Dive deep into the power of the Bible with host Rick Hughes, as he challenges you to enrich your spiritual life through understanding scripture’s role. Rick breaks down complex teachings into accessible lessons, focusing on how storing God’s word in your heart can transform your life. Explore the vital concepts of grace versus law, discerning sin, and the importance of maintaining faith in God’s justice. Whether you’re a seasoned believer or new to your faith journey, Rick’s insights provide valuable wisdom for living a victorious Christian life.
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, stick around. It’ll be a short 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education, and absolutely no manipulation. That’s right, no con games. We’re not asking for money. We’re not soliciting membership. We’re not doing anything like that. We’re just simply giving you the Word of God, hoping that we can verify and identify God’s plan for your life, and if you choose to do so, you have the freedom, you have the privacy to orient and adjust to the plan. This is a significant show for me. This is number 850 shows. That’s 850 Sundays we’ve been broadcasting across America doing the FLOT line, F-L-O-T. If you’re new to the show, FLOT stands for the Forward Line of Troops. And what we’re teaching is that there are 10 unique problem-solving devices found in the Bible, nothing that I discovered my pastor taught them years ago. But if you’ll learn them and use them, they will keep the outside sources of adversity from becoming the inside sources of stress. We all know adversity is inevitable. But a lot of people don’t realize stress is optional because adversity is certainly what circumstances do to you, but stress is what you do to yourself. That’s why the Christian life is so unique. It’s a wonderful way to live without worry, without fear, without bitterness, without antagonism, without revenge motivation. That’s a relaxed mental attitude. That’s living a great Christian life and that’s living the life that the Lord Jesus Christ demonstrated you can live. So if you’ll listen to the Flatline, learn some information. If we have some material that you need, you can always go to our website, rickhughesministries.org. rickhughesministries.org. And there you’ll find we have a new book called Crash Course in Christianity. And this is one of, we’re really proud of this book. It really organizes the Christian life by three phases, phase one, phase two, and phase three. And then we also have a new book called Christian Problem Solving, which deals with the 10 problem solving devices. And as well, we have the 2020 transcripts of every radio show we’ve done during the year 2020 and every radio show we did during the year 2019. Those transcripts are all available for you in printed form and book form as well. So if you want them, they’re free. All you have to do is contact us and we’ll send them right on out to you. Today we’re going to talk about something that is very dear to me. When I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my Savior, one of the first things that happened as a football coach gave me a Bible. And he told me that I needed to start reading that Bible, and he said, you probably should start reading in the book of John. Well, I took that small New Testament back to my apartment where I was living with my roommate, and he thought I was nuts bringing a Bible home. But I began to read in the book of John and I found that God knew all about me in eternity past. A lot of things in that book were just, almost sounded just exactly like me. And that’s when I began to have a love affair with the Bible, with the word of God, learning the scriptures. Now, I’ve never really sat down and tried to memorize scripture. That’s never been my forte, memorization. A lot of organizations like Navigators talk about scripture memorization. But I have memorized scripture from repetition. So as you hear it repeatedly, you learn it and you repeat it and you learn it and you repeat it and you learn it. It’s like the guy in the military marching forward march about face, you know, and you hear it enough times, you can do it in your sleep. That’s the way I’ve learned my scripture, listening to my pastor teach it to me over and over and over and over. And then it sinks in and stays there. And there’s a scripture that I have never forgotten, and I want to give this scripture to you today. And I want you to remember this verse for the rest of your life. It’s in Psalm 119, verse 11. Here’s what it says. Thy word have I hid in mine heart, so that I might not sin against thee. Thy word have I hid in my heart so that I might not sin against thee. Let’s give some principles on this particular verse before we dissect it. It was an instructional verse in the Psalms that gives us some insight, this verse does, about how to avoid the lust of the flesh, how to avoid the lure of the world, and how to avoid the deceptive abilities of Satan. if we hide the word of God in our heart? And that’s what we’re gonna answer today. What does that mean? So who wrote this? It wasn’t David, it was someone else, but the writer did