Understanding Your Soul – Part 4
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 523 aired on September 20, 2015
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes you know the drill. Please stay with me for 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration, some
education and without any manipulation. No hidden agendas, we’re not trying to sell anything.
We’re not trying to ask you to join anything. We’re not going to ask you to give up anything.
What I am going to ask you to do is listen, listen as I try to accurately present the truth found in
the Word of God, the Scripture. Yes, it’s a show about the Bible but maybe unlike the other
shows that you’ve heard because we don’t rant, rave, jump up and down, and holler, we’re just
here to give you information. If I can verify and identify the plan of God for your life, then you
have the privilege and the opportunity to orient and adjust to the plan. This is up to you but my
job is always to get it accurate, to be as accurate as I can. Therefore we use the original
languages, we go as much in depth as we can, doing each verse line by line, word by word
sometimes, in an exegetical form. Exegetical, where we exegete the word, see how the word was
written, what it meant then, what it means today, and we’ll form categories out of certain verses
that we look at. For example John 3:16,
“For God so loved the world.”
We have the doctrine of
God, the doctrine of love, and the doctrine of the world. We have God,
theos,
love,
agapao
,
world,
cosmos,
and so we can develop each one of these doctrines. I could teach you at least 20
to 30 hours on each subject and I’m not even a well-qualified pastor. You get a man that really
knows the languages and understands how to do this, he can develop the doctrine of God in ways
that you’ve never seen, just like my pastor did many years ago when he taught me that God is
omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. He is immutable. He is veracity, eternal life, love. God is
righteousness, sovereignty, and justice, all part of the characteristics of God. I had to learn these
things just like you need to know these things and when we learn these things, we can use them
in the faith-rest drill, problem-solving device #3 on the FLOT line of our soul. If we use the
sovereignty of God as a Biblical rationale to relax and not worry, or we use the justice of God,
like if someone maligns you or hurts you in some way, you turn them over to God. You let God
handle it. This is using the justice of God rationale where you don’t have to worry about
anything. For example, you learn about God or you learn about the world or you learn about love
and the different types of love. Problem-solving device #6 is personal love for God. Problem-
solving device #7 is impersonal love for others. If you’ve heard me teach this, you know what I’m
talking about. If you haven’t heard me teach this and you would like to hear more there are two
things I can do for you. Number one, we have a book where all the Christian problem-solving
devices are listed or we can get you the series of radio shows where I taught them and you can
have them on MP3. You need to learn these, you need to understand these. They are not new.
They are age old Biblical truths put together in such a way to explain how the Christian life
operates. We can’t make the rules up. We can’t just dillydally through life and try to impress God
with our human works and with our good deeds. We have to follow a plan, there is a process.
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God has a plan and it’s called protocol. It says a right thing must be done in a right way. God
honors protocol and so as a believer in Jesus Christ, you must learn the plan. If you don’t learn
the plan you’re going to go to heaven, yes, you are going to have eternal life, yes because you
accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior but when you get to heaven you’re going to realize what
you missed, how you blew it, how you had an opportunity to glorify God to the max, but you
didn’t do it because after you accepted Christ as your Savior, then you went merrily off down the
My Way Highway. You put the Bible aside, you never learned it, you never took time to explore
it, you never stayed filled with the Holy Spirit, and you lived your Christian life out of
fellowship, under discipline. This might explain why you went through as much suffering as you
did, because God was trying to get your attention. We started several weeks ago talking about
understanding your soul and this is going to be show number four on the real enemies of the
soul. Now listen carefully, you are an invisible, living soul that will live forever. Your body will
go back to the grave. You will die and your body will return to ashes. However, you’re going to
get a resurrection body. When Jesus Christ our Lord returns, your earthly body will resurrect
from the grave and you will get a resurrection body. This is the body that you will have forever.
Your soul will inherit this new body. Right now your soul is in a sin-infected body. Your body
has a sin nature. No one taught you how to sin, you knew how to sin inherently. You knew how
to lie, you didn’t take lying 101 in school. You knew how to hate. You knew how to be jealous.
