e Episode 545 aired on January 31, 2016
Good morning, this is Rick Hughes host of the FLOT Line. Welcome. For the next few moments
I’m going to invite you to stay with me. It will be about 30 minutes of motivation, some
inspiration, some education, all done without any type of manipulation. So the FLOT Line is
always heard right here, same time every Sunday morning. Thank you for being with me and
thank you for listening. For the last few weeks we’ve been going over a review of the 10
problem-solving devices. That’s what this show is predicated on, the 10 problem-solving
devices. These things, when you learn them and apply them into your life, they can stop the
outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. That’s why we
always say that adversity is inevitable and stress is optional. The optional part is if you learn
God’s Word, God’s 10 problem-solving devices and deploy them into the thinking of your soul, if
you do this, if you have this Biblical inventory of ideas, if you think in terms of divine
viewpoint, then you can stop this stress from ever, ever occurring in your life.
One of the
greatest problem-solving devices we have is problem-solving device number 10, Occupation
with Christ.
We’re told in Romans 13:14
“To put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
We’re told in 1
Peter 1:8
“To love the One we have not seen,”
and you know we’ve never seen Him. We’ve
never put our eyes on Him. We only know about Him from the Word and from the ministry of
the Holy Spirit as He witnesses the truth of the Word of God to us.
Occupation with Jesus
Christ is focusing on Him as in Hebrews 12:2,
“Put your eyes on Him, the author and the
finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross.”
When we
focus on Christ we understand who He is, what He is. You know, one of the most amazing things
is people studying the life of Christ. My own pastor has been teaching a series on the life of
Christ and we are almost 800 hours into this series. These are all available on DVD or MP3, 800
hours on the life of Christ and we have not even gotten to Jerusalem yet where He goes to the
cross. It’s an amazing study. So when we’re talking about learning about our Savior, remember
this, that He was the prototype.
He came into this world undiminished deity and true
humanity in one body. Jesus Christ faced the same things we face.
Now He did not have a sin
nature. He was not related to Adam like we are. He was born of a virgin. There was no man
involved in His human birth and thus He was not related to Adam. He did not receive Adam’s
original sin, you and I do, but other than this, He went through what we go through. Matthew 4
talks about how He was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil and
how He handled this temptation using the faith-rest drill. He as a human, a man, not God, but as
a man had to be filled with the Spirit.
As a man Christ had to use His Father’s Word.
As a
man He had to use the faith-rest drill. As God He was totally different, He was the God-Man and
He’s in heaven today waiting the shouted order of the Father to return. He’s the only person in
heaven in a resurrection body and we will be there with Him in our resurrection bodies. So let’s
remember when we are talking about occupation with Christ, it’s you having personal love for
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your Savior. There’s no greater motivation than personal love. This is the greatest virtue you
could have. In 1 John 5:3,
“If you love Me you will obey Me and My mandates are not hard.”
It’s
clear, it’s plain, God has a wonderful plan for your life and it’s not hard. It’s not hard to
understand the protocol plan of God but it does require that you learn it and apply it into your life
and have a maximum amount of God’s Word, the mind of Christ. Did you know the New
Testament is called the mind of Christ in 1 Corinthians 2:16? Did you know Paul said in
Philippians 2:5,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus?
”
Being occupied with
Christ is thinking like He thought.
How do we know how He thought? It’s all recorded in the
New Testament, it’s all there for us. So when we learn God’s Word and we circulate this Word in
our stream of consciousness. You know our soul has a conscience and it has self-consciousness
and so we have inside of us a memory center. This is where we can recall things that we’ve
learned. If I say the word, for example rebound, you should know in your memory center if
you’ve listened to this show before, that this is 1 John 1:9,
“If we confess our sins He is faithful
and just to forgive us.”
We rebound when we sin. This means we recover our spiritual life, we
resume our advance but if we don’t rebound from the sin, then we stay under the flesh and we
stay carnal and we set ourself up for discipline. So we have an area of recall, that’s the memory
center inside your frame of reference. It’s the area of retention of the Word of God in your soul.
