Rick Hughes explores the perils of arrogance, anger, worry, and fear, revealing how these mental attitude sins can derail your spiritual journey. With illustrative examples and biblical references, Rick unveils the destructive power of unchecked emotions and provides practical spiritual solutions that encourage growth and resilience. This episode empowers you to confront your fears and embrace faith, offering tools to manage adversity with grace. Delve into the rich insights of scripture and learn to navigate life with a renewed sense of purpose and peace.
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.
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Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick around. It’ll be a short time of motivation, some inspiration, some education, all without any manipulation. We always talk about that. We always say that because we don’t try to con people. We’re not hustling money. We’re not soliciting membership. We’re just trying to have a show where we teach you some concepts about the Word of God, hopefully to verify and identify the plan of God for your life so that you can orient and adjust to the plan. But it all starts with the greatest news the world has ever known, and that’s the news that Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, has redeemed us out of the slave market of sin. Our debt to God has been paid by Him, and we are now free from the penalty of death and the power of sin in our life. And by receiving Christ as Savior, we in effect accept the offering that he made on our behalf. It’s a free gift, compliments of the grace of God. That’s why the Bible says in Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace you are saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it’s a gift of God and not of works, lest any man should boast. And again in Titus 3, 5, not by works of righteousness, which we’ve done, but according to his mercy, he saved us by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Spirit which is shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Lord. That being justified by his grace, there it is again, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. So by grace, it’s grace, the grace gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s the best news I could tell you today, but there’s more news to talk about because You always hear me say that you have a completed soul, you have mentality, you have volition, you have a conscience, and you have a self-consciousness, and you have emotions hanging around in the background somewhere there, and that’s where the dangerous thing comes in. So the good news is that everyone that’s listening to me has the opportunity to develop a spiritual IQ. In God’s wonderful plan, human IQ is not the issue. It’s spiritual IQ, and it’s learned by getting God’s word and developing some wisdom in your life. And as you develop wisdom, you have insight and discernment, and you’re able to have what we call spiritual x-ray vision. In other words, you can keep yourself out of a lot of trouble and save yourself a lot of mistakes when you have the wisdom of God in your life. Read Proverbs chapter one and you’ll see it all right there. So what we’re talking about today is the wisdom of God from the scripture, hopefully to encourage you, to challenge you, to motivate you to be the man or the woman that God created you to be. Okay, so today what I want to talk about is a little different. This show is recorded back in May, but it’ll be played in June, and hopefully things are beginning to get back to normal. I don’t know what’s going to happen as a result of the virus and the pandemic, but I pray that by the time this show airs, we’re beginning to get back to normal. Today I want to teach you about mental attitude sins. Mental attitude sins that occur when we’re under stress. Mental attitude sins that often occur when we’re under stress. Mental attitude sins begin with words expressed in your mind to start with. You have to think in terms of words. God wrote pure words in the Bible, the pure words of God’s scripture. where it says the word of God is alive and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit and the joints and the marrow is a critic of thought and intense of the heart. That’s the word of God. And you have words in your soul. When you learn scripture, you learn words. And your mental attitude sins are actually words that you’ve learned, expressed in your thoughts, and then manifested in the actions that you do. But everything starts with a thought. That’s why the Bible clearly says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is in Proverbs. So these sins that I want to talk to you about, these are some sins you can commit while you’re driving your automobile, while you’re sitting in your favorite chair, or just relaxing under the shade of a big old tree in your yard. You can do these sins without ever lifting a finger. They are committed in your head, committed in your thoughts, in the mentality of your mind as you think words, and they become real actions as a result, and they’re just as real as any sins you may be committing outside of your body, such as the drunkenness or adultery or any other overt sin. The bad thing about these mental attitude sins is sometimes you might not even be aware that you’re sinning since you didn’t violate one of your personal taboos. You know, people have personal taboos. You know, don’t drink, don’t dance, don’t smoke, don’t wear makeup, don’t chew gum, don’t drink RC Cola, you know, stuff like that. Goofy stuff. It’s not in the Bible. And yet these are personal taboos, and so many self-righteous people think they’re a good Christian because they didn’t violate one of their own personal taboos. Well, these are actual sins, not taboos. So the number one mental attitude sin, number one mental attitude sin that anyone can commit is the sin of arrogance because so much springs forth out of arrogance. Arrogance is the number one mental attitude sin because it produces an unrealistic self-image in your soul. And it gives you unrealistic expectations about how you should be treated. If you have an unrealistic self-image and you think