552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript
pdf
Page 1 of 6
552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript.pdf
The Plan Revealed
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 552 aired on March 13, 2016
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes stay with me for motivation, inspiration, some education, and no manipulation. I hope
that’s refreshing, no manipulation. I’m just trying to give you some accurate information to help
you verify as well as identify God’s plan for your life if you’re interested. This information
always comes from the Bible, God’s living Word. I’m reminded of a passage of Scripture that
says,
“The Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword”
(Hebrews
4:12). Whenever we meet, we’re always giving you Scripture. This is the basis of the authority
we represent, Scripture, nothing else. Not human viewpoint, not my viewpoint, but what does the
Bible say. As we move through life we find people that have their own viewpoint about politics,
finances, love and marriage, and often it is not what the Bible says. Thus it’s called human
viewpoint as opposed to God’s viewpoint. Legalism says that you earn your way to heaven by
what you do, that you have to be good, you have to avoid certain sins, and if you don’t avoid
these sins, well then you’re going to go to hell, people will tell you. However, this is not what the
Bible teaches. Unfortunately, religion seems to focus on this. Religion seems to focus on works
and it seems that in organized religion the more works you have, the more fruit they say that you
produce. They call it “producing fruit” and there’s always those people in churches that are fruit
inspectors. It’s sort of like the more good works you do, well then the better God’s going to smile
on you. Unfortunately, God does not operate this way. He cannot be manipulated. He cannot be
coerced. He’s doesn’t operate on emotions like you do. See, this is humanizing God and
humanizing God doesn’t work. He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. God even knows
what you’re thinking. God knew about you in eternity past before you ever became a figment of
your grandmother’s imagination. God knew you and provided for you a wonderful plan. This
plan started with His Son our Savior, the Anointed One, Jesus Christ coming and dying on the
cross for our sin, paying for our sin. This is why 2 Corinthians 5:21 says,
“He that knew no sin
was made sin for us.”
This had to be done because there was no way that you or I could redeem
ourselves out of the slave market of sin. Why could we not do this? Because Romans 3:10 says,
“There are none that are righteous, no, not even one.”
And “
All of our righteousnesses are like a
filthy rag in God’s eyes”
(Isaiah 64:6). I won’t give you the literal Hebrew interpretation of filthy
rag because it may be offensive. Some of you that have been around, you know what the
interpretation is. This is what God thinks about these good works.
As a believer in Jesus Christ
your good works will not carry you.
Number one, they won’t save you and number two, they
won’t carry you. In other words, they won’t carry you to the Judgment Seat of Christ and get you
any rewards. They are going to be burned up as wood, hay, and stubble. Hopefully you can
identify good works, let’s make sure we know what we’re talking about. Good works in regard to
salvation means you try to earn your way to heaven by not doing certain sins. You may think
since you haven’t fornicated with someone, you may think since you don’t cheat on your taxes,
552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript.pdf
and you may think since you were a member of the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts that you’re a good
person and it may be true. You may be a morally good person. If so, I’d like to know you, I like
meeting good people. This doesn’t qualify you or me for heaven.
“Not by works of righteousness
which we have done”
(Titus 3:5). It’s clear when Ephesians 2:8 says,
“For by grace are you
saved through faith. It’s a gift of God, not of works lest any man would brag about it.”
Yes, I
enjoy being around good people but good people don’t go to heaven unless they believe in Jesus
Christ and receive Him as their Savior. This is the problem, they don’t see a need for Christ,
especially people that are self-righteous. If they look into the mirror and they say to themselves,
“You know, I’m a pretty good person. I bet you that God will cut me some slack and give me a
break.” It’s not going to happen. The slack that God cut you started on the cross when Christ paid
for your sin. He doesn’t require you to pay for it. He required His only begotten Son to pay for it.
But self-righteous people don’t think they need redeeming because they don’t think they’re bad
enough. The bad people, the sinners, the prostitutes, the tax collectors such as found in Luke
15:1, they knew they were bad enough and they were the ones who believed in Jesus Christ. If a
person realizes who they are, then they know what they are. This is where it all starts, Proverbs
23:7,
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is.”
The real you is what you think and this
includes your motives, your intentions, and your desires.
God knows your motives for what
you do. He knows what you intend by what you do and He knows what your desires are. He’s
able to evaluate us based on this. 2 Chronicles 16:9 tells us,
“His eyes go to and fro across the
earth.”
