Join us on The Flotline as Rick Hughes dives into the profound topic of living within God’s will. Reflecting on biblical history, Rick explores the lessons from the southern kingdom of Judah and the message of judgment delivered by the prophet Isaiah. As we step into 2026, this episode challenges listeners to consider whether they are truly following God’s path in their personal lives and for their nation.
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, please stick around. It won’t be long, just a few minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and all without any type of manipulation. We only have two objectives here, and that’s to glorify Christ and to magnify God’s wonderful plan for your life. If we can do that and we can help you orient and adjust to the plan, that’s a wonderful thing. So thank you for giving us a few minutes of your time. Very serious topic we want to talk about today, and that’s whether or not you are in the will of God, whether or not you are living in the will of God. That’s something you might have to ask yourself as we enter into this new season. As we move into the year 2026, you may be wondering what exactly is God’s will for your personal life? Or even, actually, what is God’s will for your nation? I can think as far as our nation goes, we seem to be headed in the right direction under our current leadership. But you and I know that that could change in any election. So the question I’m asking you is this. Are you personally, individually, following God’s will in your personal life? We want to go back to the book of Isaiah for just a minute, do a little history lesson. We find the southern kingdom of Judah in trouble with their God for several different reasons. Remember the Jews had split into two kingdoms after the death of King Solomon. The northern kingdom, which was Israel, and the southern kingdom, which was known as Judah. I don’t have time in this short radio show to give you a history lesson on these two nations, but I’ll tell you that the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered around 720 BC by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom of Judah fell much later around 586 BC, conquered by the Babylonians. The prophet Isaiah was indeed a major prophet, much like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but more than any other prophet, Isaiah points forward time and time again to the person of Christ in his book. Appropriately, therefore, the Old Testament book of Isaiah is second only to the book of Psalms in being the biblical book most quoted in the entire New Testament. In Isaiah chapter 1 through verse chapter 39, Isaiah addresses Jerusalem, the southern kingdom of Judea, primarily with a message of judgment coming from God. Again, let me say this, from Isaiah chapter one through 39, Isaiah addresses Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah with a message of judgment that’s about to come upon them. I’d like to quote to you now some research from the Bible Knowledge Commentary written by John Valvard and Roy Zuck. And this is what they said in regards to that coming judgment. The reason destruction was going to come on Judah was that everything the nation said and everything they did was against their covenant with God. The people of that land defiled God and were open about their sin, much like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And therefore, the coming disaster was brought on by themselves. I remind you of a verse in Hosea 8-7 that says, “…whose host of the wind will reap the whirlwind.” And a lot of the disaster, a lot of the problems we have in our life, we bring them on by ourselves because of bad decisions that we make, especially in regards to the plan of God for our life, if you are in fact a Christian. In the book of Isaiah, the word woe, W-O-E, is used 22 times, and it’s a warning, a warning of a coming disaster. In chapter 30, the word woe is used toward those who wish to form an alliance with Egypt for protection rather than following God’s plan. Thus, Judah was going to be put to shame. You know, the New Testament tells us Paul’s writings in 2 Corinthians 6, 14, do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. And the fact that Judah would entertain being delivered by Egypt rather than being delivered by God was a terrible sin. Even though people had turned away from God, here’s what’s amazing, and here’s what you and I need to focus on this morning. God longed to be gracious to them, even though they turned their back on him. As I said to you before, you may walk away from God, but he won’t walk away from you. He may turn your back on God, but he’ll just love you from behind. Isaiah 30, 18 says, and therefore will the Lord wait. Notice that word wait. Therefore will the Lord wait so that in order that he may be gracious unto you. Gracious unto you. And therefore will he be exalted so that he may have mercy upon you. For the Lord is a God of judgment and happiness belongs to all of those who wait for him. Those words, wait and gracious and mercy, all are significant for us. I don’t know about you and what you’re doing in your life, but if you’re out of the will of God, he’s waiting on you to get back in. He’s waiting on you to change your mind. And we’ll talk about that here in a minute. And he’s very gracious unto you. Therefore, every day that you live is a grace day. And he will have mercy on you if you’ll turn back to him. You know, God promised to provide direction for the nation of Judah if they would just turn to him. In Isaiah 30, verses 20 through 21, here’s what it says. