SPEAKER 01 : 0:08

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 : 0:23

Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick around with me. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and no manipulation. No conning anybody, not trying to raise money, not trying to sell you anything. We just want to give you some information, not speculation, but information. Information from the Word of God that will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life if you’re interested. And if you are, you can orient and adjust to the plan. My job is always to get it accurate, get it right, not mix it up, not confuse you, but to give you the truth. That’s what I’m trying to do. But before we get started today, a couple of things I’d like to tell you, and then we’ll move on to what we’re going to talk about. It’s time for us to renew a lot of our radio stations. We have 110 stations across America. We have signed contracts with, and we pay to run this show in these stations all across the country. So if you’ve never contacted us to tell us you’re listening, I’d like to ask you to please consider doing so. Please let us know where you are, what station you’re listening on, so we can, as we make our new contracts, we know we’re getting the best bang for our buck wherever we are. We don’t want to waste money if people are not listening. So there are a few areas where we’ve never heard from listeners, and if you’re in one of those areas, drop us a note, drop us a line, and then we’ll let these stations know we’re going to continue our contracts with them. We want to be there. We want to continue to give you the information. And we would appreciate if you let us know. You can email us, rick at rickhughesministries.org, rick at rickhughesministries.org, or you could call 800-831-0718, 831-0718, 800-831-0718. Let us know you’re listening. That helps us as we renew our contracts and sign our new deals for the coming year, okay? And again, if you have any information you’d like to get, you can go to our website, rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org. I want to remind you, I’m not Richard Hughes. That’s someone else. If you go on the Internet looking for me and you find rickhughesministries.org, that is not me. That’s a man in Georgia. I am rickhughesministries.org and have been for 20 years. So sometimes the Internet is confusing to people, and they send it to the wrong person, the letters or the notes that they get. Anyhow, rickhughesministries.org, not Richard Hughes Ministries, okay? Now, I don’t know what you think about family. A lot of people do. You know, faith and family is very important to people. I didn’t have much of a family growing up. I never knew my father. To this day, I don’t know who it was. My mom raised me as a single mother, and she often farmed me out to guardians that would take care of me during the week, and then I’d go home on the weekends on Friday night and Saturday night and go back and live with the guardians from Sunday night until Friday night again. I wound up in four or five different grammar schools and eventually got into high school at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama, and there I met a football coach that kind of brought out the manhood in me and what kind of person I really could be as an athlete. But I didn’t have a whole lot of family. We did have a grandmother, my mother’s mother, and I did have a step-grandfather, and we would get together on Christmas. But to some people, family is everything, huge families. And I admire that tremendously. Maybe you have that. Recently, we witnessed the passing of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and she was the longest reigning monarch in British history. And my gosh, her family tree goes back for hundreds of years. She was the daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. So the royal family of Britain certainly has some amazing history, history of both tragedy and triumph. But here’s the best news I could ever tell you. You do have a family. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, You and I are in the royal family of God. We are members of the royal family of God, and that supersedes even the British family, even the British reign of kings and queens and dukes and princes and earls. I mean, God’s royal family. I want to welcome you to the royal family of God. If you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you know, sometimes Christians call each other brothers and sisters. I don’t go in for that a whole lot, but we are members of the same family. The royal family of God is defined as every church age believer, regardless of his ancestry, regardless of his background, regardless of his race, regardless of classification, et cetera. In other words, all distinctions are erased at the point of salvation and reconciliation to God. And we are now, every one of us, you, me, and any other person who’s done this, we are one in Christ. We’re in God’s royal family. What an amazing, wonderful blessing that is. We are members of the royal family of God. And it’s permanent, a permanent royalty. It’ll last forever. because our royalty is eternal and secure since it’s related to our regeneration that never is taken away. And that means that every church age believer from the time the church started at Pentecost until now, every church age believer is definitely in full time royal service for the Lord Jesus Christ. You and I are both believer priests and royal ambassadors. We’re royal priests and royal ambassadors. Let that sink in for a minute. You have a title, not the Duke of Earl, not the Duke of Windsor. You are the royal priest of God. You are the royal ambassador of heaven. That’s amazing. The plan for the royal family of God is not some ritual plan like what Israel went through in their dispensation. That’s been superseded now, and it’s the protocol plan of God which calls for maximum utilization of divine power by the royal family of God. God’s protocol plan says that a right thing must be done in a right way. You’ve been left here on earth to represent