Our Unique Life – Part 6
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 621 aired on July 23, 2017
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes I’d like to invite you to stay tuned. It’s going to be about thirty minutes of motivation,
some inspiration, some education always done without any type of manipulation which means
we don’t try to con people, we’re not trying to hustle you for any money, we’re not going to ask
you to join anything. We’re simply trying to give you accurate information. Information that I
pray will help you verify as well as identify God’s plan for your life and if I can do that and you
can do that, then you can orient and adjust to the plan if you want to, that’s up to you. You have
your own life, you live your own decision-making process. God gave you a soul. And inside that
soul you have something called volition and that means that you are not an automaton, you can
choose. You can choose to make any decision you want to make. I do know that bad decisions
limit future options and if we make enough bad decisions, we don’t have much options left. But
as you go through life you make choices every day. The most important choice you could ever
make, the single most significant decision you could ever make in your life is to do what the
Bible says,
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”
Why is that essential?
Because you don’t live here forever. You’re lucky if you make it 50, 60, 70 years through here.
But hey, there’s something on the other side of this veil. It’s called eternal life and your soul is
never going to die. Your body, yep, you’re going to die physically. Your body’s going to go back
to dust but your soul and hopefully your spirit, if you’re born again and have an active human
spirit, it’s going to live in the presence of the Father in a resurrection body – a new body. That’s
why this is so important. It’s not just about living here now, although that’s normally what we
focus on, the things that are seen, but the Bible tells us to focus on the things that are unseen. So
that’s what this study has been about. I’ve been in a study for five different Sundays now with
you and it’s about the unique Christian life. How unique is this life? I recently taught this study at
a church in Houston, Texas and it is available on a DVD series. If you’d like to watch it all you
have to do is contact us and we’ll send it to you free of charge if you’d like to watch it. But this
unique Christian life is awesome. We, first of all, have many unique assets that we taught you.
We went over that. And we live in a most unique time. That’s what we’re talking about now. The
unique period that we live in is called the church. We live in the Church Age. And in this unique
time that we live in called the church, this most unique time in the history of the world, it was
also hidden because no one really knew about it. It was called a mystery doctrine in the Bible. It
wasn’t revealed. These unique times, the church, means that we are adopted. You and I, we’re
adopted into God’s royal family and we are now a new spiritual aristocracy. That means you and
me, we are nobility – spiritual nobility. Why?
Because God’s Holy Spirit lives within us and
we are now ambassadors or personal representatives of Jesus Christ while we are still here.
And I told you last week, we have to assume His mindset, the Bible says,
“Let this mind be in
you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
And we also assume His personality profile where the Bible
says,
“He humbled Himself and made Himself of no reputation and took upon Himself the form
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of a slave.”
Paul admitted that he was a slave to Jesus Christ. He said that personally in the
Bible. He said in Romans 1:1,
“Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated
unto the gospel of God.”
Yes, when Christ freed us from the slave market of sin, and that’s what’s
so unique about the cross, He purchased our freedom.
He freed us from the slave market of
sin. He bought us, He paid for us with His own life which was the redeeming ransom that
God required. So we have been set free in Christ.
“If any man’s in Christ,”
the Bible says,
“he’s a new creation. Old things are passed away and all things become new.”
But even though
we’re free, even though we’ve been set free, we can come back and voluntarily surrender to the
ownership of Jesus Christ and serve Him if we want to do that. In Galatians 5:1 the Bible says,
“it is for freedom that Christ set you free. So keep standing fast and don’t become entangled
again in the yoke of slavery.”
The yoke of slavery is what the cosmic system offers you. In the
cosmos diabolicus, Satan’s world that’s what it is, there’s slavery. Slavery to the details of life.
There’s slavery to the lust patterns of life. And people get enslaved to alcoholism, get enslaved to
sexual addictions, they get enslaved to financial addiction – slavery. Slavery to the details of life.
What the world offers is a big lie. That if you have money, if you have success, if you have a
beautiful spouse, a beautiful home, beautiful children, you’ll be happy. That’s a lie. I mean,
they’re all things that will make you happy for sure but that’s not the source of happiness. Christ
said,
“Happiness belongs to those who hear My Father’s Word and keep it”
in Luke 11:28. And
He said,
“I’m going to leave My joy for you,”
to the disciples. There is a way to be happy and the
most wonderful way to be happy is not to be enslaved to the lust patterns of life and not to be
enslaved to the cosmic system of life, not to be fueled by satanic temptations that appeal to your
particular area of weakness. So negative volition, not positive volition, negative volition results
in people being enslaved to circumstances in life. As a Christian you can be a slave to the details
in life. And so circumstances and people are not the key to happiness. If you think like that,
under that sort of thinking, then any prosperity you might have is going to lead to some self-
righteous arrogance. And any adversity you may have it’s going to lead to some self-pity, feeling
sorry for self.
