Rick Hughes shares invaluable insights on the ‘The Flatline,’ emphasizing the vital importance of understanding the doctrine of volitional responsibility. Explore how personal choices shape our spiritual journey, often leading to self-inflicted suffering. This episode opens a compelling discussion on how arrogance can cloud judgment, the historical implications of such actions, and the divine path to rectifying this through humble realization and pure reliance on God’s word. Tune in for practical wisdom on transforming curses into blessings through spiritual growth.
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 good morning and welcome to the flatline i’m your host rick hughes please for the next few minutes stay with me just a short time of motivation some inspiration a whole lot of education
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And you remember we do it without manipulation. We don’t try to con people. We’re not soliciting you for money. We’re not asking you to join anything. The objective of this show is to simply give you accurate information. Hopefully information that will help you verify as well as identify God’s plan for your life so that you can orient and adjust to the plan. if you want to. That’s really up to you. But the Flotline has been on the air for 13 years. Many of you have been listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you for letting me know the show is playing in your area. I’m very grateful when my spotters out there say, yes, it did play today. Good. We like to hear that. And if you have anything you’d like to send us and tell us that you’re learning, always love to hear from you. You can email us from our website, rick at rickhughesministries.org. rick at rickhughesministries.org. Or simply go to rickhughesministries.org and you’ll see how to email from there. And, of course, we have our material that’s available, books and different things that we’ve written and we’ve published free of charge, never a charge, for anything we do on this radio station. We believe in operating by grace. That means if God’s in it, he’ll pay for it. If not, we’ll shut the doors and go do something else. So thank you. Thank you for being here. Please listen up today. You may remember last Sunday we talked about the core values of the mature believer. Those core values are built around the flat line in your soul which is made up of those 10 problem-solving devices. 10 unique problem-solving devices taught in the Word of God. beginning with the rebound technique, it solves the problem of sin, moving to the filling of the Holy Spirit that solves the problem of the genetically formed sin nature that wants to control your life, moving to the problem-solving device of the faith rest drill that solves the problem of unforeseen circumstances and disasters that may hit your life, and then Moving into grace orientation as a problem-solving device, understanding we’re saved by grace, we live by grace, we treat others in grace. Moving from there into doctrinal orientation, which means that we now begin to develop a new way of thinking. We make a course adjustment in our life. We begin to think with terms of grace. divine viewpoint instead of human viewpoint, and that comes from the Bible doctrine in our soul. This gives us another problem-solving device called having a personal sense of destiny, beginning to realize that my life is about more than just me. beginning to understand what God’s plan for me is, what my spiritual gift is, and where I fit into this thing. It’s a wonderful thing to walk through the door with a personal sense of destiny and leave your agenda behind. This is all developed by personal love for God, which is a problem-solving device, our greatest virtue we have. The Bible says, if you love me, you’ll obey me, and my mandates are not hard. That’s 1 John 5, 3. So virtue love is the greatest motivation for the believer. We love him, the Bible says, because he first loved us in 1 John. And he did for John 3.16. God so loved the world. He loved you and loved me before we even thought about him. And so from personal love for God, we develop the problem-solving device of impersonal love for others. This lets us deal with people that don’t necessarily like us, people that we don’t necessarily like ourselves, people that are weird, obnoxious, rude. We can still love them through using impersonal love in our lives. It’s a wonderful operational tool for you. Then this leads us to sharing the happiness of God, plus H, the happiness of God. What a wonderful way to live. Jesus talked about it. Happiness belongs to those people who hear my Father’s word and keep it. So it is possible for you to have a lifestyle of happiness in your life. And from there to move into occupation with Christ, the final problem-solving device for us. If it’s no longer I, but Christ in me, Paul talked about. For me to live is Christ, to die is profit. So there we have it. These are 10 unique problem-solving devices that we could go into in great depth on each one of them, and we may do that soon. We may go back through and review all of those, but those are where your core values come in. Without