Yes, He knows. So the next time you think that God is going to cut you some slack
because you’re a good person, please remember that this is not true. If it were, then Christ would
not have needed to come and die for us, to pay the penalty for us. We could have earned it
ourselves but we can’t. This is why so many people have a hard time with believing in Jesus
Christ and trusting in Christ alone, in faith alone in Christ alone. This is foreign to some people. I
hope it’s not foreign to you. I hope you have made the single greatest decision that any one
person can make, where Romans 10:13 says,
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord
shall be saved.”
If you at some point in your life have admitted to the Father that you are
willing to receive Christ as your Savior, this is the greatest decision you can ever make.
For
me it happened one night in a home as I was visiting with a friend for what I thought was a party
but turned out to be a Bible study. I wasn’t a Christian. I didn’t even belong there but that night I
heard the gospel. I heard how Christ died for me. I heard that He paid the penalty for my sin.
And the greatest news I heard was this, I could have peace with God, that I didn’t have to lay in
my bed at night and think about all the horrible things I’ve done and wonder, if I died would I go
to heaven? That night, by making a single decision to receive Christ as my Savior, my life
changed. This is why 2 Corinthians 5:17 says,
“If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old
things are passed away and all things become new.”
That night, I didn’t become different on the
outside. I was still the same person if you looked at me. But on the inside I was transformed, I
was given a new life. Spiritually speaking I was born again. My dead human spirit that was
identified with Adam’s original sin was born again and now I have a physical life as well as a
552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript.pdf
spiritual life, and I certainly had to learn how to live the spiritual life. It took me a long time as I
wandered around trying to be a “Good Christian,” listening to what other people told me I should
do. Things like, “Well you know. good Christians don’t do this and good Christians don’t do that
and if you want to be a good Christian, then do what I tell you to do.” It’s always weird. I
remember one time I purchased a gun, a handgun. This was years ago and I remember a “Good
Christian” getting offended at that. He said, “Well brother, don’t you trust God?” It’s ridiculous
that people get so absurd about these things. Listen, you trust God and I trust God and the Bible
doesn’t say, “You shall not own a handgun.” The Bible doesn’t say, “You shall not take a drink.”
The Bible doesn’t say,”You shall not dance.” The Bible doesn’t say, “You shall not smoke.” And
yet people come up with all these legislative rules about what they think the Bible says. It may
be a shock to you but it’s just as bad for a preacher to eat two chickens on Sunday afternoon as it
is for the owner of the house to drink two beers, if you think this is a sin. See what I’m saying?
There is a sin called gluttony. However, this is always overlooked because we want to go to the
“bad things” and if you do the “bad things,” then some say you can’t go to heaven. Bad people do
go to heaven every day because they have trusted in Jesus Christ as their Savior. They’re not
good in the eyes of the others who look at them. The Pharisees looked at people all the time, they
looked down their noses at people all the time and this is what our Lord was confronted with
constantly. The self-righteous, religious Pharisees who thought they were better than everyone
else and they were not. He called them,
“Dead men, vipers”
(Matthew 23:27-33). He detested
these, not in a way of sinning, I don’t mean that, but He detested their self-righteous attitude
because they rejected Him and rejected everything that He did to identify that He was in fact the
Messiah. They plotted to kill Him and eventually they succeeded in having Him tried before
Pilate. Even though Pilate said,
“I find nothing wrong with this Man”
(Luke 23:4), they insisted
that He be crucified. I’m thankful that He was crucified because this was God’s plan originally
from the beginning.
It was God’s plan for Christ to be crucified on the cross and He told the
disciples this was God’s plan.
He warned them that He was going to have to die and there was
not going to be the kingdom they expected to happen. They were going to have to wait for this
kingdom and they were going to have to take up their cross and follow Him as well. This
kingdom is yet to come. It’s called the Millennial Kingdom and it is coming. We don’t know
when but we know from 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 that He will return and He will resurrect the
dead from the grave.
“We will be caught up together with them in the clouds and thus shall we
ever more be with the Lord.”
Now, I only have one question. If this happened today would you
go? Would you be in heaven? Would you receive a resurrection body? Have you in fact trusted
Christ as your Savior? Do you even know for sure? Some people say, “Well, you can’t know for
sure Rick, there’s no way you could ever know for sure.” Oh yes there is. Let’s go to 1 John
5:12-13,
“These things are written so that you might know that you have eternal life. He that has
the Son has life and he that hath not the Son of God, hath not life.”
If you have received Jesus
Christ as your Savior, you have eternal life. Christ said,
“I will never leave you. I will never
forsake you”
(Hebrews 13:5). He says in John 10:29,
“My Father which gave them to Me is
552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript.pdf
greater than all and no one is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hand.”
