Surveying The Times
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 578 aired on September 25, 2016
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and I would like to
invite you for the next few minutes to stay with me. 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration,
education, all done without any manipulation, you know this, because we’re not trying to hustle
you. We’re not trying to ask you for money, we’re not trying to sell you something. We’re just
trying to give you something, giving you some accurate information, information that is designed
to help you verify as well as identify God’s plan for your life and if you can do this, then you can
orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. My job as host of the FLOT Line is to get it right,
to get it correct, not to try to convince you, but just to give you the information. I don’t offer
useless speculation, I offer accurate information from the canon of Scripture. All across the
United States this morning, from California to New York, many people are listening to this radio
show. Not at the same time, some shows are earlier, some shows are later but people are listening
everywhere and I am so grateful for the privilege to have the opportunity to bring this
information to you. There’s no greater joy in my life than to represent our Lord Jesus Christ and
to give information to ladies and gentlemen just like you that can take it, learn it, use it, and
apply it into your life. You know, we started talking about having capacity for life on one of our
last radio shows and I showed you where Paul spoke in Philippians 4:11-13 that he had learned
how to have capacity for life. He had learned how to handle difficulties in his life and he learned
it,
manthano
was the Greek word, to learn. We get an English word
mathetes
or disciples from
this, learners. Paul had to learn God’s plan and you and I, we learn it by experience or by
example or by study. And the point is the less you know, the easier it is to manipulate you. That’s
why this show is about information. We are not trying to manipulate anybody, we’re trying to
give you information so you will not be manipulated by the devil’s world. You can learn truth or
you can learn the lie, that’s up to you. Perception of truth comes in many different ways. In the
believer’s life it comes by means of pistisism. That’s a word maybe you haven’t heard before,
pistisism from the Greek word
pistis,
P.I.S.T.I.S. and it means faith. We learn by faith. You see
the Christian life is a life of faith, we live by faith.
“For by grace have we been saved through
faith, it’s a gift of God and not of works lest anyone should brag about it.”
Some scientists might
want empirical data that God exists and thus may say, “Well I can’t prove it so there is no God.”
Someone may try to rationalize away why God doesn’t exist. But you and I have experienced it
because of faith and we have learned God’s Word by means of faith. See, this is what Satan does
not want. Satan is in the business of dumbing down people. If he can dumb you down then you
can be easily manipulated and this is not ever our desire. We want you to know God’s plan,
understand God’s will, and have so much blessing in your life. Like David said in Psalm 23:5-6,
“
My cup runneth over and surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.”
There’s a great psalm, Psalm 37:25, that says,
“I’ve been young and now I’m old and yet I have
not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging for bread.”
That’s a great promise from
578-Surveying-The-Times-transcript.pdf
God that as a mature believer, even your children, the blessings that you leave historically for
your children are passed on. God has wonderful logistical grace provisions for us in Matthew
6:25. It just says, “If we’ll seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, He will take care of the
rest of it.” Then there’s surpassing grace and that’s when we get to heaven, we’ll have grace that
we never even realized, things that we never even knew existed. We’ll see colors we never knew,
we’ll see things that we never knew existed, we’ll hear sounds we’ve never heard, all of that in
heaven. We’re told to
“Delight ourselves in the Lord and He will give us the desires of our
heart.”
A key to this is if you have the capacity to handle it because if God gives you something
you can’t handle, then it’ll destroy you. When the Bible says to
“Delight yourself,”
it means to
be happy or take delight in the Lord. There is the source of all happiness. As Jesus said in Luke
11:27-28,
“Happiness belongs to those people that hear My Father’s Word and who keep it.”
God will not give you something that will destroy you. I mean, prosperity is a great test because
it can lead to arrogance. Many people have a problem with prosperity. They get self-righteous in
prosperity and they get full of self-pity in adversity. Prosperity and success will not make you
happy. I remember the statement of Elvis Presley before he went to be with the Lord. Someone
said, “Elvis, you’re rich and you’re famous. Are you happy?” He said, “No, I’m lonely as heck.”
Lonely, rich and famous but lonely.
As Americans we have the opportunity to stand on the
shoulders of a lot of people that went before us in the military, those that have gone before
us in Christ, those who went before us in our families. When we stand on their shoulders it
gives us the advantage to survey the times from the height of their perspective from what
they saw.
We come to realize that the strength of a civilized society, our very core strength, is the
value system that perpetuate the prosperity and the freedom we enjoy. We are a civilized society
and we have core values. These core values have been passed down from generation to
generation to generation of Americans. These values are what prosper our nation and keep us
free.
