In this thought-provoking episode of The Flatline, Rick Hughes guides listeners through the essential journey of the Christian life. Beginning with the concept of being born again, Rick explains the transformative experience that reconciles believers with God’s promise of peace and fulfillment. The discussion highlights the pivotal steps of rebooting, reconnoitering, and rebounding, which are vital for maintaining spiritual health and avoiding the self-inflicted stress that arises from adversity.
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 Flotline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. For the next few minutes, I’d like to invite you to stick it out, stay around. It’s going to be a short time of motivation, inspiration, education, and as I say every Sunday morning, no manipulation. That’s right, no requesting money, no con games, no membership to join, just listen up. 30 minutes of accurate information helping you to verify and identify god’s plan for your life and if you can do that you can always orient and adjust to the plan that’s strictly up to you but my job is to be accurate and get it right and i will do that to the best of my ability the flat line is about learning god’s tremendous problem-solving devices 10 of them to be specific Those 10 problem-solving devices form a main line of resistance in your soul. If you learn them and you use them, then you can stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. That’s why we always say adversity is inevitable and stress is optional. That means adversity is what circumstances do to you and stress is usually what you do to yourself. God has a better way to live, a unique life called the Christian life, a wonderful lifestyle. When you empower your life with God the Holy Spirit as your mentor and using the Bible as your textbook, then you can live an amazing life where you do not ever have to worry. You do not ever have to be afraid. You do not ever have to have any guilt. I mean, it is a different way of living. It’s the most unique life in the world. It’s a life of confidence and trust and fulfillment, but you put your eyes on the prize, the final objective. What a great way to live, and it’s yours. It’s for you. It’s free. It’s the Christian life. But it starts with you learning some things. First of all, you have to reboot from the old life. The old life, the old man is dead. You’re going to die a death. It’s possible that we’re all going to die. It’s probable, excuse me, we’re all going to die. We have to die because we can’t go into eternity in these bodies. They won’t work there. but to reboot is very simple the bible says if any man’s in christ he’s a new creature old things are passed away and all things become new you can actually start your life all over again today by making a decision to believe in jesus christ you can be born again it’s called the second birth and jesus taught it in john chapter 3 when he was confronted by nicodemus a ruler the pharisees who snuck up to him at night to ask him some questions because he was intrigued with who, in fact, Christ actually was. And Jesus cut to the chase as normal and said, You must be born again. No one goes to heaven without being born again. Born again simply means that in right now, if this has never happened to you, you are a body and you are a soul. There’s no doubt about that. But you do not have a human spirit. You are dead spiritually. And because Adam’s original sin was imputed to you at the moment you were born, you were born spiritually dead. When you come to the cross and believe in Christ, you maintain your same body. That doesn’t change. I wish it did. I wish we all got a perfect body at that moment. We’ll get it later, not today. And our soul doesn’t change. We’re told to renovate our thinking of our soul, so that’s what we’ve been talking about on our show. But the human spirit that was dead, dormant, inactive is made alive. God the Holy Spirit comes to indwell the human spirit. It’s made alive, and you now have fellowship with God. You have rebooted. You are now a member of God’s family. You have been born again. And remember, Jesus said, I’m not going to take it back. He’s not an Indian giver. He said, I will never leave you. I will never forsake you. I give unto them eternal life, and they will never perish, and neither shall any man ever pluck them out of my Father’s hand. That’s in the book of John. So here we go. If you make a decision to believe in Christ today, you can reboot your life. You can fire it back up in a different way. I did this when I was 22. I never really understood it before, never understood what was possible before. but I will never forget the first night I went back to bed after having accepted Christ as my Savior. The guilt was gone, the fear was gone, and I had the most phenomenal peace with God. That’s a fair question to ask you. Do you have peace with God? Because if you don’t, then maybe you need to reboot as well. Start your life all over again. It’s possible you can begin a new life, a spiritual life in Christ. Your body’s not going to reboot. Your soul’s not going to reboot. But that human spirit that’s dead and dormant will be made alive as God the Holy Spirit comes to indwell you. And from that moment on, man, the world is yours. The opportunities, the empowerment, the insight that God gives you is unbelievable. Once you reboot, then you have to reconnoiter on a daily basis. That means you have to take a look around and take stock of your sin because you will sin even though you reboot your life. Your sin nature didn’t disappear. You’re still going to sin. And so God made fantastic provision for our sin. He knew we were not perfect like His Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. We have sin natures. The disciples even proved that. And so what do we do when we sin? The Bible says if we confess our sin, then He’s faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That