Emotions can enslave you if you’re not careful, enslave you to the details of
life.
So we don’t really live our life for the recognition or for praise.
The objective of the
Christian life is you being willing to serve your Lord and your Master, Jesus Christ the
anointed Son of God.
Only His will, desiring to give Him all the recognition and all the praise,
not you. When we do a funeral sometimes people want to remember the loved one, and that’s
fine. But funerals are about the faithfulness of Jesus Christ not the faithfulness of the person who
passed away. So we’re not there to eulogize that person, we’re there to glorify Jesus Christ and
His faithfulness and what He said in His Word. I mean, I’ve seen wonderful pastors, men of God
that were such slaves to the will of God that they gave all of their time to study and teach the
Bible. They sacrificed a lot of things they could have done, a lot of travels they could have done
so they could teach God’s Word. It’s not easy to teach God’s Word. When I’m filling in for certain
pastors (sometimes they may ask me to come and fill in for a while) if I’m going to teach like
four hours in the local church it may require me to study 400 hours. I mean, you just don’t get up
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there and ad lib it. You must know what you’re talking about. That’s why the Bible says you,
“study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that need not be ashamed, but rightly
dividing the Word of truth.”
I can think of nothing worse than to stand in the pulpit and
misrepresent God because I didn’t study, because I took something that I didn’t understand and
tried to talk about it. Therefore, it’s imperative that any pastor willingly forfeit his freedom in life
to serve his Master, the Lord Jesus Christ. If he’s going to shepherd his flock, he’s been called by
God to be an overseer and that means there are a lot of things that he might like to do but he’s not
going to have time to do them if he gives attention to the details of studying and teaching God’s
Word. For example, you know some churches may have a January Bible study and sometimes
they go through say the book of Romans in maybe a week or maybe ten days but you can’t do
that. If you study the book of Romans, line upon line, word upon word, verse upon verse, you
might be in the book of Romans for two or three years. You can’t hustle all the stuff out of there
in a week or two. And so all of us are slaves, slaves to Jesus Christ.
Our objective is to use our
spiritual gift to serve Him and to serve His desire.
You have a spiritual gift. You have a
spiritual gift that God gave you. And that gift, whatever that gift is, whether it’s the gift of giving,
the gift of administration, the gift of helps, the gift of mercy. Maybe it’s a communication gift
like the gift of pastor-teacher. Maybe I’m talking to someone that should be a pastor-teacher.
Maybe it’s the gift of evangelism. Whatever that gift is, your objective is to use that gift in His
service to glorify Him. For example, don’t get confused, don’t get mixed up, evangelists don’t
need to play pastors and pastors don’t need to play evangelists and pastors don’t need to play
missionaries. We have to have a single mindset of feeding and protecting the flock of God, not
running all over the country. You know, that’s what happens to a lot of pastors, they run all over
the country wanting to do everything and they forget their own flock. So we live in some pretty
unique times that demand a fairly unique lifestyle which is in the Bible. It’s a code. There is a
code in the Bible for us to follow while we are still here in this time continuum. The code that
I’m about to teach you is called the royal family honor code. The royal family honor code. If
you’ve never heard that before, it’s a study you really need to understand. And I don’t know that
I’m going to be able to do it all now but if you’d like to know more about it, just contact me. I’ll
tell you where you can get a complete study on the royal family honor code. But what it is, is a
system of spiritual integrity mandated by God and revealed in the New Testament, in the Church
Age. So in order for us to function as aristocracy, which is what we are, spiritual aristocracy, we
must have an aristocratic lifestyle. A lifestyle of class and the mindset of virtue. And aristocracy
has standards. We must have standards, you must have standards.
Standards that believers are
called to live by are found in the royal family honor code.
In this code we have the lifestyle of
aristocracy. You know, in America today is almost like we’ve become a nation of peasants in the
way we think. My pastor once said that. Aristocratic thinking seems to have disappeared. And as
a nation we kind of think stupidly sometimes, if we think at all. If you want to find out what a
man’s thinking let him talk because words are an extension of what he thinks. So if he has a
vocabulary of about twenty words then you know he doesn’t think very much. Your vocabulary is
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indicative of what’s in your soul or what you think. And, you know, we get addicted to these
handheld entertainment devices. We’ve eliminated much thought. And people seldom read
anymore and so they’re entertained by the cell phone or the tablet device and this dumbs down
American children. I mean American children spend hours glued to video games. If you’ve got
grandchildren, like I do, you know what I’m talking about. They no longer think for themselves
and they lose a skill set they should have learned growing up called problem solving ability. God
has given us a new way to think and a new way of living to function in a unique period of history
called the Church Age. And that new way of thinking is the mentality of aristocracy found in
Romans chapter thirteen. Take your Bible and read through it, I don’t have time to go through it
right now, all of it. Maybe I should teach a series on the royal family honor code but I will leave
that to the well-qualified pastors that can do it much better than me. And as I said, if you want to
know about it, contact me and I’ll tell you where you can listen to a pastor teach it.
