SPEAKER 01 : 0:08

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 02 : 0:23

Good morning and welcome to the FLOT line. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. That’s right, FLOT, F-L-O-T. The FLOT line stands for the Forward Line of Troops. What we’re trying to do on this show is to give you the information from the Word of God that would allow you to set up a main line of resistance in your soul so you can stop the outside sources of adversity from becoming the inside source of stress. God has wonderful problem-solving devices in the Scripture. If you learn them and apply them into your life and use them, that’s called wisdom. And wisdom gives you discernment and understanding so that you can save yourself a lot of misery. So the Flatline comes on this station every Sunday morning to give you this information, help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life, and you can orient and adjust the plan if you’d like to. But our job is to give you these biblical truths. So I want you to remember something. God gave you two ends. One of those ends you sit on and one of them you think with and success in your life will depend on which one you use. Heads you’re gonna win and tails you’re gonna lose. Heads you’re gonna win, what does that mean? Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. That’s Philippians 2.5, that’s in the Bible. That’s your head, that’s the part of your soul called your mentality. And that’s where your spiritual life is lived. You are what you think, not what you think you are, because the Bible says in Proverbs, as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is. So the real you is the sum total of your thoughts, your intentions, and your desires. And that’s the amazing thing about our wonderful God. He, in his omnipotence and omnipresence and omniscience, he can look right into your soul and see what you’re thinking. So please, pay attention today to the things that we say. We broadcast this show over 27 stations across America, and we do it by faith. We know if God’s in it, he’ll pay for it. If not, we’ll go do something else. But it’s always a wonderful thing not to beg for money, not to ask people for money, but to trust the Lord to supply your needs. And he always has and always will because he is faithful and just, never to let us down. So with that in mind, we have a lot of things we can offer you. A lot of books that we’ve written that are free. We have a book called Understanding Your Soul. We have a book called Practicing Your Christianity. We have a book called Christian Problem Solving. We have a book we’ve written for prisons called Divine Pardon. A lot of information. And they’re all free. Books you might want to get if you’ll contact us through our website. That’s rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org. And there you can find us and there you can find all of our radio shows listed. You can listen to them online if you’d like to. Or we can provide you with MP3s of the various radio shows going as far back as the very first one over 700 shows ago. If you can think about how many Sundays in a year and 52 Sundays in a year and here we are. 52 weeks a year and we are into 13 years of doing this radio show. Man, it’s amazing. Today I want to talk to you about something that you’ve heard mentioned before. You’ve probably heard it preached before from the pulpit of your local church. It’s a little three-letter word called sin, S-I-N. And there’s a lot of people that don’t understand sin and what it is, what it does to you, what it’s all about. So we want to go through a study today briefly on sin. I’d like to start off with some verses of Scripture. starting with Acts 13, 37, and 38. This verse says, He whom God raised up saw no corruption. That’s the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No corruption meant he never sinned. Therefore, let it be known to you, brethren, that through this man… is preached to you the forgiveness of sins. And by him, everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses. This verse indicates that we all sin and that we can be justified from our sins by God through Jesus Christ. Acts 10, 43 says to him, all the prophets witness that That through his name, whoever believes in him will receive remission of sin. This is how we are forgiven for our sin. Faith alone in Christ alone. Now keep in mind, we are born with a sinful nature. We got it from Adam’s original sin. The Bible tells us, for by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin. That’s why we have to die. Death by sin. One man sinned in the world and death by sin and now death has come upon all because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So no one, none of us are capable of living without sinning and none of us are capable of living without being related to Adam except Jesus Christ our Lord. He was born of a virgin. This is what’s so important in his life. He was impeccable. He never sinned. He did not receive the imputation of Adam’s original sin because his mother did not have sex with a man. It was an amazing conception, a miracle, and he was a sinless lamb of God that went to the cross. So, again, John 20, 31, these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, And that believing you may live or you may have life eternal in his name. Life eternal in the name of Christ because why? Our sins are judged on the cross. On him, our sins replaced. Now, keep in mind, I don’t have the authority to forgive any sin. But I do have the authority to freely declare your sins are forgiven by faith alone in Christ alone. No man can forgive sin. Only God can do that. But any man who is a believer in Jesus Christ can declare your sins forgiven by faith alone in Christ alone. Now, in 2 Corinthians 5.21, he, that’s God, made him, that’s Christ, forgiven. the one who knew no sin, that’s the sinless perfection of Jesus, to