The Importance of Scripture – Part 2
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 613 aired on May 21, 2017
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I am your host Rick Hughes and for the next
few minutes I’d like to invite you to stay with me, a short time of motivation, some inspiration, a
whole lot of education, with no manipulation. That’s right, no hidden agendas, not trying to sell
you anything, this is not an infomercial. It is simply a show about the Bible, that’s all. Some
information that I’d like to give you I hope will help you verify and identify God’s plan for your
life. If you’re able to do this, you can orient and adjust to the plan as you please, that’s up to you.
God didn’t make you a little robot, an automaton. He gave you freedom, free will. He gave you a
volition. He gave you the right to choose and the Bible says in Joshua 24:15,
“Choose you this
day who you will serve, but as for me and my house
we will serve the Lord,” G
ood morning,
welcome to The FLOT Line. We started a study last Sunday when I was with you on the
importance of Scripture, the importance of knowing the Scripture, and being able to discern the
Scripture, being able to tell when someone teaches the Scripture that he gives the sense of the
verse and the meaning of the verse. That is, what the verse really means and what’s the sense,
what’s it trying to say to you, not taking it out of context. You know, there are so many people
that teach the Bible, there are so many Bibles being sold, it’s amazing, the number one selling
book in the world. They’ve got a hunting Bible, a marriage Bible, a widow’s Bible, a whatever
Bible. Everybody wants to sell you a Bible but very few people want to teach the Bible
accurately from the original languages. Many pastors do have Greek and Hebrew training but
they don’t use it, they put it aside when they get out of seminary and that’s a mistake. It’s critical
that you take a look at these verses in the original languages so you can see what the original
intent of the verse was. I always love the way my pastor did it. He did what we called the ICE
technique, I.C.E., isogogical, categorical and exegetical. This simply mean the isogogics of the
word. What did the word mean then? What does it mean now? Then he would do the category. If
you’re studying a verse like John 3:16, you may have the category of God, the category of love,
the category of the world, so he would develop categorical studies. Then exegesis means that he
would go line by line, word by word, verse by verse, because every jot and every tittle in the
Bible is important.
Everything in the Bible is inspired by God for a reason.
If I were teaching
you the book of John, we would go through the book of John beginning with chapter 1 verse 1 all
the way through the end of the book through the last verse in the book. We would go line by
line, word by word, verse by verse. That’s how you learn the Bible. There’s nobody that can teach
the book of Romans in a week. There’s nobody that can teach the book of John in a week. We
have church services where we have the January Bible study or the February Bible study and
somebody comes in and wants to teach you the book in a week. You can’t understand it that way
and sometimes they want to sell you their study guide to go with it. Then we get into marketing
and I stand firm on this.
God does not tolerate marketing His Word.
We are not allowed to
market the Word of God.
We’re not allowed to sell the Word of God.
We got it free, we give it
613-The-Importance-of-Scripture-p2-transcript.pdf
away free and yet in today’s modern Christianity, it’s all about marketing. Whether it’s accurate or
not, whether it’s true or not, that’s another issue but this issue is about selling the Word of God. If
God’s in it, He will pay for it. You don’t have to hustle the money up. I learned this a long time
ago. My pastor taught me this and I’ve always lived by this principle. Now, we’re going to
continue our study today about how to get close to God and we’re doing this under the
importance of understanding the Scripture, the sense and the meaning of the Scripture. In
Jeremiah 9:23,
“And you shall seek Me and find Me when
[notice, when]
you search for Me
with all your heart.”
Remember that you have a mind, M.I.N.D., and you have a heart. Both of
these are inside your head up there. Your mind in the Greek New Testament is the word
nous
,
N.O.U.S. and the word for your heart is
kardia.
The mind is where you assimilate information
and the heart is where you store the information and apply the information. Information that
comes into your mind is simply comprehended.
Information that is believed in your mind and
applied into your heart becomes wisdom.