is the rebound technique. When you reconnoiter, then you must rebound. That’s the three R’s, reboot, reconnoiter, and rebound. Rebound means you’re getting back in fellowship after you bounced out of fellowship. You get out of fellowship by committing personal sin in your life. When you sin, you quench the Holy Spirit and you grieve the Holy Spirit. That means you disappoint him and you cut off his power. How’s that? But when you go to the Father and you name your sin as per 1 John 1, 9, then you’re cleansed and the Holy Spirit is put back in the control of your life. You’re under the filling of the Spirit again. And then you can resume your spiritual life. You reboot by believing in Christ. You reconnoiter by keeping an eye on the sins that you commit on a daily basis. You rebound. those sins when you know you’ve committed them. You resume your spiritual life. If you don’t rebound, your spiritual life is put on hold. No one advances spiritually with known sin in their life. Matter of fact, the Bible says, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. You must rebound to resume your spiritual life, your spiritual advance. And spiritual advance means that God expects you to grow up spiritually, not stay a baby. To grow, the Bible even says, grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And that’s a mandate. And so we grow. We resume our spiritual advance. We listen to a well-qualified pastor, teach us the Bible on a consistent basis, and we apply what we learn. Hearing and applying the Word of God is the beginning of momentum in your life. Jesus said, happiness belongs to those who hear my Father’s Word and keep it. And that’s the key for you and for me as well, to apply what we learn. And then once we resume the spiritual life and we start advancing the spiritual life, the testing comes. And this is where you must have another R. It’s called resiliency. You must be resilient to handle the testing. You must be able to pick yourself up, move on. Even if you commit a sin and you get knocked down, don’t go sit in the corner and cry about it. Don’t go to have yourself a pity party. Don’t go thinking that the world’s over because I failed God. If God was through with you, he would have taken you home. But the fact that he left you here means that he still has a plan for your life. So be resilient. Bounce back. That’s what these problem-solving devices do. They give you the opportunity to be resilient, to keep pressing on even though you may fail. to keep pressing on even though the circumstances are beyond your control, to keep pressing on, and by that I mean to keep taking in the Word of God, keep staying filled with the Holy Spirit, keep representing the Lord Jesus Christ in your life with your actions and your manners and the way you’re thinking, renovating the thinking in your soul. This is what I mean by keep pressing on. To be resilient requires those things. Or you can just have a pity party and you can go sit in the corner and you can tell God, I resign. I quit. I give up. I can’t do it. It’s too hard. Well, unfortunately, you’re going to stick around and you can’t walk off the field. I mean, you’re still here. As long as you’re still here, God still has a plan for you. So get over your failure. Get over your adversity. Get over whatever you’re going through. Remember 1 Corinthians 10, 13 says, there’s no temptation that’s overtaken you that’s not common to man, and God always provides a way out. He does. So you have to remember that. But if you don’t, if you’re not resilient, if you don’t resume your spiritual life, if you don’t rebound by reconnoitering your sins, you will get into reversionism. Reversionism. It’s a process, not a single act. It’s a process. Reversionism is a very dangerous place for any believer to be because it’s the process of you reverting back to your old habits and your old practices, you reverting back to your former self. It doesn’t mean you’re not a Christian. You’re still a Christian. But in reversionism, you yield to the temptations of your sin nature. You know, you have three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil. And certainly the world is there with its lure and its appeal. The devil is there with his false doctrine. But the flesh is your main enemy. You know that. It lives in you, and you must learn to control the flesh. All of us have problems with the flesh because we have different lust patterns. Whatever the lust of your flesh is, that’ll be the pattern most of your life that you’ll face. Some people lust for sex. Some people lust for money. Some people lust for drugs. Some people lust for power. Some people lust for attention. It’s a different lust pattern in every one of us. We don’t all have the same lust pattern. But that’s the pattern that will tempt you. That’s the pattern that will surface. The minute that you begin to quit reconnoitering your life and quit being resilient and enter into reversionism, that’s when the failure in your life begins. If you fail to rebound, and you try to justify why it’s okay for you to give in to the sin nature trends and the sin nature patterns, then you will set up personal carnality in your life called perpetual carnality. Perpetual carnality. Carnality is you being out of fellowship, quenching the Holy Spirit, grieving the Holy Spirit, and allowing your sin nature to dominate your thinking. Perpetual carnality. Why did you get into that? Because you didn’t reconnoiter and rebound and resume your spiritual life. You didn’t have the resiliency to stick with it. And this sort of attitude or action will short out the protocol plan of God for you. You will have no spiritual growth. There’s no filling of the Holy Spirit. There’s no Operation Z, advancing into problem solving devices. Remember, Operation Z is simply a way of saying that you sit under a communicator who communicates the word. The Holy Spirit captures the word the communicator tells you, and then you comprehend the word that he told you by means of the Holy Spirit. Once you comprehend it, then you comply with it. That doesn’t happen in reversionism. In reversionism, your spiritual life shuts down. and it’s unchecked by rebound. You don’t confess your sin anymore. Once you start chain sinning, you sink into subnormal categories of personal sin since there’s no spiritual growth. You don’t have the ability to think clear. Now you’re thinking in terms of human viewpoint thinking, and you are building up scars on your soul. You’re building up scar tissue because of your own arrogance, your own self-justification. You’re deceiving yourself into saying it’s okay, and you’re totally self-absorbed with whatever it is you’re chasing. Yeah, you’re a believer. Yes, you’ve accepted Christ as your Savior. But you are in perpetual carnality. You’re in reversionism. And you are distracted from your spiritual life. And you now have apathy. You now have indifference. You have the wrong priorities in your soul. And you have no truth. You’ve got no relationship to reality anymore. Now you’ve become irrational and you live under the illusion of the mirror of arrogance. You justify your behavior. You think you’re okay when in reality you’re a mess and you know it. You’re just too arrogant to admit it to yourself or to anyone else. Your wrong priorities are are going to destroy you. Until you begin to think clearly and see yourself as you really are, you will never recover from your sin. Only a slow, slippery slide down the my way highway until that road runs out, the bridge is out. I remember an illustration about a fellow standing on the middle of the bridge trying to stop traffic at night and people trying to run over him and go around him because they didn’t know the bridge was out and he was trying to warn them. Many went around him and many lost their lives. You may be trying to go around the warning as well. The bridge is out. You will have the wrong priorities in your life, the wrong key to happiness in your life. You’ll think pleasure is where it’s at. You will pursue happiness with loved ones, social life, details in life, That all becomes very important to the key to you fulfilling your life. But they’re not. You might even reject a legitimate authority and become increasingly hypersensitive about any sorts of authority. And then you lose your objectivity. And you will obviously blame others for your misery. It’ll be your parents’ fault. It’ll be the preacher’s fault. It’ll be the police officer’s fault. It’ll be the president’s fault. It’s never going to be your fault, right? Because you reject legitimate authority. As a result, this spiritual development in your life is arrested, stalled out spiritually. You’re crashing and burning spiritually. You’re vulnerable to demon influence, not demon possession now, demon influence. A Christian cannot be demon-possessed, but he can be demon-influenced by doctrines of demons. And your thinking becomes clouded by the cosmic smokescreen of Satan. You begin to believe all sorts of garbage as you seek to fill the void in your empty life left by the spiritual vacuum you created because you believed. did not reconnoiter, rebound, resume, and have the resiliency to stick with it. And as a result, you begin to accept the lie. You begin to accept false doctrine as a result of rejecting the true doctrine. Listen to what the Bible says about that in 1 Timothy 4.1. But the Spirit says… In the latter periods of time, that’s between the first and second advent of Christ, some believers will become apostate from doctrine, paying attention to deceitful spirits and concentrating on doctrines of demons. When you reject truth and get involved in the cosmic system, this always leads to the frantic search for happiness. And 2 Timothy 3, 4 says you’re a lover of pleasure rather than a lover of God. This frantic search for happiness, or what I call going down the my way highway, can take you in many different directions. You’ll be doing anything you can to fill up your empty life. You’ll buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t even like. You’ll spend money you don’t have. You’re just a narcotic. You know, that’s the narcotic to deaden the empty pain of the empty life. And so, you’re not happy with what you have. You won’t be content with what you have. You’re not happy now. You won’t be happy in the future. And unhappy people take their unhappiness with them wherever they go. Yep, it’s going to follow you everywhere. Even if you move to another state, even if you move to another house, you’re going to be unhappy. Mainly because God the Holy Spirit is going to be convicting you of your sin, just like he’s doing right now. And God the Holy Spirit is going to be warning you of what’s coming, just like he’s doing right now. Hebrews 13, five, let your lifestyle be free from the love of money. Be content with what you have for he himself has said, I will never leave you. I will never forsake you. Without capacity for life, you will never be content. Happiness has to do with people or circumstances in your way of thinking, but it’s not what you have or don’t have. That’s not the happiness I’m talking about. The happiness I’m talking about is the peace that you understand when you’re in the center of God’s plan. When you’re learning God’s word and applying it, Jesus said in Luke 11, 27 and 28, that’s the key to happiness. Happiness belongs to those who hear my father’s word and who keep it. The frantic search for happiness in the life of the reversionist will lead to Operation Boomerang. boomerang. In other words, you were unhappy and miserable and you went out in a frantic search for happiness and your unhappiness and your misery is going to intensify as it comes back to haunt you. Your unhappiness increases and happiness becomes more elusive. Those people that you trust will abandon you. The cosmic