Learn To Be Content
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 577 aired on September 18, 2016
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes asking you to stay
with me for the next few minutes, basically 30 minutes of motivation and inspiration, education,
all done with no manipulation. That’s right, no hidden agendas here. We don’t try to con you.
We’re not trying to solicit money. We’re not asking you to join up, fess up, give up, nothing like
this. This show is simply about God’s Word, me trying to give you accurate information, not
human speculation but accurate information from the infallible canon of Scripture called the
Bible. If I can do this, if I can help you orient and adjust to God’s plan, that’s my idea, that’s what
I’m trying to do. Verify it, identify it, and then you have to make the decision. Do you want to
orient and adjust to this plan or do you want to stay on your plan? I always like to ask people,
“How’s it going? How are you doing with your own plan?” It’s a wonderful thing that God has a
plan for your life. I’m going to show you something rather amazing today, the amazing things
about God that sometimes we don’t even realize, we don’t even know. Thank you for listening to
the FLOT Line and again, we enjoy hearing from our listeners. I’ve gotten several fantastic
letters lately. Thank you for writing to me. Thank you for telling me how the Word of God has
encouraged you. Thank you for telling me how you’ve gone on to pursue more depth in your
spiritual life and you’ve found a real qualified pastor, you’ve gotten under that man, and you
started to study and grow and your family’s growing. I love to hear these sorts of things. I love to
hear from people that are really growing in grace and have found their right pastor and they are
sticking with it and they’re becoming part of what we call the pivot. That’s the core group of
mature believers that deliver a nation in time of disaster, much like what Gideon did in the Old
Testament in the Bible. Just a few men, 300 men, that’s all God needed, and God did the work.
We need in America a strong pivot of mature believers, not a military pivot, not something like
this. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a spiritual pivot, a pivot of mature believers
because as go the believers in a nation, so goes the nation. If God wants to check out the United
States of America to see if He wants to continue blessing us or not, He’s going to look at our core
group of believers to see if there are mature believers. You remember 2 Chronicles 7:14 don’t
you?
“If My people that are called by My name,
[that’s the believers in that land]
if they will
humble themselves and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I’ll hear their prayers
and heal their land.”
Also in Hosea 4:6, we studied why a nation is destroyed,
“My people are
destroyed for lack of knowledge. Since you’ve rejected knowledge, I’ll reject you and you’ll no
longer be priests for Me.”
You know, it’s important that you understand the spiritual life operates
on knowledge. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ you have two lives. You live a physical life,
that’s the life people see in the way you dress, where you live, what you do, and you live the
spiritual life, that’s the invisible life. This life is lived in your head, in your soul, in the invisible
part of you, and that’s what God can check out. When He wants to check you out, He’s not
looking at where you live. He’s not looking at what you’re wearing. He’s looking at what you’re
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thinking and He’s wanting to know if you are occupied with the person of Christ. When the Bible
says in Philippians 2:5,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus,”
this is telling us
something, that we need to renovate our thinking.
We need to change the way we think and as
a mature believer, you have to think divine viewpoint, not human viewpoint.
Divine
viewpoint is what mature believers operate on. Human viewpoint is what the rest of the world
operates on and most of the time it’s pure evil because it’s manufactured and spread by Satan.
Human viewpoint, you know like, “The secret to happiness is having a lot of things.” “The secret
to happiness is knowing all the right people.” See, that’s human viewpoint, that’s not divine
viewpoint. I’ll tell you today what divine viewpoint says about the secret to happiness. Today if
you’re interested, if you like learning about God’s Word, you’re in the right place. I’m not a
pastor, I’m just a radio host. We’ve been doing this show over ten years. My job is to direct you
to a well-qualified pastor so you can learn, so you can grow, and I can encourage you, I can
identify you as a person that has hunger.
We call this positive volition, the person that’s
hungry wanting to know more about God.
Unfortunately, not a lot of people are hungry, I
mean they like pastries, they like cake and pies and cookies and steaks and fish and chicken but
they don’t like being fed the Word of God. When I run across someone like maybe you, you love
learning about God. You love hearing about God. You love getting into His Word and seeing the
new things every day that He prepares for you. You’re my kind of person, you’re the person I’m
looking for and I thank you for being this way. Today I want to read to you a verse written by the
apostle Paul out of the book of Philippians. Let’s see if I can pull it down here, get my Bible
close, and not knock over all the microphones. Here’s what he says in Philippians 4:12,
“I know
how to be abased and I know how to abound.”
