Understanding Your Soul – Part 10
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 530 aired on November 1, 2015
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and again for the
next few minutes please stay with me. It’s going to be a time of motivation, inspiration,
education, all done with no manipulation. We’re not trying to hustle you. We’re not trying to
recruit you to join up, fess up, give up, nothing like this. This show is about one thing and one
thing only and that’s giving you accurate information, information that my prayer is will help you
verify as well as identify the plan of God for your life. If you’re able to do this you can orient and
adjust to this plan, that’s up to you but we don’t offer useless human speculation. There’s enough
of this around today. We offer accurate information from the canon of Scripture, short Biblical
principles, Biblical concepts that will help you understand God’s will and plan for your life. My
prayer is that if you’re listening, you will continue to listen. If you would like to get ahold of the
book we’ve been talking about,
Understanding Your Soul
, feel free to write to me. We have been
doing a series on the soul of the believer and let’s keep this in mind. If you are a Christian, if you
are a believer in Jesus Christ, you are trichotomous. My pastor taught me this years ago. This
means you have a body and you have a soul. Everybody has a soul, even unbelievers. The soul
has mentality. The soul has volition. The soul has a conscience and a self-consciousness which is
an awareness of self. You can look in your yearbook and pick yourself out, can’t you? That’s self-
consciousness. So you have all of this in your soul. There is another part and that is the human
spirit. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ and you have accepted Him as your Savior, you have
been born again. This means you don’t have a different body, you still have the same body. You
don’t have a new soul, you still have the same soul, but the human spirit that was dead inside of
you because of your identification with Adam’s original sin has now been made alive. You are
now indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit lives inside of you. Ephesians 1:13,
“You are sealed with the Holy Spirit unto the day of redemption.”
Galations 5:17 says that this
brings about a war, a war between the flesh and the Spirit. The idea that the Apostle Paul wrote is
that there is always a conflict inside of your soul. This conflict is the sin nature that wants to
control your thoughts and emotions and God the Holy Spirit in control of your thoughts. It all
boils down to one simple thing, your volition. Who do you choose to be in control? This is why
sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don’t, like that commercial that was on
television. Both of these are at war, Galatians 5:17,
“The flesh wars against the Spirit, the Spirit
wars against the flesh and these are contrary one to another so that you can’t do the things that
you would do.”
There’s always a war and as long as you allow God the Holy Spirit to
control your life, then you can be in tune with God’s will, plan, and purpose for your life.
How would you stop the Holy Spirit’s control in your life? Well, one little three letter word, sin.
When we sin, whether it’s something that we think, something that we say, or something that we
do, the Bible says we quench the Holy Spirit and we grieve the Holy Spirit. The Bible uses a
term called carnal. When you sin you become carnal, you become fleshly. You see, at any time in
530-Understanding-Your-Soul-p10-transcript.pdf
your life like while you’re listening to me, you are either filled with the Holy Spirit and spiritual
or you are controlled by your sin nature and carnal. How would you know the difference? Is
there unconfessed sin in your life? This is the difference. Is there sin in your life you haven’t
dealt with? I don’t mean forsake it, this is not what I’m talking about. I said, have you named it to
God? 1 John 1:9 says,
“If we confess our sin He is faithful and just to forgive us and to purify us
from all of our wrongdoing,”
and the secret to this verse is the word confess. It’s a compound
verb
homologeo.
Homo
means the same, and we use it in our English language to come up with
the word homosexual, the same sexually. When the Bible says confess it’s
homologeo. Logeo
means to say. So if you put the word to say along with the word the same, it means if we say the
same. Essentially what God is telling you is that when you sin, admit the sin to Him. Tell Him
what you did. Don’t say, “I was a bad boy God. I was a bad girl God.” Tell him what you did. “I
lied. I cheated. I lusted. I lost my temper. I said something I shouldn’t have said. I gossiped. I
maligned. I was afraid. I worried.” See, these are all sins. When you fulfill 1 John 1:9 you are
using problem-solving device #1 on the FLOT line of your soul. This is the rebound technique.
When you rebound, when you name your sin to God, you are instantly filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now you are already indwelt by the Holy Spirit. You are already sealed by the Holy Spirit. But
you simply have quenched the Holy Spirit by means of your sin and you chose to do it. Now you
must choose to admit it. The psalmist in Psalm 32:4-5 said, “As long as I kept my mouth shut
and didn’t admit my sin, I almost dried up and died.” Yes,
“God does discipline those that He
loves”
(Hebrews 12:6). He can administer warning discipline. He can administer intense
discipline and there is even dying discipline. This is for the believer. Even under dying discipline
the believer goes to heaven. You can read 1 Corinthians 5:1-5 for yourself. He’s going to heaven
but his life was cut short. I know you want to go to heaven and I want to go to heaven but neither
one of us want to go on the next train. We would like to live all of our days that God allows us on
this earth. If you hide your sin from God and don’t admit it, then you’re going to come under
warning discipline, eventually intensive discipline, and if this doesn’t give you an attitude
adjustment, there could be dying discipline.
