Rick Hughes challenges listeners to confront the complacency of casual Christianity and the significance of spiritual maturity. Learn about God’s unfailing love and righteousness while discovering the essential aspects of grace orientation and personal accountability in faith. Join us on a transformative exploration of God’s justice, understanding, and the commitment required to grow spiritually strong in a world filled with distractions.
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 01 :
Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, stick around. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education, and absolutely no manipulation. No begging for money, not trying to sell you something, not going to ask you to join up. We’re just going to ask you to listen up as I seek to verify and identify the plan of God for your life. If I can do that, you’re welcome to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. It’s your choice, your privilege. But my job is to get it right. I would like to tell you that we have a lot of material available to you free of charge. If you go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, you’ll find many of the books we’ve written. It’s all free. We don’t charge for anything. But the one thing I want to alert you to are our transcripts of all past radio shows going back from 2018, 19, 20, 21, and we’re working on 22 now. We get 52 shows a year, and these 52 shows are all put into a book for you to read word by word, line by line. It’s called a transcript. And so you can use one of those and read one each day and kind of catch up and go back and remember what we taught. And it’s a good way to recall some information. If you’d like to get those transcripts, just write to us through the website. There’s a place to order it. Or any of our other new books, such as Christian Problem Solving, and our book on practicing your Christianity, or our latest book on God’s promises and principles. It’s all there. You can see it. It’s all free. We also have a lot of CDs and DVDs available where we’ve spoken at various other venues. Again, free for you if you want it. But let me remind you, I’m not a pastor. I’m not trying to build a church. I’m trying to direct you to a church. I’m trying to direct you to a well-qualified pastor that you can sit under and and learn and grow. That’s what I’m trying to do for you, and I hope you’re understanding that. We call our show The FLOT Line for one reason, because my pastor taught me this concept years ago, like I’m teaching it to you now. I’m reteaching what he taught me. FLOT stands for Forward Line of Troops, Forward Line of Troops, and it’s dealing with the concept of 10 unique problem-solving devices found in the scripture. If you learn these 10 unique problem-solving devices, you can stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. So 10 unique problem-solving devices. If you don’t know what they are, contact us. We’ll send you the book called Christian Problem-Solving. It will outline each one of them, and you can read and see what we’re talking about. But here they are. Rebound, problem-solving device number one that deals with the problem of sin. Filling of the Holy Spirit, problem solving device number two that deals with the problem of your old sin nature. Faith rest drill, problem solving device number three that deals with unexplained difficulties in your life and how you handle it. And then we have grace orientation, biblical orientation. We have personal sense of destiny, understanding God’s destiny for you. And then we have the virtue love concepts of personal love for God and impersonal love for others. And then sharing the happiness of God. As Jesus said, I’ve taught you these things so that my joy might be in you, John 15, 11. And then occupation with Christ, which is the great problem-solving device. And I would like you to learn these things. We even have a bookmark with all 10 of them listed on it. You can stick it in your Bible and refer to it from time to time if you’d like to. So if you’d like to get any of this information, go to the website, rickhughesministries.org. Don’t go to Richard Hughes Ministries. That’s a different person. RickHughesMinistries.org, and then you’ll find us there, and you’ll see a picture of me talking to a bunch of kids because we’ve been speaking in schools for 50 years, traveling, going across the country, speaking in schools. And in the month of October, we’ll be in two schools for a week at a time, and these obviously are not public schools. You don’t get in public schools and talk about the Lord Jesus Christ. They won’t let you. But private schools, private academies are not necessarily Christian schools. They’re private schools. And these type folks will still welcome you to come in and teach the principles of God’s Word. So we’ve got that coming up in October, and we’ll need your prayers for those as we travel. But let’s get into the topic that we want to study today. And when I said learn the 10 problem-solving