Understanding Your Soul – Part 6
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 526 aired on October 4, 2015
Good morning and welcome to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes. For the next few
minutes listen for motivation, inspiration, some education, and we do not use any manipulation.
We’re not trying to con you into doing anything. This show is not going to ask you for any
money. We’re not going to sell you anything. We’re not going to ask you to join up or fess it up.
What we are going to ask you to do is listen up. Listen to me as I clearly and accurately present
the details revolving around the plan of God for your life. Hopefully I can verify and identify this
plan for you and you, if you choose, can orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you. I can
assure you my job is to get it accurate and I take it very seriously. We’re not here playing games.
We’re here to give you life saving information, information that will direct the course of your life
so that you won’t make bad decisions. Remember the motto that we have and we even have a
bumper sticker that says it. If you would like one, write to us. We’ll send it free of charge.
Bad
decisions limit future options.
If you make enough bad decisions, well then you don’t have any
options left do you? Thank you for praying for me. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your
encouraging letters. It is my prayer that we will continue this show and be a guiding light. This is
what I want to do. I want to direct you to where there is a well-qualified pastor. I want you to see
the need to sit under that well-qualified pastor so that you can study God’s Word on a daily basis.
You can learn, apply, and then glorify God. That’s a little acronym LAG, and if you do this
remember our Lord said,
“Happiness belongs to the people who hear My Father’s Word and
keep it”
(Luke 11:28). This is a must do and will do.
You must hear God’s Word. Then will
you keep God’s Word, will you obey it? This is where your volition comes in.
Every one of
us has a volition. We all have a chooser, a decider. Your chooser is listening to me right now. You
could choose to push the button and go to another channel and you may but you have a volition.
We are all victims of our volition. We are not a product of our environment. It’s easy to say, “The
reason I am a loser is because I grew up in a bad environment.” That’s not true. A lot of people
grew up in bad environments and they’re not losers. They oriented to God’s plan. They learned
God’s plan. They adjusted to God’s plan and they have fantastic, fabulous lives right now. Not
that they’re rich, not that they have a lot of money, that’s not what I mean. I mean they have
tremendous peace. They have tremendous happiness. They have tremendous direction. They
know what their life is about. They know where they serve, what they do. They are well-
motivated people with an objective outlook on life. Then there’s always the other side of the coin
and that’s the people who live by their emotions and that’s never a good thing. As a matter of fact,
we have been studying the soul and we’ve done several Bible lessons on the soul. By my notes
we’ve done five 30 minute shows dealing with your soul, so this should be number six. We all
have emotions. I do, I find myself crying sometime when I’m watching an emotional movie. I
know I shouldn’t but sometimes tears well up in my eyes, something gets to me a little bit. We
have a sin nature too, we all have Adam’s original sin imputed to us, inside of us. Remember
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this, you have a body and you have a soul and if you are a Christian, if you have accepted Christ
as your Savior, you also have a living human spirit. You are body, soul, and spirit. Now if you’re
not a Christian, if you’ve never accepted Christ as your Savior, then you are not trichotomous.
You don’t have a body, a soul, and a spirit. You’re bichotomous, you just have a body and a soul.
You can’t have fellowship with God until you’re born-again and this means that the spiritual birth
must take place. This is what John 3:3-6 was about when Nicodemus was a bit confused and
asked Jesus,
“How can I go back into my mother’s womb to be born again?”
Our Lord Jesus
Christ explained to him it’s a spiritual birth, not a physical birth. Being born again spiritually
means you believe in Jesus Christ and accept Him as your Savior and your dead human spirit is
made alive. This is how you have fellowship with God. When you go to heaven you’re going to
get a different body, you’re going to get a resurrection body, a body that won’t wear out, and your
soul and your spirit will be housed in your resurrection body. Emotions like the sin nature reside
inside that body. Emotions, and the sin nature are part of Satan’s world and they will remain with
your body until it rots in the ground. There’s nothing wrong with emotions if you use them
correctly, but the soul is not the seat of emotions. Your soul has mentality. Your soul has volition.
Your soul has a conscience and a self-consciousness, but the soul is not the seat of emotions.
Emotions accompany the sin nature and should reinforce the danger to you of getting too
emotional about something because when we are emotional, we don’t think. Did you hear me?
When we get emotional, we stop thinking.