not have the available spiritual assets that you and I have today because there was no filling of the Holy Spirit. There were no New Testament writings such as Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, or Romans, or Acts, nothing like that. And when he refers to thy word have I hid in my heart, he’s referring to the Torah, T-O-R-A-H, or the first five books of the Bible. And this includes the mandates of God, not just the Big Ten, but the complete codex one through three, or what we say 613 different mandates in the law of Moses. Now, obviously nobody’s gonna memorize all 613 laws of Moses, but you might be able to recite the 10 commandments, which are the freedom code. So there was also a dietary code, the military code, and much more. All of these were needed to ensure that the Israelites established and succeeded in their land that God had given to them. Today, we have 66 books called the canon of scripture. We call it the Bible, the canon of scripture. And there are passages in that Bible written to specific individuals and specific people. However, there are principles in these particular passages that are equally important to us, even though they were not written to us. For example, Psalm 119 verse 11, the verse that we’re going to study. Thy word hath a hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Here’s what we know about the word of God or the Bible. We know this from Hebrews 4.12, For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, and of the joints and the marrow, and is the discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. So here the writer of Hebrews makes an analogy to the Bible and the Roman two-edged sword. Not the ramphaia, which is a big one-edged sword, and not the xiphos, which is a small little stabbing sword, but the Roman machaira, the two-edged sword that conquered the world. And it says here that the word of God is quick, works very effectively, powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, And it divides our soul and our spirit and the joints and the marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. So when we read the Word of God or we hear the Word of God taught, it cuts us into our soul. It cuts into our mentality, into the way we think. And it reveals what our thinking is like. And it reveals when we have negative volition, when we are contrary to the will of God. That’s what the Word of God does. It reveals to us God’s plan. That’s why it’s like the two-edged sword. In 1 Peter 1.25, Peter wrote, the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word by which the gospel is preached unto you. We’ll talk more about that shortly. But the Bible will always be with us for the rest of eternity. I don’t know if you realize that, but it’ll never go away. Why? Well, the words of God found in the canon of scripture are alive. It means they have a life of their own. They’re powerful. That means they can overcome the darkness of this world. They are sharp and discerners of thoughts and intents of the heart. So the word of God, when you learn it and put it into your soul, it reveals to you what you really are. It’s like a mirror and it lets you see yourself as you actually are. You know, there was a poem about if the world made you the king for a day, what would you think about it? Well, the Word of God cuts right into your soul and shows you what you really are. Not what people think you are, not what you dress up to be, but what you think, because the Bible clearly says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is. And that’s why the Word of God is alive, and that’s why it discerns what you’re thinking. Now, the Old Testament writer said this in Psalm 119, verse 11, he wished to hide the the word of God in his heart, so it would help him to resist sinning. 2 Corinthians 10, 5 has something to say about this concept of controlling the thoughts in your heart. And we’re not talking about the cardia that pumps blood in your chest. In your head is your heart and your mind, your noose and your cardia. When the New Testament writers wrote about the heart, they’re talking about the responsive part of the soul called the heart. The mind is where we receive information, and the nous, N-O-U-S, is the Greek word, and the heart, kardia, K-A-R-D-I-A, is where we respond with that information. We store that information. So when we’re talking about the discerner of the heart, this is what we have to say about it in 2 Corinthians 10 five. Casting down imaginations, casting down every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Every thought to the obedience of Christ. That’s what the Word of God does. It controls what we think. And what the Bible says that we are to think in divine viewpoint terms, not human viewpoint. Human viewpoint is what the world would have you to think. It’s what Satan would like for you to think. It’s the evil that’s in this world that’s close to the truth, but it’s not the truth. Evil is very dangerous because it counterfeits God’s plan. But the word of God as taught properly and clearly will reveal your thoughts. And that’s what it’s supposed to do. And it’s supposed to help you to