If you want to search for God, you have to search
with all your heart and that means that you have positive volition, that you’re hungry for truth,
that you want to know truth, that you’re not playing games, you don’t have an angle, you’re not
trying to manipulate God so God can get you out of a jam. You want to know God and His Word.
I don’t know if there was really a point in my life where I came to the fact that I had to study the
Word of God, but I know that after I became a Christian, many people tried to manipulate me
and coerce me into doing things that I didn’t feel right doing such as raising money or such as
buttonholing people on the street. I wouldn’t beat people over the head with the Bible or
whatever, but I love to witness to people. I love to share Christ with people. But there were
things that I was not comfortable with. As I grew and as I eventually found a well-qualified
pastor that could teach me, there was nothing wrong with me, that I was thinking clearly and the
more he taught, the more I learned, the more I learned, the more I understood that I didn’t know.
That’s the way it is with you.
If you want to get close to God, you study His Word, you study
His Word consistently under a pastor who has the gift who can teach it to you and you will
discover, like me, the more you know about God, the more you realize you don’t know.
We
know He is immanent. We know He is transcendent. We know He is omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent but we don’t know a whole lot about what He looks like because we have this image
in our head of what we think He looks like. We know He looks like Jesus Christ. He is God.
Christ is God that’s manifested in the flesh, God in the flesh. Jesus was God, is God, and is in
heaven today in the presence of God the Father. We have God the Son, God the Father, and God
the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit that lives in you and the Holy Spirit that lives in me and we
are told to let the Holy Spirit control our life, to run our life, to run the show. That’s why the
Bible says be filled with the Spirit. Don’t walk in the flesh. Don’t let the flesh control you, that’s
carnality. So if you’re going to get close to God, you’re going to have to learn His Word. You’re
going to have to be under a qualified pastor. You’re going to have to study it and apply it in your
life and the more you learn about God, the more you will come to understand Him. It’s not an
emotional thing. It’s not you going to a mountaintop. It’s not you going to a retreat somewhere
613-The-Importance-of-Scripture-p2-transcript.pdf
and feeling really close to God because there was a big bonfire and you all sang,
Oh how I love
Jesus
, until nobody could sing it anymore and you felt closer to God. That’s not how it happens.
Apart from accumulating divine viewpoint, apart from learning the Word of God, you’ll
never know Him and you’ll never be able to please Him because you’ll go about it your
way.
You will try to make up the rules as you go along and there’s protocol when you deal with
God, which means that a right thing must be done in a right way. You can do a right thing like
going to church and praying and giving money and etc., but you can do it in the wrong way.
When it’s done in the wrong way, then it’s simply wood, hay, and stubble and according to 1
Corinthians 3 at the Judgment Seat of Christ it will be burned up, it won’t be accepted. It was a
right thing done in the wrong way. Once you learn the mandates of Scripture, then the test is
always going to be, will you obey the mandates of Scripture? If you learn divine viewpoint, if
you learn God’s Word, then the Word of God is capable of guiding your thoughts.
The Word of
God is capable of directing your thoughts.
Listen to Colossians 3:15,
“Let the peace of God
rule in your hearts,”
be in the heart, not the mind. To rule is the Greek word
brabeuo
and it
means to be an umpire, to be a judge. The Word of God is designed to judge your thoughts and to
control your habits, not only your bad habits but your good habits, your lifestyle, your destiny.
As you learn God’s Word, it rules your thoughts.
Whenever there is a confusion of thought in
the soul and whenever this happens, you have to choose to decide which way you’re going to go.
“Am I going to do this?” “Am I going to do that?” “What does the Bible say? Okay I know what
the Bible says. Now what am I willing to do?” If you’re not willing to obey what the Bible says,
then why study the Bible? Then some people say, “Well, you know two or three people can get
two or three different meanings out of this.” Yep, they sure can sometimes, when they don’t go to
the original languages, that’s for sure.