devices, I don’t know if you heard last week’s show, but Hosea said, my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. That meant they did not learn something. And you must understand that as a believer, you are expected to learn something. And it’s not easy. So we want to talk today about those lazy believers that are not interested in learning anything. We call them the nod to God crowd, the casual Christian. Hello, God. See you next week, God. Good to be here this Sunday morning, God. Bye-bye. And then off they go into the devil’s world. What is a lazy believer? He or she is the Christian who’s not willing, not willing, not willing to put forth the effort required to reach spiritual maturity. Effort. You don’t grow to spiritual maturity without putting out some effort in your life. This sort of person, he or she, is basically indolent in regards to the effort required to meet God’s expectations. Does God have expectations on your life? Well, certainly he does. What exactly does God expect out of you? That’s what we’ll talk a little bit about today, God’s expectations for you. I can tell you this. He doesn’t want you to be a baby Christian all your life. If you have a young child, you want that child to grow up and be a strong, healthy young child. Same thing with you. When you accept Christ as your Savior, you’re a baby Christian. God wants you to grow up and be a strong, healthy, representing the Lord Jesus Christ. I know a lot of our listeners that are listening to the radio right now are up in years, just like me. That doesn’t make any difference. How old you are is not the issue. You say, well, I’m 60 or I’m 70 and I’m too old to learn. Birdseed, birdseed, you’re not too old to learn. You are expected to learn. The expectations are still in the same way for you when you were 25 and 65. Doesn’t make any difference. Once you accept Christ as your Savior, your journey is just beginning. And no one explained that to me after I got saved. No one told me what was expected out of me. Everybody wanted to just tell me, go do this brother, go do that brother. And I didn’t know what in the world they were talking about. No one told me that I was going to have to grow up. I was going to have to learn to be a spiritually mature individual. No one told me I had to give to evangelism. No one told me much of anything until I met a pastor, a well-qualified pastor. who taught me the word of God. Now, you probably wouldn’t like him. You’d say, well, he’s mean. He’s not very nice. He didn’t have to be nice. He had to be accurate, and he was extremely accurate. So once you accept Christ as your savior, your journey just begins. I mean, it’s gotta make sense to you that a baby has to grow up. The infant must learn how to walk and talk and care for herself, right? Well, the Bible teaches the same expectations for you. The new believer must learn how to walk in fellowship with God, how to talk with God, and how to care for their self in the devil’s world, the angelic conflict, what we call the arena of contention. These things require learning something. And the first thing I had to learn was a new vocabulary. Words like fellowship, words like sin nature, words like sanctification, justification, they were new to me. I’d never heard those words before after I got saved. So if I was going to grow spiritually, I was going to have to require to learn some things, some effort. The first thing that was required of me was to get a Bible. a good translation of God’s Word. Listen, there are a lot of Bibles for sale at the bookstore. The King James Version, the New American Standard Bible, the NIV Bible, the Net Bible. I mean, the number of books on the bookshelf is incredible. The Bible’s the number one selling book in the world. New International Version. Wow, once I acquired a Bible, once I figured out which Bible I wanted, Then I had to figure out what it said. So I needed a teacher to explain it to me. If you gave me an algebra textbook and said, here, figure algebra out, I could have never done it. Why do you think you can take a Bible without a teacher and figure out what it’s telling you? You have to have a pastor who understands it better than you. For example, I had no idea where I even got the Bible, where the Bible came from, what it was all about. I had no idea how it was originally written in languages that I did not even know of, languages I had never even heard of, like Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Fortunately for me, my God was one step ahead of me and pointed me the same as I’m trying to point you to a well-qualified pastor. Not the kind of guy you might expect, you know, sweet, mild-mannered, milquetoast preacher. God pointed me to a mighty man of strength and character, one I could respect and to a point fear. Not frightened like the coach I played for in college, Bear Bryant. I mean, it’d scare you to death, but respected and feared him. Little did I realize that this pastor that I was being pointed to was actually very kind and