In this enlightening episode, Rick Hughes dives deep into the essence of spiritual growth, emphasizing the necessity of doctrinal orientation and the role of pastors in helping believers find their personal sense of destiny. Explore the essential virtues of personal love for God and impersonal love for others, and understand how these form the spine of a vibrant Christian journey. Discover the profound joys and peace that come with aligning your life with biblical wisdom, and see how occupation with Christ can provide clarity and motivation for whatever life may bring.
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 the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, stick around, please. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, but all done without any type of manipulation. because we’re not trying to hustle you. We’re not going to seek money. We’re not going to ask you to join up, fess up, give up, nothing like that. We’d just like to ask you to listen up. Listen to me as I teach the Word of God and attempt to verify and identify God’s plan for your life. And if I can do that, you can orient and adjust to the plan if you’d like to do so. It’s your privilege. It’s your life. You make your own decisions. You’re responsible for every decision that you make. So here you go. God gave us two ends. Remember that. I always talk about this on the radio show. God gave you two ends. One end you think with, one end you sit with. And success in your life is going to depend on which one of those ends you use. Heads you win, tails you lose. It’s important that you think right. And that’s why the Bible clearly tells us, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. everything you do starts with a thought and becomes a motive and becomes a decision. And that’s what the Lord can read. He knows what you’re thinking. That’s his omniscience. He’s very much aware of what you’re thinking. He’s very much aware of every deed you do. So we want to learn how to think right. And that’s what the flat line is all about. A lot of people that might be listening for the first time might not understand what the flat line is or what the flat line stands for. It’s simply a military analogy for the forward line of troops, F-L-O-T. What we’re trying to teach is there are 10 unique problem-solving devices taught in the Word of God, and if you will learn them and use them, they will act like a main line of resistance in your soul. And what they will do is they’ll stop the outside sources of adversity from overrunning the thinking of your soul and becoming stress. That’s what’s so unique about the Christian life. You never have to have any stress whatsoever because stress is emotional override of the soul. It’s you not thinking, it’s you feeling. but there’s a better way to live. And then that’s the Christian life, a wonderful life, a wonderful way to live, but you have to learn it. And that’s why we have these 10 unique problem-solving devices. And that’s why we’ve just completed a book on that, by the way. The book is free. It’s called Christian Problem-Solving. We’d like to offer it to you today, free. Just write to us. Let us know you want the book. We’ll ship it out as soon as possible. But it lists all 10 problem-solving devices that I’m reviewing for you. Last radio show, we reviewed rebound, we reviewed the filling of the Holy Spirit, we reviewed the faith rest drill, and we reviewed grace orientation, and today we’ll continue reviewing the rest of those 10 problem-solving devices. The reason we do this is because the Bible clearly says we need to grow, grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The Christian life requires thinking. It requires you learning. It requires you growing. You have to learn how to execute the plan of God. Most people never think about the spiritual life being a unique life. Most people just think, well, I’m a Christian, and they never really consider that there’s a spiritual life. There is a process that we have to go through as believers. I mean, we start out as young believers and we don’t understand the process. We don’t understand rebound, how to stay filled with the Holy Spirit. We don’t understand how to use the faith rest drill. We don’t understand grace orientation. These are things you have to learn. So when 2 Peter 3.18 says, grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, this is not a request. This is a mandate in the original Greek language of the New Testament. Grow is a verb, it’s a mandate, it’s a command. And it’s the word auxano, auxano, A-U-X-A-N-O, the Greek word. And it’s what we call a imperative mood verb, which means it’s a command. But here’s the principle, no one ever grows spiritually by singing. You don’t grow by sitting around in church singing praise songs about God. