Spirit. We grieve the Holy Spirit. And we have to confess that sin, which is problem-solving device number one on the flatline of your soul. Rebound. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us and to purify us from all of our wrongdoing. I had to learn how to rebound and rebound a lot because I still dealt with many issues. Even though I was saved, even though I was a Christian, all my bad habits didn’t go away. All my bad temperament didn’t go away. I had to grow in the grace and the knowledge of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, just like you have to do the same thing. So finally, by getting under this great pastor and beginning to study God’s word line by line, word by word, under the ICE technique, isagogical, categorical, exegetical, I began to put together the framework of biblical doctrines in my soul that sustained me and helped me to grow spiritually. Because I had no idea I was an evangelist. I had no idea I would have a life of traveling and speaking and giving the gospel. And it started with me going to many, many schools in West Virginia and speaking. And from there to Mississippi and speaking in over 400 schools in two years. And from there to Georgia, speaking in another couple of hundred schools in a year. And God began to shape and form and mold my ministry of talking to teenagers and in what we call spiritual emphasis weeks. Now, Satan’s really good at stopping this. He doesn’t want anybody in the public arena to get any information. And so the public arena has been shut down, but there are a lot of private schools, and I’m not talking about Christian schools. I’m just talking about academies where there may be 200 to 500 students. That door is still open, and that’s a door I’ve been able to go through for many, many years and taught many, many teenagers the word of God and what God expects out of them. And this is something that I had to come to. God only uses prepared people. If I wasn’t prepared, I could have never had that opportunity. And you’d be surprised how many people I spoke to that told me I was goofy, how many people I would speak to that would try to straighten me out. And you know what? They were not lost people. They were not unbelievers. They were all Christians. They were all Christians that took offense. Christians that didn’t like the way I said it. Christians that said, no, you can’t do it that way. No, you can’t do it that way. In my church, we teach it this way. In my church, we teach it that way. I’ve never seen so much confusion and controversy in organized religion in my life. Maybe you’re like that. Maybe you don’t understand exactly what you’re supposed to do or not supposed to do. I was talking with a young man today on the telephone who had been reading a book about some woman who claimed she was the bride of Satan. And he actually believed that junk. And I went, are you kidding me? Oh, no, no, she was the bride of Satan. I said, where do you get that? Satan didn’t ever marry anybody in the Bible or marry anybody in the Old Testament, anybody in the New Testament. She’s just claiming that so she can sell you the book. How much you pay for the book? Oh, $20. Well, are you out of your mind? People have no idea what’s real and what’s not real, what’s legitimate and not legitimate. until you get a framework of biblical doctrine in your soul, and that’s why we teach you the Flatline. We teach you the Flatline to give you a framework of biblical doctrine in your soul. Once you understand rebound, once you understand the filling of the Holy Spirit, Once you understand the faith rest drill, once you understand grace orientation, once you understand doctrinal orientation, once you understand your personal sense of destiny, once you understand what personal love for God is and impersonal love for others, what that is, And then you come to understand how you share the happiness of God and eventually what it means to be occupied with Christ. If you build that residence of doctrine in your soul, then you have a framework for a successful Christian life. By the way, we have a new book out called Christian Problem Solving, and it lists every one of these that I just mentioned on the radio shows that I’ve taught in the past and It’s all the different transcripts that I’ve taught regarding these things, and you can order it today free, no charge whatsoever. Just go through the website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org, and order Christian Problem Solving, and we’ll send it straight to you free of charge. But you need to understand this biblical framework so that you can have the right idea of what you should and shouldn’t do as a Christian because so many people don’t understand the will of God. So many people don’t understand that there’s something he wants you to think, there’s something he wants you to do, and there’s someplace he wants you to be. God has a geographical will for your life. He wants you to be someplace. There’s something that he wants you to do. He gave you a spiritual gift, and that’s what I didn’t understand. I had to learn