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, that’s discipline, and the water of affliction, discipline, yet shall not your teachers be removed into a corner anymore. And your eyes will then see your teachers, and your ears will hear. A word behind you saying, this is the way. Walk ye in it when you turn to the right and when you turn to the left. Did you notice ears and eyes? This is what it takes to learn God’s word. See it and hear it. That’s why we have it in printed form so that you can read it. And that’s why we have pastors that teach from the pulpit so you can hear it. This is the way, this direction. God will give you direction from his word. These verses give us some clear insight and understanding as to how God is very patient with us and how he in fact provides direction for our daily lives. Did you notice the words, will the Lord wait so that he may be gracious unto you? This verse is telling us how very patient God is. He’s very patient, and he’s been very patient with me, and I’m sure he’s being very patient with you. very patient in regards to your salvation as far as you coming to know jesus christ and receive him as your savior here’s what the bible says about his patience it says in second peter 3 9 the lord is not slack concerning his promise as some men count slackness but is long suffering to us not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance or change of mind. People get mixed up on that word repentance. They think it’s an emotional thing about feeling sorry for your sin. What the word actually means is to change the way you think. The word long-suffering is the Greek word makrothumia. It’s a compound word, makrothumia. It’s a combination of two words. Makros meaning long and thumos meaning temper. So this word patient means that God has long tempered. He demonstrates the patience that he demonstrates as a result of something that you may not recognize yet. But let’s talk about it. His unfailing love for each one of us. Unfailing love for you and me. How could God love me after things I’ve done? And how could God love you after the things you’ve done? Because that’s his character. He loves us. He created us. He made us. And he’s not going to abandon you. You may walk away from him, but he won’t walk away from you as I told you earlier. So he demonstrates this patience with his unfailing love. And notice that the Apostle Paul even recognizes that word love is a very patient thing. In 1 Corinthians 13, 4, love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous. Love does not brag. And love is not arrogant. Love is patient. As a parent, you may find yourself losing your patience with your children sometime. It’s very hard to deal with unruly children. You can’t afford to lose your patience, but it happens, and that’s when it becomes a sin, and you have to rebound that sin if you get angry or mad or lose your temper and go to God and confess your sin and learn to be patient. Now, here’s a question I have to ask you. Has God been patient with you And does his patience ever diminish? Or will there come a time when his patience will turn to wrath on your behalf? Will it? Has he been patient with you, waiting on you to line up with his will and you won’t do it? You got your mind made up, you’re going to live your life the way you want to live your life, even though you know better, even though you’ve heard better, even though you’ve been challenged by the Holy Spirit and by God’s word, quit doing what you’re doing. But you continue to go down that road. Is there ever going to come a time when that patience will turn to wrath on your behalf? Well, I assure you that God’s plan will move on, whether you get on board or not. My own pastor once said, you may be in the plan of God, but you might not be in the will of God. What that means is you might be saved and in God’s plan, but you’re not following God’s will once you’re in the plan. So let me ask this question. What exactly is God’s will for the Christian? Can I answer that question? Yeah, I think I can. I think I can answer it in a couple of key verses, beginning with Romans 12, 2. That verse says, do not be conformed to this world. There’s God’s will for you. Do not be conformed to this world. Don’t try to fit in. Don’t follow the leadership of the world. And the verse goes on to say, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. That means change the way you think. That means identically to go from arrogance to humility. Why should you change your mind about the way you’re living? The verse goes on to say, so that, purpose clause, so that you may prove what is good and acceptable and the perfect will of God. So you want to know what the will of God is for your life? Change the way you think. Change the way you think from arrogance to humility. Humility is teachability. Arrogant people can’t learn anything because they justify their decisions and their actions. So changing how you think means becoming like the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what it means. The key word is humility. Arrogance through self-justification or humility through grace orientation. It’s up to you. Your arrogance will self-justify why you’re right and God’s wrong. Your arrogance will convince you that you’re doing the right thing, even though you know better. Or you can think in terms of humility through God’s grace orientation. Remember, arrogance always reacts to authority and humility responds to authority. Another verse that I can tell you describes God’s perfect will for your life is found in 2 Timothy 2.15. This is the second proof that God has a plan for your life. Here it says, study to show yourself approved unto God. A workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. Did you notice approved and ashamed? There is a plan for your life. There is a way for you to know that plan. And you can be approved under a workman that does not need to be ashamed. If you can be ashamed, you can be unashamed. God wants you to be unashamed. He wants you to be able to rightly divide the word of truth. And this is where I tell you you need a well-qualified pastor to teach it to you so that you can hear it and see it in your Bible and hear it as he teaches it from the pulpit. So the word study is a verb and it’s a mandate. It’s not a request. Study why? Why should I study God’s word? So that I can approve God’s will for my