Understanding Your Soul – Part 7
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 527 aired on October 11, 2015
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes stay with me for some motivation, inspiration, education and no manipulation. That’s
right, no manipulation. There are no hidden agendas here. We are not trying to sell you anything.
We are not trying to recruit you for anything. Our objective is to give you accurate information,
information that will help you verify, identify, and solidify the plan of God for your life. If you
can do this, then you have the freedom, the privacy, the opportunity to orient and adjust to the
plan, that’s up to you. My job is to be accurate and to get it right. FLOT is a term for the forward
line of troops and we are using a military metaphor to talk about how the Christian life works.
We are presenting a case that if you learn these 10 unique problem-solving devices they act as a
a FLOT line. They protect your soul. Your soul has mentality and when the outside sources of
adversity attack you, what normally happens is we quit thinking and we start emoting. If you let
the outside sources of adversity overrun the command post of your soul, then you stop
responding and you start reacting. Adversity is going to be inevitable for all in the human race
but stress is always optional. You do not have to worry. You do not have to be afraid. You do not
have to be bitter. You never have to feel guilt. This is the unique thing about the Christian life.
This wonderful life is a supernatural life empowered by God the Holy Spirit and led by God’s
Word.
“The Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword”
(Hebrews
4:12).
We are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit and as we stay filled by God the Holy Spirit,
He takes the Word and leads us and then we begin to represent the lifestyle of Christ to
those who know us.
We replicate His lifestyle. He never worried. He was never afraid. He was
never bitter. Yes, He was tempted. Yes, He was tested, but He never sinned. He was the Son of
God without spot and without blemish who went to the cross for us. Yes, He paid for our sin
because He was the sinless Lamb of God. We sin. We have Adam’s original sin imputed to us as
members of the human race and we have a sinful nature, but thank goodness we have God the
Holy Spirit indwelling us. If we will,
“Walk in the Spirit”
(Galatians 5:16) and
“Be filled with
the Spirit”
(Ephesians 5:18), then we can learn how to execute, live, and enjoy the wonderful life
called the Christian life. Walking in the Spirit is the key and it starts with rebound. This is
problem-solving device #1. When you rebound you confess known sins to God. You see, sin
grieves the Holy Spirit and quenches the Holy Spirit. You become carnal, you become fleshly,
you break fellowship with God and the Holy Spirit is quenched. He doesn’t leave you, He’s
quenched, He’s grieved. When you rebound, 1 John 1:9 or Psalm 32:4-5, when you go to God
and name the sin, then you reinstate the Holy Spirit back into control. You put Him back in
control. Listen, this can happen eight or fifteen times a day. You don’t wait until you go to bed at
night to confess your sin. When you sin you immediately name it to God and why do I say name
it? Because 1 John 1:9 tells you to do this,
“If we confess our sins.”
The original word confess
from the original Greek language is a compound word pronounced
homologeo.
It means the
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same, to name, so we name the same thing. We tell God what we did. “I just lied, I just lusted, I
just whatever” and God will cleanse you.
Without the cleansing of the Holy Spirit you will
never get anywhere in the Christian life.
You can act Christian and you are, you can act holy
and you’re not. Listen, a Christian sins. A Christian gets out of fellowship. A Christian can go for
years under the domination of his sin nature. He’s still a Christian, he’s going to go to heaven but
he’s not a spiritual believer. He’s not a growing believer until he understands how to become
spiritual by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit and then learns how to grow by means of
studying God’s Word and applying it into his soul. When you are learning God’s Word and
applying it in a state of spirituality, then you begin to replicate the life of Christ. See, you have a
body and that’s never going to look like Jesus’ body and you have a soul. If you are a believer,
you have a spirit. You have a human spirit, the part of you that was born again. In your soul, the
mentality of your soul, you will begin to think like He thought. This is why 1 Corinthians 2:16
tells you the New Testament is
“The mind of Christ.”
This is why Philippians 2:5 tells us,
“Let
this mind be in us, that was also in Christ Jesus.”
As we begin to think like Christ thought,
then we began to have discernment. The enemy of the soul is lack of discernment.
This is
critical for you to understand.
If you don’t have spiritual discernment, you’re going to be
defeated in your life from time to time. Spiritual discernment is necessary. If you don’t have any
spiritual discernment, even as a maturing believer, you’re going to be attacked. It will be just
enough to throw you off course, to get you going in the wrong direction. Then once you
recognize you’ve made a mistake, it’s sometimes a little hard to recover from this. You have to
recognize this.