and a very giving individual. But in his classes, they were tough. And I began to grow and learn exactly what happened to me and what God expected from me. A lot of people couldn’t take that. A lot of people said, well, he’s not nice enough. He doesn’t smile enough. He doesn’t talk about his wife enough. Well, why doesn’t he come out and shake hands with everybody? All the goofy stuff, you know. I had to learn something from my pastor. I had to learn about my sin nature. I had to learn how to deal with my sin. I had to learn how to deal with my failures. I had to learn what my spiritual gift was, or you might say my position on the team. Excuse me. Excuse me. I learned who my enemies were, and I learned how to defeat them. Now, you might not know this, but I actually attended Bible college, but never really learned much about the mechanics of the Christian life in Bible college. I mean, I did learn about the Bible and the books of the Bible and the Old Testament and the New Testament, et cetera. But it was through my pastor’s systematic teaching of God’s Word that I discovered the things I’m talking to you about. Many of the things that I learned from him, I regularly teach them to you on this particular radio show. But this was not always easy. It required a routine and a lot of work. studying nightly to listen to his classes. You know what he taught? He taught in his church Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Sunday morning, Sunday night. That’s right. That’s how much he taught. And to tell you something else you wouldn’t understand, but you’d probably be amazed, if he didn’t go an hour early, he didn’t get a seat. He had nightly classes. and they were recorded and I could take advantage of those recordings as I traveled and went around the country speaking in high schools and I could listen to those notes on the tape player and take extensive notes myself. Hours and hours of studying and pages of notes But in the end, I had enough truth to get the message straight. The first book I ever studied with my pastor was the book of 1 Corinthians. You should see my notes on 1 Corinthians, pages and pages and pages, hours every night studying. And he spent hours every day studying at home and preparing to get up in that pulpit for an hour and teach me. But every hour he taught me was eight or nine hours at home studying. I had to find somebody God could trust not to foul things up. I had to be that kind of person. I had to be the person God could trust. I did not say I don’t sin. I know what my weaknesses are. I know what my failures are. But God also knows that I have learned how to effectively represent his word to you and to thousands of others. And it wasn’t easy. It took hours and hours and hours of Bible study, pages and pages of notes and wearing out Bibles and wearing out Bibles. You say, but you’re a preacher. What makes you think I’m different than you? What makes you think I live a different life than the life you live? Yes, I may have a radio show, and yes, I may be a call upon to speak, but you have to know the same information I have to know. You’re just not required to teach it in the pulpit. Many of my early friends in Christ have since long ago peeled off. Why? Because they had no desire to spend hours listening to someone teach the Bible. They weren’t willing to submit to any authority from any pulpit. They simply were not willing to put forth the effort required to grow spiritually. And I said effort. Yes, effort. The end result was they had no stability in their lives. They developed, unfortunately, no soul strength. They still live in slavery to the desires of their flesh. And unfortunately, they depend on other people, such as you or me, to acquire God’s blessing on our land. Yeah, they want the freedom, and they want the blessing God pours out, but they are like hundreds of those that Gideon sent home who were not prepared to fight for their freedom. You want to be prepared? You want to be one of the 300 that Gideon kept, using that as an analogy? Then how do you prepare? Regardless of your age, how do you prepare? Let’s get this straight. Knowing God is not the same as understanding God. I have no doubt you know him. through Jesus Christ our Savior, I have no doubt, but do you understand the God you know? Jeremiah 9, 24, but let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me. Again, there is a difference between knowing God and understanding God. Well, what does God want you to understand? I’ll quote it for you out of Jeremiah 9, I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, saith the Lord. So what does God want you to understand? He wants you to understand his unfailing love. Unfailing love. I am the God who exercises loving kindness. Unfailing love of God. It’s amazing. Matter of fact, my pastor wrote a book called The Unfailing Love of God. We can make it available if you want it. Just contact us. We’ll get it to you. The unfailing love of God, regardless of what I do, regardless of my sin nature flaws, regardless of many things, he loves me and he loves you. Never has been a time that he doesn’t love people. That’s part of his essence. The Bible says God is love. God loves you. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, loved the world. He loved you and me when we were jerks, when we were wretched people, and he loved us, and he loves us today. He wants us to understand his unfailing love for us. And then he wants us to understand his perfect righteousness. I go back to the verse. I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness on the earth. In these things I delight, saith the Lord. He wants you to understand his perfect righteousness. We call that plus R. God is absolutely righteous, and man is minus R, absolutely no righteousness. If you want to have a relationship with God, you’ve got to have equal righteousness. How can minus R equal plus R? How can your righteousness come up to the equivalent of God’s righteousness? I’ll tell you how. The Bible says it. He who knew no sin was made sin for us so that we may be made the righteousness of God by means of him. It’s through Jesus Christ that God’s perfect righteousness is imputed to us. It was a trade-out. He took our sins on the cross and he gives us his righteousness. You’ve got to understand that. And then God wants you to understand his justice. The only way this is going to happen, justice, the only way this is going to happen is for you to learn something about his attributes, and this is not going to be easy. It’s not going to be easy. Are you willing to put the time in to become a mature believer? Are you willing to sit down daily with a Book or daily with a tape or daily with a video and open your Bible and get a notebook and take notes and learn it and apply it into your life. That’s the only way it will happen. 2 Timothy 2.15, study to show yourself approved unto God. Study is a verb, and this is not a request. This is a mandate. God is telling you through Apostle Paul, study, study, study, study. Why? To be approved unto God. What does that mean? It means you can do a right thing in the wrong way, and that’s not approved. We’ve talked about that many times. A right thing in a wrong way is still wrong. Is it right to go to church? Yes. Is there a right way to go to church and a wrong way to go to church? Yes. You can show up at church all you want to, but if you’re quenching the Holy Spirit with unconfessed sin in your life, you’re in the right place, but you’re in the wrong way. You have to rebound. You have to get filled with the Holy Spirit so he can teach you the word that the pastor is bringing forth. Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman who need if not to be ashamed. Ashamed. I can just see you showing up at the judgment seat of Christ and the Father looking at you and say, boy, you blew it. You had every opportunity to glorify me and you never took time to learn it. Rightly dividing the word of truth. Not to be ashamed, but rightly dividing the word of truth. If you can rightly divide it, can you wrongly divide it? Yes. Yes. So you better get it right. If you’re going to presume to speak for God, if you’re going to presume to tell your friends what the Bible says, you better be sure you got it right. And there’s more people that gets it wrong than gets it right, I assure you. If someone tells you in order to be saved, you got to be baptized, that’s a lie. The Bible says, for by grace are you saved through faith. It’s a gift of God and not of works. as anyone should brag about it. If someone tells you in order to be saved you gotta give up bubble gum, you gotta quit drinking RC colas, that’s a lie. That’s a lie, that’s spirituality by works. That’s salvation by works. You have to understand it so you’re not ashamed at the judgment seat of Christ that you told lies and you misrepresented God. How can you even worship a God you don’t understand? Is it possible? What do you think he’s like? In 2 Peter 3.18, the Bible says, grow in grace. Grow, that’s another verb, and that’s another commandment. That’s not a request. That’s a mandate. Study and grow are both commands. This one’s from Peter. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Grace orientation is problem-solving device number four in the plan of God. Grow in the grace and in the knowledge, the full knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. There are two different words for knowledge in the Bible. One of them is called gnosis and one of them is called epinosis. And epi is a preposition. That means full knowledge. There’s a difference between knowing something and understanding something. Grow in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever. These two verses alone demand a volitional response from you. They are commands. This is God telling you, do this, do this. It’s not just asking you. This is how you acquire biblical wisdom. Understanding the God you know gives you insight and discernment into the devil’s tactics, what he’s up to, how he tries to deceive you. In