life. So that I will be approved by God. A person that doesn’t have to be ashamed because I did the wrong thing at the wrong time. And the only way I can do that is to rightly divide the word of truth. This is where you gotta be very careful, because some people are gonna tell you something’s true and something’s not true, especially in the day of social media. If you don’t get under a well-qualified pastor, you’re probably never gonna find out what the real truth is, and you’re gonna hear all the religious lies and all the religious manipulation. But what is true is God’s grace. What a wonderful, wonderful gift. For by grace are you saved through faith. It’s not of yourself. It’s a gift from God so that no one would brag about it. That’s a wonderful gift. If you understand grace, you’re beginning to understand what the Christian life is all about. So if you will obey these two mandates that I just read to you, if you will obey Romans 12.2, stop being conformed to this world, change the way you’re thinking, and if you will obey 2 Timothy 2.15, study to show yourself approved unto God, if you will obey those two mandates, then you will find comfort in the verse I’m about to give you. Isaiah 58, 11. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your soul in times of drought, and he will strengthen your bones, and you will be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. Did you notice God will satisfy your soul at a drought, and he will strengthen you, your bones, What a wonderful way to live. Refreshed and provided for. Refreshed and provided for. On the other hand, if you ignore those two mandates I read to you from Romans 12.2 and from 2 Timothy 2.15, then what is the result of that? If you ignore those two mandates, you will not find refreshment from the Lord. You will always, always struggle to survive in the devil’s world because of your hard-headedness, because of your own arrogance. And you will go it alone. which means you will be miserable and unhappy, and you will always blame your misery on another person. Oh, it’s never your fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. Someone didn’t treat you right. Someone didn’t treat you fairly. Someone said something that you didn’t like. So you blame your unhappiness on other people Rather than looking into the mirror and seeing your own negative volition. You don’t study God’s word. You don’t seek to learn God’s word. You’re not interested in God’s word. And you’re not trying to be unconformed of the world. You relish in being conformed to the world. You think just like your friends think. On top of this self-defined misery, we call it self-induced misery, going it alone, miserable, unhappy, always blaming everybody else, you will find divine discipline if you don’t follow those verses I told you. Divine discipline. What is that? It’s God’s way of getting your attention so that you will get back to following his will for your life before you self-destruct due to your own bad decisions, as you wander down the my-way highway searching for happiness in all the wrong places. Listen to Hebrews 12, five through nine. Have you forgotten this exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children? My son, despise thou not the chastening of the Lord, that’s discipline, nor faint when you are rebuked on him, that’s more discipline, For whom the Lord loves, he disciplines and scourges every son that he receives. And if you endure discipline, God deals with you as with a son. For what son is he whom the Father does not discipline? But if you’re without discipline, wherefore all are partakers, then you are not a child of God, but a legitimate child of God, not a son. Furthermore, we’ve had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Did you hear that? We’ve had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Respect. Shall we not much rather be subject unto the Father of spirits and live? And live? What does that mean? Well, if you read Proverbs 15, 10, it says this. Correction is grievous unto him that forsakes the way. But he that hates the reproof or the correction of God will die. These two verses might explain why you’re in such sad shape today. You’ve been through warning discipline. You’ve been through intense discipline, and you might even be under dying discipline because you hate the correction of God. The correction of God may come through your pastor, may come through your parents, and may come in different ways. But do you like it? Do you appreciate it when someone tells you you’re wrong and out of line and you need to straighten up? Or do you think God is unfair and unjust and everybody’s all against you? I assure you God is not unfair, nor is God unjust. And if you are in fact a Christian, then God in his unfailing love is trying to rescue you before you destroy yourself. He’s not mad at you, but he is administering discipline to hopefully correct your course. And I might say this, that your future depends on how you handle that discipline. I encourage you to stop blaming others for your unhappiness. I encourage you to confess your sin of ignoring God’s word and not paying attention to his urging. Wandering down the my way highway, too proud to admit your own arrogance and not seeing yourself as you really are. Listen to the words of the prodigal son as taught in the parable of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, I suggest you read the entire parable found in Luke 15, 11 through 24. Luke 15, 11 through 24. Listen as I read just two verses, 17 through 19. And when he came to himself, that’s the prodigal son, He thought, how many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and despair, and I’m dying from hunger. I will rise and go to my father, and I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and I’m no more worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants. Notice he was starving. He was about to die. And for some people it takes this sort of disaster before they admit they made a mess