be sin for us, so he assumed our sins on the cross, so that we might be made the righteousness of God through him. On the cross, there was a trade-out. He took our sins, not our sin nature. He took our personal sins, the sins that we commit, and the sins that offended the justice and the righteousness of God. He paid for it. God judged him in our place. He who knew no sin was made sin. So this is a judicial imputation of the sin of the world imputed to Jesus Christ on the cross. And thus we have an imputation when we receive him, when we trust him and accept him as our savior. We are made righteous through him, the righteousness of God through him. In other words, once we move into the royal family of God through faith alone in Christ alone, we have equal righteousness. Our righteousness is not accredited to us because of what we’ve done. It’s accredited to us because we are in Christ Jesus. That’s where we get that righteousness. So in your position in Christ, You and I are secure and we are eternally saved because he alone paid the penalty for our sin as the justice of God demanded that it be paid. He did that. But in our experience, we still sin daily. Since we have a sin nature and compliments of Adam’s original sin, we sin daily. You and I both sin, and you know you sin. And we may not all have the same lust patterns. We may not all sin in the same area. But you sin, I sin, because we’re humans. So these sins can be mental attitude sins. They could be sins of the tongue. They could be some sort of overt sin. But whatever they are, when we do them, they break fellowship with God in time due to the quenching of the Holy Spirit and the resulting grieving of the Holy Spirit. You see, we have a relationship with God that never changes. That’s eternal. But in our position, we are in and out of fellowship because of personal sin. So recovery from sin is based on the work of God. It doesn’t depend on any work that we do. I mean, if we sin, we can’t go buy a cake and give it to somebody hungry and say, okay, God, now you forgive me because I fed a hungry person. That’s not how it works, and it doesn’t work that. To say, well, I won’t ever do that again, I sure promise. recovery from sin is based on the work of God it does not depend on any works on our part it’s based on grace so the interesting thing is we do nothing to be forgiven forgiveness is based on what God did at the cross where he imputed all of our sins to the Lord Jesus Christ and he judged them on him God the Father did not forgive our sins on the cross. He judged them and canceled them out. And Isaiah 43, 25, I, even I, am he who blots out your sin for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins. So on the cross, all sin was judged. When you receive Christ, that forgiveness is imputed to you, and you’re given the righteousness of Christ. As long as you’re in the human world, you will need to confess sin. You’ll need to name your sin to God because it breaks fellowship with God and quenches and grieves the Holy Spirit. So can a sin send me to hell? And the answer is no. There’s only one sin that’s unforgivable, and that’s the sin of unbelief. or someone failing to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed Son of God. In 1 John 5 10, he who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself, but he who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of his Son. So the unforgivable sin is the sin of rejecting Jesus Christ as your Savior. There’s no way that God can deal with that because you would then be in the great white throne of judgment standing in your own righteousness and your own works trying to satisfy the justice of God, and good luck with that. It won’t work. God’s justice has already been satisfied in Christ. He judged him in our place. He paid for our sin, and when you come to the cross, When you say to the Father, I believe that Jesus Christ is your Son, and I’m willing to receive him as my Savior, those sins that were judged on the cross are taken away on your behalf. No longer are you looked at like this. You know, even if you die an unbeliever, your sins are not brought up at the great white throne of judgment. the only thing that brought up is your name in the Lamb’s Book of Life. And the answer is no. You’ve died without receiving Christ, so your name was blotted out. But secondly, the books of works would be opened, and you can try to justify yourself as to why you will come to heaven. But remember the verse said, Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did I not do this and do that and do this and do that? And he said, I’ll tell them I never knew you. Depart from me, ye that worked iniquity. So the meaning of forgiveness means to set aside the repercussions of sin. Forgiveness is a result of Christ being judged for our sins. But it’s not the means of salvation, the solution, For pre-salvation sins is they’re blotted out. They’re removed. Isaiah 43, 25, I blot out your sin. There it is. Forgiveness means the repercussion of sin is removed. And the sin is the thing that keeps us from having a relationship with God. So it’s removed. And now we are in God’s family. Now we can have a relationship with God. Now we can grow in grace, but we still are tempted daily until we leave this body. and get a new body, a resurrection body, a body like that of our Savior. So how you feel about your sin, it’s interesting. Can I make up my sin to God? Can I do something to show him that I’m sorry, that I won’t do it again? No, you can’t. Just simply confess the sin as he instructs you and move forward. That’s why the Bible says, if we confess our sins, he, that’s God, is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So how you feel about your sins is of no consequence to God. You know, God doesn’t get emotional like you do. God doesn’t operate on emotions like you do. You feel really horrible and you feel really terrible