Isn’t this amazing? 2
Timothy 2:13 says,
“Even if we believe not, yet God still abides faithful.”
There are many people
who believed in Jesus Christ at a young age and as they grew older and strayed away from the
Word of God, may even say, “There’s no such thing as God.” But God hasn’t forgotten what they
did as a youngster. They will be in heaven based on their faith in Jesus Christ, even at a young
age. You know why? Because in Ephesians 1:13 it says they are marked or branded with God’s
brand.
Ephesians 4:30 says when you believe in Jesus Christ,
“You are sealed until the day of
redemption.”
We use this cowboy illustration, cowboy metaphor. Satan may steal the cattle and
he may brand them with his brand, but they still belong to God. Recently my pastor was teaching
the three parables in Luke 15. The parables of the lost sheep that belonged to the shepherd and he
went to find his sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. These were all believers who strayed
away and yet the Father looked for them. The Father longed for them.
The Lord is never going
to disown you.
You might have done some pretty stupid, ridiculous, absurd things but He will
not disown you
.
This is the one great promise you can always count on, even your children. If
you evangelized them when they were young like I did with mine and you saw your children
accept Christ as Savior like I did, they may walk away from the Lord like some of mine have but
they still belong to Him. There’s not a day that goes by that we can’t pray that God would call
them back to Himself, that He would convince them, convict them, and that they would seek His
face. Yes, they still belong to Him. We belong to Him and we have eternal life through Christ our
Lord and our Savior. I hope you will never forget this and I hope you will always remember what
we talked about last week. We have three enemies that try to destroy our spiritual life. Yes, we’ve
accepted Christ as our Savior and yes we are beginning to
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge
of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
(2 Peter 3:16) and yes we are studying
“To show ourselves
approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of
truth”
(2 Timothy 2:5), but we have enemies.
We are in a war, a spiritual war.
It’s not a war for
your soul. Your soul is already saved.
It is a war for your thinking. It is a war to distract you.
It’s called the angelic conflict.
The angelic conflict is alive and real in this world. Satan doesn’t
want to go to the Lake of Fire, no more than you do, and so he’s constantly appealing his case to
God. He’s constantly trying to worm his way out of the sentence that’s been passed and if he can,
he will use you or me to try to impugn the love of God and to try to show that God is not love
and He shouldn’t send anybody to hell. This is not true. God loves you and God loves me. Hell
was not prepared for you, me, or anyone else. It was prepared for Satan and the fallen angels in
eternity past who rejected God’s plan.
The fact that people wind up in the Lake of Fire is not
ever God’s plan because 2 Peter 3:9 clearly says,
“He is not willing that any should perish.”
This is why He sent His Son. Satan wants to avoid hell if he can so he will try to distract you, to
limit you, to hinder you from promoting the gospel, from promoting Jesus Christ in your life. He
will do anything that he can. Jesus Christ identified the devil as our enemy in John 8:44 where
He said,
“You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.”
It goes
on to say,
“He was a murderer from the beginning and he does not stand in the truth because
552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript.pdf
here is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks, he speaks a lie from his own nature because he is
the father of lies.”
He’s a liar.
This is what you have to remember about Satan. He will tell
you what you want to hear.
He will offer you whatever the world has and you want. If you go
for the lies, you will sink yourself into the mire of the cosmic vortex. You’ll never get out. He
will wave it in front of you like something that you want and you will never get it. It’s interesting
to see it happen to people. They want this, they want that, they have this dream, and that dream,
and they’re willing to walk away from God’s plan and chase what the world offers. This is
another enemy, the world.
So our enemies are the flesh, the world and the devil.
Satan is a liar.
He cannot give you happiness. He cannot give you eternal life. He cannot give you security and
yet he will tell you that he can. He will lie to you. And he is a murderer. What does he seek to
do? He seeks to destroy you. If it weren’t for God’s plan, he might have already done it but you
have an angel that watches over you. Some people call it a guardian angel or as Hebrews 1:14
calls it,
“A spirit that ministers to you.”
You have an angel that ministers to you. He watches
over you. You have the Holy Spirit living inside of you and 1 John 4:4 says,
“Greater is He that
is in you than he that is in the world.”