Learning the truth of the Scripture, the truth of the
logos,
the Word of God, not the person
logos,
Jesus, but the Word of God, Bible doctrine on
a consistent basis, establishes protectors in your soul.
God actually has soul protectors one of
my friends said. I like that, soul protectors, which give us wisdom in time of satanic attack and it
keeps the human viewpoint from invading your soul. This is why Paul said in Colossians 1:9,
“We don’t cease to pray for you and we desire that you might be filled with the knowledge of His
will in all wisdom, in all spiritual understanding,”
in other words, to have responsible spiritual
intelligence. If you fail to learn God’s system, if you fail to learn how the protocol plan of God
works, if you fail to execute His plan you wind up being a Christian casualty on the battlefield,
sucked into the cosmic vortex, this invisible zeitgeist in history, the invisible lure like a tornado
whirling around and sucking you into it, human viewpoint thinking, the lure of the devil, the
times of the world. The Bible says in Hosea 8:7,
“If you sow to the wind, then you’re going to
reap the whirlwind,”
this vortex.
It’s very easy for a Christian to get into the cosmic vortex.
You may know some family member that’s in the cosmic vortex. They’re believers, they’ve
accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior, there’s not a doubt about this but they let sin get into their
life. They did not confess their sin to God. They grew cold or disinterested in God’s plan. They
got interested in some other human endeavor and the cosmic vortex whirled them off down the
613-The-Importance-of-Scripture-p2-transcript.pdf
road and now you don’t see them anymore. They will be dumped out somewhere in life just like
a tornado dumps out all the debris that it sucks up. Eventually they’ll be dumped out somewhere
and this dumping place is called the sin unto death. There are three types of discipline: warning
discipline, intense discipline, and dying discipline. When you don’t respond to the warning
discipline, even though God loves you, He warns you, Hebrews 12:6 tells us this. He scourges us
sometimes, that’s the intense discipline, and then sometimes He just has to take us home because
we are unfit, we’re too hard-headed, we’re too arrogant. That’s where it all comes from, it comes
from arrogance. The misunderstanding of who you are and what you are, this unrealistic self-
image we get when we justify the things that we do, thinking that it’s okay even though the Word
of God says it’s not okay, we justify it and then we become self-absorbed with it.
If you’re going
to learn God’s Word, it’ll keep you out of this cosmic vortex. Colossians 3:25,
“For he who
does wrong receives the consequences and God is not a respecter of persons.”
I don’t care
who you are, me, you, anybody else, any famous Christian celebrity, get out of the will of
God, sin, walk away from what the Scripture says and you’re in for it, you’re in for
discipline.
The cosmic system is out there. It’s the devil’s viewpoint. It’s the devil’s plan. It’s
human viewpoint where all the human viewpoint is spawned in the world, in the cosmic system.
That’s what the cosmic vortex is, it’s you operating in the cosmic system. Listen to 1 John 2,
“Stop loving the kosmos or anything related to the kosmos. If anyone keeps on loving the
kosmos, then the love of the Father is not in him because all that’s in the kosmos, the lust of the
flesh, the lust of the eyes, the arrogant pattern of life, is not from the Father.”
The cosmic system
has its own communion cup, did you know this? Maybe you’ve taken communion at church and
you should in remembrance of what Jesus Christ our Lord did for you. In 1 Corinthians 10:21,
“You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.”