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not how you grow. You grow by learning God’s Word, and so 2 Timothy 2.15 tells you that. Study to show yourself approved unto God. Here’s another verb, study, spoudazo in the Greek New Testament, spoudazo, S-P-O-U-D-A-Z-O, spoudazo, and it again is an imperative mood verb. So we have one verb that says grow and one verb that says study. Every one of us must know and understand what the spiritual life is if we hope to glorify God to the maximum. If we hope for God to use us, we have to understand that a right thing has to be done in a right way. Unfortunately, many Christians don’t understand this. And so they never really grow. I mean, they love the Lord. They understand that they’re saved and they’re going to heaven. But the Bible verse in Jeremiah 9 said, I’m looking for people that not only know me, but understand me. And that’s what I’m trying to do on this radio show is look for those of you that have a hunger for to understand the God you know? Do you have a hunger to understand the God you know? Are you willing to apply the time that it takes to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and the Savior, Jesus Christ? Are you willing to do what Jesus said? Come unto me, all ye that labor and heavy laden, and I’ll give you rest. Take my yoke on you and learn of me. Learn of me. My yoke is easy, my burden is light. study, grow, learn. You have to learn how to live the Christian life, how to execute the Christian life. That’s what these 10 problem-solving devices are. It’s in a nutshell. Here is the Christian life in a nutshell for you. We have it in bookmarks. We have it in a book. We have it any way you want it so you can remember it, but you have to learn these. You have to learn how to rebound and stay in fellowship and handle sin and You have to learn the filling of the Holy Spirit and how to let the Holy Spirit control your life and not your flesh. You have to learn how to live under the faith thrust drill so emotions won’t overtake you and you panic in the fear panic ploy. You have to learn what grace orientation is, that you’re saved by grace, you live by grace, you die by grace, and there’s surpassing grace in heaven. And then it’s all connected to doctrinal orientation, biblical orientation. I’d like for you to become familiar with that term, doctrinal orientation. This refers to the sum total of the word of God that you need to learn and put to use in your life. Without this, without Bible doctrine, you have no answers, you have no solutions. You have no motivation for your life. And that’s why I said God instructs us to study in 2 Timothy 2.15. Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needed not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. In Hebrews 5.11, the writer of Hebrews, whoever he was, said, look, I’d like to teach you some things, but you’re not capable of learning them. You’re still a baby. You’re not ready for the snake. You still need a bottle. Read it. Hebrews 5, 11 through 16. Now, where do you learn this stuff? How do you just pick up a Bible and start reading it? I run into people like that. They brag about having read the Bible through. There’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible. That’s not the process. The process is a local church. The process is the pastor in the local church. He has a spiritual gift, and it’s his job to study the Word of God, to dissect the Word of God, and to teach the Word of God to his congregations. Unfortunately, many pastors don’t do this. Many pastors are not allowed to do this, and so they’re forced to visit and counsel and do things that don’t assist people in growing spiritually. You need to have the privacy of your priesthood when you go to church. You need to be able to learn God’s Word. And listen, if you went to the first grade for an hour and a half a week, you’d never get out of the first grade. 30 minutes on Sunday morning, 30 minutes on Sunday night, 30 minutes on Wednesday night, that’s an hour and a half a week. no wonder many christians never get out of the first grade they never take any time to study and learn and grow so you say well i may go to church for an hour and a half but i’ll go home and read my bible that’s not it sure you can read your bible sure you can pick up things but that’s not the way the program is lined up in the word of god you must sit under the authority of a pastor who has the gift a well-qualified pastor he’s called the shepherd and we’re called the sheep And it’s his job to see to it that we’re fed and to see to it that we’re protected. And we have to learn Bible doctrine. It’s called metabolizing the Word of God. When you eat, you have to metabolize the food to convert it into energy. And so if a good pastor studies and teaches God’s Word and you are filled with the Holy Spirit, he helps you understand it. And he can’t assist you if you’re out of fellowship. If you’re not using rebound, if you’re not confessing your known sin, I don’t care how many times you go to church, I don’t care how good the pastor is, the Holy Spirit cannot do his job. You must be in fellowship when you sit under the authority of your pastor. You must not have unconfessed sin in your life because you will not be able to convert what he taught into spiritual dynamics in your life. So if your pastor doesn’t teach you the Word of God, I suggest you find one that will. Sometimes people have to seek outside assistance. And I can tell you there are many books, many tapes available for you if you choose to use them and not for sale. Some people try to charge for all their stuff, but that’s… I don’t agree with that. I think if God freely gives it, we need to freely give it out. That’s why we don’t charge for anything on our show. We believe if God’s in it, he will pay for it. Thus, we have bills like everybody else does, but we don’t ask people for money. We wait on the Holy Spirit to motivate people to give, and that’s the way it