In this episode of The Flatline, host Rick Hughes takes listeners on a deep dive into the powerful and life-changing wisdom contained within the Bible. Rick’s conversational style sheds light on how biblical teachings can guide us through life’s everyday challenges. By sharing personal reflections and insights, he encourages listeners to orient themselves around the unshakeable truths of the Word of God. This episode challenges us to weigh our life’s decisions against the Biblical standard and evaluate what truly determines a fulfilling and successful life. Rick raises important questions about personal choices, explores the absolute standards of morality presented
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.
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Good morning and welcome to The Flatline. I am your host, Rick Hughes, and thank you for tuning in. The next few minutes are dedicated to motivation, some inspiration, some education without any manipulation. No appealing for money, no asking you to join anything, just asking you to listen. Listen as I give you the Word of God, hopefully something that will challenge you and help you to orient and adjust to the plan if you wish to do so. Remember, you have your own volition. You can decide what you want to do with your life. It’s your choice. It’s up to you. God gives you freedom. You’re not a little automaton, and you have to make that decision. So whatever you choose to do with your life, that’s between you and God. But I can give you some information that may help you if you’re interested and if you listen. Because this show is always designed to remind you of biblical truths and hopefully introduce you to a new way of studying and learning the Word of God. Again, no manipulation, no solicitation. Just verify it, identify it, and let you orient and adjust if you wish to do so. So thank you for listening. Every Sunday morning we come on this station. Every Sunday morning we trust God to provide. He always does. It’s our pleasure to join with you. So today we would like to talk about the Word of God, Hebrews 4.12, something very important and very dear to me. Where the Bible says the Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit and the joints and the marrow, and is a critic of the thoughts and intents of the heart. My pastor, before he went to be with the Lord, used to quote this verse before every sermon that he gave, before every Bible study class that he taught, and after hearing him repeat it a few thousand times, it got burned into my memory. The Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword. That’s the Roman sword, the machaira, the two-edged sword. Not a romphalia, a big one-edged sword. Not a zephos, not a little dagger sword. But the Roman sword, the Roman sword they conquered the world with, two edges. And the Word of God is compared, analogous to the two-edged sword. It pierces to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit. and of the joints and the marrow, and is a critic of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. The Word of God criticizes in our thoughts what we’re doing, what we plan on doing. This is what’s neat about God. He knows your thoughts, your intentions, your motivations, your desires. He knows all of that. And His Word will comment on that in your soul if you learn it. So the first question you have to ask yourself if you own a Bible is, Is the Bible the inspired Word of God? Is it really the inspired Word of God? Can you trust it? I mean, that book is the number one selling book in the world. They got campers’ Bibles, children’s Bibles, lonely wives’ Bibles, lonely husbands’ Bibles. Everybody’s got a Bible trying to make a buck off the Word of God. Nothing wrong with buying a Bible. There’s something wrong with everybody trying to make a buck off the Word of God, that’s for sure. But can you trust the Bible? There are a lot of different interpretations. The King James Version, some people say it’s just only the King James Version and nothing else. And then there’s the Net Bible, the New English Translation. There’s the NASB. There’s the American Standard Version Bible. There’s just tons of translations. Hopefully. Hopefully, any pastor you study under will get away from the English and go back to the original manuscripts, the original Greek words, and see what these words mean and how they apply to your life today to study under what my pastor used to call the ICE technique, isagogical, categorical, exegetical. I didn’t know what that meant the first time I heard it. I had to look it up. But isagogical, categorical, exegetical. The isagogics of the word, the categories that are in the verse, in this verse particularly, the word of God. So there’s a category called the Bible. Two-edged sword, there’s a doctrinal category called the sword of God. And you can go on, the soul and the spirit. There’s two different categories. The psuchikos and the pneuma, so we got that. And the joints and the marrow and the critical thoughts and the intents of the heart. So if you break a verse down, you can get a lot of categories out of that verse. And then exegete means go line by line, word by word, verse by verse. We’re not going to do all of that this morning, but we’ll do some of it. But that’s the way my pastor taught for many, many years. Exegetical, categorical, isagogical. So is the wisdom of the Bible a concise set of standards, or is it merely a relative or subjective book according to the situation? That’s the question you have to ask yourself. Is it a concise set of standards? Can you trust it? Here’s another question. Is there an absolute source of wisdom available to us today? Is there an absolute source of wisdom available to us today? Or as some people say, are we left alone to take our best shot at what might be right and what might be wrong based on your own standards? is there a absolute standard of what’s right and what’s wrong in this world today and the answer is there is it’s called the word of god or the bible it is an absolute standard It is not relative and it is not subjective to the situation. It is