what my spiritual gift was. It was a gift of evangelism. Well, then I had to learn how to present the gospel accurately. With all the social media that goes on today, I am convinced there is a tremendous amount of satanic infiltration into the minds of young people through social media. And what’s going on is a lot of Christians are on social media spewing a lot of false information. Oh, they spew little devotional thoughts and things like that, but when it comes to living the Christian life, Again, I’ve talked with several people that said, well, I heard a guy on YouTube, and he said I should do this. I heard a preacher on YouTube, and he said I should do that. People are totally confused, and Satan uses this to confuse the issue of spirituality. You know, there’s a difference between being saved, which is salvation, and living the Christian life, which is spirituality. And at any one moment of time in your life, you’re going to be spiritual, Are you going to be carnal? Right now, right now, you are either spiritual or carnal. Now Billy Graham, bless his heart, he’s in heaven with the Lord, but he cannot be any more spiritual than you. He could not be that. If he was filled with the Holy Spirit and you were filled with the Holy Spirit, then you’re both spiritual. And you’re both saved the same way. So if your pastor is filled with the Holy Spirit and you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, you’re both spiritual. But that’s not all there is to the Christian life. You go from spirituality to maturity. Your pastor may be a lot more mature than you, spiritually speaking. What’s that related to? That’s related to the biblical framework or doctrine in his soul. He has more of the word of God stored in his soul than you do. What is his soul? It’s his mentality. It’s his volition. It’s his consciousness and his self-consciousness. And as he’s learned the Word of God and stored that into the framework of his soul, then he’s more mature than you. So if he has 1,000 cc’s of Bible doctrine in his soul and you have 100 cc’s of Bible doctrine in your soul, there’s the difference right there. Now, the Christian life is not designed for you to run to the preacher every time you have a problem. That’s not the way you glorify God. You can’t glorify God letting somebody else make your decisions for you. You have to learn God’s word and apply God’s word in your own life and glorify God with your decisions you make for yourself. If there’s something you don’t understand, I’m sure your pastor can give you a good answer, but eventually you have to be able to answer it yourself because he’s not the one being tested. You are the one being tested. You are the one that Satan will attempt to distract. You are the one that Satan will attempt to discourage. And you are the one that Satan will attempt to defeat. How does he do that? Well, you get your eyes on yourself or you get your eyes on people or you get your eyes on circumstances. And all of a sudden, everything becomes foggy and chaos and confusion. And you won’t do the right thing because you don’t even know what the right thing is. And so you just collapse on the floor in a puddle and cry, why God let all these things happen to me? I can hear you now. Why is God letting this happen to me? Don’t you know the Bible says all things work together for good to those who love God, that’s your virtue love, those who love God and are called according to a predetermined plan. Through Christ Jesus, God called you He has a plan for your life. And do you love him? Yeah, I love God. People tell me that all the time. I love God, really. Well, 1 John 5, 3 says, If you love me, you will obey me, and my mandates are not grievous. They’re not hard. If you love God, you will obey God, and you will obey what the Scripture tells you to do. And it’s a lot more than the Ten Commandments, I promise you. There are well over 400 commandments in the Old Testament, Codex I, Codex II, Codex III. And you’re just talking about the 10 commandments. Now we have a new law, a new law of love in Christ Jesus. And what do you do with that? Do you even know about that? So the Christian life is a complicated life of learning the procedure that God has for you to live. But listen to what I’m about to tell you. God’s plan is called grace. and the protocol plan of God must be learned and must be executed. If you don’t believe me, why would it say study to show yourself approved unto God? If you don’t believe me, why would it say grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? If you don’t believe me, why did Jesus say take my yoke on you and learn of me? Learn, study, grow, these are all verbs that mean you must grow spiritually as a Christian. However, Satan has a plan also. His plan is called evil in the Bible, evil. And it’s full of human good, which is a distortion of divine good. And Satan has a college that he teaches people his plan. It’s the college of the chaos world, the chaotic world. Here it is. It’s like an octopus with all these tentacles going out. People have to learn how to be humanist. People