Rick Hughes delves into the profound elements required for a robust spiritual life – momentum, virtue, and poise. Gain insight into how faithful devotion and understanding of God’s Word can craft a legacy that outlasts our earthly lives, imparting wisdom on how to effectively reveal Christ through your actions and beliefs. Be challenged to take a step beyond the mundane and embrace a spiritual path filled with authentic integrity, ultimately leading to eternal recognition and fulfillment.
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, and for the next few minutes, please stay with me. It’ll be a short time of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education, and we don’t do any manipulation. That’s right. You heard that right. We don’t con people. We’re not trying to get any money from you. We’re not trying to get you to join up, fess up, give it up. This show is about giving you accurate information. The whole show is designed to remind you of biblical truths and introduce you to a way of studying. Building a flat line in your soul is a main line of resistance inside of you so you can learn God’s wonderful problem-solving devices and stop the outside sources of adversity before they become the inside sources of stress. Adversity is inevitable in life, but stress is optional. And adversity is mostly what circumstances do to us. But that stress stuff, that’s what we do to ourselves because we worry ourselves sick. We get guilt. We get shame. We get all sorts of things. You don’t have to live like that. There’s a wonderful way to live in the Christian life. It’s a very unique life, and I hope that you’re interested in learning about it. This whole show is predicated on teaching you the mechanics of the Christian life. I’m not a pastor. I’m not here to be your pastor. I’m just a window of fresh air, a breath of opportunity. But if you’re interested in learning God’s Word on a consistent basis, if you’re one of those rare people that says, I can’t get enough of it, I want to know more, how can I learn more? then you’re listening to the right place because I can direct you to well-qualified pastors across the country who in fact do teach the Word of God from their pulpits and have been there, some of them as many as 40 years. And great men of God that teach just like I do, line by line, word by word, verse by verse, with no appeals for money, no gimmicks, no games. It’s all about growing up spiritually. That’s what the whole thing is about. The whole thing about having a flat line in your soul is so you can grow up spiritually. Most people never really think about growing up spiritually. They think about growing up physically, that they have a physical life and As you get older, you begin to change and you grow physically. You grow from a baby to a teenager to an adult to maybe an older person. And not to say an older person is not an adult, but you know what I mean. You go through phases. Spiritually speaking, the Bible says we have to grow up spiritually. I get that where it says, grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Grow is a mandate in the Greek Bible. It’s not a request. It’s an order. And as a Christian, we are mandated to grow spiritually in our spiritual life. So if you accepted Jesus Christ when you were 10 or 12 or 15, and now you’re 50, have you grown? How much have you grown? What do you know about the plan of God? What can you quote? What can you tell people? Just what kind of spiritual growth has been in your life? Because really, honestly, most people never grow. They get involved in church. They get involved in the ritual and there’s very little reality to it sometimes. And they get involved in a routine and it’s hard to grow if you’re not being fed. I like to eat, you like to eat, we have to be fed. And so if we’re not fed spiritually, we’re not going to grow. And that’s the job of the well-qualified pastor to feed you. And not 30 minutes a week, not an hour a week, a lot more than that. My own pastor teaches about four hours a week, four hours from the pulpit every week. And it’s a wonderful way to study consistently on a daily basis, breaking it down, taking the word of God in every day. And so I pray that this is something you would consider in your life. Because you want to leave a legacy behind. You don’t want to show up at the great white throne, or not the great white throne, but the judgment seat of Christ. You don’t want to show up at the judgment seat of Christ and have the Lord say, have a seat, I’ll get to you in a few thousand years. I mean, you want to hear, well done, my good and faithful servant. And so building a spiritual legacy is very important. My own pastor was teaching that the other day, and that motivated me to mention it to you. God is always looking for a few MVPs. You know, being football season, we talk about the MVP of the Sugar Bowl, the MVP of the Orange Bowl, the MVP of the Super Bowl or whatever. But the MVP that God is looking for doesn’t stand for most valuable player. It stands for someone who has momentum, someone who has virtue, and someone who has poise. Momentum, virtue, and poise. Without those three things, you will never build a spiritual legacy in your life. A legacy is something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past. And you won’t always be here, but you want to leave a legacy for those behind you. And it’s not physical that we’re talking about. It’s not the money you left them. It’s not the property you left them. The important thing as a believer in Jesus Christ is that you represent Christ and leave that legacy. That’s what the disciples were challenged to do. The Lord Jesus Christ, speaking to the disciples in John 17, in verse 25 and 26, as he prayed, he said, “‘O righteous Father, the world has not known you, “‘but I have known you, “‘and these men here have known that you