understanding core values, you can never have the fundamental beliefs of that you need to sustain your life in the devil’s world. They are the guiding principles in your life that should dictate your behavior and help you understand the difference between right and wrong. It’s sometimes hard to understand what evil is. Evil is a genius Satan. The genius of Satan is called evil. And the most evil thing in the world is organized religion. It was organized religion that crucified our Lord, and it is organized religion that opposes grace today. So if we operate with these core values, we have a divine establishment system in our soul. We’re called the royal family. So we learn the royal family honor code. I hope you’ve heard me talk about that last week. There is a code for the aristocracy of those who are in Christ Jesus. It’s an honor code, and it relates to personal integrity in our relationship with others using impersonal love, and only can that function as we are filled with God’s Holy Spirit through rebound. As we learn the word and make a course correction in our thinking and treat people in grace, then our destiny becomes clear to us. So this code we develop, this code we adhere to in our life is essential. And therefore, we’re told in 2 Timothy 2.15, we are to study to show ourselves approved unto God. If you must be approved, then obviously you could be disapproved. That doesn’t mean you’re not saved anymore. It just means that God said, nope, you’re not cutting it. It’s like the football player that has all the talent and all the strength and speed and beauty and all of that, but he doesn’t know the plays. So the coach can’t trust him, can’t put him in the game. He doesn’t know the plays. As a member of God’s royal family, you must know the plays. You must understand the code of ethics that are in the word of God. You must understand that aristocracy of the royal family has a standard based on the example set by our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s why it’s essential that we understand God’s protocol plan because that’s where the honor is produced. That’s where the integrity comes from, the protocol plan of God, which simply means a right thing must be done in a right way because absolute truth will tolerate nothing less than honor and integrity and virtue and All of that comes through the filling of the Holy Spirit and the perception and the application of God’s Word in your life. That’s called spiritual growth. That’s where you begin to develop integrity. So it starts with spiritual self-esteem, which is an attitude of self-confidence, not having to depend on other people. A lot of people have this dependency on others. They have to go to others to get advice, go to others to tell them what to do. You really don’t have to do that. As you learn God’s Word under a well-qualified pastor, you are perfectly capable of handling every situation in your life. You’re perfectly capable of knowing the solutions and what you should do and not do. I mean, I understand. When I first became a Christian, there was much I didn’t know. I went to people and asked them. And I’ve got a lot of goofy answers. I mean, everything from play the tambourine and sing do Lord to you can’t drive a certain automobile. You have to dress a certain way. You have to talk a certain way. There was so much legalism. I couldn’t believe it. And I didn’t know what legalism even was, but I tried to fit into the mold that they wanted me to fit into, and obviously it didn’t work for me. And of course they wrote me off and said, what a loser he is, you know. So I had to find my own pastor who taught me God’s Word, taught me what the real Christian life is about, and I was able to study and grow and learn just like you, and make the adjustments in my life, and now we’ve been in the ministry 50 years now, 50 years of serving our Savior, speaking in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of schools, hundreds of radio shows, And it’s amazing how every time and every now and then I run across people who listen to this show who want to straighten me out, want to tell me that I’m wrong and don’t mind sending emails and telling you, you need to listen to me, brother. I could straighten you out. I don’t need straightening out. I’m just fine. So keep your emails. But you can pray for me always. If I’m wrong, if I’m wrongly arrogant, then the Lord will let me know. Because we have a law of volitional responsibility. This is what I want to go over with you today. You have a volition. When we talk about this, 10 problem-solving devices, the only way you can learn them is to exercise your volition. God gave you a chooser. It’s part of the format of your soul, mentality, and volition. Volition is you saying, yes, I will do that. Are you saying, no, I won’t do that? You use your volition every day. You walk into the grocery store and you say, yes, I will buy that one, and no, I won’t buy that one. You choose. And under the law of volitional responsibility, it’s possible. For you and I, it’s possible, listen carefully, that we can cause our own misery and our own suffering. It’s the most common and the first cause for