In this
particular honor code we are mandated to live by recognizing first of all, the privacy of the
priesthood, that every believer has privacy. No one has the right to stick their nose into
someone else’s business.
Matthew 7 says,
“don’t judge lest you be judged because with the
measure you measure it will be measured to you again.”
And I remember learning about the
proboscis monkey many years ago. He’s a monkey that has a nose about two feet long – a weird
looking thing. And some Christians are like that. They have a nose about two feet long and they
want to stick it in everybody’s business. That is a sin. God says stay out of other people’s
business.
Don’t judge people, don’t malign people, don’t criticize people.
You let God do the
judging. The Supreme Court of Heaven is open twenty-four hours a day and if there’s a problem
He can handle it. He doesn’t need your help. This is where a lot of people don’t live by the honor
code. They invade the privacy of other people. Even asking silly questions like, ‘Where were you
last Sunday brother? We missed you.’ It’s none of your business where they were last Sunday. So
keep your nose out of their business. Give people privacy. And you should have the
understanding that spiritual advance, growing spiritually, moving from being a spiritual baby to a
spiritual adolescent to a spiritually mature individual, that comes from learning God’s Word not
from doing something. Doing something is not growing. We need more learning and less doing.
And a lot of folks would be a lot better off because they get all wrapped up in the doing and not
the learning and here’s what happens, they do the right thing but they do it in the wrong way and
it winds up glorifying self and it’s not divine good production and it’s going to wind up being
wood, hay and stubble at the Judgment Seat of Christ. So an honor code like that, for an
aristocratic lifestyle like we must live, demands that we think and we grow. Not that we hustle
around, hustle people and do things.
That honor code demands you have extremely good
manners and extreme thoughtfulness to other people.
It’s only lived under the virtue love
concept which is problem-solving device number eight, loving others. You know,
“we love God
because He first loved us.”
He loved you with impersonal love. He loved you based on His
character not your character. And when we’re talking about virtue love, you using impersonal
love for other people, other Christians that may be obnoxious to you and you deplore them, you
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are not relaxed around them, you vibrate every time they come in your periphery, your hair
stands up on end because you think to yourself, ‘Oh no, here comes that nosy so-and-so again,’ –
you have to use impersonal love. This is a grace asset. Learning to grace people out.
Learning to
treat people in grace even though they don’t treat you in grace. Gracing people out. Loving
them based on your character not their character.
Therefore, you stay relaxed, you are
thoughtful, you show good manners. The worst thing in the honor code is to gossip or to malign
or to slander other believers. We are warned about that in Ephesians 4:25. It says,
“Therefore,
having laid aside the lie, each one of you speak truth with his fellow believers since we are
members one of another.”
There’s nothing worse than lying. Lying to another believer or lying to
a pastor can get you in serious trouble. Just ask Ananias and Sapphira about it when you get to
heaven, when they lied to Peter about their contributions. You can read about that in the book of
Acts as well. So, if you are a believer, then you are a priest – only in the Church Age. And here’s
something unique about our lifestyle, we don’t have to confess our sins to any other people. You
don’t have to go to the priest to confess your sin.
You are a priest, you are a believer priest and
1 John 1:9 says you can confess your own sin. It says you can go directly to God’s throne
room and name your own sins.
And don’t tell somebody else your sins. This whole concept
about having a Christian partner, I think they call it an accountability partner that when you mess
up you’re suppose to go tell them what you did is wrong. Do not do that. That leads to problems,
complications and it’s not the way God designed it. There’s nothing in the Bible about you
having an accountability partner. Your accountability partner is God the Holy Spirit and He is
certainly capable of convicting you when you do wrong and convincing you that you need to
rebound your sin and get back in fellowship. And if you don’t, then God the Father will discipline
you as any father disciplines his children. But stay away from going to someone else and telling
them what you did. Because, first of all, they don’t need to carry that burden, they don’t need to
hear it. And secondly, they’re probably going to tell somebody else and then there goes your
privacy. So you can go to God’s throne room. You can confess your own sin in private. You
function under your own priesthood and that’s important to remember.
