The Heart
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 575 aired on September 4, 2016
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next 30
minutes please join me, stay with me, 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration, education, all done
without any manipulation. You’ve heard that before because you know that on this radio show
we’re not trying to sell you anything, we’re not trying to hustle you, we’re not trying to get you
to join up. We’re just offering to give you some accurate information, not human speculation, but
accurate information that I think will help you verify as well as identify God’s plan for your life
and if you’re able to do this, then you can take the information and make the application if you
want to do so. I mean it’s your life, you’re responsible for it, you make decisions every day about
your health and your finances and your friends. So my prayer is that you will understand how
bad decisions limit future options. It is not God’s will for you to make a lot of bad decisions
because when you do this you box yourself in and the first bad decision you make is to reject
Jesus Christ as your Savior. That’s the worst decision anyone could ever make because there’s no
way out of this. The Bible says,
“It’s appointed unto man once to die and after that the
judgment,”
and if you come to the judgment and you haven’t accepted Christ as your Savior, you
leave the justice of God no alternative because the righteousness of God will not be satisfied.
This is the neat thing here, God’s righteousness was satisfied through Jesus Christ. Thus, 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.”
So when I come to Christ and receive Him as my Savior I’m given His
righteousness, it’s credited to me. He took my sin, He gives me His righteousness and now the
justice of God is satisfied because He looks at me and sees Christ. If I reject Christ, if I try to go
to God on my own human standards, on my own good works, then the Bible says,
“There are
none that are righteous, not even one. All of our good works are like a filthy rag in God’s eyes.”
So my relative righteousness won’t stand. God’s justice must judge me and I’ll wind up in the
Lake of Fire apart from believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. So that’s the first bad decision, there’s
no answer. The second bad decision is when a believer in Jesus Christ decides to go down the
My Way Highway. He decides to ignore God’s laws and God’s plan, he rejects the establishment
concepts taught in the Bible, and he allows his sin nature to dictate policy in control of his life.
Much like Sampson did in the Bible, one of the greatest strongest men that ever lived but who
wound up self-destructing because of his own weaknesses and his own failures. It’s so easy, it is
so easy to self-destruct. All it takes is a little bit of arrogance you see, and arrogance goes like
this. When you justify why it’s okay to do something that you know is wrong, then you deceive
yourself into thinking you’re okay and then you get totally absorbed with this and then you
destroy yourself. So arrogance always follows self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption,
self-destruction. You make enough bad decisions, you’ll destroy yourself, you’ll wind up with no
options left. I cannot tell you how many people do this every year, for medical reasons or
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financial reasons or spiritual reasons or whatever.
“We sow to the wind and we reap the
whirlwind,”
the Bible says. Listen, it’s critical that you don’t self-destruct. God has a wonderful
plan for you and this plan is for you to be happy and have a marvelous life. The Bible says,
“Happiness belongs to those people who hear God’s Word and who keep it.”
To the extent that
you don’t hear God’s Word or learn God’s Word you’re never going to be happy because you’re
never going to have divine solutions. You’re always going to have human solutions and human
solutions are no solutions. I mean it’s like asking somebody in a newspaper to tell you what you
should do about some complicated problem you have when the Bible already tells you what you
should do about it. And so it’s important that you listen today. It’s important that you learn these
things because your life is at stake. The very happiness of your life is at stake. You don’t want to
go through life being miserable. You don’t want to go through life being full of regrets and
second-guessing everything that you do. So please stay with me and stay tuned and learn what
these problem-solving devices are.
The Bible has a lot to say about the heart.
It mentions the
heart more than 800 times. We’re not talking about a heart attack, you know people have heart
attacks every day, heart problems. The Bible speaks of it not in relationship to the organ that’s
located in your chest but the Bible talks about the heart as the thing that is located between your
ears. Now you may call that your mind but the Bible calls this your heart, your
kardia.
See what
you have up there is you have a
nous,
N.O.U.S., that’s a mind and you have a K.A.R.D.I.A., you
have a heart.
The
nous
or the mind is where you assimilate information and the
kardia
or the
heart is where you apply or use the information.
Thus there are two lobes up there, right lobe,
left lobe joined by millions of nerves forming a thick cable. I think they call it a corpus callosum.