Lack of spiritual discernment is a real handicap in the Christian life.
If your
soul is not firmly grounded in God’s Word, you will be tempted by Satan to take a path that
veers slightly away from truth.
Just a little bit off of divine viewpoint today, but tomorrow and
the next day you keep veering off and eventually you will be miles apart. It is not necessarily that
you committed a sin but you lost an opportunity to glorify God. You failed to take the next step
in your spiritual life. Some of you have been listening to me for quite a while. This applies to
you.
It’s time that you took that next step and get under that qualified pastor that I talk
about all the time, the man who can teach you God’s Word.
It is time you get your Bible and
a notebook and you sit down at the table and you start studying and listening to your pastor teach
you God’s Word. Then watch what will happen in your life. The first thing that will happen are
distractions. Satan will throw a fit. He will do anything to keep you from doing this. He doesn’t
want you sitting under a well-qualified pastor learning God’s Word. The world will present
distractions and the lusts of the flesh will lure you, anything to stop you from advancing in your
spiritual life. You can be blind to the truth and be dulled if you don’t learn God’s Word
consistently. There is only one way to do it. You are a product of your decisions. You make the
choices, no one else, you do. You decide, “I want to grow up. I want to be a mature believer.”
Does the Bible say you should grow up? Yes,
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of your
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
(2 Peter 3:18), this is a mandate.
“Study to show thyself approved
unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed”
(2 Timothy 2:15), this is a mandate from
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God. And so is
“Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me. My yoke is easy and My burden is
light”
(Matthew 11:29-30). The writer of Hebrews says,
“I have a lot of things I would like to
teach you, but you are dull of hearing”
(Hebrews 5:11). I can’t tell you how many churches I’ve
spoken in and people are dull of hearing. They can barely stay awake during the service and if
you don’t entertain them with some music and get their foot thumping around, they don’t even
make it the first 15 minutes.
Wake up. You must realize the critical hour that you live in and
it’s time for you to get some spiritual discernment. It’s time for the eyes of your soul to see
the world as God sees it, not through a distorted, warped vision of mankind.
Unbelievers,
people that are not Christians, and believers that are carnal, Christians out of fellowship,
arrogantly believe that they see the world with perfect clarity. This is wrong. You see, they can
take the truth and turn it upside down and what is truth becomes a lie, what is a lie becomes truth
to them. They are stupidly captured by the lies of Satan.
When you have enough of the Word
of God in your soul to have some serious spiritual discernment, then not only will you see
the difference between God’s Word and Satan’s lies, you will appreciate it.
You are evaluated
by the mirror of the Word of God in your soul. This is not a mirror of your emotions. This is a
mirror of truth. The writer of Proverbs put it this way when talking about having spiritual
discernment, he said,
“To know wisdom and instruction, to discern wise counsel, to receive the
instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity, to give prudence to the naïve, to give to the
youth both knowledge and discretion, a wise man will hear and increase in learning and a man
of understanding will acquire wise counsel”
(Proverbs 1:2-5). And in Proverbs 3:13-18,
“Happy
with the wisdom of God are those who find wisdom and those who get understanding. For
wisdom is better than silver and the revenue of wisdom is better than gold. Wisdom is more
precious than jewels and nothing you desire can compare with it. Long life is in the right hand of
wisdom and in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways
[this is wisdom]
are the ways of
pleasantness, and all of her paths are peaceful. She’s like a tree of life to those who lay hold of
her and to those who hold her fast they will be called happy.”
What is wisdom? Let me explain it
to you. When you hear the Word of God taught by a well-qualified pastor, if you are filled with
the Holy Spirit and in fellowship with God because of no unconfessed sin in your life, then that
Word of God is transferred down to your mind where you now comprehend it. It’s in your
nous
,
your mind, but it hasn’t done you any good yet. Yes, the Holy Spirit has made it spiritually
perceptible. Yes, the pastor communicated it to you. The pastor did his job. The Holy Spirit did
His job. Now it’s your job. Now you’ve heard it and you understand it. Now will you apply it? If
you take what you’ve heard, learned it, understood it and now apply it, then it becomes wisdom.
Then it moves into the heart, the
kardia,
the Greek says this is the part of you where wisdom is
stored. Wisdom, which is called
sophia
in the Greek, is the launching pad of your soul so when
you hit a situation where you need to know answers, bingo, you can recall it out of your frame of
reference. Up it comes and you know what to do. You don’t have to get on the phone and call the
preacher and say, “Preacher, pray for me. What should I do?” You can’t live your spiritual life
based on the strength of your pastor.
You have to live your spiritual life based on your
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strength as you learn the Word of God from your pastor
. He doesn’t have time to solve all
your problems for you. You’ve got to be able to stand on your own two feet.
To know the Word
of God and apply it is wisdom.
Think of it this way. When your soul reaches an elevated status
of discernment, you will see Satan’s traps. It’s like you walk through the forest and the first time
you don’t even see things. When you really are used to being in that forest, you will see animals
you never saw, you will see trees you never saw, you will see branches you never saw, you will
have a lot more perception.
You not only differentiate between right and wrong once you get
some wisdom but you begin to see the difference between human good and divine good.
There is a big difference. Human good is not rewardable. Human good is you playing church. It’s
ritual without reality. Divine good, this is the good produced under the filling of the Holy Spirit.
Remember talking about protocol and how there must be protocol? It is never wrong to go to
church, yes, that’s a correct thing to do, but there’s a right way to go to church and a wrong way
to go to church. If you go to church with known sin in your life and you haven’t used problem-
solving device #1, you haven’t rebounded that sin, then you are acquiring human good. You look
good, you’re in the right place, you’re doing the right thing, but you have quenched the Holy
Spirit. You have grieved the Holy Spirit. You are not going to get anything out of it because you
won’t be able to understand the Word that the pastor brings to you because the Holy Spirit can’t
do His job of making it spiritually perceptible to you. You shut Him down. You don’t live the
spiritual life on your own. Without the power of the Holy Spirit, you will be dead in the water.
You look like a Christian, you may even talk like a Christian, but you will be dead in the water.
You will not glorify God because you are producing human good. Do you want to discern good,
better, and best? Do you want to always choose the best? Do you want to make all decisions
based on eternal ramifications, not on the false promise of earthly pleasures and satisfactions? If
we choose God’s way, it is a straight way. We avoid the interesting side roads in our life and we
reach the objective of spiritual maturity as quickly as possible. Even when we get there, even
when we become mature believers, we still make mistakes. Even though we’ve got discernment,
we still make mistakes. We have a sin nature and our sin nature is never going to go away until
we die and get another body. When we get another body, a resurrection body, it won’t have a sin
nature. This body does, this body is from Adam.
“For by one man sin came into the world and
death by sin and now death has passed on all, for all have sinned”
(Romans 5:12). We are living
in sin infected bodies. By means of the Holy Spirit we learn how to keep that sin nature in
control but it’s going to come up. There are flaws in your life acquired or inherent. There will be
flaws and until you learn to recognize them, stay away from them, identify them, you are going
to make mistakes. It won’t be major but if you don’t deal with it, it could slowly accumulate into
a major problem. You can accumulate so much human viewpoint, so much garbage in your soul
that you actually become accustomed to the stink that comes out of your life and you’ll think it
smells so good. Your friends will be nice but their lack of spiritual focus will distract you from
ever growing spiritually. Your time will be spent doing things that aren’t wrong, but it will take
time away from you learning God’s Word. You won’t necessarily be sinning in your decisions but
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because they’re not the best decisions, they will give Satan an opportunity to distract you and
destroy you. If you keep up this lifestyle, you’ll make thoughtless, impulsive, decisions. There is
nothing worse than being impulsive. Without a Biblical foundation, making these impulsive
decisions becomes sin and they accumulate into a forceful magnet for other sins. Without some
spiritual discernment you’ll be gullible. You’ll be impulsive. You won’t have any tact in your life.
The perfect description of anyone easily swayed by motion, you can read it for yourself in Psalm
73:22, “It feels right to me.” This will become your motto as you slowly take yourself off the
true course of your spiritual life. Oh, you will say, “I prayed about it, brother.” What a joke, you
prayed about it. Were you even in fellowship when you prayed about it? What does praying
about it do? Listen, don’t let me shock you, but
prayer is not a problem-solving device.
Prayer
is a means of communication with the Father where we intercede for others., where we glorify
God our Father, where we pray for our own needs but it is not one of these 10 problem-solving
devices. A lot of these problem-solving devices work through prayer, but just saying, “I prayed
about it,” this doesn’t do anything. I think one of the hottest movies out today is a movie about a
woman who prays a lot. In this movie does she ever identify that you can pray and not have your
prayers answered? Did you know there are at least ten different reasons why prayers won’t be
answered? One of them is praying out of fellowship, praying with known sin in your life.
“If I
regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me”
(Psalm 66:18), that’s simple. You can
waste your time on nonessential issues when you stop learning and applying God’s Word. You
stop listening to somebody teach you God’s Word. Oh, you’re busy, you’re friendly, you’re nice,
you’re wonderful, you’re a mother, you’re a grandmother, you’re a father, you’re a grandfather,
but you’re not growing and you’re not glorifying God because you’re not doing anything that a
sweet, nice, unbeliever couldn’t do.
Your rate of learning God’s Word must exceed your rate
of forgetting God’s Word if you want to succeed in the spiritual life.
If you want to execute
the spiritual life, you’ve got to have a rate of learning greater than the rate of forgetting. That’s
why the writer of Hebrews says, “It’s hard to explain the Word of God to you since you’re
deficient in the hearing department” (Hebrews 5:11). He goes on to talk about spiritual food and
baby food and why people need baby food. You see, the believer who doesn’t have any spiritual
discernment, he’s got to make lot of right choices, but he is going to blunder into situations that
will threaten his very soul.
With spiritual discernment you can glorify God by making the
best choices in your life and you can stay in God’s will.
You can find your personal sense of
destiny, problem-solving device #6. The volition of your soul can be motivated by the vast
encyclopedia of God’s Word inside of your soul. Your soul will no longer be dominated by its
own thoughts, tainted with emotion, thinking about the world. Now your soul can be filled with
God’s Word and you can have perfect spiritual viewpoint called spiritual discernment.
“Whoever
loves discipline and instruction
[in other words whoever makes the Word of God the number one
choice in his life]
loves spiritual discernment, and whoever hates reproof from the Bible is
stupid”
(Proverbs 12:1).
God is pretty blunt. Either you love His Word and you learn it
every day or you’re stupid. God doesn’t negotiate or compromise the truth.
You’re either
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filling yourself with divine viewpoint from God’s Word or you’re being stupid. Are all kinds of
things permitted to me? Yes, but are all things profitable to me? No. Paul talks about in 1
Corinthians 6:12.
“I must not abdicate my spiritual freedom by becoming enslaved to any of
these things. All things which are not sin are lawful but all things are not beneficial.”
“All
things which are not sin are permitted to me,
but all things do not edify my soul”
(1 Corinthians
10:23). The spiritually discerning believer, hopefully you, knows that many things are not sinful
but they sure can distract you from ever reaching maximum glorification of God, because you
choose to think about them rather than being occupied with Christ. True spiritual discernment is
being able to choose the right course of action among a number of different courses, choosing
that which is most fitting in a particular situation, understanding and knowing God’s will. God’s
promise to you is that His wisdom is available. It’s available to everyone of us if we will just get
serious about learning His Word for every aspect of our lives.
“Wisdom shouts in the streets.
She lifts her voice in the town center”
(Proverbs 1:20).
When you desire the sweet refreshment
of God’s Word, it doesn’t whisper in your ear. It shouts clearly, enthusiastically, and succinctly.
You will know God’s will, but you must sit under a pastor who can teach it to you. The Bible is
not a novel, it’s a textbook. It is designed to be learned and this is why God gives men the gift of
poimen kai didaskolos,
the Greek for pastor and teacher. Do you sit under a qualified pastor?
Does he teach you God’s word daily? Do you learn God’s Word on a consistent basis? If not,
you’re never going to have the spiritual discernment I’m talking about. It’s critical you understand
this because brick by brick you erect a mansion in your soul and it starts with a foundation of
God’s Word. You listen, you learn week after week and year after year, and that mansion grows
until you glorify God to the max.
All solutions in life, all divine solutions, all have their origin
in the Word of God.
Remember this, human solutions are no solutions at all but divine solutions
are the only solutions. When spiritual discernment fills your mansion in your soul, you won’t be
overcome by life’s decisions. You’ll be calm, you’ll be competent, and you will be sure that the
Word of God backs up every decision you make, even the trivial decisions. You can now discern
what’s appropriate, not merely what might be okay or what might be wrong, but what’s
appropriate. Proverbs 15:14,
“The soul of the spiritually intelligent seeks spiritual discernment,
but the mouth of the fool feeds on folly.”
“The soul of the discerning person seeks knowledge
and wise men seek understanding”
(Proverbs 18:15).
I hope you’re listening. I hope you’re
learning. We’ll be back next week same time, same place. I hope you’ll join me. Until then, this
is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to The FLOT Line.