Have Faith in God
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 590 aired on December 18, 2016
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes, please stay with me. It will just be a few minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some
education, and we do it without any type of manipulation. We are asking you to listen up, maybe
take a few notes, maybe jot some things down if you’re interested in learning how God’s plan
works. This is a show about the Bible. No ranting, no raving, this is a show about how you can
verify and identify the plan of God for your life and if you’re able to do this, you always have the
freedom and the privacy to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. I would like to spend a
few moments with you this morning discussing a critical issue. That issue is a simple word that
we all have heard many times, something that we all understand and it’s part of the 10 unique
problem-solving devices that make up the FLOT line of our soul. Remember, each one of us are
encouraged to build a main line of resistance inside our soul, an invisible barrier that will stop
the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside sources of stress. Since
adversity is inevitable, we like to say stress is optional. Because adversity is what the
circumstances in life do to you, sometimes you create it, and stress, well that’s what we do to
ourselves. As believers in Jesus Christ it is possible for us to live this supernatural life, a life that
does not have fear, a life that does not worry, a life that does not get bitter nor seek revenge. It’s
the Christian life. The Bible says in Ephesians 4:30,
“Be kind to one another, forgiving one
another even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you,”
and that’s a critical thing for us if we’re
going to understand these 10 unique problem-solving devices and build this FLOT line in our
soul. I hope you’ve heard me teach this. If not, we have a book about it. It’s called
Christian
Problem-Solving,
we’ll be glad to send it to you free, no charge ever. It lists all 10 unique
problem-solving devices. The first three are critical because the first one is rebound. Rebound is
how you get back in fellowship with God after you have committed personal sin. Remember, sin
comes in three areas: something you say, something you think, or something you do. When you
sin it’s like taking a garden hose and crimping it and the water won’t come out. You essentially
quench the Holy Spirit, you grieve the Holy Spirit. He’s not able to do His job. You crimp the
water hose and so when you go to God and admit your sin as per 1 John 1:9 or Psalm 32:4-5 in
the Old Testament, when you name your sin to God, you un-crimp the hose. In other words, you
give the Holy Spirit freedom to operate in your life again. You can resume fellowship with God.
You cannot have fellowship with God if you’ve quenched the Holy Spirit and grieved the Holy
Spirit by committing sin and not naming your sin. Naming your sin to God as per 1 John 1:9 is
what we call the rebound technique, you keeping a short account of sin, even while you’re
driving, even while you’re talking to someone. It’s so easy to be critical. It’s so easy to malign.
It’s so easy to get frustrated. It’s so easy to get angry driving. So you see these things happen
every day and as believers we do not have to live this way. Rebound is critical and there’s not a
minute of any day that should go by that you’re not examining yourself, making sure there is no
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unconfessed sin in your life. I can hear you now saying, “That’s impossible, I can’t keep up with
all of my sins.” Well, that’s why the verse says,
“If we name our known sin then He’s faithful and
just to forgive us from all unrighteousness,”
and this means even the ones you don’t remember.
I’m sure there are sins you’ve committed you don’t remember but if you will name the ones you
are aware of, God is faithful and just to cleanse you from all of them. That’s rebound, this gives
you the filling of the Holy Spirit. That’s the fuel for the Christian life. That’s the power for the
Christian life when you combine it with God’s living Word. Thus the filling of the Holy Spirit is
problem-solving device number two. Problem-solving device number one is the rebound
technique, how I recover from sin. Problem-solving device number two, now that I’ve recovered
from sin, the Holy Spirit is filling and controlling my life and it solves the problem of my
genetically formed sin nature controlling my life. Problem-solving device number three is using
the faith-rest drill, using God’s Word to solve and handle difficulty in your life.
In the Bible, in
Mark 11:22 Jesus tells the disciples to have faith in God, a simple statement,
“Have faith in
God.”
The background to that statement is this, that He has now, in the last week of His life,
come into Jerusalem. On the way into Jerusalem, He saw a fig tree that was a beautiful tree. It
had all kind of leaves but no figs and He cursed the fig tree. The fig tree was barren. This fig tree
was a type of Israel that was barren, that had no fruit and He cursed that fig tree. Then He went
on into Jerusalem and as He approached Jerusalem, the people welcomed Him as the King and
they began to sing Hosanna the King to Him,
“Blessed is He who comes in the name of the
Lord.”