God the Father and to lift up the Lord Jesus Christ, and there’s protocol involved. The first protocol, as we talk about it on the Flotline show, is the use of the filling of the Holy Spirit. You cannot do your job as a royal priest or a royal ambassador if you are not filled with the Holy Spirit. And you do receive the Holy Spirit when you get saved. You’re indwelled by the Holy Spirit, according to the book of Ephesians, chapter 1, sealed by the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. So no one’s going to take you out. of the Holy Spirit’s control, but that’s not the filling of the Holy Spirit. The filling of the Holy Spirit comes by means of rebound. When you know you’ve committed a sin, when you are aware that you’ve either sinned in your mind like worry, fear, anger, bitterness, or you’ve sinned with your mouth like slander, gossip, maligning, criticizing, or you’ve sinned overtly, something you might do overtly like drunkenness or fornication or adultery, when you sin, you quench the Holy Spirit. That means you shut off his power. That means he can’t intercede for you. He can’t help you in prayer. He can’t give you God’s direction. He can’t help you understand what the pastor is trying to teach you because you’ve shut off his power. And you have to rebound. You have to stay in fellowship with God. This is the biggest problem in the Christian life today. People do not understand this. If you don’t stay in fellowship with God by using rebound, you’re never going to be able to fulfill your priesthood or your ambassadorship. You must rebound. What is that? 1 John 1, 9. We’ve said it one million times. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The minute you admit a sin, boom, you’re back in fellowship with God. That means you’re filled with the Holy Spirit. The minute you sin, boom, you’re out of fellowship with God and you’ve quenched the Holy Spirit. And of course, that’s known as grieving him. So all of this works off of the protocol plan of God. And you have to understand that. Maximum utilization of divine power by the royal family of God comes through the filling of the Holy Spirit and the dynamics of the Word of God. The Bible says the word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder, the soul and the spirit and the joint and the marrow is a critic of thoughts and intents of the heart. You have as your weapon God the Holy Spirit and God’s living word that will live and abide forever. So the protocol plan of God, the flatline, the learning these problem-solving devices is related to an unprecedented provision throughout all of human history. unprecedented in the fact that all three members of the Godhead indwell your body. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, they indwell your body. And thus, your body is a temple of God. Did you know that? That your body is a temple of God? I mean, you don’t have to go to church to meet God. He lives in you. 1 Corinthians 3, 16 through 17 tells you that. Don’t you know, quoting now, that you are the temple of God and the spirit of God dwells in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy and you are that temple. This is a direct warning to you as a believer priest not to get out of fellowship and stay out of fellowship. and bring shame to the name of God. When you sin and don’t rebound, you’re in trouble. And there are three stages of discipline. We’ve talked about this on the show, warning, intense, and dying. God will warn you, you’re out of line. You don’t listen, you don’t pay attention, you don’t correct your attitude. Then it gets intense where God puts the pressure on you, and that hurts. If that doesn’t work, then he may just call you home too soon. You may be taken off the battlefield way too soon. God may have wanted you to live for 100 years, but you couldn’t stay in fellowship 100 minutes. You sinned so much, and you kept quenching and grieving the Holy Spirit, and you did not rebound. And so God said, all right, I’m just bringing you home. We’re wasting time. So the protocol plan of God provides you with this power in your life. You have two royal commissions. The first one is that royal priesthood I talked about. whereby we represent ourselves before the throne of God. You don’t need a priest to go to God for you. You are a priest. Listen, 1 Peter 2, 9. But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people that you should show forth the praises of the one that called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. You are a priest, a believer priest in the family of God, the royal family of God. You can go to God and rebound. You don’t have to have someone else confess your sins for you, and don’t ever tell someone else what your sins are. That’s none of their business. That’s between you and God. So you want to be a royal priest? You want to represent God? You can do it for yourself. You are a believer priest. And you have a royal priesthood, a royal priesthood. A royal ambassadorship is the second one we talked about. And this is how we represent God to all mankind. So the royal priesthood, we represent ourself. And the royal ambassadorship, we represent God to all mankind. 2 Corinthians 5.20, now then we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were beseeching you by means of us. And we pray you on Christ’s day, be reconciled to God. How can you get reconciled to God? By being religious? No. By giving up sin? No. There’s only one way that you can be reconciled to God, and that’s what the Bible says. He who knew no sin was made sin for us so that we could be made the righteousness of God by means of him. It’s only by means of the death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior that that you have an open channel of communication to God the Father. Christ provided that, and that’s why he said, I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, and no one can come to the Father but by me. So the royal family of God, while it’s on earth, while we’re here, we’re called the body of Christ. And in heaven, when we get there, we’re called the bride of Christ. So we’re the