system will lure you into some sort of organization and they’ll abandon you. Even though God never abandoned you, even though you turned your back on him, he never, ever, ever turned his back on you. And you get recruited by the cosmic recruiter. That’s another R. Recruited by the cosmic recruiter. That cosmic recruiter can lure you into the world system of promise as you seek to deaden the pain of your empty life. So there you go. In Operation Boomerang, what you thought were going to make you happy turned out to be only temporary. And now your misery intensifies. You lose control of your life. You begin to break up. But you can’t stop the vicious cycle of emotional distraught in your life. And it tears you apart. It’s because you’ve walked away from the plan of God. You walked away from the confidence of God. You walked away from the promises of God. You went down the my way highway. It is time to reconnoiter what you’ve done. It’s time to rebound your sin, resume your spiritual life. Nothing will satisfy you as long as you’re in reversionism. Everything will only be a temporary fix for you. I mean, you will yearn for peace, you will yearn for fulfillment, but you won’t find it. The arrogance of unhappiness sets in, even romance, even sex, even promotion on the job. even temporary prosperity won’t give you what you’re looking for because you don’t have the capacity to handle them you don’t have the problem solving devices needed to maintain them romance does not solve problems by the way it creates problems sex doesn’t solve problems it creates problems prosperity doesn’t solve problems it creates problems like jealousy and guilt and bitterness and abuse those are the problems All of this leads to you getting into the emotional revolt of your soul. You stay in reversionism long enough, and your emotions will destroy you. Emotional revolt of the soul, they’re not designed by God to create policy in your life. Emotions were not designed by God for you to live by and be directed by. They are appreciators. I mean, worship is not an emotional experience, it’s thinking and appreciating what God has done for you. We’ve tried to make worship an emotional experience today. Mentality versus emotion is the key. When emotions dominate your thinking, you always become irrational, operate on those emotions. Because emotions don’t have any content. Emotions don’t have any rationality. They don’t have any virtue. Emotional revolt of your soul will divorce you from reality and it will substitute irrationality combining with arrogance and eventually produce probably some sort of mental illness. You’ll probably become a psychotic believer. Now all your biblical priorities will be gone. No more divine norms and standards. And now you begin to attack truth. You begin to go after God in your bitterness. Now you have permanent locked in negative volition and you are perpetually carnal. You will never understand God’s plan for your life. You have no word of God in your soul. You think like an unbeliever. You’re antagonistic to truth. And this is all a Christian I’m talking about. And now you have a blackout of your soul. Scar tissue hardens your heart. Your soul blacks out. You get into a vacuum that absorbs everything that’s wrong in your life. It’s called the vanity of the mind in Ephesians 4.17. The Greek word vanity is metiotis, the vacuum in your mind. This subjects you to demon influence, being influenced by the cosmic system. This is not demon possession I’m talking about. It’s the infiltration of the cosmic system into your thinking. causes a blackout in your soul. That means the lights go out in Georgia, as they say, nothing is clear anymore. That’s a result of you being out of fellowship, staying out of fellowship in reversionism, not recovering, being lured into the cosmic system, going down the my way highway and everything else I’ve covered here today. I covered a lot with you. Your understanding is blacked out. You don’t really see yourself as you are anymore. You see yourself as you think you are. Your norms and standards were given to you by God to protect you, but you burned them away with the scar tissue in your soul. And the Bible warns you, don’t let any advantage be taken over you by Satan. For we’re not ignorant of his devices, but you have forgotten that. And you have not put on the full armor of God. You gave place to the devil when the Bible told you in Ephesians 4.27 not to do it. And now you have become lion bait. He’s walking around like a roaring lion seeking who he can devour. And you’re next on the list. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to heaven. That’s not what I’m saying. It means you have wasted your life. You wasted the opportunity to renovate your thinking. You wasted the opportunity to glorify God. You left your first love. You abandoned the plan that God had for your life. And you went into the my way highway. It’s a shame that you have to look into the mirror of the word of God to see yourself like this. But this is you. This is what you’ve created inside of you. You created a monster and you know it. There’s only one way out. It’s going to take time. But first of all, you must reconnoiter your sin, rebound your sin, resume your spiritual life and purge the scar tissue out of your soul with the infiltration of the word of God that will flush you out and clean you up No one can make that decision for you. It’s like a drug addict. You’ve got to decide, do you want to keep living like this, or do you want to get right with God? Reconitre, rebound, resume your spiritual life, and be resilient in face of adversity. Think about these things. Ponder on them. Listen to me. And hopefully you’ll come back next week. Until then, I’m your host, Rick Hughes. And I’d like to invite you next week. And please come back. And thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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.