works. Some people sell their writings, and some people sell them in bookstores and all that stuff, but if you’re going to grow spiritually, you’ve got to study God’s Word every day under a well-qualified pastor. What you’re trying to do is to learn to think like Christ thinks, and that’s what it means, doctrinal orientation. You have to change the way you think. You have to acquire the mind of Christ. What does the Bible say about this? What does the Bible say about that? The more the Bible you learn, the more divine viewpoints you gain and you’ll begin to see how God’s word relates to everything in your life, such as your parents, your marriage, your finances, your authority in your life, all of it. But there is one thing I want to point out for you is called retention. Those things you learn may not be retained because the rate of forgetting can exceed the rate of learning. It’s possible that you can forget it quicker than you can learn it, so you have to do it on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s good for a pastor to review so you can retain. There’s nothing wrong with him giving a review of a message that, well, I might have heard that before. Well, maybe you need to hear it again because you can’t retain it. You’ll forget it. But doctrinal orientation is critical for any believer that wants to grow up. He has to retain the word of God in his soul. He has to put it into a stream of consciousness. He has to be able to go to it and pull it out when he needs it and to use it in his life. He can’t pull it out if he didn’t learn it and he can’t learn it if he doesn’t sit on someone teaching it. That’s why the Bible says faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So it’s critical for you to have doctrinal orientation. Orient everything you say, everything you do, every decision you make has to be oriented to the word of God. What does the Bible say about this? What does the Bible say about marriage? What does the Bible say about business? What does the Bible say about nationalism or patriotism? What does the Bible say about this? It’s all there. Now, that is another problem-solving device. So we have rebound, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the faith rest drill, grace orientation, doctrinal orientation, and now we come to a personal sense of destiny. Personal sense of destiny. So on the basis of the promise of God, we wait. We wait for God to show us what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to be, what we’re supposed to think. And this is an unbelievable opportunity to realize you know you’re going to heaven. You know you have a destiny in heaven. But you might not know what your spiritual gift is. You might not know where God wants you to work, what God wants you to do. and you never will learn it if you’re self-absorbed. If you’re so involved with yourself that you become preoccupied with your own destiny and you forget about God’s plan, if you’re concentrating on yourself, that’s dangerous because it leads to unrealistic self-expectations. You have to concentrate on God’s word and God’s plan for you by learning and applying his word every day. That’s called divine viewpoint, and that’ll free you from being worried or being absorbed with self. So any believer who’s spiritually mature, any believer who has self-confidence based on God’s word is going to know he has a personal sense of destiny. I never realized, for example, that I was going to be an evangelist. I had no clue. I never went to church as a youngster, even as a teenager. I never studied the Bible. I didn’t even own a Bible. And yet here I have been in the ministry for 50 plus years now. I did not know what God’s destiny was for me. I did not know I had the spiritual gift of evangelism. But it took a while as I studied the Bible and got under a well-qualified pastor to learn what the spiritual gifts were and to recognize and see my own gift, thus know what I was supposed to be doing with my life. So let me ask you that question. As a believer in Jesus Christ, do you know what you’re supposed to be doing with your life? Do you know what your spiritual gift is? Do you know how to use it in your local church? This is what I’m talking about. Having a personal sense of destiny is critical for you. That’s the only way you can have any confidence in your life and what you’re supposed to be doing. This is how you get direction. This is how you get motivation. Do you know why you’re here? Don’t get preoccupied with your personal problems. You’ll lose sight of your destiny. I mean, if you have problems, rebound the problems. Confess the sins. Maintain your spiritual momentum. Keep going forward, and God will show you. There are a lot of ways to know what is the will of God, and there’s a book that a friend of mine has written called Divine Guidance, and I can recommend that book to you. We’ll be glad to send it to you if you write to us. a book on divine guidance, how God the Holy Spirit will show you where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing, even where you’re supposed to live, what your gift is and how it operates. That is a personal sense of destiny. Now let’s move on to the next problem-solving device called personal love for God. The Bible commands us to love God, and there’s no doubt about that. If you say you love me and hate your neighbor, you’re a liar. The truth is not in you, the