bring your thoughts into captivity so that the lust of your flesh or the lure of the world, or the deceptive tactics of Satan don’t capture you and get you out of fellowship and cause you to crash and burn. Now, we know what sin is, and we know what sin does to us. Sin, S-I-N. And remember, sin can be one of three things. It can be something that you think, it can be something that you say, and it can be something that you do. And remember, the first problem-solving device that deals with sin is rebound, where the Bible says if we will confess our sin, God will be faithful, God will be just to forgive us and purify us from all wrongdoing. No one told you you were ever going to sin again. You would never sin again after you accepted Christ. If they did, they lied to you because the Bible says if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. I remember meeting a guy one time that told me he didn’t sin anymore. I said, you don’t. Nope, don’t sin. I got saved. I don’t sin. By the time I got through talking to him, he was so mad he was sinning. He was ready to strangle me because I frustrated him. Yes, we all sin. But the Bible says this about our sin in Romans 6, 12. Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you should obey it in the lust thereof. And do not yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin. but yield yourself unto God as those who are alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. See, you’re alive from the dead. You were dead in your trespasses and sin. And when you accepted Christ, you were born again. So this said, as those who are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God, that’s the parts of your body. And then he goes on to say in Romans 6, 14, for sin shall not, shall not have dominion over you, for you’re no longer under the law, but under grace. I was talking to a person on the radio today in an interview, and they wanted to tell me that we’re still under the law. We have to keep the law. But according to this verse, sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law, but you’re under grace. And there it is in plain black and white right there in the Bible. I did not try to straighten this person out. I’m not in the business of straightening anybody out. They have their opinion, and I just said, that’s nice. That’s nice. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That’s nice. And let it go. You are not under the law. You’re not going to heaven because you keep the law. You cannot keep the law. The only person that fulfilled the law was the Lord Jesus Christ, and that’s why he was qualified to go to the cross and to pay for our sin. And that’s why he was resurrected on the third day, because he was God. The innocent lamb of God, without spot and without blemish, it takes away the sin of the world. So don’t let sin control your mortal body. Reign, control, so that you would obey it. And the lust thereof, lust, everybody has a lust pattern. Some people lust for money. Some people lust for sex. Some people lust for drugs. The worst of the people that lust for power, politicians. Lusting for power is evil. Because there are always so many people that want to control everybody else and tell them what to think, what to say, what to do. And like me, you don’t like that. I don’t like it and you don’t like it. So what does it mean to hide the word of God in your heart? Well, first of all, you got to possess it. You can’t hide it if you don’t own it. And the Apostle Paul called the Bible a treasure. And he said we have this treasure in our earthly bodies. That’s the scriptures that we’ve learned and applied. So here’s exactly what sin does, so you’ll understand it. Sin will steal your treasure. Sin will steal your treasure. If you get enough sin and you get into reversionism, you’re still saved, you’re still going to heaven, but you’re going backwards instead of going forwards, and you wind up eventually under the sin of the death because of God’s discipline, you’ll have eternal life, you’ll be there forever, but there’ll be minus any rewards. Your treasure will be stolen. So you must understand the importance of not letting sin reign, not letting sin steal your treasure, and how do you keep that? By putting the word of God in your heart. What does that mean to have God’s Word in your heart? Let’s go back to what I told you earlier, the nous and the cardia, two different parts. When you listen to a pastor teach you the Bible, you listen with your mind, your mentality. You’re listening, you’re comprehending, you’re understanding, but it hasn’t done you any good yet. It’s called gnosis knowledge, G-N-O-S-I-S, gnosis knowledge. What you must do is transfer that gnosis and make it epinosis. The word epinosis is the word full knowledge. Full is epi and gnosis is knowledge. So in the news, when you hear information taught by a well-qualified pastor, It becomes gnosis or knowledge, but it hasn’t done you any good yet because until you transfer that knowledge by faith and store it in the compartment of your heart where it becomes wisdom, then it will do you no good at all. You would have just heard it and you would have left