body of Christ now, and we’ll be the bride of Christ in heaven. Revelation 19, seven through eight. Let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife, what is his wife? That’s the body of Christ. His wife has made herself ready, and to her, the body of Christ, was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white, for the fine linen is the righteousness of the saints. After the rapture of the church, what’s the exit resurrection? First Thessalonians chapter 4 talks about when the Lord Jesus Christ will come back at the exit resurrection and we are raptured out. When we are taken to heaven, I mean, you may be walking down the street one minute and boom, you’re gone. You go to meet the Lord in the air. First Thessalonians chapter 4. Read it for yourself. The dead in Christ should rise first and then we that remain behind shall be caught up together with them in the clouds and so shall we evermore be with the Lord. When we go with the rapture, we go to heaven and we are prepared as the bride during that tribulational period, that seven year period. But when we come back with Christ at the second advent, We come back as his bride and listen what the Bible says. Here we are coming back now. We’ve been raptured. We’ve gone to heaven. We’ve been there seven years. There’s been the marriage of the lamb to the church. And here it is in 1911 through 14 revelation. And I saw heaven open up. John now records the vision and behold a white horse. And he that sat upon it was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. That’s the Lord Jesus Christ. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns, and he had a name written that no man knew but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven, you and me, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, that’s our righteousness, followed him upon white horses. If you like horses, there’s horses in heaven. Right there they are, white horses. So think about that. Royal family of God, the bride of Christ. And now we come back with him to the earth for a 1,000-year reign of the millennial reign of Christ. Our security as royalty is based on this, the sealing ministry of the Holy Spirit. We are sealed by God at salvation. This is a guarantee of our status as members of the royal family of God. Now what’s the objective of leaving us here? Why did God leave us here? Well, the first objective is for us to take in the Word of God on a consistent daily basis until we receive the mind of Christ. We become Christ-like. We begin to think like Christ so that when people see us, they see an image of Christ. That’s our first objective. Take in the Word of God. Begin to have personal love for God, the greatest virtue in the world. Virtue love is personal love for God. The Bible tells us God is love. And if we reciprocate and reciprocate with that love, then we are growing in Christ. And this develops what the Bible calls spiritual self-esteem. If you have personal love for God, you can have some spiritual self-esteem. Now, the believer, you and I, we must continue to grow spiritually while we’re here. I mean, we start off as babies and we gotta get to spiritually adult and then we get to heaven. So how do we do that? Well, we take in food, and that food is the Word of God, and we feed on the Word of God. Here’s how it works. You stay filled with the Holy Spirit. You sit under the ministry of a qualified pastor. He serves you a great meal. He teaches you God’s Word, hopefully more than one meal a week, and you eat it. You take it in. You metabolize it. You learn it. You use it. You apply it into your life, and you grow. That’s how you develop spiritual self-esteem. So as we grow spiritually, we develop this autonomy where we don’t need other people to tell us what to do. We can handle it ourself. We understand the Christian life. We understand how we’re supposed to live. And we develop the phenomenal problem-solving device called impersonal love towards other members of the human race. Personal love for God, you develop first. Impersonal love for others, you develop second. That comes from understanding the Word of God. That comes from the filling of the Holy Spirit and maturity in your life where you can relax around other people and love them even though they might be weirdos, even though they might be jerks. You can still love them, but you love them based now on who you are, not based on who they are. Impersonal love is your love based on you, not your love based on them. That’s how God did it. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Weren’t you part of the world? Weren’t you one of those weirdos in the world and God loved you? He didn’t love you based on your character. He loved you based on his character. And it’s the same thing with you using impersonal love. So as we take in the word of God, As we live the protocol plan of God as believer priests and royal ambassadors, we grow spiritually and we develop love for other members of the human race. And while all this is going on, you’re going to be tested. I mean, Satan’s not going to sit by and clap his hands and say, oh boy, look, a great Christian is growing right there. No, you’re going to be tested. There’s going to be momentum testing. And this will see whether or not you’ll stick with it, whether or not you’ve got enough courage to stay in fellowship and keep growing daily, or whether you’re going to peel off and be distracted and discouraged. You go through momentum testing. You go through people testing. That’s a hard test to pass. You know, the biggest test will be from members of your own congregation, not people on the outside, people in your own church. People will turn on you. People will say things about you. People may malign you. How will you handle that? People testing and then system testing, disaster testing. All these are going to come in your life. They have to for you to reach spiritual maturity. But when you get there, When you get to spiritual maturity, then you undergo the final test called evidence testing. And this is where the Father allows you to be put on the witness stand