And the left lobe is called the
nous
in the original Greek manuscript of the Bible, in the New
Testament, and the right lobe is called the
kardia
. And so when the Bible says in Ephesians 6:6
that we should,
“Do the will of God from the heart,”
that’s not talking about emotions. When
we’re talking about the heart we’re not talking about a feel-good emotion, we’re talking about
the right lobe of the soul. Listen, your head, you’ve got a left and right side up there. One side
perceives it, the other side applies it. One side is where it comes in, the other side is where it
goes out. This is what’s so interesting as we study this, if you don’t think the heart can think, if
you doubt what I’m telling you, you say, “Aw, the Bible doesn’t say anything about the heart
being a thinking mechanism.” Well listen as I read it to you.
Proverbs 23:7,
“As a man thinketh
in his heart so he is.”
Yes, your heart thinks.
It’s not talking about the organ in your chest, it’s
talking about the brain between your ears. That’s where your heart is when the Bible talks about
it. Listen to Proverbs 3:1,
“My son, forget not my law but let thy heart keep my mandates.”
So
now you have the heart making a volitional decision to say, “Yes, I will obey you,” that’s positive
volition. Negative volition is you saying, “No, I will not obey you,” and this is the interesting
thing. God gave you volition. He did not make you into a small automaton who has no choice.
You can choose to believe in Jesus Christ, you can choose to reject Jesus Christ, you can choose
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to obey God, or you can choose to reject God’s Word. The first issue of negative volition found in
the Bible was in eternity past in heaven when Satan chose to make himself higher than God.
When he chose to ascend to the throne of God he used his superior intelligence, his superior
energy and brilliance, and everything else that he had and he made a decision,
“I want to be like
the most high God.”
When you and I self-destruct we make a decision and this decision is made
in the heart. That’s why it’s critical that you understand
the heart is where the real you is.
Listen
to Proverbs 23:12,
“Apply thine heart unto instruction and your ears to the words of
knowledge.”
So what this is saying is that as a believer in Jesus Christ you must learn
instructions, you must learn God’s Word. Jesus Christ our Lord put it like this, He said,
“Come
unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I’ll give you rest.”
He said,
“Take My yoke
upon you and learn of Me. My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
What exactly is it that we
need to learn? Do you understand this? What we have to learn is the protocol plan of God. We
have to learn how this thing works. We live a supernatural life. We have supernatural assets. We
have supernatural ability. You say, “What do you mean?” Well, we have God the Holy Spirit, no
one else has this, only believers in Jesus Christ. We have God the Holy Spirit and we have God’s
Word and the Bible says,
“It’s alive and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword.”
There
are about 40 things you get the moment you believe in Christ so you must learn the protocol plan
of God. What do you think the disciples did for three years as they went with the Lord Jesus
Christ and traveled with Him? They learned, they watched, they listened, they learned. They had
to learn because He said, “I’m going to leave you. They’re going to kill Me and you’re going to
have to learn how to handle things without Me being present and without Me having to tell you
what to do.” He warned them about that. This is what believers must do. We must learn God’s
Word. Why? Because the Bible says,
“Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.”
Listen, if you don’t hear the Word of God you don’t have any faith, you’re not learning, you’re not
growing. There are over 7,000 promises recorded in the Bible. How many of them do you know
because that’s the source of your faith. Those are the rationales you use to make your stand for
God when disaster and tragedy and adversity hit your life. What stabilizes you? What anchors
you? It’s your faith. It’s called the faith-rest drill and this is problem-solving device number three
on the FLOT line of your soul. We’ve taught this. If you don’t remember it let me know. And
we’ll send you material on it. It’s up to you but it’s the single most significant contributor to your
stability in the Christian life and you must learn information to have strong faith. It’s not like a
little train trying to go over a mountain pulling hard and saying, “I think I can. I think I can. I
think I can.” That’s not what it is. It’s the strength of essence in your heart from learning God’s
Word and storing it inside of you where it becomes wisdom or what the Greek New Testament
calls
sophia
. When you have
sophia
or wisdom, then you have strength and the doctrine that
you’ve learned, the Word of God that you’ve learned is cycled from your
nous
or from your
mind over to your heart where it is stored in your memory center and there you can recall it when
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you need it and it comes out as wisdom. This is the smart thing to do. This is what God wants me
to do. Now if you don’t have this, you may be calling the preacher saying, “What should I do
preacher?” Or you may go to a friend and you may say, “What should I do Joe?” or Sally, or
whatever. You can’t live your life on what someone else tells you all the time. I have people write
to me and say, “What do you think I should do about this?” I don’t answer these questions. I’m
not here to tell anybody what to do. I’m just here to give you information and lead you to where
you can get more information, where you can get under a well-qualified pastor, and you can
learn and study and grow and you can decide for yourself what you should do. It’s not my job to
tell you what to do nor is it the pastor’s job.