You are a priest and you
are an ambassador. In privacy you function under your priesthood, in the public you
function under your ambassadorship.
That’s how you serve God. So the honor code of
Romans 13 demands that you live first of all, under establishment principles. And that’s the
establishment code of freedom of choice, marriage, family and nationalism. These are called the
divine establishment principles. Freedom to choose, God ordained you to have the freedom to
choose, that’s why He gave you volition. And marriage is for all members of the human race.
And the family is for the human race to raise children and teach children and inculcate Biblical
standards and norms and standards to children. And nationalism, this is what God did at the
Tower of Babel when He separated the nations by language and by land – separated people. And
so, you know, when I go fishing I don’t see brim swimming with catfish and I don’t see catfish
swimming with bass and I don’t see bass swimming with something else. Even bass have
species: striped bass, spotted bass, smallmouth bass and they all stay together. But we don’t seem
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to want to do that. We want to merge. That’s exactly what Satan wants you to do. That way he
can control you. So the honor code, we live under that establishment principle of nationalism.
You are an American. This is your country and you are to pray for your leaders, pray for your
country and stay out of any type of internationalism. That’s the way the past administration
wanted to take the direction of this country into a progressive international viewpoint. No, that’s
not what we do. We are Americans and we stay proud of our American heritage. You raise your
family. You teach your children. You get married. The lawful honorable correct thing to do. And
you have the freedom and the right to choose your destiny in life. So the honor code demands all
those things. And it’s much greater than morality. It’s past morality. I mean an unbeliever can be
moral but a Christian, the spiritual life is so much greater than morality it’s hard to explain it.
The honor code demands that you be patriotic, that you respect your government authorities, that
you serve in the military if it’s possible, that you respect law and order. And as far as a Christian
relationship in government goes, just take your Bible, read Romans 13:1-7 and you’ll see all of
this. The honor code would condemn any mental attitude sins that motivate gossiping or judging
or maligning other people. This is what distinguishes you from the unbeliever. Not simply the
fact that you are more moral, that you don’t fornicate, you don’t lie, you don’t cheat, you don’t
steal – I’m glad, but the honor code is much more than that. And that’s what will make you
magnetic and the unbeliever will see it in you. They will see that you are different because you
live by a different code than they do. They live by do unto others before others do unto them.
That’s not the code you live by. So we are believers. We live in the Church Age. We live in the
client nation of USA. And we are expected to form the basis of the pivot that holds back God’s
discipline on this nation. God’s looking for people to stand in the gap, to make up the hedge
between Him. And if you can be a part of that pivot, it means that you are part of the group of
mature believers that has an impact in history, an invisible impact as it may be, but God the
Father is watching and God the Father knows. You remember when Lot got in trouble in Sodom
and Gomorrah and Abraham convinced Him and said, ‘Will you spare the city if I could just find
ten righteous people?’ And the Father said, ‘Sure, find Me ten and I’ll spare it.’ God is always
searching the hearts and minds of people. How many righteous people are there in America? Are
you one of them? If you are, if you’re growing spiritually, if you’re staying filled with the Holy
Spirit, if you’re learning God’s Word on a daily basis then you need a medal – you’re part of that
pivot. You are part of the invisible group of believers that make up the pivot that helps sustain
this nation and keep us away from the discipline of God. So you live a very unique lifestyle and
your positive volition, your hunger for Truth, your hunger to serve God is buying time for
America – for America to be evangelized and for Americans to take heed of God’s Word. You are
the one that must stand in the gap according to Ezekiel 22:30 where God said He was looking for
somebody to stand in the gap. But He said He couldn’t find anybody. Well, it’s imperative that
you be the person. That you are the one who’s willing to stand up. That doesn’t mean you become
a crusader and get involved in crusader arrogance. It means that you are consistently filled with
the Holy Spirit, when you sin you admit it immediately, you consistently take in God’s Word
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every day under a well-qualified pastor. If it’s in your local church or if it’s at home around your
dinner table with a tape player, a DVD player, get your Bible, get a notebook and learn God’s
Word every day and then apply what you learn. As you do,
you will grow, you will glorify Jesus
Christ, you will start replicating His life, re-presenting Him to this lost and dying
generation. That is your challenge. That’s what makes this Christian life so unique.
And
there’s a lot more to go here. I mean, I’m just scratching the surface. I’m not through with this.
We’re going to go for another show or so on this. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re learning.
And, as I said, I did a presentation at a local church in Houston on this. If you’d like to get the
DVD of the series, let me know. We’ll send it to you free of charge. I hope you’re listening and
learning. And until next week, this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to the
FLOT Line