You cannot partake of the table
of the Lord and the table of demons. The false doctrine, the false system, the lure of the world,
it’s all out there and if you going to be in fellowship with God and I would warn you about this,
if you take communion in your church, make sure there’s no unconfessed sin in your life because
when you take communion with known sin in your life, you’re asking for divine discipline. You
are insulting the character of God when you do this. You must be sure when you take
communion that you go to the Father before the communion elements are served and simply bow
your head and say, “Father, if there is any sin in my life, show me now. I want to confess it, I
want to purge it out,” and then God will be faithful to reveal it to you. You can’t take communion
with known sin without getting discipline for it. God’s protocol plan and Satan’s cosmic system
are mutually exclusive. They don’t work together, they’re totally different. If you are a believer in
Jesus Christ, you might choose to live your life outside of God’s protocol plan and you might flirt
around with the cosmic system in your frantic search for happiness, in your human viewpoint
thinking. It’s so easy to do this. It’s so easy as a Christian to step out of the plan of God, to quit
following the rules and then make your own rules up. It’s easy in the field of love and romance
because you meet someone and you think you love this person. This happens all the time, it
happens to young girls and young men. You’re a believer and they’re not and you say, “Well, I
613-The-Importance-of-Scripture-p2-transcript.pdf
love him and they are fantastic and we have a great time together, but I’m a Christian. He’s not a
Christian.” What does the Bible say? Don’t do it. The Bible says absolutely never marry an
unbeliever, but you in your arrogance say, “Oh, I’ll change him,” or “I’ll change her.” You go
ahead and you marry the unbeliever because you think you love this person and the end result is
you step out of the protocol plan of God and you create more misery than you can ever solve in
your life. Marriage doesn’t solve problems, it compounds problems. When you put two sin
natures together, it doesn’t make anything go away. It makes it twice as bad. If you continue to
live your life, just in this one episode for example, marriage, you can go to finances, you can go
to a lot of different areas. If you choose to live your life outside of the protocol plan of God, you
are flirting in the cosmic system and you are searching for happiness and you will never find it.
You know, some of the richest men in the world have said these things. I remember Elvis Presley
said, “I’m lonely, so lonely. I’m rich and I’m famous but I’m lonely.” Rockefeller said, “I’ve made
millions but they brought me no happiness.” The only true source of happiness according to the
Lord Jesus Christ is found in Luke 11:27-28 where He told an interruptive woman who shouted
out at one of His messages, He told her,
“Happiness belongs to those who hear My Father’s
Word and who keep it.”
This means happiness is related to a clear conscience. This means
happiness is related to no guilt. This means happiness is related to living inside the protocol plan
of God,
“Hear My Father’s Word and keep it.”
How do we grow? We hear, without hearing
there’s no faith, so you have to hear.
What am I listening to? Am I going out in the woods and
listen to a bird chirp? No, I’m sitting in a church listening to a qualified pastor teach the Bible.
He has a spiritual gift, the gift of
poimen kai didaskalos
in the Greek New Testament, pastor and
teacher. It’s his job to teach. Now, maybe you can sit in that church or maybe there’s not a church
near you. You can do what I do, you can listen to DVDs. My church is not where I live so I get
the DVDs of my pastor and I study the DVDs. Each day I put on a DVD and I watch it, take
notes, open my Bible, sit down and study and learn and then on several occasions a year I will be
in that church. This is the way that I grow and it’s a way you can grow as well if there’s not a
church in your area. You let me know and I’ll connect you. I’ll give you the name where you can
get the same information I’m getting and then you can grow sitting right there in your home until
God reveals what you’re suppose to do. This cosmic system is Satan’s strategy as the ruler of this
world. It’s the way he can control you and manipulate you. It’s the way he can bend the rules and
you seem to think it’s okay because Satan will exploit believers through their own arrogance. He
has his propaganda machine, his indoctrination, and it always promotes antagonism towards
God. What Satan appeals to is always our own arrogance. The Bible says in James 4:6,
“God
makes war with the arrogant, but He gives grace to the humble.”
That’s our key, we have to
humble ourselves which means respect for authority.
Humility is teachability.
Nobody can learn
that doesn’t have any humility because they think they know it already. They think they don’t
need to hear it and you need to understand that Satan will target you if you’re arrogant. He will
manipulate you if you’re arrogant. He will use you to promote his scheme if you are arrogant.