We were built on these core values. Our traditions, our customs, our moral values
define just who and what we are. If you’ll think about this just for a minute, this is what the
enemy of this world will try to do away with.
He tries to do away with the traditions that most
Americans enjoy, the customs that we stand by, and the values that we trust in. These traditions
usually are based on the principles found in God’s Word called divine institutions.
That’s what
America was founded on, the divine institutions of freedom, marriage, family and
nationalism.
God designed each of us to be free. He gave you volition. He did not make you into
a robot. He gave you the ability to choose. He ordained marriage for all members of the human
race by first creating Eve and bringing her to Adam. The family – God ordained the family for the
raising of children, establishment of authority and for teaching correct norms and standards to
young people. Then nationalism. God at the Tower of Babel destroyed any concept of
internationalism. That’s not in His book. Yet today it seems that’s what the world wants is one
world government, one world leader, all on the same page. That’s exactly what Satan would like,
to get us all under the same roof, all on the same page. Then he can control all of us. God set
boundaries logistically, linguistically, physically as different peoples, different races, different
578-Surveying-The-Times-transcript.pdf
lands, so we are not all the same. We are from different countries, different races, speak different
languages, and this is important. That’s part of nationalism, not internationalism. So when you
hear someone speak in terms of internationalism, that’s not God’s plan I assure you. Our
traditions are based on the principles founded in this nation. The framers of the Constitution had
these principles and they believed in these principles. I could go through them one by one for
you, but I’m not here to talk about politics. You’ve heard me mention these things before,
freedom to choose, freedom to make a decision. Your volition is the greatest God-given
responsibility that you have and it has to be protected. I mean it has to be. God gave you the
freedom to choose. God did not make you, as I said, into a little automaton. He gave you the
freedom to choose and you can choose for or against Christ, and choosing Christ as your Savior
is in fact the single greatest decision you will ever make in your life. However, if you reject
Christ, and that is absolutely the worst decision that you will ever make since there’s no remedy
for unbelief.
“He that believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life, and he that
believeth not, the wrath of God abides on him forever.”
That’s the Word of God. You see, if a
person rejects Christ, he has no alternative. He may try to impress God with his good works,
however, the Bible says,
“There are none that are righteous, no, not even one.” “All of our good
works are like a filthy rag”
in God’s eyes. So for someone to get before the Great White Throne
of Judgment and say, “But God, I never smoked and I never drank and I never cursed and I never
cheated on my spouse and I never cheated on my taxes. I never ran a red light. I never drove over
55 miles an hour, and I never committed gluttony so I should be able to come into heaven.” No,
none of these things will get you into heaven. The only thing that will get you into heaven is
what Jesus said in John 6:29,
“This is the will of the One that sent Me, that you believe in Me
whom He has sent.”
Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the anointed Son of God? Do you
believe that He’s the Redeemer, the Savior, that His death on the cross was a substitute for you
and me, our sin? See, the Bible says,
“He that knew no sin was made sin for us so that we can be
made the righteousness of God through Him.”
That’s the great volitional decision you must make
in your life.
Now in regard to the core values that this nation were founded on, they act as a
rudder on a ship and they guide us and they keep us from crashing on the rocks of divine
discipline.
This rudder is composed of the family and the authority within the family. It’s
composed of the church and the authority within the church. Your family and your church
are where you develop your norms and standards.
Your family will teach you norms like
brush your teeth, comb your hair, make your bed, clean your clothes, and your church will teach
standards like the Ten Commandments or God’s Word. What does God’s Word say about this?
When you get these norms and standards, when you properly orient and adjust to society, then
you can go to school and fit in, you can go to work and fit in. See, you’re not maladjusted. But
without proper norms and standards, you’re maladjusted and you’re arrogant and you may even
become a criminal. You may think it’s okay for you to steal from people because they have it and
you don’t.
The rudder on America, the guiding force on our ship is gone. We are floating
helplessly in the sea of history. We are about to crash on the rocks I assure you
. Likewise in
578-Surveying-The-Times-transcript.pdf
your personal life, there’s got to be a rudder to guide you, because if you don’t have this rudder,
then you also will be at the mercy of the winds of history and it will drive you as well into the
rocks of destruction. As a fisherman, sometimes when I’m out fishing in heavy winds, we can put
out a drift sock.
A drift sock acts as a parachute that catches water and slows down the drift.
Your church is the drift sock. Your spiritual life is the drift sock.