sent me.'” and i declare it unto them your name and i will declare it that the love with which you love me may be in them and i in them so the lord jesus christ said i have known you known is something that you must acquire you don’t just wake up one day and have knowledge you get knowledge from experience and so the lord jesus christ knew god the father don’t you remember The Bible says when he was 12, he increased in wisdom, stature and in favor with God and man. To have wisdom, you have to have gnosis and you have to have another word called understanding. And put these two together and you have discernment or wisdom, gnosis and understanding. And it’s important that you remember that the Lord Jesus Christ, even though he was the God man, undiminished deity and true humanity in one body forever, that as a man, he had to learn the Bible that he had at the time. He had to learn the law of Moses. He had to learn the Old Testament prophets. There was not a New Testament. There was not a recorded scripture like we have today. But as a man and a child, he had to learn just like you have to learn. And even though it was written about him, it was also written to him. And so when he talked about Old Testament prophecies and principles, They were things he learned. He wasn’t speaking as God. He was speaking as a man and things that he learned. You’ll have to excuse me. You can tell I have a cold just from the way my voice sounds. So a sneeze came up on me right there. So anyhow, and then he said, he said, I declared it to them. And this meant that he made it known or he revealed it to them. And so the spiritual legacy of our Lord Jesus Christ was that he revealed his father to those disciples. And then those disciples said, Their legacy was to reveal to us everything about Christ that they heard, saw, and learned. They revealed it. The legacy of the apostles is seen in 2 Peter 1.16. And my pastor brought this up the other day when we were studying. I’d like to share it with you. In 2 Peter 1.16, Peter said, For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we ourselves were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the majestic glory, saying, This is my beloved Son. This is my beloved Son. in whom I am well pleased. And so Peter said, we ourselves heard this. We heard it. We heard it said. We heard this. And we were with him on that sacred mountain when that came. That’s the Mount of Transfiguration. We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable and you will do well to pay attention as it is a light shining in the dark places until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart. So the legacy of Peter and the apostles was leaving behind the New Testament canon of Scripture, the Word of God that we have today. And the Holy Spirit inspired them. Peter said we didn’t come up with some cleverly disguised thing. It wasn’t something we devised on our own. This was from God the Holy Spirit. And their legacy is exactly that. Just as Christ revealed the Father to the disciples, they in turn reveal Christ to us and the Father to us. So that legacy that Peter had was the written word of God passed on to us. Not the legacy found in a temporal life, not wealth, not possession, but the legacy of a spiritual life such as Peter left for you and our Lord left for the apostles. Now, what is going to be your legacy? That’s the question. Are you prepared to be an MVP for God? Because you’ll never be a person MVP that has a legacy if you’re not. So let’s start with the M, the V, and the P. M stands for momentum. Momentum is simply hearing the word of God and keeping it on a consistent basis. No one can have any momentum if they don’t hear and keep the word of God. And thus, in Luke 11, 27 and 28, the Lord Jesus Christ said, happiness belongs to those people who hear and keep my Father’s word. Hearing and keeping is the essence of momentum in your life. You hear under Operation Z, we call it, where a communicator communicates, where the Holy Spirit captures, where you comprehend, and then where you comply. And so if the Holy Spirit communicates through your pastor and he captures that information for you and brings it down to your mind so you can understand it, and you comprehend what the pastor said, then you still have to, by faith, comply with it. You have to be obedient to it. There’s no momentum in your life without obedience. I mean, you can hear the word of God taught and taught and taught, but if you don’t obey it, you do not have momentum. No one’s perfect. No one can do everything right every time. And that’s why we have problem-solving device number one in the flat line of our soul, which is rebound. When we sin, we go to the Father and we rebound. We confess our sin when we fail. And the Bible says he’s faithful and just to forgive us and purify us from all of our wrongdoing. So if you’re going to leave a spiritual legacy, If you’re going to be the MVP for God in your family, there must be consistent momentum. You must study God’s word consistently. And I’m not talking about reading a small devotional book every morning. That’s not studying God’s word. Studying God’s word is you sitting under a well-qualified pastor position. hopefully on a consistent basis every week, four or five times a week, and letting him teach you the word, whether you’re in person or whether you’re at home with a DVD or an MP3. You got your Bible out, you got your notebook out, and you’re studying, you’re learning. You’re learning principles and promises and applying them into your life. That’s where the momentum comes from, and that’s what will eventually change the way you think so that you will begin to assimilate things from divine viewpoint, not human viewpoint. And you will do what Romans 12, one through three says, stop thinking of yourselves in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think, but