You knew how to be vindictive. These are all traits of the sin nature. Your body is infected with a
sinful nature, you got it from Adam. This is why Romans 5:12 says,
“For by one man sin came
into the world”
This is why you can seem like two different people. Sometimes you’re good to
go and sometimes you’re a mess. Do you want to know why? Because you let your sin nature
dominate you. You do not stay filled with the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:16 says,
“If we will walk in
the Spirit, then we won’t fulfill the lust of the flesh.”
Your soul has mentality. Your soul has
volition. Your soul has a conscience.
It’s inside of your soul the real you is found, you are
what you think.
Proverbs 23:7 says,
“As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”
God’s not
impressed with your image and your style. God’s impressed with what you think. If He wants to
check you out, He’ll look at your thought process. He’ll look at your motives. He’ll look at your
intentions. He’ll look at your desires. Yes, He sees your failures and He understands you fail
because you are sin infected. But He also knows your motives, your desires, and your intentions.
Your soul has four enemies: sin, arrogance, evil, and emotion.
With sin, you have three
enemies: the world, the devil and the flesh. The world and the devil are always out there and the
flesh, the sin nature, is always in you. What do they do?
The world will distract you from
advancing spiritually.
If you’re a Christian, you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior, the
world will do everything it can to pull you off of the path, this path being the road to maturity,
the road to becoming a mature believer, the road to glorifying God to the max in your life. The
world will distract you, business, marriage, family, social events, whatever. Anything to keep you
away from the Word of God, to keep you out of church, to keep you away from growing, to keep
you from studying. The devil will use the world and your flesh has a natural affinity for the
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world because your flesh enjoys what the world offers as temporal happiness. The world is a
major distraction for most Christians. We also have the devil. We know the devil is a deceiver.
For the Christian, what he’s going to try to do is to deceive you into believing something that’s
not true. For example, he may tell you that, “You’re not eternally saved. You’ve done something
bad since you accepted Christ as your Savior and God’s angry at you and now you’re not really
saved anymore. You need to make it up to God.” That’s stupid, that’s ridiculous. You can’t make
it up to God, you didn’t earn it to start with. Ephesians 2:8 says,
“For by grace are you saved
through faith, it’s a gift of God and not of works lest anyone should brag about it.”
You have
eternal life complements of the grace of God, related to the finished work of Jesus Christ His
anointed Son on the cross where He was our substitute, where He paid the penalty for our sin.
That’s the truth. Satan may come along and say, “You know, three years ago you had an affair,”
or “You know, four years ago you stole something.” He’ll bring all this old stuff up and then he
wants you to think, “If I was a Christian, I really wouldn’t have done that.” He’s a deceiver, he
wants you to doubt God. He wants you to doubt God’s plan and he will send people that will be
ministers, people that have wonderful sounding language. Jude calls them filthy dreamers and
they teach false doctrine. They teach lies. Here’s a big lie that floats around today. “Dream big,
you can live your dreams. If you want your dream, you can live your dream. Don’t quit
dreaming.” You’ve heard all that. Listen, God’s plan for you is so much greater than anything you
could ever dream up, you would be embarrassed if you could see it on a movie projector. You
dream up what you think will make you happy but God has something that will give you a
superabundance of happiness, more than you could ever imagine. It’s not about people or
circumstances. See, this is what most of our dreams are about, that “People will make me happy.
If I could just find the right man, if I could just find the right lady, if my kids would just be the
right people, if I could just win the lottery, if I could just whatever.” People and circumstances
don’t make you happy. This is a false doctrine that the world lures you with, the prosperity
concept
.
Let me tell you something, God has a plan, it’s a wonderful plan. He has something that
He wants you to think. He has something He wants you to say. He has something that He wants
you to do. He has a place that He wants you to be and He will provide everything you need to
fulfill the plan. The first thing Satan’s going to do once he realizes you’re starting to grow and
you’re starting to understand some things, you are starting to realize who you are and how the
plan of God works, he will try to deceive you. He will send a minister, a mouthful of teeth along,
a big smile and he’ll pay attention to you and pat you on the back and tell you how much he loves
you and how much they need you and he will take you where you do not need to go. He will lead
you into the things that are not true. The Bible is full of these warning. 2 Peter warns about it.