Bible says. Personal love for God is the greatest motivation any Christian can have. But how could you love somebody you don’t even know? When the Bible tells you to love God, it implies you’ve got to know him. That’s why all that Bible study that we talk about is necessary. The more you learn about God, the more you love God, the more you appreciate God, the more you adhere to God’s plan, and the more you want to learn about God. If you want to test how much you love God, read 1 John 5, 3. Here’s what it says. If we love God, we’ll obey him and his mandates are not, they’re not hard. So obedience is leaked to loving God. It’s the greatest virtue you have. It’s the greatest motivational virtue in your life. Personal love for God. God is perfect, he’ll never deceive you, he’ll never fail you, he’ll never fall out of love with you, he will never let you down, and you can love him with all your personal love and he will always be worthy of that. Personal love for you to direct towards God is the highest Christian virtue you have, and it’s what motivates you to love others who often will fail you and let you down. But if you don’t have personal love for God based on having an intense personal relationship with him, then you’ll have no spiritual motivation to love other people as well. Do you demonstrate your love for God? How? By keeping his word. Keeping his word. Ephesians 6, 1 and 2. Children, obey your parents. Honor your father and your mother. There’s a mandate in the Bible. If you’re a young person, do you obey your parents? Do you honor your father and mother? Do you love God? If you obey these verses, you might. This is where things get tough because it’s only by means of personal love for God that you can have the motivational virtue to obey those sort of passages that I just quoted. This is why it’s such a tremendous problem-solving device. If you will stay in fellowship, if you will learn God’s word, if you will come to understand the gods you already know, then you can develop this intense personal love for God that I’m talking about. It’s an amazing thing. It doesn’t mean you walk around with your head in the stars all day long singing, oh, how I love Jesus. But it means that you have honor and obedience to his plan and that God’s able to depend on you. Now, another personal problem-solving device is impersonal love for all people. Personal love for God, impersonal love for others. Impersonal love for all. When you love someone, be it a parent, even a friend, even a mate, you’ll find that that person is imperfect and often can let you down. They make mistakes. We’re human. We have sin natures. So even the best of us fail sometimes every day. But love, this is an interesting thing about God’s love. It’s not designed to work only when we’re on good terms with somebody. I mean, think about the worst person in your block. Did you realize God said you got to love that person? We call them a W-O-J, a weird, obnoxious jerk. And you’re supposed to love them? This is the thing that makes the Christian life so unique, that we can actually love our enemies. That doesn’t mean we would not fight to defend our home or not fight to defend our family, but it does teach us that we must follow Christ’s example of loving all men. The problem comes when you try to love people with personal love because they’ll let you down and you’ll get angry. That’s the wrong thing to do. You let your emotions take control. You get preoccupied with your problems and you’re out of fellowship with God. You’re sinning with anger, bitterness, vindictiveness. So the thing to do is switch loves. Go from personal love to impersonal love. Now you can love anybody based on one simple principle. Your love for him is not based on his or her actions or performance, but rather based on your own personal integrity. Personal love for God. That’s where it comes from. In other words, nothing in the person that you’re told to love is worth loving. But the motivation to love that person is not based on what he is or who he is or what he’s done or hadn’t done. It’s rather based on your life and your personal love for God. You can love him based on who you are, not who he is. Is this not what God did for you? God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. God loved you. Were you a jerk? Yes. Did God give his son for you? Yes. That’s impersonal love. He wasn’t loving you based on your character. He was loving you based on his character. And when you believe in Christ, you can do the same thing. When you receive the Holy Spirit and grow in grace and knowledge, you can use impersonal love to love people that are not worth loving, just like God loved you when you were not worth loving. So it’s not based on who they are. It’s based on who you are. God did this for you in John 3, 16. The world was full of sin. We know God doesn’t love sin, but how did he do this? He loved us based on his integrity, his virtue, his honor. He loved us. And we can use that same sort of impersonal love to deal with people that are unloving towards us. So personal love for God motivates us to have impersonal love for others. And these two loves can solve all your people problems if you’ll let them. So as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you have a flat line in your soul, if you have a main line of resistance and you have impersonal love for all, then people will not