“There is a sin leading to death”
(1 John 5:16), you
can read it for yourself. This is for believers who break fellowship with God and do not ever use
problem-solving device #1 and they become useless to God. He simply takes some home way
too soon and it’s not a victorious crossing over the river either. A lot of times there is suffering
involved because this believer would not listen to God the Holy Spirit. This believer would not
obey God’s Word and this believer had to be taken home way too soon. Don’t let this be you. Use
rebound when you know you have sinned and make sure you are back in fellowship with God.
The Holy Spirit inside of you can teach the human spirit inside of you what God’s plan is.
The
secret to learning is the Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 3:18 says,
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge
of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
You can’t grow if you quench the Holy Spirit. You can’t
grow if you grieve the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is the teacher of spiritual phenomena
to the human spirit. Your human spirit is how you have fellowship with God. John 4:24 says,
“We worship God in spirit and in truth.”
Christ is truth and so as we learn the mind of Christ, it’s
530-Understanding-Your-Soul-p10-transcript.pdf
the Holy Spirit who helps us metabolize this information. It’s the Holy Spirit that helps us bring
this information into the mind so that we understand it and comprehend it. It’s our faith once we
understand it and comprehend it that gives us the ability to put it to use and apply it into our
lives. This is why Jesus said,
“Happiness belongs to those people who hear My Father’s Word
and who keep it”
(Luke 11:28). This is the application part. The hearing part, well this is you
going to church, listening to a well-qualified pastor teach you God’s Word. As he teaches you
God’s Word, if you are out of fellowship, if you have unconfessed sin in your life, you are in the
right place but you are in the wrong way. The Holy Spirit is quenched and grieved and so there’s
not going to be the process of spiritual conversion. You’re not going to get what was taught and
not be able to apply it. You’re only going to get human viewpoint thinking. I’ll tell you
something else, when someone begins to teach something that is contrary to the Word of God
and promote it as true, if they begin to tell you that this is true or that is true and it’s not, the Holy
Spirit will not metabolize this information.
The Holy Spirit will not allow this information
which is false doctrine to cycle into your soul and the reason is because it would be sin.
“To
him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin”
(James 4:17).
Yes, you can sin
by buying into false doctrine. This is why the Bible constantly says stick with the truth, follow
the path of the people that set the road down before you, don’t stray, don’t go looking. Listen,
Jude 1:13 talks about people out there that are like wandering stars, they are like roaring waves.
My pastor’s been teaching the book of Jude lately and we are right now 70 hours into that little
short book. Many false teachers are like wandering stars, they are like waves with foam and
there’s nothing to them. They break and they’re gone. The star flies by and it’s gone. Sometimes
there are unbelievers who are there to hustle you. They are there to get you somehow or another,
to get into your pocket, may be an insurance salesman, may be somebody in a multilevel
marketing business, and they show up in your church and they hustle you and try to get you
involved so they make some bucks off of you. Or it could be some false teacher that comes into
your church or some pastor that you put confidence in who teaches you something that’s not true.
It’s not true, it’s a stretch and you say, “Okay, I believe it.” This is not the Holy Spirit. You have
quenched the Holy Spirit and grieved the Holy Spirit because you bought into false doctrine or
what’s called the doctrine of demons. Satan has got his own crew out there and they are well at it
every day.
If there’s anything the believer must do, it’s guard the doctrine in his soul.
The
Bible talks about the Word raining down. If I used this metaphor every time you go to church,
you might want to carry an umbrella with you. That’s right because you want the pastor to rain
the Word of God down on you. You want to be fed God’s Word. You want to be nourished in
God’s Word but you can’t do it if the Holy Spirit is not in control. With sin in your life it’s not
going to work. With someone teaching you something that’s not true, it’s not going to work.
Only
the Holy Spirit can verify what’s true and only the Holy Spirit can allow you to have
fellowship with God.
Yes, you have a body. Yes, you have a soul. And yes, you have the Holy
Spirit living in your human spirit allowing you to have fellowship with God. When your body
decays, crumbles, and goes to the ground, and it will, don’t put your hope in science that they’re
530-Understanding-Your-Soul-p10-transcript.pdf
going to find a cure. When you die, you’re going to be transferred. You’re going to have a new
body, a resurrection body, and your soul and your spirit will have an eternal home in the new
body, in the resurrection body. As an unbeliever, well it’s darkness and torment forever according
to the book of Jude and many other passages.
