Join host Rick Hughes in this enlightening episode of The Flatline as he delves into the profound concept of the ‘door to doom.’ Understanding life’s adversities are inevitable—but stress is optional—Rick guides us through the essential Christian problem-solving devices that lead to a fulfilling, spiritual life. Discover the importance of establishing a strong main line of resistance in our souls and what it truly means to live a supernatural life anchored in faith.
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 for the next few minutes, please stay with me. The FLOT line is designed to give you some information, accurate information, no manipulation, no solicitation, just information that will help you establish a main line of resistance in your soul called a FLOT line, F-L-O-T. That’s a military analogy, a metaphor for a forward line of troops. We like to talk about learning God’s problem-solving devices. And if you learn 10 unique problem-solving devices taught many years ago by my very own pastor, and I reteach it to you often on this radio show, then you can establish that main line of resistance so that you can stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside source of stress. That’s why we say adversity is inevitable and stress is optional. So by studying God’s Word, learning God’s Word, you have the opportunity to live the most unique life the world has ever known. It’s called the Christian life. It’s a supernatural life where there’s no worry, no fear, no regret, no guilt, no doubt. It’s a way to live by faith and trusting in the providence of God. What a fantastic thing to have the monkey taken off of your back and put it on the Lord’s back and let him handle it. The Supreme Court of Heaven is open 24 hours a day, so if you’ve got a complaint, all you’ve got to do is take it to the Lord and leave it in his hands. You’re going to find as you grow older that you’ll have difficulties. You’ll find health adversity coming into your life as part of evidence testing in your life. And as you face these tests, you have the opportunity to glorify Jesus Christ in a way that no one else ever could. You also will face people testing. People will let you down. People may cause you to stumble if you put your eyes on those people. And you have to learn to pass those tests as well and not destroy your testimony by getting bitter or angry at someone who stuck it to you. So we talked in the last two studies about the doctrine of being a spiritual failure. We’re going to change the name of that. to entering the door to doom. Entering the door to doom. There are a lot of ways that you can enter the door to doom in your life, and we’re gonna mention some of those to you in this brief study that we’ll do with you. And one of the first ways we’ve already covered is if you become a stumbling block to other people. Our Lord said in Luke 17 one, it’s inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come. When you become a stumbling block, you enter the door to doom. You enter into divine discipline in your life that starts with warning discipline. And this is where God will speak to you gently in a wonderful, kind way. And if you don’t listen, if you’re so arrogant that you cannot respond to the discipline, then he comes with intense discipline. All this is taught in Hebrews 12, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, right in there. And divine discipline, intense discipline has pain associated with it. This is where God has to lower the boom to get your attention. You get an attitude adjustment if you have enough humility to respond. Whenever God puts discipline into your life, you can respond to it or you can react to it. If you react, you use your own volition to go negative towards God and justify why you’re right and God’s wrong. And believe you me, people do it all the time. God is never wrong. You are wrong if there’s a question about it. So you can’t allow yourself to become a stumbling block. A stumbling block discourages young Christians. A stumbling block defeats young believers who are trying to grow in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ because they get their eyes on you. They look at your flaws and your failures. And so you have to be very careful not to be a stumbling block. And you’re not perfect, okay? Understand that. None of us are. None of us are perfect. And We tell people all the time, don’t get your eyes on me. Keep your eyes on the Lord because I have flaws. I’m human. But sometimes if I don’t control my flaws, if I allow my old sin nature to lead me into deviant behavior, the lust of the flesh, which could include money lust, power lust, sex lust, drug lust, a lot of different lust patterns. Well, then I can become a real stumbling block to someone maybe that has their eyes on me or maybe that thinks that I’m really some kind of person. But God warned us in Jeremiah 17, 5, “‘Cursed is the man that trusts in man.'” And cursed is the man who makes flesh his strength and whose heart turns away from me. Don’t put your eyes on people. Don’t put your eyes on a pastor. Don’t put your eyes on anybody but on Jesus Christ. And that’s what Hebrews 12, 1, 2, and 3 tells us. Focus on him who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross. we do not want to be a stumbling block he was not a stumbling block and so another way that we get ourselves into trouble and enter into the door of doom is when we have no self-control lack of self-control can destroy you and so paul warns us in the word of god to have self-control and we’ve been through some of that even identifying the self-control in the marriage and self-control loss of self-control in a nation a society without morals and values has no self-control and we came up to the doctrine of responsibility and this is where we want to go now tonight to the doctrine of response this morning excuse me to the doctrine of responsibility Every believer must take responsibility for his decisions, good, bad, or indifferent. And so let’s give