The Bible very clearly teaches that when we allow
emotions to control our thoughts, we are allowing the sin nature to control our souls. Sin is
a symptom of rejecting God’s truth
. Do you know why? Because emotions are non-rational. If
you are a Christian and you get emotional, you can only retreat from reality. You don’t advance
ahead. You don’t know the reality of Bible doctrine, only the rah rah rah of emotional religion.
There’s a lot of this out there today, a lot of emotional religion, a lot of people making noise for
Jesus. Make no mistake about it, emotions are nothing but human viewpoint wrapped in feel-
good paper and colorful ribbons and streamers, with no nutritional value.
Emotions cannot, will
not, ever produce muscle on your soul.
All they can do is drain the soul vitality that you have.
Philippians 2:5 says,
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
Romans 12:3 says,
“
Stop thinking in terms of arrogance beyond what you should think.”
Thinking, mind, these are
mentality things. You have intentions, you have desires, you have motives, and these are part of
your thought process. This is what God looks at. When you get emotional in worship and in
religion, this is not the way to God. This is the way to feel good, get high, and when you leave,
you don’t feel good anymore. If something goes bad, you don’t feel good anymore. Listen, I get
emotional sometimes in church, I do, if I hear something that’s really good and I learn something.
And I go, “Wow, that’s amazing. I wish I had known this before.” Well, that’s cool but to get
emotional to where there’s no thought, to where there’s just swaying and singing and hand
raising, nobody is thinking, and we’re all crying, we’re all getting emotional, this is not the
Christian life. You’re not learning anything. God says the emotional believer is seasick. He’s
queasy from this lack of Bible doctrine in his soul. We must learn God’s Word and pack it in our
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souls. Listen to Ephesians 4:14-15.
“In order that we are no longer immature
[that’s seasick from
lack of stability in Bible doctrine]
driven out of control by every wave of false doctrine
[That’s
why I use the term seasick, it’s like somebody who is seasick in a rough sea],
and blown here
and blown there by every wind of false doctrine coming from the trickery of men, who in cunning
craftiness carry out their deceitful plotting; but instead
[the Apostle Paul says]
by practicing the
teaching of doctrine in association with virtue love, we can grow up in every way through the
Word of God with respect to God the Father who is absolute authority and Jesus Christ His
Son.”
A spiritual child, a young believer regardless of his age who is just beginning to learn
God’s Word is like a ship on the high seas, destabilized with no rudder, totally incapable of
intelligent action because he hasn’t learned anything yet. He’s operating on emotions. It took me
a year or longer after I accepted Christ as my Savior before I oriented to a direction. I was on an
emotional high. I had new friends, new things to do, new places to go, and I made some silly
decisions that were based on an emotional driven volition. The original languages of the Bible
talk about the basis for rational thought.
If you don’t know God’s Word, if you don’t
understand God’s Word, you’re shooting dice with the devil and he has loaded the dice.
He
is relying on you to have a momentary emotional high. “Let’s go over here to this camp and let’s
get emotionally high for the weekend,” and then when you come back it won’t sustain you. It
won’t carry you. The higher you go in your emotions, the lower you fall when they let you down.
In Ephesians 5:17,
“Stop becoming non-thinkers, but continue to become spiritually
intelligent about God’s will.”
Of course Satan wants you to rely on your emotions because
they’ll take you away from God’s plan. If you think, you’re going to be thinking about God’s plan
and way too often Satan has his own evangelists, his own pastors, and they advise you to feel
emotional, to let your emotions explode. “Go ahead and cry brother. Let’s work up a good cry.”
Working up a good cry won’t save you and won’t lead you in the Christian life. I remember years
ago in a meeting that I did before I learned very much doctrine and a man wanted to rededicate
his life to the Lord in the meeting in which I was speaking. I told him to go ahead. He said, “I’ve
tried it before and it didn’t work.” I said, “Well, do it again.” He said, “How do I do it?” I thought
for a minute and I thought, “just exactly how does this man rededicate his life?” I said, “Pray
about it. Get down on your knees and pray and say, ‘I rededicate my life to the Lord.’” He said,
“I’ve done that, it didn’t work.” Give it all to God? I mean, what do you tell him? I didn’t know
enough doctrine to tell him anything except get emotional about it and he was emotional. He was
frustrated. He had tried to live the Christian life and was failing. He was a believer but he kept
going back to his sin. I didn’t know how to explain to him the rebound process. I didn’t know
how to explain to him how to be filled with the Holy Spirit and I’m not the only one that didn’t
know. There are a lot out there today that still don’t know. The original languages of the New
Testament warn you about playing dice with the devil. Of course he wants you to rely on your
emotions. He doesn’t want you to think, he wants you to follow your emotional feelings and your
sin nature will lead you into listening to the emotions of your body and not thinking from the
mentality of your soul. Look at it this way. You have a mind and your emotions on the other side.