what it is. So you do not, let me put it this way, you know and you realize there’s nothing new under the sun, don’t you? I mean, we repeat patterns that reoccur unless we step outside the mold of human viewpoint thinking. And that’s the question, how do you think? See, the Bible tells you, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. And the Bible also says in Romans 12, 3, stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think. So you have to realize people have been thinking a long time about what’s right and what’s wrong and rationalizing that. So have you ever tried to live a life of happiness and fulfillment only to be disappointed with the results and even frustrated? Have you? I mean, your marriage is not working, is it? Your job is not fulfilling, is it? Your finances are in a critical mess. Your kids are in a mess. You can’t control them. You can’t even get to them. And you’ve lost control of everything in your life. Do you sometimes just seem hopeless? What a sad place to be. Maybe, just maybe, you might ought to consider what God has to say since you pretty much made a mess out of things on your own, haven’t you? I mean, look at it. Look at your finances. Look at your spouse. Look at your kids. Some of you can say, mine are great and I’m proud for you. And others of you can say, man, what a mess this is. Maybe you have to consider what God has to say. See, there are two ways to live your life. You can live it according to the absolute standard of the Bible that is alive and powerful, or you’ve got to choose some other way to live it. You’ve got to have some other rules to govern your life, some other way to think. Since you don’t want to think divine viewpoint, you’re not interested in what the Bible says, then you have to come up with some sort of human viewpoint, some sort of alternative way of thinking, rationalizing, perceiving what is truth and what is fiction. Not that you’re an evil person, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean you’re bad, but it’s that you’ve never really taken time to learn the other way or to see what God offers you, if you will at least try to follow his plan. And you know, why do some people not read the Bible? Well, because it convicts them and it exposes their shallow thinking. When you read the Bible, it’ll come alive. It’ll speak to you as a Christian. And it’s like a mirror. It will reflect what you don’t want to see sometimes. That’s how powerful that it is. I mean, come on, money can buy happiness, right? No, wrong. Money cannot buy happiness. Oh, well, love will fulfill my life. No, it won’t. Children will bring me joy. No, they won’t. The sad truth is that unhappy people, like maybe yourself, take their unhappiness with them wherever they go. You may even buy things you don’t need to impress people that you don’t even like. That’s the sad thing about life. It’s just a narcotic to deaden the pain of an empty life. So I’m suggesting there’s an alternative life. There’s a life found in the Word of God, which is alive and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword that can control your thoughts and judges the intents of your mind. The Word of God. This is the Bible, the recorded scriptures, both Old Testament and New Testament. And I know, I know what people say, well, men wrote it. And if you say men wrote it, but here’s what’s recorded. Second Peter 121. No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, many others were led by God to record their thoughts as the Holy Spirit prompted them. And in the New Testament, we had the recorded thoughts of men who never even dreamed, they never dreamed they would be writing scripture that would be endorsed by God or used to change the lives of millions of people. Do you think Peter, James, and John, fishermen, Do you think it was ever in their mind as they were following Jesus Christ through Galilee and across the Jerusalem that they would write the New Testament? Do you think that ever came to their mind? Luke, Mark, Paul, they ever thought about the words that they would write would still be available today and it is alive and powerful? All we know about Jesus Christ was written by these disciples. Everything, also a doctor, Luke, and a disciple of Paul whose name was Mark. But Paul, a known killer of Christians who was converted, wrote many of the pastoral books. And it’s all been saved for centuries and given to you as a gift. Which gift you promptly disregarded and set out to conquer the world on your own. What a dumb thing that was. I mean, how you doing with it? You entered into the devil’s world armed with only human viewpoint of maybe a friend or someone who supposedly was a wise person. And like many, myself included, you promptly became a victim of your own bad decisions. And then in frustration, you turned around and blamed God for the mess that you caused. I mean, he laid it out for you in the Bible. It’s alive and powerful. It’s already there for you. It’ll live inside of you. If you learn it and use it, it’ll protect you. It’ll give you wisdom, insight, discernment, and understanding. Just think about this, the Bible is powerful. The Greek word in our gaze means a descriptive adjective describing what it can do in the life of the one who believes it. If you have faith perception, It means you take the word of God and believe it and live it by faith. It can change your life. It can change your life. Just think about this. The life of Jesus Christ, the anointed son of God, is recorded for us in the Bible. His crucifixion and his resurrection included with the words that say, whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. I believed those words when I was 22 years old and my life changed in an instant. I didn’t look any different on the outside, still the big old ugly guy that I always was, but inside there was a new birth, a new spiritual birth, and I was made spiritually alive. The Bible that is alive and powerful clearly states that if any man is in Christ, he’s a new creation. Old things pass away and all things become new. A new spiritual species, a born again Christian. And that’s what