out of their lives because they would not follow God’s will. Which will is in fact to bless them and to prosper them as we saw earlier. Notice his attitude of humility had to be replaced with the attitude of arrogance. You see, he was very arrogant when he left his father’s home. He took his inheritance and went off and wasted it. And now he’s about to die and he gets some humility and he has to admit that he made a mess out of his life and returned to his father. Until you’re willing to admit you’re making a mess of your life, you’re never going to be restored. And so Luke 15, he arose and came to his father and when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion on him and fell and hugged him and kissed him and the son said, Father, I’ve sinned against heaven and in your sight and I’m no more worthy to be called your son. But the father said to the servants, bring forth a breast robe and put it on him. put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet, bring out the fatted calf and kill it, let’s eat, let’s have a celebration for this my son was dead, he’s alive again, he was lost and now he’s found. What a wonderful thing. As I said before, all Christians are in the plan of God, but not all Christians are obeying the will of God. If you are in the directive will of God, Your lifestyle will be characterized by two individual things. You will, number one, stay filled with the Holy Spirit by using problem-solving device number one. And number two, you will maintain consistent spiritual growth by means of learning and applying the Word of God on a daily basis. And I’m not talking about you trying to teach yourself, but I’m talking about you sitting under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor teacher. So let’s start with problem-solving advice number one. That’s 1 John 1, 9 is what we call rebound. When you sin, do you confess your sin? Because the Bible says in 1 John 1, 9, if we will confess our sin, he will in fact forgive us of our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. if you confess your sin, if you have enough humility to admit to God you made a mess out of your life, if you have enough humility to admit that you were wrong, if you have enough humility to come to God and admit your sin to him, and if you have enough humility to get into a local church and listen to the pastor teach you God’s word, not trying to teach yourself, as some people do, It’s at this point, if that happens, you will discover the geographical will of God for your life. There is a geographical will of God for your life, and it depends on where he wants you to be. Listen to Acts 8, 26. And the angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip. By the way, Philip had just had a great revival in Samaria. All sorts of people were getting saved, and the angel of the Lord said, Philip, let’s have a word over here. Philip, come here. And he said this. This is what he said. Arise. In other words, get out of Samaria. Go towards the south and to the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is the desert. And it was there that he met an Ethiopian studying and reading from the word, not understanding what it was about, and was able to lead him to Christ. It’s quite a story in Acts 8.26. There is a geographical will of God for your life. Where does God want you to be? And I can tell you it’s where you can be fed his word. And there is a viewpoint will of God. That’s the second thing. What does he want me to think? In Philippians 4 verse 8, the Bible tells you what to think. It says, think on these things. It’s very clear. Take it out and read it. Philippians chapter 4 verse 8, think on these things. And finally, what does he want me to do? And the short term is today. What does he want me to do today? And the long term is, what is he going to do with the rest of my life? That has to do with your spiritual gift as a Christian and what God wants you to do. Serving him. Maybe you’re a communicator. Maybe you serve him as a church member. Teaching. Maybe a deacon. Maybe a servant. Whatever. God has a plan for your life. He’s equipped you to do it. So I pray that you’re paying attention to these things. Because your future happiness depends on it. Let me warn you right now. There is a limit to the patience of God. There is a limit to the patience of God. Are you pushing the limit? It’s where his patience ends and where judgment begins. We see it all throughout the Bible. All throughout the scriptures we see it. And I want to warn you. I’m warning you this morning through this radio show that that time is coming if you continue to live like you’re living. God’s not going to keep putting up with your foolishness forever. He loves you. He’s speaking to you even through this radio show. And he will guide you and correct you. But as long as you continue to be negative, as long as you continue to neglect his word, as long as you continue to go down the my way highway, you have nothing to look forward to but misery and divine discipline as a child of God. So, are you in the will of God? Are you following God’s will? Are you obeying God’s will for your life? Go back to those two verses I gave you, Romans 12.2 and 2 Timothy 2.15. That’s where it starts. Did you listen this morning? Did you learn anything? Were you challenged? I hope so. I pray so. Again, this show is for two reasons, to glorify Christ and to magnify God’s plan. So I pray that that’s been done. I pray that you will believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and receive him as your personal Savior if that hasn’t happened yet. Because God’s patience will run out sooner or later. As the man soars to the wind, he’s going to reap the whirlwind. Think about that. Don’t forget it. Hopefully you’ll come back with me next week, same time, same place, same channel. Until then, thank you for listening this morning. This is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flotline.
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.