think in terms of humility because God has assigned to each one of us a standard of thinking from his word. And that’s a critical issue, thinking from his word. What does the Bible say about that? Every decision that you make in your life must be run by the Word of God. What does the Bible say about this? When you don’t do that, when you don’t have any momentum, when you just take your best shot on luck and hope that you did the right thing, Probably nine out of 10 times you’re gonna mess it up. So you must know the Word of God. You must have some momentum. You must be under a great pastor that teaches you the Bible so you can apply it and live it in your life. And then there’s the virtue part, the V for virtue. You wanna leave a legacy? You need to have virtue or integrity. That’s what God is looking for. God’s looking for men and women with integrity. People that have the filling of the Holy Spirit. People that operate under faith rest drill. People that understand grace orientation and biblical orientation. Men and women with integrity. Not dual-souled people, saying one thing, doing something else. The Bible calls that a disukos. Two-souled. You can’t say one thing and do something else. You wind up in sin every time. That’s not to say you can’t recover from the sin, but because all of us strive to do what’s right, but we fail constantly. You know you do. Don’t look at me like that. I never fail. Yes, you do. You worry, you get upset, you get angry, you get impatient. Mental attitude sins come into your life just like anyone else, or maybe it’s the more obvious sins. When you sin, it doesn’t mean you’re not saved anymore, but it certainly means you’re not demonstrating any integrity in your life. God wants you to have integrity. He wants you to have virtue. He wants you to live virtuous. And virtue is an amazing thing. Virtue love is the greatest thing I know of to tell you about. Virtue love starts with us loving God. We love God because he first loved us, the Bible said. That’s reciprocal love and that’s virtuous because the Bible says if we love him, we will obey him, 1 John 5, 3, and his mandates won’t be hard. What are we supposed to obey? Here’s something Jesus said, “‘Come to me, all you that labor heavy laden, “‘I’ll give you rest. “‘Take my yoke and learn, learn, learn from me.'” Learn, what does the Bible say? Study to show thyself approved unto God. A workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. What does the Bible say? Grow in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Learn, study, grow. That’s your spiritual life. That’s how you develop integrity. That’s how you become the virtuous man or the virtuous woman that God is looking for. Virtue love has two parts to it, personal love for God the Father, yes, and also impersonal love for others that you might not even like. The ability to love a jerk, the ability to love a weirdo, an obnoxious person, you can do it because you love them based on who you are, not based on who they are. You’re loving them based on your integrity, not theirs. That means you can be relaxed around them. You can assist them when you need to. It doesn’t mean you have to run over there and hug their neck and say, I love you. Jesus told me to tell you I love you. That’s not what it means. But it means that you’re never to get upset around people that don’t like you or people that are obnoxious to you. That you are to be just as kind, just as wonderful to them as you would be to your best friends. That’s virtue. That’s integrity. That’s using virtue love as a problem-solving device. So if a person comes into your office that you can’t stand, you can put the hackles on the back of your neck, flare it up. Your eyeballs can get wide open and you can stare at him with just hatred. Or you can nod and say, hello, how are you? And use the faith rest drill. Turn it over to the Lord. Let the Lord handle this situation. You can’t handle it. You probably already tried to handle it and that’s the reason it’s a little messed up now. so virtue integrity momentum virtue and poise poise is the ability to think under pressure the bible says let this mind be in you that was also in christ jesus if you can’t think under pressure you don’t have poise that means you can’t let your emotions dictate what you should or should not do you can’t let your emotions gain control because Satan is really good at manipulating your emotions. And you’ll think you’re doing the right thing, but inevitably it’ll be the wrong thing. So if you want to build a spiritual legacy, listen to these verses. 1 Corinthians 10 31 tells you, whatever then that you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. all of it to the glory of God. There’s a spiritual legacy for you. Do everything to the glory of God. Only one life you live and it’ll soon be passed and only what’s done for Christ will last. That’s a poem I heard one time. It’s a great poem. Only what’s done for Christ will last. In Luke 26, 626, Luke 626, woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way. So you’re not trying to win a popularity contest at church. You’re not trying to win a popularity contest at the Civitans or at the Rotarians. You’re trying to hear God say, well done, my good and faithful servant. So here’s some principles. One, human good does not build a spiritual legacy. Well, what exactly is human good? There are two types of good. There’s human good and there’s divine good. Let me explain the difference. The protocol plan of God says that everything must be done in the right way. And thus there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. If you do a right thing in a wrong way, it’s still gonna be wrong. So is it right to pray? Yes. Is there a right way to pray and a wrong way to pray? Yes. Well, what’s the wrong way to pray? The Bible says, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. So if you are praying with unconfessed sin in your life, then you are building human good. If you give money with unconfessed sin in your life, you’re building human good. If you teach Sunday school, if you attend church, if you whatever, with unconfessed sin in your life, doing a right thing, but in the wrong way, it’s human good. And all of that human good will be recognized and destroyed at 1 Corinthians 3, 11 through 15, called the judgment seat of Christ. So you can’t build a legacy on human good. But if you’re filled with the Holy Spirit, using rebound, confessing any known sin to God, and then you pray, then that’s divine good. Then you go to church, that’s divine good. And by that I mean this, you are filled with the Spirit. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit because you’ve confessed any known sin to God, then anything you do for him is divine good, and it is rewardable. Divine good glorifies God. That is the lasting legacy you’re looking for. That’s the lasting legacy you want to leave your family and your friends. You glorified God with your life. You were an MVP. You had momentum, you had virtue, and you had poise. You cannot live your life if you don’t know what to live it. You see, spiritual legacy is determined by what you reveal about Christ. That’s your job. Your job is to reveal Christ. Just like the disciples had the same job, you have the same job they have. And the same things they experience, you experience. Your job is to do that. And if you don’t reveal Christ, you have no legacy. Well, how do you reveal Christ? You reflect him. You reflect his thinking. Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. You reflect his thinking. You represent him to your friends. Your church in the community represents the body of Christ. But your job is to reflect him and represent him. So in you, God the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ. Christ lives in you, the hope of glory. Christ in me, the hope of glory. The Lord Jesus Christ of the Old Testament, the Shekinah glory, that was in the temple and tabernacle and dwelled over it by night in a pillow of fire and by day in a cloud, that’s what’s in you. The Shekinah glory lives in you. And you’re told not to defile that temple in 1 Corinthians 3. So remember that. You want to leave a legacy for your children, a legacy for your church, for your family. That legacy must be built around what you revealed about Christ in your life. The recognition of a spiritual legacy at the judgment seat of Christ is seen in 1 Corinthians 3, 11 through 15. The gold, the silver, the precious stones in that passage is the lasting legacy you gave. The wood, the hay, and the stubble are the things you did, right things in wrong way. And they will be burned up at the judgment seat of Christ because they didn’t bring God glory. You were out of fellowship. You had quenched and grieved the Holy Spirit. And what you did at that time, any unbeliever could have done. You’re not an unbeliever. You’re a believer. You’re filled with the Holy Spirit, supposedly. You’re a child of God, supposedly. And you’re not living like the unbeliever lives. He can be moral. He can be self-righteous. He can not curse and not drink and not smoke and not go to dirty movies. I mean, come on. The Christian life is a lot, lot, lot, lot more than just that kind of stuff. So it’s gonna be revealed. Your legacy will be known at the judgment seat of Christ. And your eternal recognition should be in Matthew 25, 21. His Lord said unto him, well done, thy good and faithful servant. You’ve been faithful over a few things. I’ll make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of the Lord. The key there is fidelity, faithfulness. That is what God expects out of you. No one can have a spiritual legacy without fidelity, without being faithful. Faithful to stay filled with the Holy Spirit. Faithful to take in God’s word on a consistent basis. Faithful to reflect Jesus Christ in the way you think, in the way you talk, in the way you live. Faithful, spiritually faithful. This is what God is looking for when he searches the earth to and fro. One faithful man. He finds that man, he’s a member of the pivot in America. Pivot member, a faithful believer. Someone that holds the nation together with an invisible historical impact in his life. That’s got to be you. That impact may be invisible, but it’s a legacy that will last forever. You must be the person. You must take it seriously and quit fiddling around with your Christian life. Quit going through the ritual when there’s no reality to it. You know as well as I know you’re not being fulfilled spiritually. You’re not growing spiritually. You’re not learning anything. It’s time you took it serious. So I pray what I’m saying today about having this spiritual legacy and you being a person that has momentum, virtue, and poise in your life. I pray that that will encourage you, that it will be an inspiration to you, that that will open your eyes and let yourself see what you are. Again, there’s only one life. It will soon be passed, and only what’s done for Christ will last. That’s C.T. Studd, and that’s his poem. He wrote it, and it’s significantly true for you and for me. Only what’s done for Christ will last. Right thing must be done in the right way. Are you listening? Can you apply this into your life? Is it going to make any difference what’s all or am I talking to a wall? I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re paying attention because I have great hope that you are going to be the man or the woman that preserves our nation in time of adversity. Your spiritual life will hold us together. Think about it. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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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.