It’s God the Holy Spirit’s job to lead you as you
learn God’s Word and put it in your soul in the wisdom department. So when a question
comes up you go pull it out and say, “This is what the Bible says so this is what I do.”
The
Bible says in Proverbs 23:12,
“Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to the words of
knowledge”
Knowledge is the greatest thing you could have. You don’t think so? Knowledge,
you say, “How could this be better than gold? How could this be better than silver? How could
this be better than whatever?” Listen to the Lord,
“Happiness belongs to those people who hear
My Father’s Word and keep it,”
Luke 11:27-28. How’s that? You want to be happy? It’s not about
winning the lottery, it’s not about getting a lot of gold. It’s about hearing God’s Word and keeping
it because when you hear God’s Word consistently, it goes into your
nous
and then you believe it
and you cycle it over to your heart where you store it and it becomes wisdom. You in essence
become rich, rich. Paul said he gave us a treasure in our earthly bodies and the treasure word in
the New Testament, it may shock you when you hear this word, but it’s the word in the original
Greek New Testament called
thesauros
. That’s right, it’s a word treasure. The treasure of the
Word of God in your soul makes you rich. You can have happiness when no one else is happy.
You can have peace when no one else has peace. You can have confidence when no one else has
confidence. You never have to be bitter, you never have to be angry, you never have to be afraid.
That’s the unique thing about the Christian life. But if you don’t learn the Word of God, you will
never understand this and never understand how to access this stuff. And you know if God wants
to see what you’re thinking, He says, “Let Me check on Rick Hughes today,” your host, me. “Let
Me check on Rick Hughes today and see what he’s doing.” What do you think He’s going to do,
peek down at me and look at what I’m wearing? “I wonder what he’s wearing today?” Listen to
what the Bible says.
If God wants to see what I’m thinking, He looks at my heart. 1 Samuel
16:7,
“The Lord does not see as man sees, for man looks on the outward appearance but the
Lord looks on the heart.”
The heart, not the organ that pumps blood, He’s looking inside your
ears, between your ears. He’s not looking at the
nous
where the information is received. He’s
looking at the heart where the information is stored. In other words God wants to know what you
know, He wants to know what you know about Him. How can you love Him if you don’t know
Him? What’s the essence of God, do you know this? How can you love a God, you don’t even
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know what He’s made out of? He’s sovereignty and righteousness and justice and love and
immutability and veracity and eternal life and omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, these
are some of His characteristics. Do you know any of these? Do you know what this means? You
love God, I’m sure you say you love God. If I ask you, “Do you love God?” You would say,
“Yes, I love God.” 1 John 5:3 says,
“If you love Me you’ll keep My mandates and My mandates
are not grievous.”
That’s the motivation to obey Him, it’s love for Him. Well what’s one of the
first mandates?
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,”
grow, spiritual growth. God wants you to grow spiritually and not be a spiritual baby all your
life. He can’t put you into the conflict if you don’t know the plan. You have to learn, you have to
grow. That’s why the Bible says,
“Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that
needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth.”
Are you going to get to heaven
and have eternal life and be ashamed because you blew it, you never took the opportunity to
learn God’s plan? Yeah you got saved, yeah you accepted Christ as your Savior but then you
skipped on off down the road and got distracted. You never learned, thus you lived a life of
misery because you compounded one bad decision on top of another bad decision until
eventually you just wanted to beat your brains out because you got so frustrated from doing
things your way and you could have saved yourself a lot of misery had you just learned God’s
Word. That’s why the Bible says,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
God
wants you to learn how Christ thought because that was the true man. What did He think like?
Well the Bible says,
“He made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Himself the form of a
slave and humbled Himself,”
He had a humility profile. That’s what we must have, a humility
profile and how are you going to have a humility profile if you’re bowed up angry and fighting
for power and fighting for recognition and struggling, that’s not a humility profile.
What we
think is very important. For this reason we are told to guard our hearts, Proverbs 4:23,
“Guard your heart with diligence.”
Why should I guard my heart? I can tell you exactly why.
Because you have an enemy, a.k.a. the devil, and he would like to steal this information. How
does this happen? If the rate of learning does not exceed the rate of forgetting you can forget a lot
of what you learned and he can cause you to be very distracted by following the details of life.
Satan will give you whatever you want as long as you don’t study, as long as you don’t grow, as
long as you don’t replicate the life of Christ, as long as he can neutralize you by giving you a
little whatever it is you want. You’re not guarding your heart, you didn’t guard the doctrine you
learned, you forgot it.
The rate of learning must be greater than the rate of forgetting.