you some principles on the doctrine of responsibility. If you don’t take responsibility for your decisions, you are opening the door to doom in your life. One, responsibility denotes something within your power to control. You have a sin nature. You can control the sin nature or you can let the sin nature control you. Arrogance is the deciding factor. Arrogance doesn’t see itself as it really is. Arrogance sees itself as it thinks it is. So if you’re dealing with an arrogant person, they assume they’re right and you’re wrong. Arrogant people never take responsibility for their bad decisions. And the end result is they justify why they’re right and the preacher’s wrong, why they’re right and their spouse is wrong, why they’re right and the police officer’s wrong. That’s what arrogance does. But humility is just the opposite. Humility understands and orients to authority. And it understands that authority’s not perfect. Authority can make mistakes. And you don’t react to the authority when they do make a mistake. You just forgive them. You respond to it. But arrogant people with self-justification always deceive themselves through self-deception and always get totally absorbed in what they’re doing with self-absorption. And when you do not take responsibility for your bad decisions, you in effect are going through the door of doom. You are ruining your life. You are ruining the life of others around you. Point two, under the law of volitional responsibility, we cause our own misery and and we cause our own suffering by lack of self-control. You must learn to take control of your life. 90% of the suffering in your life will be because you mismanage your money, you mismanage your relationships, you mismanage your health, If you don’t take self-control, then you will spiral out of control down into the cosmic vortex until your life is utterly wasted in the door of doom. You’ll walk through the door of doom into the dark gloom of doom and never come out because you do not take responsibility. You know you’re doing wrong. You know what you’re involved in is wrong, but you justify why you do it or you put it off and say, well, I’ll get it right later. You must go to God. You must go to God today. He knows what’s going on in your life. You must go to God and confess your sin to him because the Bible says problem-solving device number one, if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and to purify us from all of our wrongdoing. That’s a wonderful problem-solving device that allows us to be filled with the Holy Spirit and Because when we don’t confess our sin, then we grieve the Holy Spirit and we quench his power in our life. His power is to reflect Jesus Christ through you. He cannot do that if you are out of fellowship with him. So you must take responsibility or you will suffer from lack of self-control in your life. Self-control in any area of lust, be it power lust, money lust, sex lust, alcohol lust, drug lust, approbation lust, whatever that is. If you cannot control that lust, it will destroy you eventually. Is it possible to control it? Yes. The Bible says in Galatians 5.16, if we will walk in the spirit, we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh. The flesh is not going to go away until you get a resurrection body minus an old sin nature. As long as you’re in the devil’s world, your flesh will remain active, and you can control it under the filling of the Holy Spirit using spiritual growth in your life, learning God’s Word, applying God’s Word, learning to recognize your weaknesses, learning to avoid those situations that put you there. Point three, under the doctrine of responsibility, By means of divine punitive action, God can actually remove the guilt in your life. You cannot function in the Christian life if you have a lot of hungover guilt, feeling sorry for yourself, having self-pity. So if God has to lower the boom in your life, and he may have already done this as you’re listening to me today, get over the guilt. If you are still alive, he still has a plan for your life. If he didn’t take you home, he left you here for a reason. Maybe you’re going to be a testimony in the future to God’s grace through your failure. Or maybe you’re going to be a stumbling block in the future, a testing for younger Christians that have to learn to get over themselves by looking at you. I wouldn’t want to be that person. But if you can rebound your sin and confess your sin to God and get out from underneath that divine discipline, anytime you go to rebound, anytime you name your sin to God, Any cursing in your life will immediately be turned to blessing. It’s a principle of doctrine that’s always true. So you must remember that. You must come to understand that. And that way, God can use you in a wonderful way, okay? Four, each of us must take responsibilities for our own decisions. We must take responsibility for our own actions. Whether they’re sins, whether they’re impetuousness, whether it’s our own indiscretion or impulsiveness or even cowardlessness, we must take responsibility. We can’t blame it on someone else. That’s exactly what Lucifer did in eternity past. He blamed it on God. He said, in essence, if you knew I was going to sin, why did you create me to start with? And God didn’t make Lucifer sin. Lucifer chose in his own arrogance to sin. Point five, we can never blame others. We can never blame others for our misery. We can never blame others for our unhappiness. We must take full responsibility for every decision we make. I don’t know how you grew up. I know how I grew up, and it wasn’t a great way to grow up. I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know living in a federal housing project without a father was a bad way to grow up. But it happened. I didn’t know living with four or five different guardians was a bad way to grow up. But it happened. But Daddy couldn’t look at my life and my failures and say it’s my mother’s fault. It was my fault. I made any bad decision I made, and you make any bad decision