I’m going to back up and start with
Philippians
4:11,
“Not that I speak in respect of want for I’ve learned in whatever state I am, to be
content.”
That’s the key word, to be content. Then he said these words and they support it. He
said,
“I know how to abound. I know how to be abased. Everywhere in all things I am instructed
both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”
And then he goes on to say,
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
Here’s what I want to do today with
this verse. I want to start off with this verb where he says,
“I have learned.”
Philippians 4:11,
“Not that I speak in respect of want, for I have learned in whatever state I am in, in this state to
be content.”
Learn is a Greek verb called
manthano
and we use the Greek verb because this is
written in Greek. It was not written in English so we go back to the original word, we want to see
what it means.
Manthano
means to increase in knowledge. There is a word that comes after this
that you might have heard before,
mathetes.
You say, “What’s
mathetes?”
He’s a learner or a
disciple. The disciples were called
mathetes
because they were
manthano,
they were learning
from Jesus Christ. They had a face-to-face Instructor for three years before He went to be with
the Father. There are three ways to learn. You can learn by experience and that’s like an
apprentice. You can learn by example and that’s like watching your mom or your daddy or your
grandfather or your grandmother. Or you can learn by study and get it on your own.
However
you learn, you must learn God’s Word. Here are a couple of principles I would like to give
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you about
“I have learned.”
First, the less you know, the easier it is to be manipulated by
Satan.
Paul said this in Ephesians 6,
“Put on the armor of God so that you can stand against the
strategy of the devil.”
He said,
“Put on the helmet of salvation, pick up the sword of the Spirit,
put on the breastplate of righteousness, pick up the shield of faith.”
He used a military metaphor
much like we do on the FLOT Line, using these 10 problem-solving devices as a FLOT line or a
protector of your soul. That’s a military term for the main line of resistance and it’s not anything
new. But if you don’t learn God’s Word, then you are easily manipulated and this is exactly what
Satan wants to do. The Bible tells us that he can even transform himself into an angel of light and
sometimes you think you’re hearing the real stuff and you’re not. He even has ministers that do
this. I think the worst thing in the world for believers is organized religion because organized
religion sometimes wants to tell you that if you want to go to heaven, you’ve got to be good and
if you’re not good enough, then you’re not going to go to heaven. That’s not how you get to
heaven. The Bible clearly says,
“For by grace are you saved through faith. It’s a gift from God,
not of your works lest anyone should brag about it.”
There it is clear as a bell in Ephesians 2:8-9,
it’s grace. God gives this gift to you, the gift of eternal life by means of His grace.
“He who knew
no sin was made sin for us so that we may be made the righteousness of God through Him.”
Here’s what you must learn. You don’t have any righteousness.
The Bible says,
“All of our
righteousnesses are like a filthy rag in God’s eyes.”
He, Jesus Christ, is perfectly righteous so
if we come to the cross and we believe in Him and receive Him as our Savior, He gives us
His righteousness.
How does He do this? Listen again,
“He that knew no sin was made sin for
us so that we would be made the righteousness of God through Him.”
Why do we need to be
made the righteousness of God? Because God is absolutely righteous and God’s justice judges
anything that is not the equivalent of this righteousness. The justice of God is the guardian of the
righteousness of God. If you come to God with minus R, no righteousness, and you say, “But I’ve
been good. I didn’t lie. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t steal. I did all this stuff at church, but I never trusted
in the work of Christ.” It was never faith alone in Christ alone. It was always faith plus
something else, faith plus baptism, faith plus giving up RC colas, faith plus not eating any more
peanuts, faith plus whatever. When you add something to faith, you cancel it out. It’s faith alone
in Christ alone, you have to remember this. If you don’t learn this, then you wind up teaching
someone else that if you want to go to heaven it’s faith plus not doing something and then you
say, “Well, you know if you sin and you do that brother, you’re not going to go to heaven.” That’s
not true.
The only thing that keeps anybody out of heaven is not believing in Jesus Christ,
the anointed Son of God.
“God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son so that
whoever believes in Him would never perish but have everlasting life.”
There is the truth, so you
have to learn this. You have to learn how to express what happened to you. It’s hard to tell
someone how to become a Christian if you cannot even express what happened to you. Second,
we can learn truth or we can learn lies, which are false.
Second, you learn true information or
false information, depending on what you are hearing, who you are listening to.