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Now there is nothing wrong with emotions until you let them control you.
In your emotions you
usually react to circumstances and the Bible says in your mind, you should respond to
circumstances.
If you get bitter or angry or frustrated, it’s always an emotional sin and you
always react in the emotional sin. If you are filled with God the Holy Spirit, using problem-
solving devices #1 and #2, then when you have a problem you can respond by forgiving the
individual, using impersonal love, problem-solving device #8, and orienting and adjusting to
God’s plan. See the difference? Emotions do not orient and adjust to God’s plan. Emotions do not
respond, they react. This is why you have to be careful. Listen to Psalm 73:21-24.
“Yes, my soul
was bitter and I was punctured in my emotions. I was foolish and ignorant of doctrine and I
lacked insight. I was as senseless as a beast before You. With Your Word in my soul, You guide
me and afterwards You take me up to glory.”
When the writer of this psalm was ignorant of
God’s Word, his emotions ruled his soul and he behaved like any wild beast. Jude 1:10 talks
about the same thing, how teachers of false doctrine have beastly desires.
When we recover our
spiritual equilibrium, in other words we acknowledge our sin to God and are filled with the
Holy Spirit, and we resume learning God’s Word, then God can lead us in the path of
righteousness.
Then God can guide us through the minefields of life and deliver us to
unbelievable rewards in eternity. It’s amazing, but if you depend on your emotions to guide you,
precariously you will be sustained by the highs of a church that doesn’t even teach the Word of
God. When the real pressure hits your life, you will fall apart because you won’t know how to
handle it. It’s inevitable, pressure is coming and it will prove intolerable to you. Adversity is
inevitable, stress is optional. We say this all the time. Adversity is what circumstances do to you
and stress? This is what you do to yourself. By learning the 10 problem-solving devices and
putting them on the FLOT line of your soul, you can stop the outside sources of adversity way
before they become the inside source of stress. At the onset of any emotion, if you get guilty, if
you get angry, if you get hateful, if you get bored, just stop and confess this sin to God and turn
back immediately to God’s Word.
You have to make a conscious effort to put distance
between your soul and emotions.
You are a product of your decisions. You make the choices.
God didn’t make you into a little robot. You have to choose. He knows the desires of your heart.
He knows the intentions of your heart. He knows what you’re thinking. When you make a
decision to turn away from your emotions to say no to that burning desire of the flesh, to say no
to the lure of the world, to say no to the false deceptions of satanic doctrine, when you say no,
then God the Holy Spirit can sustain you and deliver you but you have to make the decision. In
Isaiah 43:25,
“I Jesus Christ, even I, am the One who blots out your transgressions for My own
sake and I will not remember your sins.”
If our Lord Jesus Christ can forget your sins the
moment you confess them to Him, tell me this. Why should you continue to feel guilty and go
back and back and back?
See, you’ve got skeletons in the closet, something you did 10 or 20
years ago and now you think God’s going to get you for this? Your emotions go wacky.
Something bad happens and you think, “I knew God was going to get me. I knew it, I knew it.”
This is not how God operates. Why should you continue to feel guilty or bitter about what you
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did if you went to God and admitted it and He forgave you?
Emotions can destroy your soul.
Don’t settle for the cheap substitute of emotional religion. Choose to put God’s Word in
your soul.
Listen, if you’re going to a church where that’s all they do is pump you up
emotionally, give you a few tall tales, a few points, a few poems, and you can’t walk out of there
having learned something, that’s emotions. I mean, do you take a Bible and a notebook to
church? Do you actually write down notes and learn something and put it into your life? Do you
actually go more than on Sunday morning? I mean come on, if that’s all you’re getting is Sunday
morning, a first grader would never get out of first grade if they only went once a week and you
go to church once a week and you think that’s enough? You’re not learning, you’re not growing.