“The Lake of Fire was prepared for Satan and the
fallen angels”
(Matthew 25:41), not for you. God sent His Son Jesus Christ, the anointed Savior
of the world to pay for your sin. When you fail to receive Him and accept this, when you try to
pay for it yourself it just can’t add up. This is why Matthew 7:22-23 says,
“Many will say to Me
in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did I not do many wonderful things in Your name?’ And I will tell them,
‘I never knew you, depart from Me you who worked iniquity.’”
Iniquity is human good. Iniquity
is satanic good. Iniquity is you doing all the right things in the wrong way. It’s no good, it doesn’t
honor God whatsoever.
Without the filling of the Holy Spirit nothing works in the Christian
life. Your soul doesn’t prosper. You don’t have fellowship with God without the filling of the
Holy Spirit.
This is why it’s problem-solving device #1, rebound and then #2, the filling of the
Holy Spirit. Without the filling of the Holy Spirit you cannot have fellowship with God. Without
the filling of the Holy Spirit you build up garbage in your soul. Without the filling of the Holy
Spirit the metabolization process of the Word of God from your pastor to you doesn’t work.
Ephesians 6:17 tells us we are to
“Put on the helmet of salvation.”
Your soul is your thinking,
your thoughts, your intents, your motivations, your desires. You will readily understand the
Lord’s mandate to wear this helmet, it protects your soul. It is your eternal security. The Bible
talks about eternal salvation and it occurs the moment you believe in Jesus Christ as Savior.
People sometimes will say, “Well, you can lose your salvation if you do something bad.” Just
exactly how bad do you have to be? Is it telling a lie, is this when you lose it? “Oh no brother.” Is
it getting drunk and telling a lie? “Well, now you’re getting close brother,” and so I have to go get
saved again? It doesn’t work this way.
Salvation delivers you from the flames of the Lake of
Fire forever, that’s faith alone in Christ alone. You are saved eternally.
The moment you
accept Christ as your Savior you are saved eternally. When you believe in Jesus Christ, you get a
ticket to heaven. It’s punched, it’s guaranteed. You put this helmet on and you carry it forever. It’s
protecting your thoughts. You see, what Satan wants to do is he wants to get you to doubt God’s
faithfulness. He wants to get you to doubt God by thinking that maybe you can do something
God hasn’t prepared for. “Maybe I did something really bad and maybe the salvation that God
provided doesn’t cover this.” You do not have to worry about doing something so stupid that you
are going to lose your salvation. As a matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet you that most of us have
already done this stuff, really stupid, stupid things, things that no one knows about. You think no
one knows about them, in your mind you hope no one knows about them but God does. You’re
still saved, you’re still a Christian aren’t you? You’re not dead yet, you’re still listening to me. If
the Father was through with us, we would be toast. He’s not through with you. Yes, you’ve done
some stupid things. Yes, you’ve had your addictions in different areas but if you will use
rebound, if you will admit it to God, if you will search the Scripture, and grow and water your
soul with His Word, you won’t have to worry about all the doubts and the fears anymore. You are
530-Understanding-Your-Soul-p10-transcript.pdf
protected from the fear of death and you have the joy and security of knowing that God watches
over you on earth and heaven is waiting for you.
Being saved means being delivered, your soul
will be delivered.
When you die you will take off and you will head for heaven. Your sin nature
will leave, it’s not going to be there any longer. It will be gone and you will not have a sin nature
in heaven. The sin nature is part of the body that is gone. You will have a new body, no sin
nature. Ephesians 6:17 tells us not only are we to have on the helmet of salvation to protect our
thoughts from doubt but we are to have the sword of the Spirit which is God’s Word. It’s
available to every one of us. I’ve been sitting here talking to you, giving you God’s Word for 20
minutes now. It’s available to every believer but only through the filling of the Holy Spirit. If you
are not filled with the Holy Spirit by using rebound, you cannot process God’s Word. The Holy
Spirit is the One who makes spiritual phenomena possible and if He’s quenched and He’s
grieved, no matter how much you listen to a pastor, no matter how much you try to read the
Bible, with unconfessed sin in your life it’s not going to cycle through.
Jesus Christ had to rely
entirely on God the Holy Spirit to sustain His humanity so that He could execute the plan
of God, then what about you? We are much more dependent on this power.
