In this enlightening episode, Rick Hughes delves into the biblical concept of wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and understanding. Journey through Proverbs to uncover the ‘Fantastic Four’ virtues that guarantee spiritual richness over material wealth. Hughes articulates the essence of having the mind of Christ and how to overcome emotional influences on your spiritual journey. With compelling illustrations, from the metaphor of panning for gold to the dangers of the ‘my way highway,’ listeners are encouraged to store the Word in their hearts and use it wisely in life’s turbulent circumstances.
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 Flotline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. For the next few minutes, you have a cordial invitation to stick with me. Listen to what I’m about to say. 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education. And we will do it without any sort of manipulation, no solicitation, no asking for money. We’re not selling anything. It’s just a show about the Bible, giving you some information that may help you verify as well as identify the plan of God for your life. And if you can do that, you have the freedom and the privacy to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s always up to you. My job on the flotline is to be accurate, to give you some information, to open the window, open the door, let you get a breath of fresh air, see something you haven’t seen before. Hopefully, using that analogy, you will develop a hunger to grow and learn God’s Word. The United States of America as we know it today is in trouble. I’ve often said there’s a train wreck coming and I can hear the whistle blowing right now. Who knows what’s going on in the future of this country? I do know we are a client nation to God. I do know he has blessed us for a long time. I do know Hosea 4 talks about the destruction of client nations in verses 1 through 6. And according to that, it’s because people forget the Word of God. They forget to honor the Word of God. They don’t care about the Word of God. And if that continues to be the course in this country, if the hateful politics continue to go on, if the advance of the enemies across the world continue to advance, we are at the crossroads of history in this country. There is one thing that could deliver us, one thing that could guarantee we can continue as a free nation and to be a client nation for God and evangelize the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that is you. your life, your testimony, your wisdom. If you become a mature believer, if you glorify God to the maximum with your life, if you replicate Christ by learning his word and thinking like he thought, then you will leave a historical heritage to this nation. You will be an invisible blessing. God will use your positive volition and continue to bless this nation and deliver this country. You can leave a heritage of spiritual heritage. You can leave a wonderful heritage behind for your family, for your nation. And it’s not about who you voted for. It’s about who you are as an individual in Christ Jesus. If you grow and mature as a mature believer, then blessings by association overflow from your life. And as it overflows into the country, then we can have some time in the future. But as goes the believer, so goes the history of this nation. And as organized religion takes greater hold and people begin to swap ritual for reality, people begin to go more for their emotional worship rather than studying and learning and applying the Word of God, then we can see the breakdown of the home, the breakdown of the authority issue in the home. And we can see what’s happening in the future and what will happen. I have grandchildren like many of you do. And it is a fearful thing to realize what they will grow up in. If this thing continues to go in this nation, the hatred, the vilification, the way that the attitude of the typical American is today, if it continues to go, As it’s going, there will be a split. There will be a crisis in the future in this nation. And it will start as a political crisis, a lack of trust within politics. It’s already there. You can see that every day. and what’s coming down the road may not be nice. So what can you do about it? You must grow spiritually. You must glorify Jesus Christ with your life, with your actions, with your thoughts. That’s why we chose to talk to you about the Fantastic Four, the greatest four things you could possess, and not money and fame and happiness and all that stuff. The greatest four things you could possess are found in Proverbs 2, 10 through 11. Here’s what it says. When wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant unto your soul, discretion will then preserve you and understanding will keep you. This is a divine truth that we started talking about last week on the flotline here. A divine truth recorded for us by Solomon, the son of David. Solomon’s mother Bathsheba was the wife of David after David actually murdered her husband, Uriah the Hittite. And David had many children. This was one of them. This is the line of Christ. The line of Christ came through Solomon. He’s the one that built the temple. So it’s an amazing, he was an amazing man, very, very smart man. And the Lord gave him a great mind. And we read last week how the Queen of Sheba came to challenge him. And she came away just amazed. And she said, the Lord has loved Israel forever and he made you king to do justice and righteousness. And she was amazed at the wisdom of Solomon. now you can have the same kind of wisdom if you acquire the mind of christ you can actually have great wisdom and great discernment this is why you have a bible and this is what the holy spirit will use in your life if you want to glorify god to the maximum you have been given the holy spirit jesus christ our lord told the disciples when i go away i’m going to send the spirit and he will lead you and guide you into all truth The truth is in the Bible, the Word of God. Without the Word of God in your soul, you’ll just be going through the ritual with no reality to it. What the Holy Spirit leads you through, leads you into, shows you answers is all found in the Bible. 