you’re worthy of something you’re not worthy of, you’re going to expect to be treated in a way you’re not ready to be treated. So arrogance is very dangerous. The most dangerous person in the world is a religious self-righteous arrogant person. This person is often filled with all sorts of arrogance, especially the arrogance of ignorance. He’s ignorant of the word of God, he lives by his taboos, and the ignorant religious person is very judgmental sometimes. very self-serving, and they believe that they’re the only one that God’s impressed with because they observe a certain set of taboos. They don’t drink, they don’t cuss, they don’t go to any movies except G-rated movies, and they would never dare walk into 7-Eleven that sells any kind of alcohol, et cetera. You know what I’m talking about. And yet they would look down their nose at you and say you’re not a very good Christian because you chew gum and drink Pepsi, you know? Come on, you know I’m being ridiculous, but you know what I’m talking about. Judgmental, self-righteous, religious people that judge others. God’s not impressed with judging anyone. Matter of fact, the Bible says, judge not lest you be judged, because with the measure you measure, it will be measured back to you again, Matthew 7, 1 through 7. So this religious arrogance is under some sort of strong delusion leading to numerous bad decisions from the area of weakness in their life. And they’re often controlled by their old sin nature and even demonic influence. Yeah, demons work in the area of religion. Organized religion is the devil’s ace trump. I assure you of that. There are many people that will wind up in the lake of fire thinking they’re going to heaven because they’re good people. They don’t do bad things. However, the Bible says there are none that are good, no, not one, because all of our righteousness is like a filthy rag in God’s eyes. So usually, the religious arrogant person is self-righteous, trying to impose their standards on other people. And they can even be emotional and irrational and mistaking some sort of religious service for what they may call Christian growth. It’s not true. And one of the really weird forms of arrogance is lust. Lust is a form of arrogance and a form of preoccupation with self to the exclusion of others. For example, David with Bathsheba, that’s an example. We’ll get more to lust later on, but Bathsheba was married and had a husband and David lusted after her and murdered her husband and took her for his wife. Another form of blind arrogance is prejudice. Did you know that? Prejudice is a form of blind arrogance. And Proverbs 13, 10, arrogance only breeds quarrels, but wisdom is found in those who takes advice. And then in Proverbs 13 again, through arrogance comes strife, but wisdom is with those who receive instruction. So that’s the same verse committed in two different languages, two different translations. Again, here he goes. Arrogance is a form of blind prejudice. Prejudice is a form of blind arrogance is what I’m trying to say. And so Proverbs 13, 10, through arrogance comes strife or prejudice. But wisdom is with those who receive instruction. One of the most crippling mental attitude sins, after we leave arrogance, is the sin of anger. Anger, where you express antagonism and hatred and resentment towards a person or a system of philosophy or something that you disagree with, politics or rules that you work under, whatever. The Greek word for anger in the Bible is the word orgei, and there’s actually two words for anger used. It always helps to have a qualified pastor that can tell you the difference, but orge refers to mental anger, which always produces bitterness. And the Bible distinguishes between emotional anger called fumos, T-H-U-M-O-S, and mental anger called orge, O-R-G-E. So one is like the thunder, and one’s emotional outburst, and one is seething anger in the mind. The problem with the believer like you and I who gets angry is that it kicks us out of fellowship with God as well as producing jealousy and cruelty in our lives because anger can turn a smart person like you into a very stupid person very quick. So Ecclesiastes 7, 9 says, don’t be hasty to be angry in your right lobe or in your mind. For anger resides in the bosom of a fool. God does not authorize any of us to run around angry. This is why many stupid and embarrassing things are said when we’re angry. Because we can’t think. We’re just emoting. And the Bible says an angry person stirs up strife. Proverbs 29, 22, but a hot-tempered person abounds in transgressions. Anger is even associated with grieving the Holy Spirit. In Ephesians 4, 30, stop grieving the Holy Spirit, the God by whom you’ve been sealed to the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be removed from you, along with all evil. Any of these sins that I mentioned, arrogance, anger, will take you out of fellowship with God quickly. When you are maltreated, don’t ever let reaction to maltreatment become a sin in your life because if you retaliate, then your reaction becomes a form of anger. And you can rest assured you will violate the royal family honor code when that happens. So don’t let reacting to some unfair circumstance become a sin in your life because you cannot build your happiness on someone else’s unhappiness. and that’s exactly what retaliatory actions tries to do you can’t get happy about trying to get revenge on someone else and get even with them i used to have a friend that said okay i’m gonna write your name in the little black book your name goes in the book i’m gonna get you well that’s not true you can’t get happiness that way so your anger Actually can destroy a marriage since anger motivates other sins and even produces a loss of self-esteem if you had any to begin with. But remember, anger, anger, A-N-G-E-R is only one letter away from danger, D-A-N-G-E-R. These mental attitude sins I’m talking about are where the verbal sins originate, such as sins of the tongue. So how do I control mental attitude sins? We want to talk about that here in a minute, because there is a way to do it. How would you control your mental attitude sins? Another crippling mental attitude sin is worry. Worry, that’s