You must get under a pastor that will teach you something. Sometimes you may have to do it like
I do, study at home. Every night I’ve got the computer playing a Bible study DVD and I’m
listening to my pastor teach me God’s Word. I couldn’t do what I do with you if I didn’t do this. I
have to be fed, I have to learn, and I have to apply just like you. Do not settle for anything less
than God’s Word being taught to you. Listen to Isaiah 46:8, this is a word to spiritual believers,
“Reflect on this doctrine and become confident in your thinking
[and then a word to those that
are carnal and live by their emotions],
come back to your senses
[in other words, let thought
control you instead of your emotions and come back to right-thinking in terms of doctrine or
God’s Word]
those of you who operate in opposition to righteous authority.”
Jeremiah, an Old
Testament prophet of God, during a time of great apostasy in Judah prophesied. He wrote several
things that describe the believer perfectly between the one who lives his life as unto the thinking
of the Lord and the one who lives his life unto emotions. Mental attitude sins related to emotions
even caused Jeremiah to blame God for the misery that he was facing when in fact Jeremiah
actually caused his own misery because of emotional sins. Instead of using God’s recovery
procedure, 1 John 1:9 and Psalm 32:4-5, he didn’t take responsibility for his self-pity and he
wound up blaming God. Listen as I read it to you, Lamentations 3:11-20,
“He
[God]
has
dragged me from the path and pulled me to pieces. He has made me desolate. He has drawn His
bow and set me as a target for His arrows. He has shot His arrows into my emotions. I have
become a laughingstock to all of my people and the subject of mockery all day long. So God
filled me with bitterness and He has made me drunk with venom. He has broken my teeth with
gravel stones and He has made me cower in ashes and my soul has been deprived of prosperity. I
forgot what happiness is and so I said, ‘My strength and my hope have perished. I have lost all
hope of deliverance from the Lord.’ Just thinking about my affliction and my homeless condition
is bitterness and venom in my soul. When I continually think about this, I become mostly
depressed.”
This is all found in the book of Lamentations. This is what happens when you let
your emotions get out of control because emotions can make you stupid. Jeremiah blamed God.
God is the author of happiness. He blamed God for his unhappiness that he brought on himself.
Not only is this blasphemy but it’s utterly, totally stupid, arrogant, and a waste of time. Jeremiah
allowed his emotions to take over. Jeremiah lost his capacity for happiness and instead of
joyfully acknowledging God’s blessing and giving thanks for whatever circumstances he was in,
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he became an expert on self-induced misery. How about you? Are you an expert on this? Are you
full of self-pity? Do you have self-induced misery? Now listen to the change. Once Jeremiah
finally abandoned his self-pity, once he finally got out of this arrogant, emotional ride he was on
and he took responsibility for his sins, listen to what he said,
“This I recall to mind and therefore
I have hope. The Lord’s many kindnesses never cease because His great compassions never come
to an end. They are renewed every morning, great is His faithfulness. Surely my soul remembers
and is humble within me. This I recall the mind and I have hope. The Lord is my portion of my
inheritance says my soul. I will put my hope in Him. The Lord is good to those who trust in Him
and to the souls who seek Him. It is good therefore to wait silently and patiently for the
deliverance of the Lord”
(Lamentations 3:21-26).
See, you can choose to be happy or you can
choose to be unhappy, what a difference.
If the sin nature and the emotions are controlling
your soul, it’s gloom and doom, afraid, bitter and miserable but with the Holy Spirit in control of
your soul, then you have happiness. Same circumstances but your confidence is in God.
Transfer your trust from yourself to trusting God.
Doesn’t this make sense? It does to me.
Why don’t you trust the One who gave you your life? If He gave His life for you, is there
anything beyond His power that He won’t do for you?
When Jeremiah finally woke up to this, it’s
amazing, his soul began to sing out with confidence because he remembered to trust in the Lord.
He discovered what you need to rediscover, the unfailing love of God. God did not fail him, he
failed God. How about you? Have you failed God? Have you blamed God for your misery? Have
you turned inward to self-pity and bitter emotions? It’s time you went before the Lord and
confessed your sin.
It’s time you begin to let the Holy Spirit control your life instead of
letting your sin nature and your emotions run rampant. Until you do this, you’re never
going to be the person God wants you to be.
Until next week, this is your host Rick Hughes
saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line