you made. Don’t blame it on your parents, and don’t blame it on your spouse. Anytime you point a finger at somebody, there’s always three pointing right back at you. Remember that. Point six, the grace of God has given each of us human volition. That means we can go positive or we can go negative. We can say yes, we can say no. So when the old sin nature, remember you have three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil. So if the world throws up a temptation to you, says you can be happy with people, money, circumstances, you just say, no, I don’t buy that. Or if the flesh throws up a temptation to you saying you could be happy with this, that, or the other, say, no, I don’t believe that. And then the devil may throw up a temptation. Remember Matthew 4, read it. Look what he did to the Lord Jesus Christ, how he tempted him four different times. And the only way that the Lord Jesus Christ could pass those temptations was by quoting scripture, scripture, scripture, scripture. You must know scripture. This is where you get your strength from. This is where you become powerful in God by using his word under the filling of the Holy Spirit. If you have the filling of the Holy Spirit and you have the dynamics of Bible doctrine, you have the two most fantastic power resources the world has ever known or ever seen. So you have to take responsibility. Failing to take responsibility is walking through the door of doom. So God gave you a volition. You don’t have to walk in that door. You don’t have to make that decision. He gave you a choice. Point seven, we must not allow our volition to lead us into sin, to lead us into human good or evil. In Galatians 6, 7, the Bible states the law of volitional responsibility. Listen to what it says. Be not deceived. God cannot, will not, I’m adding that for emphasis, be mocked. Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. And no one gets away with anything, I assure you. Point eight, under the law of volitional responsibility, it is possible that we can inflict unbearable suffering from personal sins and lack of common sense. Now, you want to ruin your life? You want to live for the rest of your life in misery, in guilt? You want to live for the rest of your life in a situation that you don’t want to be in? Then don’t listen to God. Just Go on down the my way highway and try to do it your way. Commit your sins. Go ahead and say, well, if we love each other, it’s okay. It’s not okay. The Bible says get married. Or I need it so it’s okay to lie to the federal government and cheat on my taxes because they’re stealing from me. You know how people justify tax returns. No, it’s not okay. So if we have unbearable suffering in our life from personal sins and lack of common sense, common sense is take some common sense to live the Christian life. You can’t be an idiot. You can’t do dumb things. You have to have some common sense. And if you take the Word of God and you learn it and you use it, you will have common sense. you will know when to get in and out of the rain. I mean, I like to fish. I’m out in the bass boat fishing and I see a black cloud coming up over the horizon down the lake, maybe four or five miles away. And I see the light didn’t begin to pop and common sense says, get off the water. Now, some people don’t use common sense. They say, oh, well, I’m just going to keep right on fishing till the lightning strikes them or till they get drenched in the downpour because they’re too dumb to get off the water. You must have common sense. So remember that. Point nine, the conscience that God gave you at birth is designed to house norms and standards so you always have options. Your conscience should house your norms and standards. Where do you get these norms and standards? Well, first of all, your parents should teach you norms, and your pastor teaches you standards from the Word of God. So you have these norms. You know how to control your health. You know how to do certain things, and you have standards that you live by. These are things that are your standards that govern your life without norms and standards you don’t have any options you’ll be led captive by your flesh you’ll be held captive by your sin nature God gave you options With no options, you have no chance of succeeding in your life. So therefore, it’s critical that parents give their children choices, give their children options. You teach them what the Word of God says, they see what the world says, and they choose. You can’t choose for them. You can’t make them be good little Christians. They must choose. if you expose them to the word of god and you expose them to the truth and you live that life in front of them prayerfully hopefully they will respond in a positive way to the word of god and be a delight to your soul but some children will not respond because of their arrogance because of their resentfulness and they will go down the my way highway and they will live a miserable life thinking that everybody’s treating them unfair. No one knows my circumstances, yada, yada, yada, yada. Always trying to justify why what they do is right. Ten, emotional control of the soul removes the protection of your conscience. So if you live under your emotions, I mean, emotions are wonderful. God gave them to you. They’re supposed to be the appreciator of the soul. I take a lot of pictures, and I appreciate pictures, and they’re all on my phone. I remember when we used to print them out, and now we’ve got them on the phone, 4,000 pictures on my phone. And going through them, trying to find certain pictures can be a headache. But the emotions of seeing something from the past or seeing the grandchildren or seeing kids I’ve met or seeing you or seeing, you know, these emotions are stimulated by looking at pictures. but emotions don’t dictate policy. Policy has to be from the mentality of the soul. That’s why the Bible says, let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. The Bible says we have to learn to think like he thought, and