You have a vocabulary storage. This is where you learn big words. When I became a Christian I
didn’t know any words like justification or sanctification or imputation or righteousness or any of
these things. I didn’t understand these so I had to learn a new vocabulary. This gave me a new
way to express my thoughts. This is a sad thing but it’s true, people that can’t think, can’t speak.
You’ve got to be able to express your thoughts in words. That’s why babies cannot talk. They
don’t know words yet and you know when they learn their first words, “Dada,” “Mama,”
whatever it is they learn, then they can begin to express themself. Prior to this all they can do is
cry when they’re hungry or cry when they need to have something done. So we get a vocabulary.
We have a memory, an ability to express what we remember and then we begin to store things
inside of our soul in different categories. Categories by means of subject matter, the filling of the
Holy Spirit, the faith-rest drill, grace orientation, doctrinal orientation, personal sense of destiny,
personal love for God, impersonal love for others. These are all categories and as you learn God’s
Word and store these things categorically in your mind, then you are able to go back and pluck
them out and use them when you need them to solve problems. God gave you a conscience,
there’s where all of your norms and standards are housed, this is in your soul as well. Your
conscience, it’s a wonderful thing. It protects you. It does not let you self-destruct and when your
conscience is programmed with Biblical norms and standards, when you understand what the
Bible says and live by it, then you have a clean conscience, a clear conscience. Your conscience
is not scarred up with scar tissue. Then we have the momentum department where it’s the part of
our soul where we begin to see ourself. We begin to see what we are. We begin to develop
spiritual autonomy and spiritual maturity as the ultimate goal for us. We start with spiritual self-
esteem. Then we move to spiritual autonomy and then to spiritual maturity and none of this
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happens without wisdom. This is the wealth, this is where we have God’s Word stored in our
soul. This is where we have capacity and values in our life. It’s important that you remember
these things. This is what it means to be occupied with Christ, to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to
be focusing on Him. You know He had the capacity to love someone that didn’t love Him and we
have the capacity to love Him even though He’s invisible. When we have this kind of capacity,
we can love someone who’s invisible and this requires a tremendous amount of information
inside of your soul. So those who love the invisible Jesus Christ our Savior, those who make a
role model of Him, they are the ones that are spiritually self-sustaining. They are the ones that
have zero garbage in their sub-conscience. They’re not harboring guilt and doubt and repression
and they’re not projecting their sins onto other people. These are the mature believers and when
they are occupied with Christ, they’re thinking the mind of Christ. They’re functioning as He
thought and it begins with the mystery doctrine of the Church, that it is Christ in us, the hope of
glory. We are ambassadors for God, we are royal ambassadors to the world. We are royal priests.
We have our own priesthood, our own ambassadorship. Until you know how Jesus Christ thinks,
He’s going to be invisible to you. Once you begin to know how He thinks, from His Word, and
once you begin to see and understand the things that He thinks, then we can be occupied with
Him. See, we don’t seek our encouragement from other people. We don’t seek our encouragement
from circumstances. We seek our encouragement from Jesus Christ our Lord. This
encouragement that He gives to us comes from the residence of God’s Word inside our soul, the
Word that He gave to the Church Age believer, that’s you, you and me, we’re Church Age
believers. We’re living in this mystery doctrine of the Church. No one ever knew there would be
a Church Age. No one knew anything about it in the Old Testament. Yet here is the Church, the
body of Christ. It’s Christ in us. He lives in us, not just in the tabernacle, not just in the Holy of
Holies. The Bible says,
“Don’t you know that Christ lives in you?”
in 1 Corinthians. Once we
obtain occupation with Jesus Christ, once we become spiritually mature, we don’t depend on
people anymore. We don’t depend on people to make us happy. We don’t depend on people to
tell us what to do. We depend on God and His Word. We make a role model out of Christ. We
want to replicate the life of Christ in our life. So once we attain occupation with Christ, then
what’s amazing is you also have +H that goes along with it. You’re prepared now to meet and
face any circumstance in your life because you are preoccupied with God. You’re not
preoccupied with people, you’re preoccupied with God. If Jesus Christ is going to be your role
model you must understand
Ephesians 3:19. It says,
“And come to know the love for Christ
that goes beyond knowledge [gnosis] so that you may be filled with the fullness of God.”