happened to me. It should have happened to you. And the way that it happened is it was recorded in the Bible for you to know and understand. When someone tells you you need to be saved or you need to accept Christ as your Savior, it’s written in the Bible. The living Word of God is alive and powerful. When you believe it, it’ll transform and change your life. Once I accepted Christ, I began a journey of discovery, discovering what an idiot I was and what a goofball I had been, making some stupid decisions in my life. I learned what had happened and what I needed to become, and it was all there in the Bible. But, I mean, I wasn’t all that smart. I needed a pastor to explain it to me. I was just a spiritual infant. The Bible’s not a novel, it’s a textbook. It has to be taught to you. So the first thing I learned, my pastor showed me, was this verse, study to show thyself approved unto God. A workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. I had to learn what was in the Bible and how it applied to me. I went to Bible college. I took courses about the New Testament. I didn’t learn the mechanics. I learned the historical background. But I’m talking about the mechanics of how this new life in Christ works. Not the historical background of the Old Testament or the New Testament or who wrote it or when it was written or what this is about or what that’s about. How does it apply to you? Study what? Study to show thyself approved unto God. Study what? Math? English? Science? No. Study the scriptures. since the scriptures contain the wisdom that I needed to succeed as a stranger in the devil’s world. God knew me better than I knew my own self. Listen to what the Bible says here. A Psalm of David 139. This is how well God knows you. And you can say this for yourself. This is what David wrote. Oh Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You understand my thoughts from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down and are intimately acquainted with my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before and laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It’s too high. I cannot attain to it. That’s the omniscience of God. He knew you in eternity past. He devised a plan for you in eternity past. That’s a perfect plan for your life, a plan to give you happiness and meaning and purpose and direction if you learn it, if you use it. But if you do not and you reject it, thinking you are smarter than God, you don’t need the Bible, you don’t need that stuff, you got a friend that’s gonna give you a better way to live, you’re out of your mind. Note Proverbs 1-7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of the wisdom. That’s the word respect. You have to learn to respect the Bible. God preserved it for you. God left it for you. It is your course correction. It is your direction in life. Listen, you have to start your recovery somewhere, so why not just start by respecting what God says. Listen to what he says here in Proverbs, chapter one, verse 24 through 33. It’s pretty critical, listen. I called, you refused. I stretched out my hand, you didn’t pay any attention. you neglected all of my counsel and you didn’t want any of my reproof so i will laugh at your calamity and i will mock you when your dread comes when your dread comes like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind when distress and anguish come upon you then you will call on me but i won’t answer then you will seek me diligently but you won’t find me why because you hated knowledge You did not choose to respect the Lord. You would not accept my counsel. You spurned all of my reproof. And so you shall eat the fruit of your own way, and you shall be satiated with your own devices. For the waywardness of the naive will kill him, and the complacency of a fool will destroy him. But he who listens to me, here it is, pay attention now, he who listens to me shall live securely and be at ease from the dread of evil I mean, when you ignore the Bible, you’re signing your own death certificate. When you ignore the word of God and choose to go your own way. You are going the satanic way. You’re buying into human viewpoint thinking. You’re buying into the words of the cosmic system. You’re gonna be trapped into this delusional farce that Satan has put out there. And if you wanna be happy, get some money. If you wanna be happy, get married. If you wanna be happy, follow the lust of your flesh and become whatever you wanna be. And don’t worry about it. The Bible’s not really true anyhow. You don’t have to worry about what it says. you better worry about what it says because the Bible says God will not be mocked. The Bible was around before you got here and it’s going to be around when you’re gone. It is alive and powerful. It will change you if you will believe it and learn it and live it. It will give you a history and a definition and a purpose and a meaning in your life. And you will be able to get a grasp on your marriage. You will be able to get a grasp on controlling your children. You will be able to get a grasp on your finances if you listen to what the Bible tells you. Why? Because the Word of God is powerful. It guides you. It protects you. From who? From yourself. You’re the one destroying your life, not your friends. You’re the one that’s ignoring the Word of God, not your friends. You’re the one that’s saying, I’m too busy. Wow. The word of God is powerful, guiding and protecting you from yourself and from Satan, who obviously has a plan to destroy you, to deceive you, to discourage you, to defeat you. Ephesians 6 talks about putting on the armor of God. It’s in the Bible. So that you can detect and even deflect the strategy of Satan, whose entire desire is to destroy Christians and ruin their lives. However, and this is interesting, some people seem to do it for him, don’t they? Some people he doesn’t even have to worry about. Maybe like you, you’ve done a pretty good job of messing it up yourself. Have you? Have you neglected the Word of God? Have you neglected to get under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor? Have you neglected to study God’s Word and learn and get wisdom so that you can have insight, discernment, and understanding? This is a wonderful thing about the Bible. It gives you the ability through faith perception to see what the rest of the world cannot see. Yes, x-ray vision, as they say. Yes, you can see through the word of God what the world cannot see. You can even see Satan’s plan and how it works and how he’s after you and what he’s trying to do to confuse and defeat you in your life. You can see how he uses his world to defeat your children and destroy your children. It’s all in the Bible. I don’t mean just pick it up and point your finger in the middle of it and start reading. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible. Absolutely, you can read it, but there’s a much better way to do this is to get under the ministry of a qualified pastor and learn it. Sit down each day with your Bible, with a notebook, and listen to the pastor instruct you, teach you the Word of God. Then the Word of God will govern your thoughts and direct your life if you learn it and use it You have to learn it and use it. You learn it in your mind, you use it in your heart. You see, the communicator communicates information. If you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, if you’re not out of fellowship because of unconfessed sin in your life, then the Holy Spirit will capture what the pastor communicates. And then it will come down to your mind where you can comprehend it. It’s called in the Bible knowledge or gnosis. But that’s not all of it. Then you have to comply with what your mind captures. So you do that by faith. You by faith believe it and apply it into your life. And you apply it in your heart, in your cardia, in your memory center, in your frame of reference. This is where you live your spiritual life. your mind and your heart it’s critical that you understand that only by getting under a good pastor can he explain this to you see church is not a lonely hearts club let’s take a tour this week let’s go to the game this week let’s watch a movie this week let’s all come into our little world and all fellowship together and we’ll all hang out together in our little christian community I mean, that’s fine. But the world is out there. The world is begging for help. The world needs your help. The world needs you to represent Jesus Christ and reflect him in your life. Without some divine guidance, you don’t have a shot. You don’t have a shot at making it through life before you will self-destruct. So what do you say? What do you want to do? I mean, are you ready to confess your sin to God? Your sin of neglect and the rejection of his word? Are you ready to commit your life to a fresh new approach? I can assure you of this, it won’t be easy. Any person I’ve ever talked to about studying God’s word and learning God’s word has come under vicious attack. That’s the last thing in the world Satan wants you to do. Listen to Jeremiah 33.3. Call on me, and I’ll answer you. There’s your verse for you right there. Call on me, and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things which you do not know. It’s all recorded in the Bible for you. This is what you need to pray. Oh, dear God, please show me what I need to do with my life, how I can get on course, how I can grow, how I can learn. Help me to apply what I learn. it’s there. But every time I tell somebody, every time I meet with somebody, every time I develop a close friendship and somebody starts to study, it doesn’t take long. And Satan comes through distraction and deception and sweeps them away and they’re gone. They don’t have time to do it anymore. I’m too busy. Yeah, I know I need to study the Bible. I know I need to listen to a pastor, but You know, my life is I work and I got kids and I don’t have any free time. And, you know, I’m just so busy. Well, that’s up to you. You can make it priority or you can make it not a priority. But I can tell you this. As for me, priority number one in my life is learning and living the word of God. If I had not found a pastor that would teach it to me, if I had not had positive volition to learn it and live it, I would have been dead a long time ago. I would have destroyed myself, just like you’re on the road to doing right now because you are neglecting the Word of God. It is alive and powerful. It will empower you. It will help you. It’s sharper than a two-edged sword. It’ll cut you to pieces. It’ll show you what you really are. It’ll even take into your thoughts and your mind and your soul and your spirit and show you what you’re thinking and why you’re thinking it and show you how arrogant you are sometimes to reject it. Yes, he warns you. Yes, he’s called out to you. Even through a radio show like this. Yes. What are you going to do about it? Oh, I’m just going to trot on down the my way highway and take my best shot at it. Okay, it’s up to you. But if you’re interested in getting your life together, you better get serious about studying, learning, and gathering the Word of God. If you don’t know how to do it, contact me. I’ll help you. I’ll get you the information. I’ll show you great pastors that provide information free of charge. We’ll provide information from our ministry free of charge. Anything to help you get a grip on your life, where you’re going, and what God expects out of you. It’s your future. It’s up to you. How many years have you wasted already chasing your own tail in a circle and you haven’t caught it yet, have you? So are you listening? Are you ready to make a change? Are you ready to admit you fail this big thing called life and you’re miserable? Then contact me. Get in touch with me as soon as you can. Let’s get ahead of this thing and let’s get God’s plan going in your life so you you can hear him say to you, well done, my good and my faithful servant. Until next week, I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and I would like to thank you for listening to me this morning. I appreciate it. See you next week.
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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.