have to learn how to be atheist. People have to learn how to be socialist. It’s a lifestyle, they have to learn. They don’t know what it is until it gets taught to them, and when it’s taught to them, then they say, okay, I believe that, I buy that, I’ll do that. and they’re learning from Satan. So just as God’s plan has to be learned to be obeyed, Satan’s plan has to be learned also. And he teaches it every day through the College of Social Media. But the biggest one, and this is where the biggest confusion comes in, is an organized religion. This is the number one ace in the hole for Satan, organized religion. Misleading people into believing that they’re doing God’s will or misleading people into believing that they’re going to heaven. So you go down to this church and you join up and they say, hey, brother, we’re glad to have you. Let’s put you in the baptismal tank and you’ll be saved. And so no one’s even explained the gospel to you yet, how the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ was for you, how the Lord Jesus Christ paid for your sin on the cross, and whosoever should call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. They just dunk you under the water and give you an offering thing and say, here’s your offering envelope. Now be sure and give us your tithe every month and Off you go, you don’t learn anything. This is a critical issue in the church today. the Word of God is not being taught. And as a result, we have so much confusion and chaos in the Christian world. It’s a fog of confusion. And if we have a man in the pulpit, a pastor in the pulpit, and he’s only able to teach about 30 minutes on Sunday morning because you’re worried about getting out of there and making it to the restaurant on time, how can you grow? You’re not going to grow just going down there and showing up on Sunday morning and getting 30 minutes and checking your cell phone every few minutes to see what the score is on the ball game, you’re crazy. What do you think, you’re growing spiritually by doing that? It’s not gonna happen. So if you’re serious about getting with it, That’s why we do this radio show. That’s why we offer this information. That’s why we challenge you like this, to grow in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You’re not going to grow by singing praise songs. It’s only going to come through time in the Word of God. And it’s only going to come under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor. That’s why God gave these men to you who have this gift, so that you don’t wind up manufacturing all sorts of wood, hay, and stubble. And when you get to the judgment seat of Christ, you can hear, well done, my good and faithful servant. What does that mean? It means you did the right thing in the right way. It means you understood it. That’s what it took for me. I had to learn it. I had to apply it. I had to live it in my life. Learn it, apply it, and glorify God. And I didn’t learn it by opening the Bible and putting it under my pillow at night in some sort of miasmos where it just transferred into my ears. It doesn’t happen that way. Are you willing to learn? Are you willing to sit down under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor and let him teach you the Bible like an hour a day? Maybe three or four hours a week? Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to get a notebook and a piece of paper and a pen and a cup of coffee and sit down at your table and listen as the word of God is taught? See, if there’s not a local pastor in your area doing this, I can sure tell you where there is one. I can tell you how you can tap into the resources free of charge, and you can study and grow in your own home, in your own living room until God shows you where he wants you to be. But that’s up to you. That’s why I’m here, to challenge you with this, to give you this opportunity, to give you this information. That’s why we take this step of faith and broadcast this radio show on faith in over 100 stations. That’s why we print material and distribute it by faith, hundreds and hundreds of books and magazines and things that we distribute free of charge by faith, hopefully to find you, one of you, two of you, three of you, that will grow to be mature believers and glorify Jesus Christ to the maximum. Because when you do that, then you are the one that will deliver this nation. Because as goes your spiritual life, so goes the history of the United States of America. We’re counting on you to learn it and to use it. We’re counting on you to replicate the life of Christ. We’re counting on you to glorify God to the maximum by being the person God ordained you to be. But it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen with you sitting under an oak tree contemplating infinity. You’re going to have to get with it, get into the Word, and start growing. If you want to do that, get in touch with me. Let me know. I’ll hook you up. I’ll tell you where you can go to get it, and you can start your life in the way you want it to be. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