The
word
gnosis
in the Bible is translated knowledge in the English, but the knowledge that we’re
talking about is way beyond
gnosis,
It’s
epignosis,
it’s another word.
Epi
is a preposition and it
means full.
Gnosis
is just knowledge but the believer who learns God’s Word is having full
knowledge,
epignosis,
it’s way beyond
gnosis.
Listen, the unbeliever can have
gnosis,
he can
know who Jesus Christ is. The Bible says in Jeremiah, God said,
“I’m looking for people that
know Me and understand Me.”
The understanding part is the
epignosis
part, when you
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understand it and apply it into your life.
“So that you may be filled
[Paul said, listen to this]
with
the fullness of God.”
What is this? This is you becoming a mature believer. This is you having a
maximum amount of God’s Word in your stream of consciousness so that you come to
understand that you are nothing before you learn something. You’ve got to realize this.
“And we
come to know the love of Christ.”
What do we know? We’re nothing but He’s everything and we
don’t really know how helpless we are until we get into a jam. Once we get into a jam then we go
“Oh-oh, I don’t have the ability to handle this.” So many people are like this because they’re just
what I call conventional Christians. They just play games. They’re looking for a convenient
pastor. They live in a confused world. They’re counterfeits. Yes they are believers in Jesus Christ
but they are just conventional Christians, casual Christians. They are not really serious about it.
What I’m looking for on this show, the reason that I’m talking to you is I’m looking for you to not
be a conventional Christian. I’m looking for you to be a winner believer. I’m looking for you to
be a member of the pivot, the group of invisible heroes that delivers this nation. You know, the
conventional Christian, yes he’s saved, yes. He’s accepted Jesus Christ and he does have eternal
life but he’s ignorant of God’s plan. He doesn’t understand any of these 10 problem-solving
devices. He has no understanding of the plan. So what he does is he substitutes what he assumes
is God’s plan and really it’s his plan. It’s the plan that the conventional Christian comes up with
or what somebody told him he should do, but not necessarily God’s plan. So he substitutes what
he assumes is God’s plan. Spirituality equals maturity. The only way you can be a spiritual
Christian is to be filled with the Spirit. If you’re not filled with the Spirit, you’re a carnal
Christian.
Spiritual maturity is related to the content of God’s Word in your soul.
So the
conventional Christian gets this mixed up. See, he thinks morality is spirituality and he thinks
sweetness is maturity. This has nothing to do with it. Sweet talking Christians have nothing to do
with being mature believers, being moral, being very self-righteous.
Morality is not spirituality.
Depending on how people are reared, they generally conclude that morality is something that
people have to live. You know if they’ve had any contact with Bible colleges or seminaries like I
have or certain groups, they assume that the key to the Christian life is having a very sweet
personality and being very moral. “Hello brother,” “Hello sister,” “God willing we will go to the
grocery store.” “God willing we will cross the street.” Oh, they don’t want to say anything bad
about anybody. They want to love everybody and that’s a total misunderstanding of love
sometimes. See in this superficial meaning of Christianity, he has decided that there are two
things that constitute the Christian way of living, being moral and being sweet and this is what
constitutes a conventional Christian. This type of Christian is not a winner, he’s not a mature
believer because he has no understanding of God’s plan. Oh he goes to church at least once a
week, usually on Sunday morning, he might even sing in the choir and he probably would adhere
to the local taboos. You know taboos, don’t drink, don’t dance, don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t
hang around with people that do. These are the taboos, somehow or another they come up and
say these are sins. The Bible doesn’t comment on these things unless it tells you not to get drunk.