As goes your spiritual life,
as goes the ministers of our churches, so goes the history of this nation. When churches quit
teaching God’s Word and begin to substitute entertainment, when they began to place emphasis
on emotion and not teaching, and if you quit taking in the Word of God on a daily basis and
begin to drift away from your personal relationship with Christ, you are not a drift sock. You are
not slowing down the drift.
Without the rudder, your church and your spiritual life, we’re
done as a nation, we’re history, we’re over.
There has to be a rudder to guide you. There has to
be a rudder to keep you from going into the rocks of destruction.
Let me suggest a four step
process that will help all of us regain control of our personal lives and eventually gain
control of our sacred nation that we call America.
The first thing we must do is we must
Recognize
, we’ll keep these under the R category to use an alliteration.
We must recognize that
we have lost our rudder.
Nationally we’ve lost moral direction and it appears to me that we’ve
given in to the demands of the few voices over the many. I think it started in the 60s when the
Supreme Court sided with an atheist named Madeline Murray O’Hare and she was able to win a
Supreme Court decision to keep prayer out of public schools. This has since morphed into
keeping Bibles out of school. I don’t think the Gideons are allowed to distribute Bibles, they’re
supposedly dangerous. Some Gideons have even been arrested for passing out Bibles to children.
Without the foundation of Scripture then many young people will never understand basic norms
and standards. These norms and standards are necessary to survive and exist in the modern
world. It use to be the Gideons who gave a Bible to all men going into combat. I don’t know if
this still happens or not. I don’t know if the military has stopped this or not. I know that the
Freedom From Religion Foundation headed up by Mickey Weinstein would love to stop it. He’s
just recently prosecuted an American officer for having an open Bible on his desk because “this
offends people.” All of a sudden it seems that the Word of God is more offensive than
pornography. It’s a shame but that’s what’s happening. Since the courts are the authority of the
land, I mean we have to respect the decisions that the courts make or we break the law. When the
courts made the decision, “No more prayer in public school, no more passing out Bibles to the
children,” it was a sad day. Sad when the Bible is a threat to the freedom in America. Of course
the argument is that if we allow Bibles to be given out then, “We have to let all those other
people distribute their material as well.” Well, since when did we get into being worried about
the rights of Satanists, worried about the rights of atheists, worried about the rights of agnostics,
and other weird religious groups? Why are we worried about this? We never worried about it in
the past. Without the Word of God to guide the young people in this nation, they will be sitting
ducks for such groups that I mentioned to recruit them since they will not recognize the
difference. Already young people by the dozens have been caught, captured, and lured into ISIS
578-Surveying-The-Times-transcript.pdf
and leaving this country and going to fight against us. So many young people today when
interviewed on the streets don’t even know who the Vice President is. They don’t even know who
Osama Bin Laden was. And you watch some of these things and you wonder what do they
know? Well, they know who the entertainers are. They know who the sports teams are. We’ve
had so much prosperity and so many blessings we forgot about the Giver and we live for the
gifts. That’s what America does. We forgot the Giver and we live for the gifts. Listen to a passage
in 2 Chronicles 36:15-16. This passage is critical. It’s not speaking to us as Americans, this was
written to the Jewish nation. But remember that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
He’s immutable, He doesn’t change. The message that He gave the nation Israel could be the
same message that He gives to us today. We are a client nation, we are His representative in these
days, there’s no doubt about this. This is the message that He sent.
“And the Lord God of their
fathers sent warnings to them by His messengers rising up early, and sending them because He
had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of
God, they despised His word, they scoffed at His prophets until the wrath of the Lord arose
against His people and there was no remedy.”
Does this sound familiar, mocking the messengers
of God, despising the Word of God, laughing at His prophets until there is no remedy? I
personally believe we are approaching no remedy in this country. We are going down the tracks
quickly. As I said once before, there is a train wreck coming and I can hear the whistle blowing
now. Individually, we’ve lost our moral convictions. We’ve allowed deceptive sin to creep into
our homes in forms of entertainment, various social media. Thousands, thousands, maybe
millions of young Americans have access to these things and all the deviation that comes with
them by means of social media. I think we have actually forgotten what is a sin and now because
of something they use to call situational ethics, we no longer call a sin a sin. It appears we forgot
this. We try to justify why people do things and to say, “It’s not really a sin. God loves everybody
and this is okay.” Listen, a sin is a sin. There are three types of sin that I’m aware of. There’s the
mental attitude sins. That’s the sins that we think like bitterness, anger, jealousy, implacability,
hostility and worrying. There are the sins of the tongue and that’s gossip, slander, maligning,
criticizing and lying. Then there are the overt sins and this is murder, adultery, fornication,
pervertedness. These are sins. The Bible lists them as sins yet today and in this nation, we don’t
want to call a sin a sin and that’s a problem because if young people don’t realize what sin is, then
they easily destroy the capacity of their soul to recognize the difference between right and
wrong. It’s called scar tissue and Paul speaks of it in Ephesians 4 when he says that the believers
are not to live like unbelievers with an emptiness in their mind, with a vacuum in their mind,
with scar tissue on their soul. Do you know when we put things in our life that don’t belong
there, it scars us.