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 marrows, a critic of thoughts and intents of the heart. That’s a quote from Hebrews. The word of God is alive and powerful. This is where the answers are. This is what the Holy Spirit uses. And so if you want to have knowledge, it comes in two forms. It’s knowledge that is understood, called in the Greek New Testament, gnosis, G-N-O-S-I-S. But then we have another word for knowledge, and it’s called epinosis, G-N-O-S-I-S, but we have a preposition in front of it called epi, E-P-I. That’s full knowledge. So let me show you the difference. You go to church, you listen to your pastor teach the Bible, you get knowledge, you gain understanding if you paid attention, if you listened. But to tell you the truth, most people can’t listen because they have to be entertained to listen. They’re so used to being entertained they can’t even read a book anymore. They have to have a cell phone in their hand or an iPad in their hand or something they can entertain themselves with. So if they go to church and sit down on Sunday morning, their minds wander, their minds drift. Pastors see it. They stand up in the pulpit. They see people with their eyes half closed. They see people looking around. They see people not paying attention. How in the world do you expect to ever, ever get a grip on life if you can’t pay attention for 30 minutes to a small sermon your pastor gives on Sunday morning? You’ve got to learn to pay attention. and so if you get some knowledge that’s wonderful but that’s only half of it that’s the gnosis part of it g-n-o-s-i-s in the greek new testament but now we have the epinosis part of it and that’s the application One of it is the intake and the other is the application. The Holy Spirit will capture the information. You can comprehend the information and then you have to comply with the information. And unless you comply, it does you no good. And so when you go to church, the objective of the Holy Spirit is to give you some knowledge. It’s like a treasure hunt. The Bible is a treasure, a living word treasure, a thesaurus, the Greek word treasure. And as you go to church and listen to your pastor teach, he is making you rich. Biblical knowledge believed and biblical knowledge applied equals great happiness in the devil’s world. There’s no way around it. We talked about it last week, Luke 11, 27 and 28. Happiness belongs to those people who hear my father’s word and keep it. So the more you learn and the more you apply the Word of God, the more you want to understand since it’s never-ending Word treasure and it enriches your spiritual life. You know, people get hooked on digging for treasure. And some people move to the Bitterroot Mountains and they pan for gold in the streams around the Bitterroots and all up in that part of the country. Listen, every time you go to church, every time your pastor opens that Bible and teaches you, he’s making you rich. You are panning for gold and you’re going to find those nuggets right there. That’s his job, to make you rich. If you don’t have a desire to be rich spiritually, If your desire is to be rich physically, then you’re concentrating on the wrong things. There’s nothing wrong with being rich. God blesses a lot of people who are rich. A lot of my supporters have much money, and they contribute to these things. You don’t ever hear us ask for money, and we don’t because we know if God’s in it, he’ll pay for it. But people don’t focus on the money, they focus on the Word of God. God can handle the details of life. If you think having money makes you happy, you’re sadly mistaken. Because unhappy people take their unhappiness with them whatever side of town they live on. Doesn’t make any difference if you win the lottery or not. it’s not going to make you happy it’s just the details of life but the treasure of the word of god if you’re searching for that treasure it’s a never-ending search until the day you exit this planet and go to be face to face with the lord you learn you grow you apply into your life you store the word of god in the mentality of your soul your soul has a mind in your mind you have intentions desires you have volition And as you put the word of God in your soul and apply it to every circumstance in your life, then it will free you from something that is a real detriment. It’s called emotional control of your soul. If you don’t learn to take charge of your emotions, if you don’t learn to let your emotions, quit letting your emotions manipulate you and control you, then you can never advance in the plan of God because advancing in the plan of God is not something emotional. You may get emotional about something you did, some trip you took, some picture you saw, some animal that you had, but getting emotional about the spiritual life, that’s not how we grow. We grow, listen to the Bible again, let this mind be anew that was also in Christ Jesus. We learn the mind of Christ. Romans 12 verse 3, stop thinking of yourself in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think, but think in terms of sanity as God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. So when you store the word of God in your mentality as it’s taught to you by your pastor, and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, then you have a treasure in your soul and you can pull it out and spend it when the circumstances arise. When circumstances arise with the treasure in your soul, you will be freed from emotional control of your life. Then at that point, if you have the doctrine in your soul, you can recall the doctrine You can recite the verse and you can reap the reward. It’s a wonderful way to live. And you don’t have to get emotional about it. You don’t have to squall and cry and run, get on the phone. Preacher, preacher, what should I do about this preacher? How