You must
get under someone who can teach you truth, not someone that won’t give you a lot of ritual with
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no reality to it.
Third, perception comes by one of three ways. Know there are two things
required to grow – perception and then application. Perception comes either by rationalism,
empiricism, or what we call pistisism.
Rationalism is the rationality of why certain things are
like they are. Empirical data is scientific data, empiricism. And pistisism, from the Greek word
pistis,
is perception which comes from faith.
We learn by means of rationalism, empiricism,
or by means of faith.
The spiritual life operates by means of faith. The Bible clearly says in
Hebrews 11:6,
“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”
So what is your faith based on?
The Bible says,
“Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God,”
Romans 10:17.
The
more of the Word of God you hear and learn, the more faith you should have, that’s how it
works.
That’s called spiritual growth. Then Hebrews chapter 5 the writer, whoever wrote this,
said, “There are a lot of things I’d like to tell you but you can’t handle them because you’re still a
baby and you need a bottle.” He said, “You can’t handle a steak and someone needs to go back
and teach you again the first basic principles of your spiritual life.” This means that there are
basic doctrines that everybody has to learn. We have to learn about the doctrine of salvation, how
we got saved and why we stay saved. We learn the doctrine of spirituality, what it means to be a
spiritual believer and what it means to be a mature believer. I mean Billy Graham is a mature
believer, you would say. Is he also a spiritual believer? Yes. Can you be a spiritual believer? Yes,
the same way Billy Graham is. If you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, he’s filled with the Holy
Spirit, you’re both spiritual believers but you might not be as mature as him. Maybe you don’t
have the content of doctrine in your soul that he has, so there are different levels of maturity.
Sometimes we have a baby believer. Sometimes we have a student believer or one that’s
growing, and sometimes we have a mature believer. There are three different Greek words for
this,
brephos, tecknon,
and
huios
.
God recognizes there are different levels of maturity, but
there is only one level of spirituality.
Either you are filled with God the Holy Spirit by
means of rebound, problem-solving device number one or you are controlled by your sin
nature and you’re carnal and in the flesh.
There is no in between, you have to remember this.
The only way you can learn this is to hear someone teach this to you. Sometimes it has to be
taught over and over and over again, this is called repetition. Some people say, “I don’t like
repetition.” Well that’s what makes it stick. If you would join the military, you’re going to learn
how to march and they’re going to tell you about face, forward march, right face, left face and
you’re going to do it until you can do it in your sleep. Anyone that’s been in the military still
remembers all those cadences and all those orders because of repetition.
Fourth, the rate of
learning has to exceed the rate of forgetting.
There is a rate of forgetting. If you’re getting
older you know what I’m talking about, you forget certain things. Some of you can’t even
remember peoples’ names, “Honey, do you remember that guy’s name,” and it’s a good friend.
Therefore, if you’re going to increase in your faith, if you’re going to glorify God, you must
consistently study His Word. Let’s review the principles. The less you know, the easier it is to
manipulate you. You can learn true or false information. You perceive information by
rationalism, empiricism, or pistisism. The rate of learning has to exceed the rate of forgetting.
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Our next principle, fifth, you can learn by inquiry or you can learn by observation.
Learning by inquiry means research and learning by observation means watching. There is a way
to learn by watching, watching mature believers, how they handle things and this is something
people don’t realize. You are being watched. Here’s a shocker for you.
Not only are you being
watched by those in your periphery, you’re being watched by the angels.
The angels don’t
have the spiritual life you have. They don’t go through what you go through. They’re not saddled
with a sin nature. They don’t have the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ and
God the Father, all living inside of them. They’re in heaven, they’re in the presence of God,
they’re not in the devil’s world. So here you are in the devil’s world saddled with a sin nature,
indwelt by God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit and they’re watching you. You’re in
a theater, you’ve got to remember this. They learn by observation and other people learn by
observing you too. That’s why Paul talks about the law of liberty and he said,
“All things are not
expedient.”
He said,
“I give up certain things if it discourages you.”