It leaves a scar and this soul scar tissue can only be erased by the filtration
of God’s Word flowing through our soul regularly.
When this happens, we can eliminate the
scars. But we have a nation full of young people that are scarred. How do I know this? Because
there’s no conscience, there’s no conviction. They can kill each other and not feel bad about it,
they laugh about it. They can steal from you and laugh about it and justify it. When you have
578-Surveying-The-Times-transcript.pdf
thousands of young people that are killing and murdering and doing drugs and involved in
premarital sex, having babies, not marrying their wives, their husbands, we have a nation full of
scar tissue, no difference between right and wrong. All of this is going to catch up with us. It’s
not going to stop overnight. We’ve lost the moral conviction. We’ve allowed this sin to creep into
our homes in all different types of entertainment and social media. Now on to the second R.
Not
only must we Recognize we’ve lost our rudder but we must Realize, there’s another R for
you, we must Realize our position both nationally and personally.
We are a client nation for
God and as such we’ve been blessed. We’ve been given the responsibility to evangelize the lost
throughout the world. We have been commissioned to be a haven for the Jew during his time of
the Diaspora. We send out missionaries to foreign countries and we disseminate God’s Word here
and at home by means of the local churches. That’s what a client nation does. And individually as
believers in Jesus Christ, we have been given many assets to survive in the devil’s world. This is
not our home, we are sojourners the Bible says. We are passing through, our home is in heaven,
our citizenship, our
politeuma
is in
ouranos
, or heaven. Those are two Greek words,
politeuma
and
ouranos, “citizenship in heaven.”
So we are just passing through, we don’t belong here. But
we can survive here because we have been given operational assets by means of God the Father
through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. We have been told to allow the Holy Spirit to fill us. He
indwells us at the moment of salvation. The moment you believed in Christ, God the Holy Spirit
took up residency inside of you, Ephesians 1:12. He came to live in you. And then Ephesians
5:18, you’re told to be filled with the Holy Spirit. You cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit and
have unconfessed sin in your life. Thus, when you rebound, when you practice problem-solving
device number one, when you name your sin to God as per 1 John 1:9, then you are filled with
the Holy Spirit. But when you sin, you quench the Holy Spirit and you grieve the Holy Spirit and
you need to rebound again. Sometimes you may have to rebound twenty times a day. If you fail
to rebound and fail to deal with the sin, then you allow the sin nature to control your life. The
Bible warns you that there would be a battle,
“The flesh wars against the Spirit, the Spirit wars
against the flesh and they are contrary one to the other.”
You have the mighty power of God the
Holy Spirit living in you. You have the power of the completed canon of Scripture that is
“Alive
and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword.”
You have qualified pastors whose job is to
study and teach God’s Word to you. We are sheep, we need a shepherd and so we have been
mandated to study and grow so that we can effectively re-present Jesus Christ to our generation.
We must realize our position as we said to begin with and we must recognize the rudder is gone.
We must Recover our destiny, there’s another R for you, recover our destiny both
nationally and personally. And if we do, number four, we will Reap, there’s another R, we
will Reap the rewards.
I’m quickly running out of time.
Recovering our destiny is done by
means of 2 Chronicles 7:14,
“If My people will humble themselves and turn from their wicked
ways, seek My face, pray, I will hear, I will answer, I will heal their land.”
Hosea 4:6-10 is why
personally we get in trouble and that’s because we don’t learn anything. You’d be surprised if you
read Hosea 4:6-10 and see why God has to discipline a nation. Reaping the rewards, that’s seen
578-Surveying-The-Times-transcript.pdf
in 1 Corinthians 3:11-16 at the Judgment Seat of Christ and in Leviticus 26:3-13. Read these
passages and you will begin to reap the rewards that God has promised to you. We are in serious
times. It requires serious people. I pray you are one of these people. I pray you’re listening and
you’re learning, and I pray you will apply it. So until next week, I am your host Rick Hughes
saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line.