Satan can’t kill you. He might like to. He might like to get
rid of you. He can’t do it. He was successful in several attempts to murder the Jews. You can read
the book of Esther and see what happened. This turned around on Satan. In the Old Testament it
describes what happened to Isaac. And you may be familiar with all of the attempts by Satan to
destroy our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. When he thought he had won the victory, unfortunately
for him, Christ walked out of the grave alive. He wasn’t dead. He is alive. Christ’s resurrection
from the dead sealed the victory for us. God has won. Satan’s had it and so now we just await the
shouted order for Jesus Christ to come back and to receive us to Himself. Until this happens,
Satan will always oppose us. In 1 Thessalonians 2:18 Paul talked about how Satan hindered him
from coming to Thessalonica and Satan can hinder you as well. How does he hinder you? Well,
like putting the carrot in front of the rabbit, he distracts you. He deceives you. The whole thing is
about discouraging you and defeating you in your spiritual life so that he can put off his time in
hell. He doesn’t want to go there. He wants to use you to get off. So once you believed in Jesus
Christ, this was another nail in the coffin for him. If he can distract you, maybe, just maybe, you
won’t be leading anyone else to Christ. Maybe he can delay his time that’s coming in the Lake of
Fire. Satan will hinder you in any way possible. Recently I had someone travel with me to an
evangelistic event and when he tried to go home, he ran into all kinds of difficulties. I kidded
him, “Well, that’s what you get for hanging out with me. Satan wasn’t happy about this so he
hindered you on your trip home, anything he could do to frustrate you.” Satan is the god of this
world, “
In whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers so that they
might not see the light of the gospel”
(John 4:4). And yet 2 Corinthians 4:4 says,
“Greater is He
that is at us than he that is in the world.
This is Satan’s objective, to put up a smokescreen so that
people who have not believed in Jesus Christ don’t have the opportunity to do it. There are so
many smokescreens up today in America, it’s pitiful. I don’t blame some unbelievers for saying,
“If that’s a Christian, I don’t want any part of it.” Because quite frankly, some of the Christianity
552-The-Plan-Revealed-transcript.pdf
that we see is obnoxious. It doesn’t represent God. It’s not really what the Bible teaches and yet
the self-righteous, legalist, emotionally carried away, crazy folks seem to be the ones that get all
the time on TV, do all the crazy things, and supposedly represent God. They get caught cheating
and stealing and whatever and then Satan has a heyday with this. He wants to expose people in
the ministry that fail, people in the ministry that do bad things, and they do, because of the sin
nature. He even has his own ministers, 1 Corinthians 10:18-22 says that he has his own
communion table, that he has his own doctrine. Satan is at work for sure along with the world
and the flesh.
We have a battle with the flesh every day. Galatians 5:17 clearly says,
“The
flesh wars against the Spirit and the Spirit wars against the flesh so that we can’t do the things
we want to do.”
There’s always this temptation. It comes in many different ways but it’s just a
temptation, that’s all. It doesn’t become a sin until you act on it. Once you act on it, then it’s a sin.
The flesh will send up these little T words, temptation, temptation, temptation, and all you have
to do is say, “No, no, no.” But sometimes you might say, “Yes, yes, yes.” Does this mean you’re
not a Christian anymore? It does not mean this at all. It means you’ve sinned. Can you recover
from your sin? Yes you can, you can use problem-solving device #1, the rebound technique.
“If
we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all
unrighteousness”
(1 John 1:9). There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t need to use this verse
in our life. The world is out there. The flesh is out there. Satan is out there. We are commanded
in 1 John 2:15,
“Do not love the world nor the things in the world because if we love the world,
the love of the Father is not in us.”
The greatest motivation you have in your life to represent
God is personal love for Him. This is why 1 John 5:3 says,
“If you love Me, you will obey Me
and My mandates are not hard.”
How can you love a God you don’t know? How can you love a
God that you humanize and you think He’s something He’s not? I can tell you something about
God. He’s sovereignty, He’s righteousness, He’s justice, He’s love, He’s omnipotence,
omniscience, omnipresence, veracity, immutability. These are some of the character assets of
God. I haven’t seen Him and you haven’t seen Him.
“No man can see God and live”
(Exodus
33:20). But I know Him because God the Holy Spirit lives in me and God the Holy Spirit lives in
you if you are Christian, to convince you of your sin, to show you the truth, and hopefully to
guard you as you grow in Christ. God wants you to grow up.
God wants you to become a
mature believer and re-present Jesus Christ in your life. This is why He gives us well-
qualified pastors who teach us His Word. Until you find yourself under the ministry of a
well-qualified pastor who teaches you God’s Word consistently, you will never grow up.
You’re not going to grow up running down to the bookstore buying some self-help Christian
book that some joker is selling for $19.95. This is not the way the plan is. The plan is for you to
sit in your church in the privacy of your priesthood and to listen to your pastor teach God’s Word
that he studied and learned and brings to you. If you’re not doing this, you’re not growing no
matter what you think. Consider these things. This is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you
for listening to The FLOT Line.