that you did that. And maybe you think God’s really mad at you and God’s going to bust you now because you did that. Listen, God does not care how you feel about your sins. But the fact that you acknowledge your sin or committed to sin, that’s what he cares about. It is how God feels about the sin that counts, not how you feel about it. And so when you sin, you break fellowship with God. You set yourself up for warning discipline, for God to call you back, come back, come back, come back. You essentially kick Christ out. And you remember the verse that said, I stand at the door and I knock and if Any man will hear my voice and open the door, I’ll come into him. That’s the Lord Jesus Christ wanting to have fellowship with you again, wanting to sup with you, but you’ve shut him out because of your sin. So emotion and confession to other people is frequently used by believers like us to pass our guilt on to other people. And I am strictly against you having a fess-up buddy, you having someone you go to and tell them about your sins and what you did. That’s the worst thing you could ever do. Go to God. The Bible says if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1.9, rebound, problem-solving device number one on the flotline of your soul. If is a third-class condition that says maybe you will, then maybe you won’t. If we confess the Greek word homo legeo, a dual compound verb, homo, the same, legeo, to say, to say the same. If we say the same, if we admit, if we name, if we cite, then God is faithful, God is just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So that’s a wonderful thing. But if you neglect rebound and fail to confess your sin to God, the bad result from neglect of rebound includes the fact that post-salvation sinning results in double punishment. Post-salvation, that’s after you get saved and you keep sinning. You have the application of the law of volitional responsibility. Under whom much is given, much is expected. If you sow to the wind, you’re going to reap the whirlwind, and you have divine punishment from God. Those whom I love, I chasten. Hebrews 12, 6. So if you fail to name your sin and allow the Holy Spirit to maintain control of your life, staying in fellowship with God by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit, then you are setting yourself up for volitional responsibility, asking the Lord as it is to kick you right in the fanny and get you straight. And it’s bringing about divine punishment from God. You don’t want to go there. God said in Hebrews 12, sometimes I have to take you out behind a woodshed. That’s a modified, expanded translation. Sometimes I have to scourge those that I love. There is the warning, there is the intense discipline, and the Bible does speak about dying discipline, and many Christians have died way before they should have because they failed to deal with their sin on a daily basis. The Greek word harmatia is the word sins, and it always refers to the sins we commit after we get saved. So the solution to personal sins after we get saved is in fact 1 John 1, 9, naming those sins to God, rebound, confessing those sins to God. Because acknowledging our sins to God is totally apart from any human works. You can’t make it up to God, public confession is not necessary. If someone tells you that you gotta get up in front of the church and admit to the church what you’ve done, leave the church. That’s legalism. That’s terrible. The solution to personal sin is acknowledging and naming the sins to God, simply to God and him alone. Apart from any human works, apart from any public confession, apart from you trying to, in your emotions, trying to make yourself feel sorry for the fact that you did it, although you enjoyed it while you were doing it. Apart from the fact that you’re going to promise God you will never do that again, and that’s a joke because you probably tried that. You probably said, oh, Lord, if you’ll forgive me, I won’t ever do that one again, and you went right back to it. The importance of you understanding sin is critical because if you’re going to live the Christian life, it’s important for you to know what is a sin and what is not a sin. Why is that important? So you can avoid the temptation and recognize what a sin is. You can rebound if you do sin and recognize it. You know, a lot of people, I’m around a lot of people in my travels, and I hear people say, gossip, malign, criticize, backbite other people. And they never consider that to be sin. Maybe they talk about their neighbors and what shoddy neighbors they are and how I don’t like that person because of this or that. Or maybe they talk about some relative. Or maybe they talk about some politician. Whenever you slander, malign, criticize, gossip, backbite, this is sins of the tongue. James warns about that. Our Father does not allow you to judge anybody. You don’t have to like the politician. You don’t have to like what he stands for or doesn’t stand for. But when you start mouthing off and accusing that person of one thing or another, you’re asking for divine discipline. You got to remember that. So you must understand that. You cannot avoid temptation if you don’t recognize the sin. And to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him is sin, the Bible says. You got to recognize sin. Many people don’t recognize mental attitude sins. They don’t recognize worry as a sin. They don’t recognize fear as a sin. They don’t recognize jealousy and bitterness as a sin. As a sin. These are emotional sins. And unless you name those sins, then you go right back into them time after time after time after time. So, you know, a lot of people are going to tell you that make an issue out of things that are not really talked about in the Bible. I mean, I took a guy, I invited a guy to go fishing with me one time in a tournament, and he said, oh, brother, I can’t do that. That’s gambling. And