can you glorify God asking the preacher for answers all the time? You glorify God when you can supply your own answers. You want to know what to do about it? Go to Bible class. Listen, learn, write it down, review your notes. And then when the disaster hits, you are prepared. And you don’t have to depend on somebody else to answer your questions. So the question that I must put forth is, is Bible study attractive to you? And if it is, do you store it in your soul when you learn it? Because if not, then church is just a bore. I know we mentioned this last week. God deliver us from self-righteous religious bores that want to talk about their human viewpoint thinking and their preaching politics. That’s not what the Christian life revolves around. Proverbs 2.11, discretion will preserve you and understanding will keep you. Now we’re reading from Proverbs, the one that Solomon wrote, the fantastic four. Wisdom enters to your heart. Knowledge is pleasant to your soul. Discretion shall preserve you. Understanding will keep you. Wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and understanding. Discretion. In the Hebrew text, mesmama. Mesmama, it means to avoid revealing private information. That’s what it’s about. It’s generally used with the idea of fraud or mischievous intent, but it can have a good sense to it as well. The American Dictionary says it’s about the quality of being discreet. to be wise or judicious in avoiding mistakes or faults. Someone once said, discretion is like a blinking light that warns of danger ahead. Do you have discretion in your life? Or are you so impetuous that you let your emotions override your thinking and your mouth say things you shouldn’t say? There’s another key word often used with discretion. It’s called prudence, which means basically the same thing, having some good judgment. So if discretion or prudence can preserve us, as the Bible says, then it should be a good thing to possess since it can deliver you, as the Bible says in Proverbs 2, 12 through 15, it can deliver you from the evil man. If you don’t have some discretion, if you don’t have some prudence, if you don’t have some wisdom and knowledge, remember the verse, wisdom enters your heart, knowledge is pleasant to your soul. So you have no wisdom, you have no knowledge, and you are a sucker. for the cosmic evangelist who comes along and proverbs 2 12 who speaks perverse things what does that mean it means he’s a liar he’s a slanderer he’s a gossip and you like it you like to hear the slander you like to hear the gossip that you know we are predicated in america today on gossip gossip columns gossip shows There’s even sports talk radio, which is all pure gossip. Gossip about this coach, gossip about this listener. They rant and rave towards each other, all emotional. It’s crazy. That’s what we have. We have you loving the evil man who speaks lies and slander and gossip if you don’t have some discretion. The Bible goes on to say in verse 13, Proverbs chapter two, they will leave the path of uprightness and walk in the ways of darkness. That means they don’t know what the heck they’re talking about. That means they’re walking down the my way highway with no headlights, no blinkers, no nothing. A lot of times when I’m night fishing for bass, I’m out in the middle of the lake and it’s pitch black dark. Last night I ran down the lake, pitch black dark. Was I safe? Yeah, I was safe. I lay a trail out on my GPS and I can follow the trail and I know I’m not going to hit anything. I’m not going to hit the bank or anything like that. And I might not have headlights on my boat, but I have some sort of direction finder. This person, in verse 13, Proverbs 2, he leaves the path of direction. In other words, maybe he has a GPS path, and he says, oh, I’m just going to go over here and do it my way. And he walks in the ways of darkness. When you go down the my way highway, in your own arrogance, thinking you know what’s best for you, then you will destroy yourself eventually because you will turn away from the Word of God, you will let your emotions control your life, and you will self-destruct. The process will be like this. It’ll be called self-justification. You’ll justify why it’s okay to do the wrong thing. And then it’s self-deception. You will lie to yourself and convince yourself you’re not wrong. And then it’ll be self-absorption where you become totally absorbed with it and you try to recruit others to your side. And then there’s self-destruction when finally you come to the end of the road and the bridge is out and off you go because you had no way to know which direction to go. You left the path of uprightness and that’s what happens. Proverbs 2, 12 through 15, stay away from the evil person. He leaves the path of unrighteousness or of uprightness and walks in the way of darkness. And the verse 14 says he rejoices in doing evil. The sin nature lust pattern. This person, whoever it might be that Solomon wrote about, the evil man, he enjoys his crooked ways. He delights in the abnormal because it makes him seem powerful and smarter than other people. The abnormal people that get into abnormal practices and abnormal things, they think they’re so smart and they think you don’t even know what life is all about. And they rejoice in doing evil. Evil is none other than Satan’s plan. Evil can be sin. I mean, all sin is evil, yes, for sure. But evil is also a system. It’s the system that Satan uses to copy the grace of God. The grace of God says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. That’s grace. For by grace are you saved through faith. Not of yourselves, it’s a gift of God, not of works. That’s grace. Evil says this, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and give up eating peanuts and you’ll be saved. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and… Give up drinking sodas and you’ll be saved. See, they always want to add something. There’s nothing to add. The work was finished on the cross when Jesus Christ, our Lord, cried out the words, Tetelestai. It is finished. Your redemption was provided by him on the cross. That’s why the Bible says he that knew no sin was made sin for us so that we could be made the righteousness of God through him. This man, this evil man rejoices in doing evil because it makes him powerful. He looks like he’s smarter than other people, when reality is he is a fool and an idiot, and he is on the road to self-destruction. Verse 14, they delight in the perverseness of the wicked. In other words, they take great joy in turning from what is right, and they find fellowship with the ones who turned away from God’s plan. And this is always interesting. You take a believer out of fellowship with God, or an unbeliever, who’s into some perverse stuff, they’re gonna gravitate to other perverse people. That’s the way it goes. You always turn away from the truth and you can find fellowship with others who turn away from the truth because there’s some sort of camaraderie there in the negative volition. You find other people that think like you think. That’s what it is. I mean, I’m looking for people that think like I think. I’m looking for you. If you have a hunger, For the Word of God, I want to be your best friend. If you have an insatiable desire to be rich spiritually, I want to be your best friend. We can talk about the Word of God, fellowship around the Word of God, enjoy the company of each other. But if you’re interested in going down the my way highway, if you’re interested in the perverse and the abnormal, I don’t want anything to do with you. And that needs to be your attitude as well. So verse 16 of Proverbs 2 says, discretion can deliver you even from a strange woman who flatters with words. Now we can apply this scripture in every goal we have in life. We have to be alert to adopt new strategies and alter the course of our life whenever we see potential dangers or potential pitfalls. So let me say it again. We can apply this scripture to every goal we have in life. We have to be alert to adopt new strategies and alter the course whenever we see danger, pitfalls ahead. That’s the caution light blinking. That’s the discernment. Exercising discernment or caution in this way is practical. It’s prudence. It’s discretion. In our case, the word for discernment means to use good judgment or have the ability to know when to keep your mouth shut. Did you hear me? There are times you must keep your mouth shut. You know, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and look like a fool than to speak and remove all doubt to those that are in the periphery. So let me give you just a little rundown here. When did you keep your mouth shut? Well, Proverbs said, when you’re angry, keep your mouth shut. Proverbs 14, 17, a short-tempered person acts stupidly, and a person who plots evil is hated. Ecclesiastes 7, 9, don’t be quick to get angry. Anger is typical of a fool. All the wisdom of Proverbs and Solomon. Ephesians 4, 31, Paul said, get rid of your bitterness. Get rid of your hot temper. Get rid of your anger and quarrels and cursing and hatred. So keep your mouth shut when you get angry because you’re going to say something you’ll regret. Keep your mouth shut when you’re tempted to lie. Proverbs 6, 16. There are six things the Lord hates. Seven of them are disgusting to him. And then it mentions arrogant eyes, a lying tongue, hands that murder, a mind that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift to run to mischief, and a dishonest witness who spits out lies. Proverbs 12, 22, lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal faithfully are his delight. So you should keep your mouth shut if you’re tempted to lie. When you’re tempted to straighten out an idiot, keep your mouth shut. It’s not going to work. Proverbs 9, 7, and 8, he who corrects a fool gets dishonor for himself. And he who reproves a wicked man gets insulted for himself. Can’t tell a fool anything. Might as well forget it and move on and let the justice of God deal with him. You should keep your mouth shut when you’re tempted to speak without having all the facts, the Bible says. Proverbs 10, 14, those who are wise store up knowledge. But the mouth of a stubborn fool invites ruin. You should keep your mouth shut when you’re tempted to say more than you should say. You have to be careful here. Proverbs 10, 19, sin is unavoidable when there is much talk. but whoever seals his lips is wise. And you should always keep your mouth shut when you’re tempted to change the word of God and pervert the truth. Proverbs 10, 31, the mouth of a righteous person increases wisdom, but a devious tongue will be cut off by the justice of God, I repeat. And you really need to keep your mouth shut if you’re tempted to malign your neighbor. Proverbs 11, verse nine, with his talk, a godless person can ruin his neighbor, but righteous people are rescued by knowledge. And Proverbs 13, three, The one who guards his words guards his life, but whoever is talkative will come to ruin. So there you have it. You must keep your mouth shut at certain times, especially if you have a quick temper. Proverbs 14, 17, a short-tempered person acts stupidly and a person who plots evil is hated. You must keep your mouth shut when you’re tempted to say hateful things too. Proverbs 15, 4, a soothing tongue is a tree of life. but a deceitful tongue breaks the spirit. There’s more, a lot more of these. It’s all found in the word of God. I’ll come back and give you some more next week, I promise. Is this ringing a bell with you? Are you listening? You want to have some discernment, wisdom, understanding, discernment, prudence? and then you need to pay attention. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re learning. This whole radio show is for you. Every show I’ve ever done over the last 12 years is for you. I hope you’re growing. I hope you’re learning. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flotline.
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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.