a sin. You might not have realized that, Matthew 6, 25. Don’t worry passage. You should read it, 25 through 34, Matthew 6, 25 through 34. It’s a passage about not worrying. The Lord said, for this reason, I say to you, stop worrying about your life as to what you eat or what you’re gonna drink or don’t worry about your body as to what you shall wear. He went on to say, is not life more than food and the body more than clothes? Then he used the metaphor of the birds. He said, look at the birds in the air. They don’t sow and they don’t reap and they don’t gather into barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than a bird? Now, which of you by worrying can grow 18 inches? And why are you worried about your clothes? Look at the lilies in the field. Look how they grow. They don’t work and they don’t spin. In fact, I say to you that even Solomon in all of his glory didn’t clothe himself like one of these. And if God keeps clothing the common grass of the field, and he does, the grass that’s alive today and then tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not do very much more for you, believer of little faith? Therefore, don’t worry. Stop thinking in terms of worrying. Don’t worry about what you’re going to eat or what you’re going to drink. or with what you will clothe yourself. These are things that the unbelievers worry about. They search eagerly for these things. But your heavenly Father knows that you have a need of them. So if you will seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, Then, then all of these things will be provided for you. So don’t worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough evil of its own. Matthew 6. And you can read it for yourself. You should get your Bible out and read it. Matthew 6, 25 through 34. There are four mandates in this passage not to worry. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. The more things you worry about, the more things you’re gonna be worried over. so don’t let worry take power over your life it’s self-torment it’s anxiety even regarding something in the past or something in the present or something that’s going to come from the future i mean people get addicted to drugs or alcohol because of worry so philippians 4 6 stop worrying about anything But in everything, by prayer and supplication, along with your thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Just bring it before the Supreme Court of Heaven. He’ll take care of it. He’ll provide. Worry. Another mental attitude sin is fear. Fear. Bad sin. Exodus 14, 13. Moses said unto the people, Do not be afraid. Stand still. Watch the deliverance of the Lord, which he’ll show you this day, because the Egyptians whom you’ve seen today, you’ll never see them again, ever. The Hebrew word for fear is yare, means to be afraid. In 2 Timothy 1.7, God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. The Greek word for fear is dahlia, d-e-i-l-i-a, dahlia. And it means to be a coward or be timid. So remember fear is an emotional overrun of the soul. It’s emotions out of control and your spiritual life cannot function under emotions and it cannot function under fear. Fear is like a virus and that’s something we’ve faced in this country. The press and the media have created mass hysteria talking about the Corona 19 virus, the COVID-19 virus, and I’ve got people afraid to death are going to die. The fear virus represents emotional arrogance in the soul as a total distraction to your own spiritual life. You know why? Because fear sees the problem and falls apart. But there’s a solution to fear. It’s what we call faith. Faith sees the problem, and through wisdom in the soul, spiritual x-ray vision, insight and understanding, when you have that, then you see the solution. Faith focuses on the solution. Fear focuses on the problem. So the more things you surrender to fear, the more things you’re going to be afraid of. I mean, tomorrow you may be, excuse me, today you might be worried about only one little thing. And tomorrow you might add something to it. So you have two things. And soon you’ll become so emotionally involved with fear that you’ll have no identity. You’ll begin to be irrational. You lose your identity, which means you have so much fear that you’re afraid of even living. Fear is something that if you don’t control it, if it continues to develop in your life, you will have no capacity to live and no capacity to love. Let me give you a fear acrostic. Fear, F-E-A-R. F means failure to trust God. Not looking at the problem, not looking at the solution. Failure to trust God. The E, F-E. E means emotionally unstable. When your emotions take over, you get afraid. You quit thinking and your mind starts wagging like a dog’s tail that’s happy to see you and your thoughts can’t focus anymore. You can’t center in on the faithless drill. You can’t claim a promise because you’re emotionally unstable. F-E-A. A stands for arrogant rejection of the promises of God. There are over 7,000 promises in the Bible how God can provide for you. We’ve even put together a book of promises and principles. It’s free. If you want one, just write to us. We’ll send it to you. It’s full of great promises for you to claim under pressure situations in your life and stay out of the trap of arrogance and coming up to your own concepts about the problem and not getting the biblical solution. F, failure to trust God. E, emotional instability. A, arrogant rejection of God’s promises. And R, R means you react to the crisis rather than respond to the crisis. You can do one or two things. You can react with emotions or you can respond with faith. It’s up to you. Now, it’s up to you. Fear is a sin. Mental attitude sin. You can sit in your car and be afraid. You can sit at home with the doors shut and the windows pulled down and the shades shut and be afraid. Or you can live your life and trust the Lord. Psalm 91, let him handle your difficulties. He will protect you under the shadow of his wings, I promise you. All right, another mental attitude sin is guilt. That’s a horrible emotional sin. It gets bottled up in the mind and living with guilt is terrible. Living with a guilt complex is terrible. And