Jude warns about it. Paul warns about it consistently with Timothy. “Stay out of that, follow the
example I laid for you.”
Satan is a deceiver. The world is a distractor. And your flesh is a
destroyer.
Your flesh will destroy you. Your sin nature, if you allow it to take control of your life
even though you’re a believer, even though you accepted Christ as your Savior, if you allow this
to happen, you will go under warning discipline from God. You will go under intense discipline
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from God. There’s even dying discipline from God. This is all seen in Hebrews 12:6-13. Link this
up with Proverbs 15:30 and you will see it. God does not play games. You do, He doesn’t. Watch
out for your enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. The flesh produces this sin we’re talking
about. Sin is whenever we step outside of the plan of God. Sin means to do anything that’s
missing the mark of God’s plan for your life. Sin is you deliberately doing the wrong thing or
maybe not doing that which you know is right. For example, if you went to one of the grocery
stores and you gave somebody a $20 at the cashier and she gives you change for $100 and you
look at yourself and you think “I didn’t give her that much money.” Then you think, “Well, this
is my lucky day,” and you put it in your pocket and stroll out, you just sinned. You stole, you
didn’t do the right thing, so that is sin.
Sin is any thought, any word, any action that violates
the character or standards of God.
God warns about sin. In Genesis 4:7 He gave a big warning
about sin.
“Is it not true that if you do what is right, you will be fine? But if you do not do what is
right, sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you but you must suppress it.”
God is
perfect justice and He’s going to hold us accountable for our sins in time and know all sins are
paid for. When you get to heaven there’s not a movie projector and God is not going to put up the
screen, invite everybody to have some popcorn, and watch what an idiot you were, this is not
going to happen. When you get to eternity, remember this, all sin is paid for. We have what is
called your position in Christ and your experience in Christ. In Christ, you are positionally free
of sin. In experience you sin. God deals with our sin. All of our sin is a matter of our decisions,
it’s called our volition. We choose, we make the choice. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re
sinning but we chose it. It’s difficult to accept this and sometimes we don’t understand it, but not
even the devil can force you to sin, he can’t.
Only you can choose to sin.
The devil didn’t make
you do what you did. God knows you chose to do what you did. Satan could have enticed you.
The world could have distracted you and lured you, but your sin nature is what will destroy you.
God is not going to accept any plea of ignorance or insanity or, “It’s not my fault God.”
The lack
of the knowledge of the Word of God in your soul prevents you from recognizing sin.
You
must recognize sin. You must learn God’s Word. Sin comes in three ways: something you think,
something you say, or something you do. We have mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue, and
overt sins. Romans 14:23 says,
“Whatever is not of faith is sin.”
Refusing to learn God’s Word is
a sin. How do I know this? Because 2 Timothy 2:15 says,
“Study to show thyself approved unto
God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth.”
If I am
mandated as I am in this passage, this is a command, if I am mandated to study God’s Word, if I
am mandated to
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
(2
Peter 3:18), if I disobey the mandate, I sin.
Failure to grow spiritually is a sin.
I am in
reversionism. I’m going backward not forward. Some people say you’re sliding back, you’re in
reversionism. Even though we are spiritually alive the minute we accept Jesus Christ as our
Savior, we still have a sin nature. We still have the flesh. It’s still inside of there and the Holy
Spirit cannot control you if the flesh is in control. You have got to learn how to turn the flesh off,
so how do you do it? Well, sin doesn’t begin with the sin itself, it begins with a lust to commit
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the sin. This goes back to the very first principle about sin, you want to do it. You choose to do it.
Every sin we do starts with a thought and what did I tell you? God has the ability to see your
intentions, your motives, and your desires. Every sin we do starts with a thought. If we take our
volition, the chooser, the decider and we go negative to God, not positive, when you do this,
when you turn your negative volition into a sinful action, you have turned your back on God.