You can learn by inquiry or
asking. I’d like to tell you something to ask your pastor. I’d like for you to ask your pastor a
simple question. “Tell me how to be a good Christian.” That’s all you’ve got to do, get him
alone. Ask him, “Tell me how to be a good Christian.” If he doesn’t tell you right off the bat, you
cannot be a good Christian until you learn how to let the Holy Spirit control your life, if he
doesn’t tell you this, he probably doesn’t know this. If he tells you, “You have to pray every day
brother. You have to read your Bible brother. You have to tithe brother. You have to come to
church consistently brother.” I mean these are things that good Christians do, but how do I
become a good Christian? Maybe he doesn’t know. If you’ve never heard him in church remind
people that they cannot sit there with unconfessed sin in their life because the Holy Spirit is
quenched and grieved, because they won’t get anything out of the service. If he doesn’t bring
something like this up, maybe he doesn’t know it. Ask him that question. Don’t embarrass him,
get him alone and ask him, “How do I become a good Christian?” Then listen to what he tells
you. Does he tell you, you must be filled with the Spirit before you do anything? Does he tell
you how to be filled with the Spirit and that’s through rebound? Every time you confess a known
sin to God, you are filled with the Spirit. Every time you sin, mental attitude sin, sin of the
tongue, overt sin, every time you sin, you quench the Spirit and you grieve the Spirit. The Holy
Spirit indwells you. He seals you until the day of redemption, that’s clear in Ephesians 1:13, and
the sealing and the filling are different.
Here’s the next principle, Satan is in the business of
deception. He wants to dumb you down,
This goes back to what I told you at the beginning,
the less you know, the easier it is to manipulate you, so Satan wants to dumb you down. How
does he do this?
Well, he would like to get you distracted so you don’t study the Bible, so you
don’t get into a qualified pastor’s church, you don’t learn God’s Word.
He’ll give you
whatever you want just to keep you away from this. He wants to dumb you down because if he
dumbs you down, you’re not an effective representative of Jesus Christ in your life.
Here’s
another principle, true worship is discovery and awe expressed in various ways.
How do
you discover things? You learn about them. So the more you learn about God, the more in awe
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you become. You are amazed at His grace and His goodness and His mercy and you express your
awe in various ways, through song, prayer, praise. It’s important you understand this.
Next
principle, we should never stop learning about God, never.
I don’t care how old you are, I
don’t care how sick you are, you never stop learning about God. All right, now let’s go to the
next principle.
The first sign of maturity and capacity for blessing is you being a content
person, you having contentment.
Listen to what Paul said, let’s go back to our verse
Philippians 4:11,
“I have learned to be content.” “Whatever state I’m in, I’ve learned to be
content. I know how to be abased. I know how to abound
[that’s prosperity].
Everywhere and in
all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.”
Contentment is capacity for life.
In Psalm 23:5,
“My cup runneth over,”
David said,
“Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”
You know, if I were you I would
like to be around a mature believer whose cup runneth over. I have experienced this and I can tell
you it’s a wonderful thing to have blessing by association. I can tell you it’s a horrible thing to
have cursing by association, so look at who you associate with. If you’re associating with mature
believers, then you’re going to get blessing by association. As their cup overflows, some of it is
going to flow over onto you. But if you’re associating with reversionistic believers, people that
don’t care about God’s Word, then the discipline in their life will overflow into your life.
Remember this, if you’re going to hang out with people, you want to hang out with those people
that are mature believers, those people whose cup runneth over and they have capacity for
blessing in their life. In Psalm 37:25,
“I have been young and now I am old, yet I have never
seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging for bread.”
These are the logistical grace
provisions that God gives the mature believer. As you grow in grace He promises to provide
every logistical need that you have. When He provides this, then you focus on Him. We want to
go into some things and here’s one verse, Psalm 37:4,
“Delight yourself also in the Lord and He
will give you the desires of your heart.”
And I can put a caveat there, if you have the capacity.
Delight is the Hebrew word
anag,
and it’s what we call the Hiphil imperative. It means it’s
reciprocal action. God will reciprocate what you do if you love Him. He loves you. The Bible
says that in 1 John 4,
“We love Him because He first loved us.”
So if God sees you delighting
yourself in Him then He’s happy to be delighted in you and He gives you the desires of your
heart, much like a father would give a child the desires of the heart. But He’s not going to give
you something that will destroy you. You wouldn’t give a six-year-old child a Corvette Stingray
and say, “Drive it kid.” You may want something that will destroy you. We’ve got to look at this.
We’ve got to examine this and see why He doesn’t give you certain things because you don’t
have the capacity to handle it yet. There’s much He wants to give you. Are you content with what
you have? That’s the key.
Without contentment, there’s no capacity.
I hope you’re listening and
I hope you’re learning. I hope I’m not too dull for you. Please stay with me. Please keep listening
and please come back next week, same time, same place. Until then, this is your host Rick
Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line