Yeah, that’s a sin but the Bible doesn’t comment on whether you smoke a cigarette or not. It tells
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you not to harm your body, yes but listen, the preacher that eats four chickens for lunch can harm
his body as much as the guy that smokes four cigarettes after lunch so come on. This
conventional Christian is a loser with God. He doesn’t understand the plan. Yeah, he goes to
church. Yeah, he sings in the choir. Yeah, he observes the taboos and this, you know if he
observes these taboos, he stays away from these frivolous, less serious members of the
congregation, the ones that he says are worldly people, they’re worldly. Worldliness is not where
you go to see a movie, worldliness is not where you eat dinner, worldliness is an attitude. It’s the
attitude of depending on the world to make you happy. This sort of conventional Christian
regards someone like you or me, someone that’s really serious about studying God’s Word,
learning God’s Word, applying God’s Word, talking about God’s Word every day, he’d think
we’re cultists. “Something’s wrong with these people,” because they never heard any of these
thoughts before. They’ve never heard anything like grace orientation, or doctrinal orientation, or
a personal sense of destiny. It doesn’t fit into their vocabulary. It doesn’t follow the teaching of
some other Christian that they listened to or use to listen to in the past so they disregard it.
They’re looking more for the conventional Christian pastor, you know dear old Dr. So-and-So, a
dear old hard-working pastor and he hustled around the church. He called on his people. He
wrote nice notes to those that did anything special. He did a lot of counseling, a lot of praying
with people, and his demands on his time were so great that even if he did have a desire to study,
he didn’t have the time to do it. This type of pastor usually would read some article to the
congregation, get them inspired, and then give them some kind of sermon or get them to buy a
book and teach from the book. If your pastor ever tries to get you to buy something, you know
right away there’s a problem. We don’t sell God’s Word. We don’t have to sell God’s Word. What
you’re looking for is a man that will stand in the pulpit and teach you God’s Word without having
to buy a book to go with it. This sort of pastor has a vocabulary that’s strictly fundamentalism
and it’s usually accompanied by a lot of “amen’s and hallelujahs” and “God willing” and “Lord
bless you.” He’s the kind of guy that gave everybody a lot of attention. I mean to tell you the
truth, he’s the kind that runs the best lonely hearts club in town doesn’t he? He went around
uttering, “God bless you,” all the time and the conventional Christian that was brought up like
this? Well, he never got weaned off the milk. You want to know what I’m talking about? Read
Hebrews 5:11-16 where the writer said, “I’ve got a lot of things to say to you, but I can’t tell you
because you’re still on the bottle. You can’t handle the meat of the Word of God, you still need
the bottle. You’re still a baby Christian. You’ve never grown up.” That’s what a conventional
Christian is. The conventional Christian and the convenient pastor generally substitute their own
ideas for what they think the plan of God is and by doing so, strangely enough, they blaspheme
God’s plan. Some conventional Christians will even substitute emotions for spirituality and they
might even tell you something like, “If you don’t feel saved brother, you’re not really saved.”
That’s not what the Bible says. The Bible says,
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ shall be saved.”
The Bible says,
“These things are written so that you may know
that you have eternal life.”
This conventional pastor and the conventional Christian may say, “If
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you don’t get at least one rosy glow from the message, then you didn’t really hear the message.
You’ve got to be inspired. You’ve got to have this emotional tinge.” All this sort of stuff has done
is rear a whole generation of immature believers, born-again believers who don’t have a clue as
to what should be done next in their life. How do I know this? Because behind the façade of
sweetness is a hypocrisy. There’s a hard-core self-righteousness and reaction to anything which
they don’t understand. They’re critical of it and they will malign it. Do you know why? Because,
“Dear old Dr. So-and-So never taught it this way,” or “It’s not in the songbook.” Most of the
Word of God is not in the songbook. See this conventional Christian is not really interested in the
sermon except in one thing. He’s interested in how long is it because he keeps looking at his
watch and he knows he’s got to get out of there get to the restaurant before the crowd gets there.