Already you know what I’m talking about don’t you? You’ve forgotten stuff you learned a long
time ago. Oh, you say, “I remember that little prayer, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the
Lord my soul to keep.’” Yeah, we all remember that little prayer. The Christian life is about a lot
more than this little prayer. You know the Bible says we’re not to harden our hearts.
We’re not
to get in rebellion against God, not to harden our hearts.
That’s this part of the head we’re
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talking about again. Proverbs 28:14,
“He that hardens his heart shall fall into trouble.”
What
does harden your heart mean? It’s referring to you creating scar tissue on your soul. Ephesians
4:17 talks about where Paul warned the believers,
“Not to walk as the Gentiles walk in the
emptiness of their mind,”
in the vacuum of their soul and he explained how they get
porosis
or
the hardness of the heart,
“whose heart gets hardened.”
When your heart gets hardened you
don’t feel conviction anymore. You don’t feel shame, you don’t feel wrong. You can do
something and you know it’s wrong and it doesn’t even bother you. That’s why we have so many
murders and crimes in America today, we have generations of young people whose hearts are
hard. There’s so much scar tissue. They don’t feel conviction. They don’t feel wrong. They don’t
feel as if they’ve done anything wrong. They claim a victim mentality and that’s nothing but self-
justification and arrogance, justifying why it’s okay to rob you or why it’s okay to shoot you.
What a sin filled country we live in huh? We’re in sad shape with a lot of hard hearts running
around. When you imagine evil thoughts it comes from your heart also. In Genesis 8:21,
“The
imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
No one sat you down and taught you how to
lie. No one sat you down and taught you how to hate. No one sat you down and taught you how
to be jealous. No one said, “Okay, let me teach you how to steal now.” I mean this started when
you were a little kid and you were playing with a little kid next door and you took his toy soldier,
you took his truck or you took your sister’s clothes and you didn’t ask. You know what I’m
talking about, that’s your sin nature, you’ve got a sin nature. You got it from Adam. It’s inside of
you, it’s a cancer and it will always be with you until you die and get a new body, a resurrection
body and in your resurrection body you will not have a sin nature. Did you know that God can
clean your dirty heart? Yes. When you get saved God removes the scar tissue. In Psalm 51:10,
“Create in me a clean heart.”
That’s one of the first things that happens when you believe in
Christ. All scar tissue is removed and your heart is clean sort of like a blackboard in the
classroom that’s all dirty and chalky and you get a wet sponge and clean it up and it’s all nice and
black and clean again. The Bible says in Jeremiah 17:9,
“The heart is deceitful above all things
and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”
I mean why so much talk about the heart? Why is it
so important? Because it’s where your true character is formed. It holds the secret to true success
in your life and the treasures of your heart are priceless. Think of the priceless memories that you
have. The treasures are keeping God’s Word and the true formula for success and true character
where you are un-intimidated by anything that the devil may throw your way. What I have to ask
you today is important. Are you guarding your heart or do you need a cleansing of your heart?
Let me remind you the Bible says,
“If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us of
our sin and to purify us from all wrongdoing.”
You can cleanse your heart today by going to God
and admitting your sin. If you hide it and act like you didn’t do it, you’re just going to build up
more scar tissue. I suggest to you that you just simply go to the Father and say, “I screwed up.
I’ve done wrong. I’m sorry.” You don’t have to tell Him you’re sorry, the Bible just says,
“If you
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name it,”
but to be honest I always say I’m sorry. Tell Him, “I’m sorry Father, please forgive
me,” and He will do it. That’s all He’s waiting on is for you to announce your sin and He is
faithful and just to forgive you when you do this. 1 John 1:9 is our problem solving device called
rebound and you rebound every time you confess a known sin to God. That’s why the heart is
important. That’s why this information is important. This is one of the most important shows I’ve
ever given to you. Now, again, where is your heart? Between your ears. Yeah, there’s an organ
called the heart in your chest but you know you could get a heart transplant and the real you is
still there. Doesn’t this prove what I’m talking about? Take your heart out, put another guy’s
heart in there, you’re still you. The real you is what’s between your ears, it’s your heart, it’s your
mind, it’s your thoughts.
The heart is where you live the Christian life.
That’s what God looks
at when He wants to check you out. That’s what can get hard and calloused and cold. So think
about it. Listen to these things. Learn from these things. If I can help you, all you need to do is
contact me. I’ll be glad to write back and send you whatever material that you need. This show is
designed for one thing, to encourage you to
“Grow in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ.”
So until next week this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for
listening to the FLOT Line