I said, what? Oh, yeah, brother, that’s gambling. You can’t fish for money. That’s gambling. And so he lives in the extreme. And does the Bible tell you you can’t play blackjack? No, it doesn’t tell you don’t do that. It tells you don’t be a fool. It tells you have some wisdom. It tells you don’t live like the world lives. But it doesn’t tell you don’t smoke a cigarette. It doesn’t tell you don’t drink a drink of wine. It doesn’t tell you a lot of the legalistic things that people tend to put on you as a Christian and tell you that if you’re going to be a Christian, you can never do this. And, you know, you have to be careful about that kind of stuff. But what is a sin and what is not a sin? Because it’s impossible to avoid temptation if you don’t know what a sin is. So the more you know about sin, the closer the accounts you can keep up with God. If you understand what sin is, it gives you the opportunity to build up resistance against the sin that defeats you so much. If you can identify what is sin in the temptation stage, That’ll help you resist it because temptation is not sin. Succumbing to the temptation is sin. The identification of temptation results in you succumbing to that temptation and you sin. So you have to recognize the difference between tempting and sinning. Some people confess the temptation and you don’t have to do that. The source of all sin is your volition. It’s what’s inside of you. It’s in your soul. It’s your volitional act of succumbing to the temptation of the sin. Whether the temptation comes from the world, or it comes from the flesh, and it comes from the devil. It’ll come from one of three places. But the source of your sin is your volition. You choose to do it. It may be a sin of cognizance where you know it’s a sin and you do it anyhow, or it may be a sin of ignorance where you don’t know it’s a sin and you do it anyhow. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s still a sin. And when you commit a sin, being able to identify the sin makes the function of rebound possible for you. If you couldn’t identify it, you can’t rebound it. So remember that one of the problems is identifying sin is that many sins, pay attention to what I’m about to tell you, many sins become accepted in a culture through many generations, so they’re no longer considered a sin by society. Nevertheless, they are. If you look at our nation morally, what’s considered a sin and what’s not considered a sin? Well, the Bible is still the Bible. The Bible still says what it says about sin. Maybe you need to read Romans, the first chapter again, and then you can understand God hasn’t changed his mind about what is sin and what is not sin. Sin is still sin, whether it’s moral or immoral, whether it’s degenerate or not degenerate, whether it’s mental or not mental, it’s still sin. So if you don’t know a sin is a sin, how could you rebound it? And until you commit another sin that you know is a sin. I mean, if you don’t know that this particular act is a sin and you don’t confess it, you’re out of fellowship. Well, maybe a day later you commit a known sin and then you go to God and admit that. And then that unknown sin is cleansed too. That’s how God does it. Even if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and purify us from all wrongdoing. All wrongdoing. okay now for the ignorant like me it might take some time but in the meantime our spiritual lives can decline if we don’t recognize sin for what it is so here’s something you need to remember don’t ever get the idea you’ve reached sinless perfection or that you sin very infrequently That very thought is the sin of arrogance, and it’s defined as not just a single sin. Arrogance is not a single sin. It’s an attitude. The self-righteous religious attitude is the attitude that crucified Christ our Savior. If we say we have no sin, 1 John 1.8, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Until you understand what the Bible calls sin, it’s impossible for you to understand your experiential status quo if you’re in fellowship or out of fellowship. You won’t know the difference. And as I said, too many people commit sins. They don’t even know their sins that they’re doing because the society has changed and said, well, this is not a sin anymore. It’s okay to do this. No, it’s not. It’s never okay to do that. All of us sin. We all fail in different ways. Respectable sins, gross sins are no different in the eyes of God. Mental attitude sins are the worst sins in the Bible, far worse than what you might consider to be meant really bad, like adultery or divorce. Legalism and self-righteousness and arrogance always want to condemn other people who commit adultery or have a divorce, and legalism is horrible. So don’t blame your sins on other people. Don’t blame your sins on alcohol or drugs or anything else. You have to take the responsibility for your sin and you have to rebound your sin immediately. And you don’t have to do it just because you lust for it. You can say, no, I’m not going to do that. Each person that sins must take responsibility for his or her own failure. It’s simply that true. Because in God’s plan for your life, all human good, all evil is rejected. And it’s inevitable that throughout all of our life as Christians, we’re going to sin, we’re going to perform human good, we’re going to fail in evil, and it’s evidence that volition is the culprit. The volition is the cause for the sin. Even if you’re insane, neurotic, psychotic, sociopathic, it’s your volition that brings you there. So think about these things. That’s some information on sin. And if you have sin in your life, confess it to God now, immediately, and he’s faithful and just to forgive you. Until next week, I’m your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flotline.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:16

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.