He wants it to be short, you know, the little sharing message. He likes the sound of his own voice
when he can stand up and give his testimony and tell people what he’s given up for Jesus.
Hearing people tell him what a great believer he is, he likes this, he likes this a lot. You see this
convenient pastor that he wants is a pastor that will counsel him, give him some counseling when
he needs it, give him some attention when he needs it. He just needs somebody to marry him and
bury him and call on him and complement him and he’s happy. This sort of demand on the part of
the conventional Christian has led to the establishment of departments in seminaries that
probably shouldn’t even be there. They’re called practical Christianity departments which is
nothing more than teaching dumb theological students how to get along with people in their
congregation and not offend them. If you’re worried about offending people as a pastor, you’re
not really going to be able to do the job. The idea takes away from the necessary study of the
languages, the original languages, getting into the Greek and the Hebrew because the Bible says
every jot and every tittle of God’s Word is inspired. You must know it from the languages. You
must have the tools to dig it out so that you can give the correct interpretation and you can
exegete the passage, you can develop the categories, you can do the isagogics. I mean this is stuff
that men must know how to do if they’re going to be well-qualified pastors. So the conventional
Christian, you know he takes a look in the mirror and kind of says, “You know, I’m the pillar of
society” and it’s not hard to con him into doing some social action as long as he gets some
attention and he’ll put his name on the billboard somewhere. He will get involved in a lot of
things. Because of his own arrogance he will try to straighten out the devil’s world.
You’ve
never been told by God you’re suppose to straighten out the devil’s world. You’ve been told
to
“Lift up Christ, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27).
You’ve been told to share Christ, not to march
against sin and try to change the world. Listen, you’re not going to change anybody’s sin nature.
The only thing that can change is they can go from being two-sided, dichotomous, and they can
become three sided, trichotomous. As an unbeliever they’ve got a body and a soul but no human
spirit but if they believe in Jesus Christ they can have a body, soul, and spirit. That’s what
happens when they’re born-again. So we’re not here to straighten out the government. We’re not
here to right all the wrongs. We’re not here to get into Christian crusaderism and try to straighten
out people.
We are left in this life as believers to have an impact on history that comes
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through God’s plan. This is when we replicate the life of Christ and represent Him to our
nation.
The conventional Christian doesn’t have occupation with Christ. He’s not occupied with
Christ, he’s occupied with himself. He’s ignorant of God’s plan for his life. He’s arrogant and
legalistic and self-righteous. Oh, he can drop a few spiritual words and he can do a lot of
traditional works. All of this stuff is a total failure and it will all be burned up at the Judgment
Seat of Christ as wood, hay, and stubble. He’s not spiritual, he’s not living the Christian life. He
looks spiritual, he sounds spiritual, he acts spiritual, but that’s a show. He doesn’t want to be
bothered with too many technical things. He says, “That’s too much, that’s a strain, it’s too
difficult to understand. Leave all of this nonsense to the theologians. I just want to be sincere and
do the best that I can.” That is not the Christian life. Being brought up in a lonely Christian
home, practicing legalism all of his life, all these blocks that he has in his mind, it’s hard for him
to ever get away from this. That’s not what God called you to be. There may be no better or
nicer, sweeter person than him but he’s not fulfilling God’s plan. He’s not learning, growing,
studying, applying, re-presenting Christ in his life. Are you listening because I have a question to
ask you? Are you the conventional Christian? Are you the convenient pastor? If so, you heard it,
it’s up to you. It’s your life, you can make decisions about what you want to do. My job is just to
get it straight, get it right, and give it to you. I pray God will speak to your heart. Until next
week, this is Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line.