sometimes it’s caused by a dominant person in your periphery who’s very self-righteous and putting you down or trying to make you line up with what they think is right. But your guilt can be a feeling of responsibility or even remorse for something real or maybe imagined. But if it’s not controlled, it can become a morbid self-reproach to life and it can destroy the person who harbors it. guilt is a sin and it has to be confessed and from that to move on you know people feel guilty about sins all the time they feel guilty because they made mistakes feel guilty about what you did that maybe you think your wife didn’t know about or your husband don’t know about but Remember the Bible says the eyes of the Lord run to and fro over the whole earth. Remember that. So failure to do God’s plan, people feel guilty about that. People feel guilty about improprieties instead of naming those things that they did and confessing them as sin and forgetting about them and moving on. They’d rather sit around and feel guilty about it. And this is exactly what Satan wants you to do. He wants you to go sit in a corner and he wants you to hang your head between your legs and say, God can’t use me, look what I did. That’s baloney. You see, Satan can use your guilt to get you disillusioned with God or with yourself. And that’s because of your own arrogant, unrealistic self-image, thinking, I don’t know why I did that. I would have never done that, but I did it. I did what I thought I would never do. Yes, you did. Why? Because you have a sin nature. And you have to learn to control that sin nature through the filling of the Holy Spirit because the Bible says the flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit wars against the flesh and they’re contrary one to the other so that we cannot do the things we want to do. It is a constant battle. constantly. But if you look down on yourself, if you let guilt take over and you sit in the corner and cry about your failure, if you get disgusted with yourself, then you’re going to be defeated and become an emotional basket case. When you fail, get up. When I played football, I got blocked. I got knocked down, but I didn’t lay there. I got up, got back in the huddle, and did better the next time. God knows when you fail, and if you will confess your sin to him, he said he would be faithful and just to forgive you. Paul put it this way in Philippians 3, 13 and 14 concerning guilt. He said, brethren, I don’t count myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, I forget those things that are behind me and I reach forth unto those things that are before me. I keep pressing towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. So if the worst thing you can do is look back and say, oh, look what I did. Yes, you did it. Yes, God knew about it. Did the dust clear? Are you still alive? Well, then maybe God still has a plan for your life. If he was through with you, he would have brought you home. And he hasn’t brought you home yet, so get back with it. Confess your sin to God. You know, the wonderful thing about getting saved, I remember this clearly, Because I would lay in my bed at night guilty and the spotlight would be in my head before I became a Christian. And I would think about the stupid things I’d done. And I was ashamed. But the Bible says this in Isaiah 59 too about when we get saved. When we get saved, the guilt is removed. Isaiah 59 too, but your iniquities have separated between you and your God and your sins have hidden his face from you that he will not hear them. So that’s before you get saved. But by means of the substitutionary death on the cross where the Lord Jesus Christ himself paid for our sins and bridged the gap between God and man, we have this verse, 2 Corinthians 5, 19. God through Christ reconciled the world unto himself. not imputing their transgressions unto them, and has committed unto us the word of reconciliation. So my sins were paid for. I had nothing more to feel guilty about. They were gone. Paid for on the cross, past, present, and future. And then when I sin in time, when I break fellowship with God, rebound removes the guilt of that. 1 John 1.9 says if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us. and to purify us from all wrongdoing. So there’s no place for shame or guilt in the plan of God. When you find that you’ve got some shame or guilt and your spiritual life has been set back unless you rebound, unless you get up, unless you move on, but you must be filled with the Holy Spirit to live the spiritual life. And no one is ever filled with the Holy Spirit if they’re in a state of guilt or shame. It’s grieving the Holy Spirit when you harbor those things. And then finally, we’ll mention lust, a devastating mental attitude sin. The Hebrew word kamad means the desire to covet, and the Greek word epithumia means a craving or a longing or a desire for that which is forbidden. The lust pattern reinforces the trends of the sin nature, whether they’re good or bad. Some people have legalism. Some people have antinomianism. Some people go crazy. Some people go self-righteous. But the categories of lust in the Bible include power lust, approbation lust, sex lust, pleasure lust, chemical lust, monetary lust, criminal lust, crusader lust, inordinate ambition lust. I mean, I could go on and on and on. But people without virtue lust for wealth. People without virtue lust for success. People without virtue lust for promotion. People without virtue lust for approbation. People without virtue lust for love. And people without virtue lust for marriage without any happiness at all. In our current political season, it’s a perfect example of those who have inordinate ambition and lust for power. Prayer is not designed to fulfill our desires and our lust. Prayer, you can use rebound to get back in fellowship, maintain the filling of the Holy Spirit, and you can defeat the flesh and the desires of the old sin nature. I hope you’ve been listening. Got a lot more to say about it, but not much more time now. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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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.