We receive it at
salvation. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We are filled with the Holy Spirit at salvation and
when we sin we quench the Holy Spirit. When we rebound we are filled with the Holy Spirit
again and we’re not under control of the flesh anymore. Just agree with God about what you did
and you can regain the most powerful weapon in the world. Do you know what the most
powerful weapon in the world is? It is not some terrorist bomb. It is not some terrorist threat.
The most powerful weapon in the world is the Word of God.
Listen to Hebrews 4:12-13, my
pastor use to quote this every sermon,
“The Word of God is constantly living and powerful,
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the point of dividing the soul from the spirit
and the joints from the marrow and is able to judge the thoughts and the intents of the mind. No
created being is exempt from His scrutiny but everything is naked and exposed before the eyes of
Him to whom we must give an account.”
It’s clear,
“The Word of God is alive and powerful.”
In
your soul you have the most powerful agent in the universe, God’s Word, God’s promises.
There are over 7,000 promises in the Bible all available for you. The dynamics of the Christian
life, all available for you, a life without fear, a life without worry, a life without guilt, a life with
confidence, a life of joy, happiness, and peace. It’s amazing and it all starts with you tapping into
God’s Word. You have a soul and you have to understand what’s soulish and what’s human. There
is a lot of human viewpoint floating around. Read the newspaper and somebody will tell you
some human viewpoint. “Do you want to be rich? Do you want to be happy? Win the lottery.”
This is a lie. You can win the lottery and still be miserable and you’re probably not going to win
the lottery anyhow, save your money. What makes you happy? Remember what I told you,
“Happiness belongs to those people who hear God’s Word and keep it”
(Luke 11:28). This is the
word of Jesus Christ our Lord Himself, God’s Word,
“Take on the sword of the Spirit,”
which is
the Word of God. God’s Word enters our soul through the Holy Spirit. It’s perfect, God’s Word is
perfect and by the way, it wasn’t written in English. It wasn’t written in the King James version. It
530-Understanding-Your-Soul-p10-transcript.pdf
was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic and what we have today are translations from the
originals. When it comes to studying the Bible we need somebody that knows the languages
because the Bible tells us in the original languages, it’s perfect. In these languages it can
penetrate, divide, and distinguish between the smallest distinctions of the soul and the spirit.
Even as the secret to life is found in God’s Word, so also is the secret to power. Therefore, you
have to believe the Word of God and appropriate the Word of God in order for these promises in
your soul to have power, to be available for you.
If you’re positive to God’s Word and if it
becomes like a sword in your hand that you’re able to cut deeply into your enemies and for
your own benefit, it can change your mental attitude.
It can give you a lasting peace. It can
give you contentment and fulfillment in your life. This is how powerful God’s Word is. It will
defend you from the influence of satanic doctrine and the temptations that come from sin and
evil. This is why we are told in
Proverbs 4:23,
“Guard your soul with all diligence because out
of it are the issues of life.”
How do you guard your soul? By learning and applying God’s
Word, by staying on course.
Even though God gives you a sword of power, He never
commands you to attack Satan. Stay away from this. He didn’t send you to straighten out the
devil. He can handle the devil. If you get around someone and they start giving commands to the
devil and trying to do that kind of stuff, I’d say go quickly and get away. It’s exactly the
opposite. He gives every believer the necessary armor to protect his soul but not to attack the
enemy of his soul.
God didn’t send you to attack Satan, he sent you to grow, to guard your
soul.
Nestled in your soul is God’s Word and it will defend you from the enemies, both human
and invisible enemies. You will be defended by learning God’s Word. The Word of God defends
itself if you guard it in your soul. Do you know what can turn you into a coward? It’s your
emotions. In a crisis, if you flip over to emotions you’re going to melt and become a loser in the
crisis.
You can’t live by your emotions. You have to live with confidence in God’s Word and
what you think.
If you are going to defend yourself through the Word of God, then leave it in
God’s hands. Any attack that comes against you, let His Word handle it. He said in Deutoronomy
32:35,
“Vengeance is Mine and retribution. At the right time their foot shall slip for the day of
their calamity is near and the impending events are hastening on them.”
God is not slack. God is
not slow. Your first mandate is to grow in grace, not to fight the enemy. Let the Lord handle the
battles.
You just arm your soul with God’s Word, understand God’s will for your life, and
let the Lord handle the battles. You focus on the solution, not the problem.
The problem
could be anything from finances to health to social, medical, any kind of problem. There’s an
answer. It’s in the Word of God and when you know it and you have faith in God’s Word, you can
do exactly what Moses told those Israelites to do,
“Stand still and watch what God is about to
do”
(Exodus 14:13). Did the Red Sea open? You bet it did and He delivered them just like He
will deliver you. All right, 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 FLOT Line.