that means we have to pick up some divine viewpoint. We have to come to learn God’s word, and we learn that through studying the life of Christ, seeing the decisions that he made, This is the wonderful thing about my pastor currently teaching the life of Christ almost 1,200 hours downrange into the life of Christ. That’s 1,200 one-hour studies in the life of Christ, and we’re not even through. We’re not even near through yet. But as you listen and learn and observe and see how the Lord Jesus Christ handled his disciples, handled the adversity, handled his family, handled his brothers, handled everything, then it teaches us how to live. We develop the mind of Christ. You must be under a pastor to teach you these things. It’s critical that you have a well-qualified pastor that can teach you the word of God. And point 11. As a believer in Christ Jesus, every imperative mood of the Greek New Testament is a command from God for you. The imperative mood is what we call in the military the commander’s intent. And the Bible says do not do this, do not do that. The imperative mood means don’t do it. And no one’s perfect, but we are all tasked with learning and following orders if we’re going to be mature believers. It’s critical that you do that. So that is the doctrine of self-control. Now let’s go to another door. Another door to doom, and this is a bad one, is you being what the Bible calls a sluggard believer. The Hebrew word for the sluggard is the atseo. The Greek word in the Septuagint is ochneros. And it’s a lazy person, a person who’s habitually lazy or a person who’s inactive. it’s he or she who has the ability to work but refuses to do so it’s he or she who lacks any drive or will who won’t take responsibility to even provide for their basic needs a sluggard paul had something to say about this sort of person In 2 Thessalonians 3.10, listen to what Paul the apostle said. For even when we were with you, we used to give you this commandment. If anyone is not willing to work, neither shall he eat. That’s a wonderful statement for a nation. That’s something America needs to put into practice right there. If anyone’s not willing to work, neither should he eat. There are exceptions to the rule, and we’ll deal with some of those. He goes on to say, for we hear that some among you are living an undisciplined life, not doing their own work, but sticking their nose into other people’s business. You want to know how to become poor. You want to know how to live a miserable life. Well, number one, you can just be lazy, as described by Solomon as he talks about the little ant. If you can’t live like the little ant, then you’re going to walk into the door of doom and gloom and destroy your life. Solomon just in an analogy said, go to the ant, you old sluggard. Observe her ways and be wise. In other words, get wisdom. Learn something from a little ant. They have no chief, they have no officer, no ruler, but they prepare their food in the summer and gather their provisions in the harvest. How long will you continue to lay down, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? And then he went on to say, a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest. Yep, that’s you. Your poverty will come in like a vagabond and your need like an armed man. If you can’t quit being lazy, if you can’t get out of bed and handle your responsibilities, which is first and foremost to take in the Word of God every day, your number one priority is to feed your soul. And if you put that off, you are being lazy spiritually. The second problem to the door of doom is negligence. In Proverbs 10.4, poor is he who worked with a negligent hand. In other words, failing to take responsibility, failing to take proper care. And Solomon goes on to say, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. In other words, it’s showing care and conscientiousness in your duties. So the negligent hand is opening the door to doom. Negligent is failing to take proper care in doing something. And spiritual negligence… is you failing to care for your spiritual life. You know, it’s interesting, a conventional Christian is nothing but a caricature of Christ, not a real true representative of Christ. You know, the hello God, goodbye God guy that you see on Sunday morning, the nod to God crowd, we call it. That’s a caricature, not a true representative of the believer in Jesus Christ. It’s a conventional Christian. Wants a preacher to marry him, wants a preacher to bury him, but the rest of the time, leave me alone, preacher. I got a lot going on. Negligence is entering the door to doom. The slack hand opens the door to doom. Proverbs 12, 24, the hand of the diligent will rue, but the slack hand will be put to forced labor. Slack, rem iah, translated deceitful labor. treacherous or negligent. Jeremiah 48.10 says, Cursed be the one who does the Lord’s work negligently or fraudulently. And this is criminal deception. This is what this word means, criminal deception. Cursed is the one who does the Lord’s work by deception as a criminal. You talk about getting into the door of doom and the life of gloom. That’s it. By acting like you’re serving the Lord, but really you’re a thief, really you’re deceptive, you’re dishonest, and you act like you’re doing a great thing for God, and you’re not. You think the Father doesn’t know about it? You think that his patience isn’t about up with you? I think it’s time you went to the Lord and confessed your sin and admitted your sin, and he said he would be faithful and just to forgive you. And there’s a lot more to say about this. I guess we have to come back next week. Time is running out, running short. But I want to go on with some other principles about how to enter the door to doom. I hope you’ll come back. I hope you’ll keep listening every Sunday, same time, same place. And until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Floodline.
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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.