make you bitter. People will not, and circumstances will not get you disillusioned because you know better than to try to use personal love for a person that’s not worth loving. Okay? Now, what about sharing the happiness of God? That’s another problem-solving device. It’s called plus H, sharing the happiness of God. The Lord Jesus Christ told the disciples, I’ve said these things to you so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be full. Joy is a wonderful peace of mind that the Holy Spirit gives to you. Happiness is being impressed with the details and the circumstances, but joy is is that even though the details and the circumstances are hard and not there, you can still have this amazing peace in your life. Sharing God’s happiness. That’s a wonderful problem-solving device for a mature believer like yourself. And it’s always directed towards self. It guarantees you that you never, ever, ever have to be unhappy. Notice the word, I taught you these things, John 15, 11, so that my happiness or my joy might be in you and your joy might be full. Taught you. Plus H belongs to those who hear God’s word and keep it. Listen to 11 to, excuse me, let me back that up just a minute. I want to try to say this correctly, get my head straight around. Luke 11, 27 and 28. Now listen carefully. Happiness belongs to those people who hear my Father’s word and keep it. Hear and keep. That’s the source to happiness. So you can’t have this plus H if you’re not learning God’s word and applying God’s word. Hearing and keeping. Learning, L-A-G, lag. Learn it, apply it, and glorify God as a result of it. Learn it, apply it, and glorify God as a result of it. It’s all important for you. The Old Testament and Proverbs speaks about this sort of happiness, how it’s acquired. It says this in Proverbs 3.13, happiness belongs to the person who finds wisdom even to the person who gains understanding. This is the source of happiness, the wisdom of God. That’s the greatest treasure you could ever possess. Paul said it this way, I’m gonna give you a treasure a word treasure, and that’s the wisdom of God. What is wisdom? It’s understanding. It’s insight. It’s discernment. When you have insight and discernment based on your understanding of the details of life and the circumstances of life, then you have God’s wisdom and you’re able to operate freely and independently in the devil’s world and not be sidetracked. So happiness belongs to those who find wisdom, even to those who gain understanding. It’s critical. Plus H, sharing the happiness of God. And it belongs only to the Christians who fulfill those requirements to grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The only thing that could bring Christ’s happiness in the middle of life, in the middle of his crucifixion, the middle of what he experienced was to know that he was fulfilling God’s wonderful plan for his life. As long as he was doing that plan, he was happy. So this is for you too. You may have to go through some sort of undeserved suffering, but you can have the same sort of plus H happiness that Jesus had if you’ll stay in fellowship and use the faith rest drill. But if you get bitter, if you get full of self-pity, Then you move into the arrogant sins and become preoccupied with your own problems and you’ll lose your plus H. So remember this. Plus H is tranquility of soul. It’s contentment in life. It’s capacity for life. It’s stimulation and enthusiasm in life. means you have the ability to motivate yourself from within. You won’t have to sit around waiting on someone else to come along and make you happy. You can take the initiative and provide for your own stimulation and your own enjoyment. The final problem-solving device is occupation with Christ. Again, I remind you, order the book. It just came out. All of this is explained in detail in the book, How to Have a Flatline in Your Soul. Very few people love the way they want to be loved and treated the way they want to be treated. This comes from some sort of unrealistic expectation a lot of times, but without the word of God, without these problem-solving devices, it’s inevitable that this will result in terrible frustration and instability in your life. Being occupied with Christ solves this problem. It sets our priorities aside, and we’re occupied with Christ. There’s so much I need to say about it. I really don’t have enough time to deal with occupation with Christ right now, but remember this. He is our role model. He’s our best friend. And once we learn to think like he thinks, once we accrue the mind of Christ, then we begin to replicate his life and represent him to our friends. That’s occupation with Christ. It’s all in that book, all free for you. If you’ll order it and study it, sit down with your Bible, go over it, you will appreciate it, I promise you. We’ll include the bookmark that lists all these as well. Rebound, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the faith rest drill, grace orientation, doctrinal orientation, personal sense of destiny, personal love for God, and personal love for all, sharing the happiness of God and occupation with Christ. All taught to me by my pastor, and I’m passing it on to you so you can learn it as well. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re learning. I hope you’re applying. Until next week, I’m 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.