Don’t ever forget this, when you turn your back on God, He just loves you from behind. He
shines on your back. He loves you from the front and He loves you from behind. 1 Peter 2:11
says,
“Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and strangers, those that are not citizens of this
earth, to
keep away from the desires of the flesh which wage war against your soul,”
yes, war
against your thoughts. Just because Satan and his demons or your sin nature zing these
unacceptable thoughts in your mind, it doesn’t mean you have to do it
.
It doesn’t mean you have
to retain it. It doesn’t mean you have to turn every temptation into a sin. See, this is what a
temptation is. A temptation is a thought process and so when you think it, this doesn’t mean
you’re sinning. When you have a temptation, when this thought comes into your mind, that
zinger goes in, your mind and your soul will tell you it’s wrong. “Don’t do that,” and then your
volition must make a decision. It’s as simple as this. If you use positive volition and say, “Yes, I
will not do this, I’m kicking this wrong thought out of my mind,” that’s good. You will defeat sin.
But if you say, “I’m going to dwell on this wrong thought and I’m going to do what this thought
is telling me to do,” then you will sin. 2 Corinthians 11:3 is clear,
“I’m concerned that just as the
serpent completely deceived Eve by his cunning craftiness and the misrepresentation and skill of
deceit, just so perhaps your thinking could be corrupted from the noble fidelity and virtue which
is in Christ Jesus.”
The only way that you can defeat the ingenuity and stealth of Satan is to
have the Word of God in your soul. The only way you can defeat the sin nature from
destroying you is to stay filled with the Holy Spirit.
If you take the filling of the Holy Spirit
which is problem-solving device #2 and you put with it problem-solving device #4 and #5, grace
orientation and Biblical orientation, then you’re going to be able to not only avoid the sin but
recognize it and see it for what it is. You can know when Satan is distracting you. You can know
when Satan is tempting you if you consistently study God’s Word. There should never be a day in
your life that you don’t feed on God’s Word. This doesn’t mean you pick it up, read it, and put it
down three minutes later. This is not what I’m talking about. I am talking about you being fed by
a well-qualified pastor, a person who has studied it, can teach it, and you have a notebook and a
Bible and you listen. I assure you every day I sit down and I listen to my pastor teach me the
Bible.
Consistently learning God’s Word gives you the ability to recognize and capture and
expel wrong thoughts when they come into your soul.
The thoughts inside of my soul are
much more valuable than possessions that we have. Our possessions will decay but our soul will
live forever so avoid sinful thinking. Sin will defeat you. All sins of both unbelievers and
believers were judged on the cross.
God doesn’t punish you for the sin but He punishes you
for allowing the sin nature to take over your soul and for not following His mandates.
Your
sins have been paid for. That’s why you can go to heaven. That’s why you have eternal life,
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you’re not having to pay for it yourself. What you can get disciplined for is your negative
volition. His punishment hurts, it’s designed to hurt. If it didn’t hurt we wouldn’t wake up. We
wouldn’t recognize what we’ve done is wrong and we would continue a life of misery until we
have an untimely death. Through sin we choose to place ourselves outside of the plan of God and
therefore He warns us about the consequences of ignoring and even defying His will. Here it is,
Romans 6:12-13,
“Do not let sin reign in your physical body so that you obey the lusts
[or the
desires]
and stop using the members of your body as weapons of wickedness under orders from
the sin nature, but place yourself under orders to God as those who are alive from death
[this
means we are identified with Jesus Christ]
and your members
[this is your body]
as weapons of
righteousness to God,”
by means of executing the spiritual life. Only the Word of God in your
soul, only the Word of God you’ve metabolized, this means you’ve learned it and applied it into
your life, only this provides the divine solutions. These are the only solutions that will work in
your life. Human solutions are no solutions. Divine solutions are the only solutions.
We cannot
glorify God to the max unless we identify and recognize sin in our life.
God hates sin,
Proverbs 6:16-19, and sin is recognized throughout the Bible in many different ways. Sins of
mental attitude like arrogance and self-pity, sins of the tongue like gossip, lying, and slandering,
and overt sins like fornication, adultery, drunkenness, even murder, these are all talked about in
the Bible. Sin breaks your fellowship with God. I’ve got so much more to tell you. Come back
next week. Until then, this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT
Line.