and went home and forgot what you heard. Probably forgot it anyhow because you didn’t even take any notes. You just remember one or two things the preacher said and that’s it. Shame on you if that’s you, if you go home and can’t remember what he said. So you want to store it in your cardia, and that’s why it’s so important we have a communicator, called a local pastor teacher, and his job is to communicate clearly to you the scriptures of the word of God, and not just once a week on Sunday morning with a gospel message. and a little bit on Wednesday night. He is to teach you the Word of God, I believe personally, on a daily basis. That’s my only belief, on a daily basis, daily. I think we need to feed on the Word of God daily. And so if he’s teaching the Word of God daily, he’s communicating God’s Word to you, and then the Holy Spirit, if you are filled with the Holy Spirit, If you’re using problem-solving device number two, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will capture that information and make it spiritually perceptible. You’ll understand it. And then it goes down into your noose where you comprehend it. Now I’ve heard it, I’ve understood it, I’ve comprehended it, and now I have to comply with what I’ve heard. And that’s the four C’s of the Christian life. Communicator teaches it, the Holy Spirit captures it, I comprehend it, and I comply with the instructions. Now, this is why gnosis doctrine is not epinosis. Gnosis doctrine, Greek word g-n-o-s-i-s, knowledge, gnosis doctrine, is simply knowledge you’ve heard but not applied. Epinosis doctrine is a doctrine you’ve heard, believed, and applied into your life and stored it into your heart. So the writer of the Psalms had this Old Testament ritual that he would demonstrate his belief in his Redeemer. And their spiritual life revolved around those Old Testament rituals, sacrifices, using the faith rest drill. However, you are different. We’re not living in the Old Testament. We’re living in the New Testament. We’re living in an age of grace. Dispensational truth tells us it’s a different time. We have the mystery doctrine of the church. They didn’t have that. They didn’t understand that. Now the Shekinah glory of the Old Testament lives in you. And we have a ritual also to remind us to appreciate the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, and that’s called the communion cup. And I warn you, when you take communion out of fellowship, 1 Corinthians talks about it, you get yourself in a jam with God because you disregard the instructions that God gave you. If you don’t want to be under discipline from God, Confess any sin in your life before you drink of the communion cup, before you take the article of bread. Don’t do that with unconfessed sin in your life or you’re going to get yourself in trouble with God. So we have that ritual that we go through to remember the finished work of Christ on the cross. The Torah that that man learned in Psalm 119 verse 11 sustained his faith in times of chaos and conflict. And in our lives, the New Testament scriptures are there to keep us from falling into sin or to be doubt or despair in regards to God’s plan for our life because doubting God’s justice is a terrible failure. Doubting God’s justice is a terrible failure. What do I mean by that? Well, the Supreme Court of Heaven is open 24 hours a day. When you get an unfair deal in your life, nationally, politically, spiritually, whatever, when it may happen in your life, what are you gonna do about it? I used to have a friend say, I’m gonna write it in my little black book and I’m gonna get even with him sooner or later. You’re not authorized to get even with anybody. If you have a complaint about the way you’re being treated, you must take it to the Supreme Court of Heaven where the Heaven is open 24 hours a day. And in your prayer, you can go to the Father and you can lay it at his feet and you can say, Lord, this is what happened to me at work. This is what happened to me in the community. This is what happened to me, et cetera, wherever, wherever. Please take care of it for me. Vindicate me. Vindicate me. That means that God will clear your name, that you did nothing wrong. And so the Supreme Court of Heaven is open 24 hours a day. If you doubt God’s justice, that’s a lack of faith. And the scripture must be reinforced. So if you’ve learned the word of God, you have to reinforce it and learn it again and again and again and again because this gives you additional strength in times of testing in your life. Times you may go through momentum testing, which all young believers go through momentum testing to see if they’ll stay with it or if they’re going to peel off. Or you may even go through some sort of evidence testing, which is exactly what Job did. And it’s scripture learned and the scripture applied. It gives you the additional strength to handle those things in your life. So the psalmist said, I don’t want to sin against thee. I want to hide your word in my heart so I don’t sin against thee. What do you mean by that? Psalm 51, verse 4. Against thee and thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest and be clear when thou judgest. When you sin, your sins are against your heavenly Father. Your sins are against the Father’s mandates. And it’s to God himself you must confess your sin. Don’t go to confess it to anyone else. It’s not your job to confess it to a friend or confess it to someone else. Confess it to God if we confess our sin. Who did you sin against? Here it is, against thee and thee only have I sinned, Psalm 51, verse 4. So when you sin spiritually by lusting or when you sin physically by stealing or when you sin in falling into the lure of Satan and being deceived by Satan and getting into some goofy thing that Satan’s got going on, and you finally recognize your sin, and you finally recognize you messed up, go immediately to God and confess your sin to God. He’s faithful and just to forgive you. He’s not going to kick you out of his royal family. He’s not going to disown you. As a matter of fact, he’s gonna put pressure on you until you do come clean. That’s called the discipline of God where Hebrews 12 says those that he loves, he disciplines and scourges sometimes with a whip. It’s all designed to get you to come clean and to admit your failure. So if you doubt the justice of God, that’s a horrible sin because that’s a lack of faith in your part. So you don’t need some kind of accountability partner. You know, people talk about that. need an accountability partner to tell your sins to bird seed. That’s not true. You don’t need an accountability partner. You’ve got God, the Holy Spirit, who holds you accountable, and you’ve got God the Father you name your sin to. Once God’s word is heard, once God’s word is applied into your heart, The objective is for it to become wisdom. What is that? Well, very simply, it’s insight and discernment based on the full knowledge of God’s word that you possess in your soul. That’s all it is. Wisdom is insight and discernment based on the full knowledge of God’s word that you possess inside your soul. But let me remind you of something. Be careful because the rate of forgetting can exceed the rate of learning. And that’s why it’s really important for you to keep studying on into your later years in your life. As people get older, their cognitive abilities decline. And when the Bible says we are to redeem the time, I believe it’s telling you you can buy days. You can buy days by studying God’s Word and being faithful to take in God’s Word. You can keep your mind sharp. You might not be able to… physically do what you used to do, but you can sure pray and you can sure use your mind. So keep studying daily, even though you may be in your 70s and your 80s, keep taking it in daily and you will extend your life and you’ll glorify God. The scriptures learned and applied can enlighten every decision that you make. That’s critical for you to understand that. In Psalm 119 verse 105, your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I don’t know if you’ve been out in the woods at night, but without a light, you’re going to stumble and trip over the trees that lay down and take a nap at night. See, they stand up in the daytime, but at night, they lay down and take a nap. And when you go walking in the woods, you trip over them and fall, but without a light. The Word of God lights your path so you don’t trip and fall. And when you take God’s word and learn it and believe it, it will protect a young person, even a teenager, from self-destruction. Listen to Psalm 119, verse 9. Wherewith shall a young man cleanse his ways? By taking heed according to thy word. listen to isaiah 40 verse 8 the grass withers and the flowers fail but the word of god endures forever no wonder you want to put it in your heart no wonder you want to store it in your soul no wonder it’s going to last forever in eternity When you get to heaven, your body won’t be there. You’ll have a different body. You’ll have a resurrection body. But everything you’ve learned about the Bible will be in your soul, in the mentality of your soul. And so the word of God will be there. And that’s why Matthew 24, 35 says, heaven and earth will pass away, but my word shall never pass away. That’s the power of the word of God. It is the most powerful thing alive besides the Holy Spirit living in you, and the Holy Spirit uses the word of God to empower you. That’s why the Lord Jesus Christ sent him to be your tutor, your mentor, to equip you to handle the adversity in the devil’s world, to see through the chaos, to see through the smog, to see through the deception that Satan throws your way. So take God’s word, learn it, use it, store it in your heart, so that you won’t sin against God, or else you’re going to fail miserably in your Christian life, and you will never hear, well done, my good and my faithful servant. I sure hope this is making sense. If you need any of our material, go to the website and order it. It’s all free. I thank you for your prayer support and your encouragement, and next week we’ll be back, same time, same place. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flotline.
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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.