You can read about it in Mark 11:9-10 and other passages in the New Testament. With
cursing the fig tree, Jesus knew what was going on. He knew that unbelieving Israel would reject
Him as their Messiah. Here it looks like they are accepting Him. It looks like here they’re
welcoming Him, but they’re not. The Pharisees hear all of this celebration and they go to the
Lord Jesus Christ and rebuke Him. They want Him to tell all His disciples to stop all this
nonsense about Him being the Messiah, “Tell them to shut up, quit saying this.” Of course Jesus
said,
“If they didn’t say that, even the rocks would sing it out.”
So He draws near the city of
Jerusalem and the Bible says,
“He wept over it.”
He looked at it and wept over Jerusalem, Luke
19:41. It’s the second incident in the Bible where Jesus wept. What He’s doing here, from what I
understand the Scripture is teaching, is He’s about to make a prophetical statement about the
rejecters of Him. Those who rejected the kingdom, those who rejected His Messiahship, they are
about to undergo terrible discipline and our Lord prophetically sees it. He prophesied the
destruction of the city of Jerusalem. You can read this prophecy in Luke 19:43-44. Jesus
prophesied Jerusalem would be destroyed and it did happen just as He said. In 70 A.D. under the
Emperor Titus, Jerusalem was sacked and the people were scattered and the Diaspora, as they
call it, occurred. They were scattered and we know that some returned in 1940 and we have a
nation Israel today but this is not the nation that Jesus will call back at the Millennial reign when
He comes to establish His Kingdom. It’s a different nation. These are Zionists. These are not
believers. These are unbelievers. This is what happened, why He predicted this even though they
welcomed Him, even though they sang these things, they would not accept Him as their Messiah.
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The next day He comes back to Jerusalem again and the fig tree has died. He explains to the
disciples what happened, what’s going on, that Israel was going to be disciplined and destroyed
but for them to have faith in God.
“Have faith in God,”
Mark 11:22, don’t worry, God still has
a plan for your life.
Faith in God means to be patient. Faith in God means to have no
doubt.
I’m sure they thought that He included them in this disaster but He didn’t. They would see
Him crucified and He told them that He would return. “Don’t doubt this, don’t ever second-guess
what I said men, have faith in God.”
Doubt is not faith. Unbelief is not faith.
You must think
about this in your life as well. When you have faith in God, you must have faith in God’s plan.
Understanding God’s plan is critical and having faith that God will not abandon you, He will not
turn His back on you.
The Bible says in 1 John 5:13,
“These things are written that you may
know that you have eternal life.”
“These things,”
the Word, you can know it for a fact. If you
don’t have faith in this, if you think, “Well, I’ve done something and now God has forsaken me
and God doesn’t want me anymore,” that’s not what the Bible teaches. Jesus Christ our Lord and
Savior died for my sin and for your sin and we cannot be good enough to get into heaven. We
cannot be reconciled to God on our own. It was only through the cross of Christ where He made
the sacrificial death for us. This sacrificial death for us satisfied the righteousness of God and the
justice of God and thus you can know beyond a shadow of a doubt you’re going to heaven. Even
though you’ve failed, even though you’ve done some miserable things, I don’t even know where
you may be listening to me today, I don’t know what you might have done but if you have ever at
any time in your life accepted Christ as your Savior, God is faithful. He hasn’t turned His back on
you. You may have turned your back on God and walked away from God and guess what? He
just loves you from behind as much as He loves you from the front. There are people that tell
you, “You’re no longer saved because you did this” or “You’re no longer saved because you did
that,” and those people are saying that you’re going to heaven based on what you do or don’t do.
I’m saying you’re going to go to heaven based on what Christ did for you, not what you do or
don’t do. It’s not a combination of the two, it’s either one or the other.
Faith doesn’t look at life
from human viewpoint.
Faith doesn’t look at life from human perspective. Human viewpoint
always has pessimism. Human viewpoint always has doubt. Human viewpoint always has fear
and uncertainty as its frame of reference. Doubt is not faith. Unbelief is not faith. When the
disciples saw the fig tree cursed and the disciples heard the prophecy of what was coming to
Jerusalem, they doubted the whole plan and our Lord said,
“Have faith in God.”
Now He is God
and essentially He’s saying, “Trust Me fellas. I’m not going to let you down. I’m not going to
leave you. Oh, they’re going to kill Me but don’t worry. Within three days I’ll walk out of the
grave and you will see Me and I’ll be alive. Have faith in God.” Remember, you must remember
this also. You do not belong here. This is not your home, did you know that? Now some of you
that listen to me, listen in California. It’s a very beautiful place to live. Some of you live in
Wyoming. Some of you live in Colorado. Some of you live in Missouri or Mississippi or
Alabama or you live in New York. You live in various places. Listen, that’s not your home. This
is not your home. The Bible says in Philippians 3:20, as Paul wrote, if you are a Christian, if you
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have accepted Christ as your Savior, your citizenship is in heaven. Listen as I quote it.
“For our
citizenship is in heaven from which we eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who
will transform our lowly bodies to be conformed to His glorious body.”
This is a wonderful truth.
The body that you live in now won’t work in heaven. If you’re getting up in age, 60 years old, 70,
your body might not be working too good right now, not like it use to work when you were 20.
But I have news for you.
Don’t worry, have faith in God. This body was designed to wear
out.
This body was designed to be discarded. This body will go back to dust. This is not the body
you will take with you to heaven. Remember, inside of you is a soul and inside of you is a living
human spirit if in fact you have been born again. God the Holy Spirit indwells your human spirit
and you’re born-again spiritually. You are a new creation in Christ. You are going to get a new
body, a resurrection body, a body like His glorious body, the body He’s in right now. I haven’t
seen it, I don’t know what it’s like but it must be wonderful not to hurt. It must be wonderful not
to have to take an aspirin or an Advil or a vitamin or anything like that, a body that never ages, a
body that never gets old. Go look in the mirror, look at yourself. You’re not what you use to be.
Sometimes we get this image in our mind when we were like 30 or 40 and we think we still look
like this, but we don’t. We are getting older. You are getting older but have faith in God.
Don’t
doubt God. You are going to get a new body, a glorious body.
This is not your home. Your
citizenship is not here. You do not belong here. You have a different home. You may reside here
now but once you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior, you were brought into God’s plan and
you have God’s program designed for you. Listen to 1 Peter 2:11, Peter wrote these words,
“Brothers, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the
soul.”
This lets us know that life is a spiritual conflict and you are just passing through the arena
of contention. Earth is the arena of contention. You don’t belong here. This is not your home.
You’re a pilgrim, you’re a sojourner, you’re passing through, going through the battlefield and
you will be caught in the battle. That’s why Paul warns you in Ephesians 6 to
“Put on the armor
of God, put on the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation. Pick up the shield of
faith, the sword of the Spirit.”
These are things that we studied in the past and can study more in
the future if you’d like, but it’s critical that you understand this. You are in a conflict. You don’t
belong here, you’re only walking through the battlefield and you are a representative of God to
this nation. Did you know this? You represent God not only to your family and to your church
but to your nation. In 2 Corinthians 5:20 the Bible says,
“Now then
[Paul writing again]
we are
ambassadors for Christ as though God were pleading through us. We implore you on Christ’s
behalf, be reconciled to God.”
Every one of us are ambassadors. We represent God to the world.
We are pleading for the world through Christ to be reconciled to God. What does this mean? This
means that the justice of God must discipline what the righteousness of God rejects. God’s justice
is the guardian of God’s righteousness and so if I talk about the righteousness of God, I have to
remind you that God is absolutely, 100%, one million times over, righteous. And you and me?
The Bible says,
“There are none that are righteous, no, not even one. All of our righteousnesses
are like a filthy rag in God’s eyes.”
Remember this. You cannot do anything to satisfy the justice
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of God. What the righteousness of God rejects, the justice of God judges. Thus, you are in line to
be judged with the devil in the Lake of Fire. However, that can be changed. When you come to
Jesus Christ the Bible says,
“He who knew no sin was made sin for us so we could be made the
righteousness of God through Him.”
The only way that you can get the justice of God off of your
back is to have the equivalent righteousness of God and the only way you can get this is through
Jesus Christ because He is perfectly righteous.
“He who knew no sin was made sin for us.”
Thus,
when you come to Christ and you receive Him, He gives you His righteousness. He’s already
taken your sin. He’s already born your sin on the cross in His substitutionary death and now He
gives you His righteousness.
By means of Jesus Christ and His substitutionary death on the
cross, you have eternal life because you now have equal righteousness with God.
And it’s
not because you don’t smoke. It’s not because you don’t drink. It’s not because you don’t say dirty
words. It’s because you believed in Jesus Christ and His righteousness was accredited to you. It
is an imputation. He imputed to you a real imputation of His righteousness to you, thus now you
are an ambassador. You represent God. You are asking others to be reconciled to God as well.
This is your mission. This is why God left you here. He didn’t leave you here so you could party
for the rest of your life. He left you here on the battlefield in the arena of contention to be His
ambassador. Now when Jesus says,
“Have faith in God,”
when He told those disciples, “Have
faith in God, don’t worry, don’t doubt, don’t be pessimistic. I know what I said. I know what’s
going to happen. But it’s not going to happen to you. You are My chosen ones. You are My
apostles, have faith in God.” And so they must trust God with this. Now, let me ask you a
question. How do you increase your faith?
If you don’t have much faith, how can you increase
your faith?
This is where I want to go to the Word of God and show you this passage in Romans
10:17, how to increase your faith.
The Bible says, “So then faith comes by hearing and hearing
by the Word of God.”
So faith is essential to live the Christian life. How do you build faith? Is it
trying harder, is that what it is? Is it like the little train trying to go over the mountain, saying to
yourself, “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can,” is this faith? No.
Faith is absolute
confidence in the Word of God. So as you grow spiritually, as you learn God’s Word, then
your faith increases. Your faith must be based on God’s plan.
For example, if you have faith
in God and you desire God to remove the Atlantic Ocean so you can walk across to Europe, well
forget it. It’s not going to happen. That’s not God’s plan. You can come up with some pretty goofy
stuff on your own that you want God to do.
Most of the time people always relate faith to their
personal needs.
They want to be healed. They want to be successful. They want someone they
love to be healed or to be successful and maybe God wants this, I don’t know, but you must have
faith in God and it starts with understanding His plan. If you don’t understand His plan, then your
faith is based on human viewpoint thinking and you can be pessimistic, you can be critical, but
you’re certainly not going to be trusting God.
Faith must comply with the plan of God.
One of
the questions you must ask yourself, “Am I an obstacle to God’s plan or am I an asset to God’s
plan?” If you are an obstacle to God’s plan, He’ll set you aside, He’ll remove you. But if you are
an asset to God’s plan, then He will utilize you. So what’s an obstacle to God’s plan? Very simple,
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any believer out of fellowship with God with unconfessed sin in his life, under control of his sin
nature, that’s an obstacle. Thus we are warned in Hebrews 12:6,
“Those that God loves, He will
discipline. He will scourge us with a whip.”
He will set you aside if He has to. There’s a passage
in Revelation 2:4 where the Lord Jesus Christ talks to the church and says,
“You’ve left your first
love.”
You’re a great people but you’ve lost your first love. That’s your motivation, your
motivation to be the man or the woman that you should be, it’s reciprocal love motivation.
“We
love Him because He first loved us.”
In 1 John 5:3 the Bible says,
“If you love Me, you will obey
Me and My mandates are not hard,”
they’re not grievous. Reciprocal love motivation is you
loving God who first loved you and this motivates you not to let your sin nature control you.
Your sin nature has a lust pattern and if you follow this lust pattern, your sin nature will dominate
you and control you until it destroys you. If you will let the Holy Spirit of God control your life,
then you will find a completely different set of circumstances as per Galatians 5:22 where your
attitude will be,
“love and joy and peace and longsuffering and gentleness and goodness and
meekness,”
and on and on, but this is the key. An obstacle, a believer out of fellowship, a
believer that will not confess his sin, a believer that’s not growing spiritually, he’s not effectively
being an ambassador for God, he’s not effectively representing God, he is in effect a traitor. He’s
in effect a hypocrite. He says one thing but he does something else. He’s an obstacle to God’s
plan. How can you reconcile the world to God if you can’t live faithful, if you say one thing and
then you do something else? You talk about being a Christian and then you cheat on someone or
you talk about being a Christian and you follow some other lust pattern, you’re an obstacle. God
will set you aside if you don’t rebound. If you rebound, you can be an asset. You can effectively
re-present Jesus Christ to your generation. That’s what God is looking for, those of you and me
included that can be an asset for the plan of God, who can effectively re-present Jesus Christ and
in essence, ask the world to be reconciled to God. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying
attention. It is so critical for you to understand this. Now until next week, this is your host Rick
Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line