and Satan will cross-examine you to try to get you to break. Can you pass evidence testing? Can you stay in fellowship in spite of what may have happened to you like Job did? He went through evidence testing. So at maturity, when we finally reach maturity, which is your ultimate goal, As a believer priest and a royal ambassador, we receive our blessings, blessings that God put on deposit for you many years ago, and he will pour them out into your life. This is the objective of the royal family of God while on earth, to get these blessings. But we have a code we must live by. This code is important. It’s an honor code. The royal family of God has an honor code, and that code is a system of spiritual integrity. It’s mandated by God in the Bible, and it’s revealed in the mystery doctrines of the church. The royal family honor code relates to God’s personal integrity and yours as well. Your integrity in relationship to other people, your integrity in relationship to God. The honor code is a supplement to using impersonal love for all believers, but it’s also a problem-solving device in the protocol plan of God. The honor code of God includes the filling of the Holy Spirit. It includes you using biblical orientation, grace orientation, and a personal sense of destiny. These are all part of the flood line. But the great enemy to this honor code, the great enemy you will face is gossip, maligning, and slandering other believers. In Ephesians 4.25, therefore having laid aside the lie, every one of you must speak the truth with his fellow believers since we are members one of another. Now let’s back up for a minute. Are there people in your church you can’t stand? Are there people in your church that have maligned you, criticized you, run you down, maybe have run you out of the church? Have you complained? Have you been bitter? Have you been full of self-pity? You’re not living up to the honor code. And this is a hard test to pass. Many of you will face it. I’ve faced it in my life, being put down for something you didn’t do. You have to use the word of God to handle these sort of tests. So the protocol plan of God is the greatest producer of honor and integrity in all of history. It’s an honor and an integrity produced by the ministry of God the Holy Spirit and the Word of God alive inside your soul. It’s an honor and an integrity produced by you perceiving and applying the Word of God in your life. It’s the application of doctrine. The application of doctrine requires you to maintain some spiritual self-esteem and move from spiritual self-esteem to the higher function of spiritual autonomy and eventually even spiritual maturity. So the Royal Family of God Honor Code is amazing because what? The Royal Family Honor Code functions best where there’s spiritual self-esteem. And we say, well, what are you talking about self-esteem? Well, that’s how you value yourself, how you perceive yourself. It’s based on the opinion of yourself. And sometimes we can be difficult to change. We might also think this is self-confidence. Your self-esteem can affect whether you like and value yourself as a person. That’s human self-esteem, but spiritual self-esteem is totally different. How do you feel about your spiritual life? Do you have spiritual confidence? That’s you being confident in your spiritual journey, not depending on another individual to motivate you or to direct you. It’s the basis for you resolving your unresolvable problems. Spiritual self-esteem becomes the base of operation for the effective application of the Word of God in your life. With the attainment of spiritual self-esteem in your life, when you get there, you’ve learned enough of the Word of God to make application to every experience in life. You know why many believers lack human self-esteem? Because they lack the ability to apply the truth of the Word of God to their experience. They lack human self-esteem, and that puts them in some sort of vacuum. They suffer from problems of dependency, dependency on other people, dependency on something to make them happy. You are to be dependent on God and independent of any problems. So spiritual self-esteem is the key. with no self-esteem, human or spiritual, then you’re going to be disoriented in life, and no one can be successful in marriage without self-esteem. Without self-esteem, you cannot entertain yourself. You can’t even handle simple problems like loneliness, problems related to social life. Lack of self-esteem and almost everything in life will destroy you. But the greatest disaster you face is failure to learn, understand, and apply the honor code, God’s system of integrity. The honor code is related to the laws of divine establishment, Romans 13, 8 through 10. Oh, no man anything but to love one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. The honor code demands patriotism, respect for government authority, military service, respect for law and order. Romans 13, 1 through 7, let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but from God. The powers that are, are ordained by God. Whoever therefore resists the power, resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist shall receive themselves damnation. Rulers, the Bible goes on to say, are not a terror to good works but to evil. So the royal family honor code revolves around three simple principles before we wrap it up. Truth or integrity in your life, impersonal love towards others, and grace orientation. James 2.8 puts it this way. If you fulfill the royal law according to the scriptures, you will love your neighbor as yourself, then you will do well. That honor code we’re talking about demands integrity, virtue, and the grace of orientation to God’s functions in life. You, yourself, myself as well, without the royal family honor code, we will be useless and worthless to God. You are a believer priest. You are an ambassador. Live up to that. Live it as you should. This is Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The Flood Line.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:19

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.