Proverbs 3, 5, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding. You can’t approach the devil’s world with what you think. You have to approach the devil’s world with what God says. So we don’t live the Christian life on impulse, but rather on divine viewpoint attained from the scriptures. I hate to tell you this, but when you ignore these mandates like study and grow, you’re sinning. You might not be getting drunk. You might not be fornicating. You might not be stealing, but you are sinning. You are neglecting the plan of God for your life. And you need to confess your sin of being a lazy believer that will not put the time into learning what God expects from you. Why do you think he left you a Bible? Why do you think he gave you a pastor? To learn to live and glorify him. God didn’t leave you here so you could be a spiritual ignoramus, but rather a spiritual superstar. For unfortunately, the casual Christian is satisfied with playing church. He’s happy to do that. You know, go once a week, put on a coat and tie, nice dress, bring the kids, go to church, and then slip off down to the buffet for lunch and back into the real world and nod to God. Goodbye. Hello, God. Goodbye, God. See you next week, God. Don’t let this be you. I call you to admit your failures and pursue God’s will and direction for your life. I call upon you to get up from the curb of life. Don’t sit there like some homeless person. Put on all the efforts possible for you to reach spiritual maturity while there is time. I don’t care that you’re 60. I don’t care that you’re 70. I don’t care if you’re 80. Get into the word of God while there’s time. We can help direct you to great pastors who can give you super nutritious spiritual food. You know, you want to take all the right vitamins. You want to stay healthy. You want to eat the right food. But the Bible is the nutritious spiritual food you need. You say, well, I don’t have a computer, preacher. No problem. If you will commit to staying in fellowship by using Rebound, if you will commit to daily studying the Word of God under a well-qualified pastor, we will help you. But I cannot create in you hunger. I can direct you, I can show you, I can provide for you, but I can’t make you hungry. You have to see your own spiritual malnutrition, and you have to decide for yourself. that you have not grown up spiritually, and that you will, from this day forth, begin to make an effort to get going in the Word of God, that you will stay filled with the Holy Spirit, that you will set aside private time for study every day. If you’ll do that, I’ll be there to help you. I’ll be there to encourage you and support you in your growth. And we can put the right material into your hands, hundreds of hours of information into your hands, Just by studying the Flatline transcripts daily, which is hundreds of hours, you can learn so much while you pray and seek God’s direction in finding a well-qualified pastor. They are out there. God has a man for you, a person he wants you to learn under. I didn’t say a woman. I said a man for you, a person that he wants you to learn under. Now, if you have the courage to pray about that, say, God, Show me where that man is. God, show me who I can listen to, how I can learn to grow spiritually. God, I’ve wasted years goofing off and not really paying attention to my spiritual life. I know you’re a good Christian. I know you go to church. I know you tithe. I know you don’t treat people bad, but are you understanding the justice and the righteousness and the unfailing love of God? That’s the only way you’re going to ever glorify God, and that’s what God’s looking for. people that represent him effectively through, first of all, giving the gospel, and secondly, by the way you live your spiritual life. We’re in the devil’s world. We’re in the angelic conflict, and you must get it right. It’s not going to be easy. Don’t be a lazy believer. Don’t be someone that doesn’t have time. Oh, you got time to play golf. You got time to call people and talk to them on the phone. You got time to go to the restaurant. You got time to watch television, but you don’t have time to study. You just think that you’re going to become a mature believer instantaneously overnight. Kidding yourself. That’s time for you to get with the program. It’s time for you to make a commitment, regardless of your age, to say, I am going to get this right before God calls me home. I don’t want to show up at the judgment seat of Christ and have God look at me and say, well, you blew it. You had an opportunity, and you never took it. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention. Don’t be a lazy believer. Get with the program and grow spiritually while there is time. I hope you’ll come back next week. Same time, same place. We’re always here, always with a challenge. I hope you’re listening. Until then, this is Rick Hughes, host of The Flatline, saying thank you for listening today.
SPEAKER 02 :
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.