You will be sucked into the cosmic vortex. You will be taken down the My Way Highway as we
613-The-Importance-of-Scripture-p2-transcript.pdf
say it and you will be discredited and I tell you, it’s a terrible life. Anybody who falls into this
satanic trap, you know Satan will target Scripture and he will tell you, “That’s not true. You don’t
really have to believe this.”
Satan will try to discredit Scripture,
just disapprove the Scripture,
and then you get sucked into his plan. There are three ways for you to get sucked into the cosmic
vortex, listen carefully. Number one is demon possession. Now, no believer can be demon
possessed. The Bible clearly says in 1 John 4:4,
“Greater is He that is in you than he that is in
the world.”
Demon possession is for unbelievers. A demon is a fallen angel, not some weird
dude, he’s a fallen angel and demon possession is real, was real in the Bible, is real today. Only
unbelievers can be indwelt by a demon and there’s all sorts of neurotic and psychotic behavior
manifested as a result of this. One of the quickest ways for an unbeliever to get into demon
possession is by rejecting legitimate authority such as law and order, police, whatever. These are
found in the laws of divine establishment. Many of these mass murderers, people that kill people
indiscriminately are in fact demon possessed. The Bible tells us in John 8:44,
“Satan was a
murderer from the beginning.”
That’s his M.O., it’s what he loves to do, to take people out so
they don’t accept Christ as Savior. That’s one way unbelievers get into the cosmic vortex, through
demon possession. Another way, and this one would be for any Christian, is by demon influence.
This is where believers have to fight the thinking of demons, the doctrine of demons. Believers
have their thoughts invaded by the thoughts of demons. Listen to 1 Timothy 4:1-2,
“But the
Spirit explicitly teaches that in the latter period of time, some believers will withdraw from sound
doctrine, giving heed to deceitful spirits and the doctrine of demons by means of hypocrisy of
liars seared in their own conscience by a branding iron.”
Satan has his own doctrine. Satan has
his own pastors and they teach the doctrine of demons and they can mislead you. They are
deceitful and they will take you into an area that you don’t belong into. It will create an
emotional revolt in your soul where your soul blacks out, you’ll develop scar tissue. Your heart
will get hard. You’ll no longer feel conviction about what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s why
Paul warns you in
Ephesians 4:27,
“Do not give the devil any opportunity in your life.”
You
can get into the cosmic vortex by demon influence or you can get into the cosmic vortex by
your own personal sin.
Curating sin in your life, not confessing your sin, getting out of
fellowship with God, developing a lifestyle of human good but not divine good which essentially
is nothing but evil, misrepresenting the plan of God, mis-living the plan of God, it looks real, it
sounds real but it’s counterfeit, it’s evil. Anytime you’re in one of these, you’re in the cosmic
system. That’s not where you belong. So how do you get out of the cosmic vortex? Well, if
you’re a Christian you rebound. You can escape the trap of the devil, 2 Timothy 2:25-26,
“Having been held captive by him to do his will.”
You can escape it by confessing your sin to
God, going to the Father and simply admitting your sin. Once you’re in this vortex it’s equal to a
lifestyle of spiritual death in time. You’re alive spiritually in eternity, that’s not the problem, but
in time, you’re out of fellowship. It’s like you’re spiritually dead in time, you have no fellowship
with God. If that’s happened to you, if you’ve lost your fellowship with God, if you don’t feel
like you’re advancing or growing, rebound, problem-solving device number one. Go to God,
613-The-Importance-of-Scripture-p2-transcript.pdf
admit your sin, confess your sin, and get under the ministry of a qualified pastor who can teach
you who you are, what you are, and how to handle the things you do.
That’s what the Word of
God is there for. It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of living, a different
mindset. It’s a mindset of humility not arrogance.
Boy, I hope you’re listening and I hope
you’re learning. I hope all of this is making sense to you. That’s why we do these radio shows.
This is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening