Join host Rick Hughes as he delves into the heart of what makes a wise believer. In this episode, you’ll discover how to guard your mind, choose wisely, and apply the wisdom of God’s Word to everyday challenges. Through compelling metaphors and scriptural references, Rick unveils the dangers of arrogance and the sins of the tongue, guiding listeners toward a life that glorifies God through humility and understanding. Tune in for practical advice that encourages spiritual growth and alignment with God’s grace.
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 Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please, please stay with me. It’s just a time of motivation, some inspiration, a whole lot of education, but absolutely no manipulation. That’s right, we’re not trying to con anybody. We’re just trying to give you some accurate information, information designed to help you verify and identify God’s plan for your life. And if you can do that, you have the freedom to orient and adjust to the plan. But the Flatline is always designed to remind you of biblical truths and introduce you to an in-depth way of studying, learning God’s Word. Again, no solicitations, just 30 minutes of education. And it all starts with the good news that Jesus Christ, the anointed Son of God, has redeemed all of us out of the slave market of sin. Our debt to God has been paid, and we are now free of the penalty of death and free of the power of sin. And so by receiving Christ as your Savior, you are in effect accepting the offering that he made on your behalf. It’s a free gift from the compliments of God. That’s why the Bible says in Titus 3, 5, not by works of righteousness, which we’ve done, but according to his mercy, he saved us by the washing of regeneration. and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Lord, that being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs all to the hope of eternal life, made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. That’s a promise from the Word of God, and what a great promise that it is. The Flatline is all about learning God’s unique problem-solving devices and using those problem-solving devices in the main line of resistance of your soul. Your soul involves your mentality, how you think. It involves your volition, how you choose. It involves your conscience and your self-consciousness. These are all parts of your soul. And God created you as a living soul. But obviously, we’re created spiritually dead because we’re identified with Adam’s original sin. And the Bible says, for by one man, sin came into the world and death by sin. And now death has passed on all for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So we’re born spiritually dead, but we’re made spiritually alive. when we believe in Jesus Christ and we receive him as our savior. That’s the new birthday. So the Bible says, if any man’s in Christ, he’s a new creation. Old things are passed away and all things become new. So as the new person, we have a new way to think. We identify with the mind of Christ. We learn to think like he thought. Just as Philippians 2, 5 tells us, let this mind be a new that was also in Christ Jesus. That’s learning to think divine viewpoint, not operating under the old way of living, which is human viewpoint. There’s a different way to live. There’s a different way to think. And it involves learning and applying the Word of God into your life, using those problem-solving devices found throughout the Scripture. And we’ve been able to identify 10 devices 10 unique problem-solving devices that we put as the main line of resistance or the forward line of troops, the FLOT line, F-L-O-T, the forward line of troops. And what this is designed to do is a military metaphor. It’s showing you that there are 10 unique problem-solving devices that you can learn and apply and glorify God with. And they will resist the outside sources of adversity before they overrun the command post of your soul and turn into stress. Overrunning the command post of your soul means that you get into worry, you get into fear, you get into guilt, you get into whatever. You don’t have to live like that. There is a way to live, a unique way to live called the Christian life. Whoever lives it is a wise person, the Bible tells us. And The Bible goes on to say in Proverbs 10, 8, the wise heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to pass. You have a heart, and I’m not talking about that thing that beats in your chest. I’m talking about what’s between your ears. Your mind and your heart are both receivers inside of your soul. The mind or the, as the Bible uses the Greek word, nous, G-N-O-U-S, nous, the mind or the nous receives information and the heart or the cardia in the Greek New Testament is where we store that information. where we respond. And so when God wants to check you out, he looks at what you’re thinking. That’s why the Bible says in Proverbs, as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is. So the wise heart is a person who has positive volition, a person who have a tendency to listen and to hear and to obey the word of God. The stupid heart, let me use that word if you don’t mind, the fool, The wise heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to pass. The fool the Bible speaks of is detached from reality due to his own arrogance. In his own mind, he justifies why he’s right and everyone else is wrong. He lies to himself, self-deception, self-justification, and self-absorption. They all lead to self-destruction eventually. And most people that wind up destroying their lives and destroying any opportunity for having happiness in life do so because of their own arrogance. It is our number one enemy in the Christian life. We have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of self-justification, self-deception, and self-absorption. The wise person that Proverbs speaks of receives and retains the information. You know, there’s a difference between going to church and hearing what is taught and going to church and hearing and applying what is taught. First of all, you can’t apply what you don’t know, and you can’t know what you don’t remember. So if you go there and just sit there like a bump on a log and don’t even write anything down, you’re not going to retain very much of what the pastor said. You may remember a couple of lines. You may remember a cute joke. You may remember some emotional analogies he gave you. Most of the time, you’re not going to remember very much at all. Out of the thousands of radio shows that we’ve done, how much of them do you remember? Do you take notes? Do you ever write anything down? Do you ever review your notes? That’s what it means to retain the instruction, to go back over and to look at it and remember it and not just forget it once you hear it and go away and forget about it. This is not like eating a meal where you eat it and walk away from the table and say, oh, burp, I’m full now. I’ll go take a nap. No, growing in grace is learning and applying the Word of God, and it requires repetition. So the wise man who allows himself to repeat and learn is a man who has authority orientation. That means he orients to the authority of the Word of God to start with, and he orients to the authority, hopefully, of a well-qualified pastor. I had people write me sometimes, and a lady wrote me recently and said she didn’t need a pastor because they can be wrong. Well, that’s obvious. Any pastor can be wrong. And it’s obvious that God the Holy Spirit will alert you when a pastor tries to mislead you. I’ve seen that happen before. If you’re under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor, I mean, this is what God gave the gift for in Ephesians chapter 4. The gift of poimen kai didaskalos in the Greek New Testament is pastor and teacher. And his job is to study and teach the Word of God, not to be a cruise ship director, to study and teach the Word of God. Your job is to learn it and apply it and glorify God in your life as a result of it. So Proverbs 1.5, let the wise man hear. and increase in learning, Proverbs 1.5. Let the wise person hear and increase in learning. If you don’t hear, you can’t learn. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So the wise man that we’re talking about in Proverbs 10.8, the wise heart will receive commandments. This is a person who receives and retains instruction. The wise man is the believer, you, me, any believer, who receives the good news. And the fool is the one who rejects the free gift of eternal life. It’s a shame, but people reject it every day. They say they got a better deal. They got something better going on. There is no better deal than the fact that Jesus Christ, the anointed son of God, paid for your sin. He alone satisfied the justice of God. And by faith in him, you can have eternal life. What kind of better deal is there? There’s not. so the wisdom of the scripture we call it divine viewpoint we call it thinking as christ thought and all scripture all of the bible is divine viewpoint And when you reject a scripture, then you’re rejecting divine viewpoint. So what you think, what’s in your mind, what’s spinning around between your ears is related to what you say or what comes out of your mouth. So if you want to know what a person is like or what a person thinks about, just listen to what he talks about. That’s where the real person is, between their ears. And what’s going on in their mind will eventually come out in their words. So the Word of God has a lot to say about what comes out of your mouth. I want to talk about that for just a minute. Proverbs 15, 28, the heart of the righteous ponders how to answer God. But the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things. The heart of the righteous, this is the wisdom of the believer who has received and retained the word of God on a consistent basis. If you don’t receive and retain the word of God on a consistent basis, then you don’t have anything to ponder. You don’t have anything to consider, to evaluate. Divine viewpoint demands that you guard your lips from speaking hastily and that you guard your lips from being impulsive in your speech. James 1.19 talks about this. It says, be quick to hear, but slow to speak and slow to anger. The person that’s not wise, the babbling fool, is not slow to speak and is not slow to anger. He’s always the first one to run his mouth. He’s always the first one to tell everybody what he thinks ought to be done. He’s always the loudest and the first about anything and is never about the word of God. It’s always about him and what he wants to do. And so the Psalmist talks about that. He said, I will guard my ways so that I may not sin with my tongue. In other words, I will muzzle my mouth. A friend of mine who’s a pastor once said these words, death and life are in the power of the tongue. And it’s true. So Psalm 39 again, 39 one, I will guard my ways so that I might not sin with my tongue. When unwise people have no inclination for the word of God, they are always quick to slander. They’re always quick to malign, to criticize, to backbite, to run down. These are the type of people that you must avoid in your life. The mouth of the believer, you and me, is not for slandering and maligning and criticizing and backbiting and lying. That’s not what it’s for. The mouth of the believer is for proclaiming gratitude for God’s mercy and for giving thanksgiving for his grace. In Proverbs 6, 16 through 19, if you’ve never read that, I advise you to take a look at it, because there are seven sins God hates, and they’re all mentioned right there. Oh, you want me to say it again? You want to read that one, don’t you? Proverbs 6, 16 through 19, seven sins God hates. And first of all, God doesn’t hate. That would be a sin to commit hate. But this is a way that we explain that the justice of God does not tolerate And one of the things the justice of God will not tolerate is a lying tongue. Proverbs 6, 16 through 19, you can see there were three sins of the tongue and three mental attitude sins and one overt sin. Look at them, read it for yourself, and you’ll get it, the idea. so we must guard our lips that we don’t send with our tongue we must not lie we must not slander we must not malign we must not criticize and yet we do it every day the sins of the tongue are mentioned in several passages throughout the bible for example in romans 2 verse 1 therefore you are without excuse every person who keeps on judging other people. For in that you judge another person, you actually condemn yourself, because you who are judging actually practice the same thing. In order to have a wonderful life, in order to maintain a wonderful relationship with God where he blesses you on a consistent basis, You cannot allow sin to sidetrack you. And one of the sins that can sidetrack you is the sin of the tongue. It’s allowing your mouth to say things you don’t need to say. The blindness of the arrogant person does not allow him to see what he actually is. It doesn’t allow him to see that he’s committing the worst of all sins when he maligns or slanders or judges someone else of committing some sin. There’s a lot of discipline associated to sins of the tongue. Matthew 7, 1 through 7, talks about this divine discipline that goes along with judging other people. And it warns us not to judge so that we would not be judged. And it says in that passage, for the measure that we measure will be measured back to us again. My pastor calls that triple compound discipline. You get your discipline for sinning, you get his discipline or whatever you accused him of, it’s taken off of him and given to you. And then you have self-induced misery because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut. And then you go back and you think, I wish I hadn’t have said that. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of criticizing, maligning, slandering, backbiting, talking about, lying about another person. So the arrogant person doesn’t see it. He doesn’t see. He only sees what he thinks he is. He doesn’t see what he really is. He doesn’t look into the mirror of the truth of the Word of God. So he looks into his own distorted mirror and sees a distorted version, and he has an unrealistic personality. He thinks he should be treated in a way he’s not worthy of being treated. In self-righteousness, the one who judges another person actually assumes the role of replacing God as a Supreme Court judge in heaven. They take God’s place. They figure they can do a better job than God, and so they judge and they create false standards. And these sort of people will seek to intimidate you and get you to uphold their false standards. False standards are called legalism. And the legalist will tell you, you cannot be a good Christian and smoke a cigarette. You cannot be a good Christian and drink a glass of wine. You cannot be a good Christian and go dancing. You cannot be a good Christian and watch any movie that’s anything under a G. And so they will try to legislate what you should or should not do. And the Bible doesn’t say these things. The Bible doesn’t say don’t smoke. It says don’t harm your body. And your body is the temple of God. First of all, sin is the greatest contaminator in the body. 1 Corinthians 3 talks about your body being the temple of the Holy Spirit. and you can send by eating too many pieces of chicken just like you could send by over smoking over drinking over anything anything that takes command of you is a sin in your life and so when you create these false standards which the legalist does he’s trying to manipulate you he’s trying to get you to live over to his standards of what he believes The Bible teaches you should do. These sort of people you need to get away from because they will never allow you any privacy in your life. They will always be like the proboscis monkey who has a nose two feet long and sticks it where it doesn’t belong. And some self-righteous believer who sticks his nose into your business and then will run his mouth and complain about you and malign you to someone else is not the person you need to be hanging around. There is nothing but legalism. That’s all it is. It claims respectability, and they will malign you. And this is what organized religion thrives on. Organized religion thrives on this. It thrives on manipulating people, trying to get you to do a certain thing and act a certain way in order for you to, quote, be a holy person. And it starts with your money, how to give your money, how to solicit money from you. And if you’re not giving money, you’re not a good person. Listen, God talks about giving in the Bible in a lot of places. But the main thing is you give as God has prospered you. And people that want to intimidate you with your concept about giving and how much you should give, I’ve even heard of churches saying, that send accountants to people’s businesses telling them how much they should be giving. And I’m not making that up. That’s crazy. Because I learned from my pastor years ago, if God’s in it, God will pay for it. So keep your mouth shut. Don’t ask for money. Just do your job and let the Lord handle the rest of it. And that’s the way we like to operate on this radio show. And we wouldn’t be here today if God didn’t provide the funds, the finances for us to pay the radio stations. to broadcast this show because they don’t give us this time free. God’s in it. He pays for it. It’s that simple. We as believers must evaluate our own selves in light of what the Word of God teaches. You look into the mirror of the Word of God to evaluate yourself. That’s the way you live up to the standards of the grace righteousness of God in your life. If you are that wise person that we talked about in Proverbs, You know, when we began this thing, we gave you Proverbs 10.8. The wise heart will receive mandates, commandments, but a babbling fool will come to pass. And then I gave you Proverbs 1.5. Let the wise hear and increase in learning. That person that I’m talking about, the wise person, will guard his tongue. since verbal sins are usually motivated by mental attitude sins called jealousy and bitterness. You’re not allowed to get into that. That’s a sin. That’s destructive. In James 3.14, but if you have a bitter jealousy, and selfish ambition in your heart. Do not boast and be false to the truth. Excuse me. Bitter jealousy means that Deacon Jones can’t stand Deacon Smith. They’ve done business with each other and they shafted each other in a business deal and they hate each other and yet they’re in the same church and they don’t get along and they’re jealous of each other. If there’s anyone in your church that’s jealous of you or you’re jealous of them, that’s a terrible sin because this is how Satan uses circumstances to divide and conquer people. Divine discipline can come from these unconfessed sins of jealousy and selfish ambition. You see, the sin of the tongue is one of the most deceptive sins in the whole Bible. And oftentimes, we’re not even aware we’re doing it. I mean, if someone’s asked you, what do you think about brother so-and-so? Or what do you think about her? What do you think about him? The best answer that you can give is, what do you think? and you’ll find out what they’re trying to do. Are they mad at that person and they’re trying to get you to take their side? Don’t ever fall into the trap of answering a question like that. What do you think about someone? That’s between them and God. It’s none of my business. It’s not my place to judge them. It’s not my place to second guess them. It’s not my place to give them advice unless they ask for it. I mean, there are a lot of people I would like to give advice to, but they didn’t ask for it. If they didn’t ask for it, who am I to assume that they want it? So the wise person will guard his tongue since those verbal sins are usually motivated by mental attitude sins. And divine discipline, as I said, accompanies unconfessed sin in your life, and the sin of the tongue is one of the most deceptive sins. There are three categories of the sin of the tongue that I’d like to run by you this morning. And the first one is the whining category, complaining category. Even though God’s grace is abundantly bestowed, the believer, you or me, we still complain about everything. Always a little pity party. Always the raw deal. Always what so-and-so said about me. Always what so-and-so did to me. Always complaining. Always whining. Paul the Apostle learned this in 2 Corinthians 12 when he asked God three different times to remove the thorn in his flesh. And every time God said, no I won’t, no I won’t, no I won’t, my grace is sufficient for you. And Paul learned and he told us as he wrote that scripture that he would rejoice in his suffering so that the grace of God might be made much more manifest. There’s the slander category, whining, complaining, number one, sin of the tongue, number two. Slander category involves gossip and maligning and judging people. And number three, the falsehood category. And that’s you lying, you fabricating, using duplicity, perjury. It is you telling something that is not true about circumstances or about people. In Romans 16, 17 through 18, the Bible says, “‘I urge you, fellow Christians,’ Keep your eyes on those who cause dissension and occasions for stumbling contrary to the doctrine which you’ve learned, and avoid them, for such types are not the servants of our Lord Jesus Christ, but are slaves to their own emotion, and furthermore, by their smooth and flattering speech, they deceive the minds of the ignorant. That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? 1 Peter 3. Let’s wrap it up with this. Finally, be of one mind, having compassion one of another. Love as brethren. Be pitiful. Be courteous. Not rendering evil for evil or railing for railing, But contrary-wise, blessing, knowing that you are thereunto called, that you should inherit a blessing. For he that will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile. Let him eschew evil and do good. Let him seek peace and ensue it. For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers. But the face of the Lord is against those that do evil. Doing evil is the sin of the tongue. Doing evil is saying things you shouldn’t say, sticking your nose where you shouldn’t stick it. That’s not you being a wise man. That’s not you learning the Scripture, learning what the Word of God said, God didn’t put you here to judge people, to malign people, to criticize people, to run people down. God put you here to glorify him. And it doesn’t glorify him when you get into some sort of pettiness like that. Sure, you’ve gotten a raw deal. Sure, people have said things about you. Sure, people have wronged you. You’re never authorized to get even. You’re never authorized to seek revenge. You’re never authorized to go complain and whine to someone else about the raw deal you got. Take it to the Supreme Court of Heaven. It’s open 24 hours a day. God is aware of what’s going on, and he alone can solve the problem for you. I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re learning. Until next week, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for being with me on 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.