the human law of volitional responsibility, suffering in general. We can create a mess in our life because we go negative to God’s Word. We can create suffering in our life from our own bad decisions. As a matter of fact, I’ll go out on a limb and I’ll say that probably 90% of the suffering that you and I go through is because we mismanage our money, we mismanage our health, or we mismanage our relationships with other people. And then there’s the 10% suffering, which is divine discipline with God taking us to the woodshed to straighten us out every now and then. I’m sure you’ve been there. I’m sure you’ve been in the woodshed with the Lord and he got your attention, didn’t he? And maybe for a while you say, I’m going to do better, Lord. I’m going to do better. And then you’re right back to letting your sin nature dictate policy. Your volition doesn’t have the strength to say no. Well, I’m sorry, but the Christian life must be lived by your volition. No one else can live it for you. No one else can decide what you should or should not do. You have to make the decision, which means you have to have a desire. If you don’t have the desire or the courage to live up to the mandates that God gives, then all of your life you’re going to be a very weak believer, and all of your life you’re going to vacillate between the spiritual life and the trends of the sin nature. So every one of us, we must take responsibility for our own decisions, for our own actions. We can’t blame other people for our own misery. Our unhappiness, our suffering is sometimes brought on by our own bad decisions. We made it. Volitional decisions. Bad decisions limit future options. I have a bumper sticker that says that. You may want one, right? We’ll send it to you. You may want to put it in your kitchen, on your car, in the back of your Bible, whatever. Bad decisions limit future options because you must take responsibility yourself for based on your own bad decisions, related sometimes to your associations with people, sometimes to your activities that you got involved with, sometimes your motives, sometimes your function in life. There are people listening to me today that are incarcerated. They made a bad decision and bad decisions limited their future options. You need to remember this because there will come a time when you’ll be free and you can’t afford to make those mistakes again. So it’s inevitable that throughout all of our life, As Christians, we are going to sin. That’s obvious. We have a sin nature, and we’re not perfect. That’s why God provided rebound for us so that we could recover from our sin by using 1 John 1.9. If we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us. So it’s inevitable we’ll sin. It’s also inevitable that we’re going to get into some sort of human good, which is nothing but pure evil. That’s not following the protocol plan of God, not doing a right thing in a right way, but maybe doing a right thing, but not in the right way. You know, human good. A lot of Christians fall into this human good, and they want to pick up all the garbage in the world, feed all the hungry in the world. take care of all the babies in the world, and those are all fine and noble things, but that doesn’t solve the problems of the world. The only thing that will solve the problems of the world is salvation through faith alone and Christ alone. Only when man gets a new heart can the sin nature be contained. And so we can pick up all the trash, we can feed all the hungry, but nobody’s gonna contain the sin nature until the Holy Spirit moves in. And that only happens at the rebirth, when we reboot, when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And then, even then, we must exercise our volition to stay in fellowship with God. Because volition is why we sin. Volition is the case for sin. You decided to do it. You chose to do it. Even in insanity or neurosis or psychosis, sociopathic behavior, it’s volition. The psychiatrist, psychologist will tell you that. We are a product of our volition. And what causes our volition to go negative? is nothing but pure arrogance. I know people today that are negative about certain things. They’re arrogant because they think they’re smarter. Some think they’re smarter than the president. Some think they’re smarter than the Congress. Some think they’re smarter than their pastor. Some think they’re smarter than their spouse, and they use their arrogance to be negative to anything that particular person says. So Galatians 6-7 states this law about volitional responsibility. Here’s what Paul wrote. Be not deceived. God will not be mocked. Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. When we sow to the wind, the Bible says, we reap the whirlwind. And so under the law of volitional responsibility, We inflict on ourself unbearable suffering, unbearable suffering from the following categories, personal sin, we sin, we don’t rebound, we get under warning discipline, we get under intense discipline, we may even move into dying discipline. You say, what are those three things? Well, when you sin and fail to rebound, whether it’s a mental attitude sin, whether it’s a sin of the tongue, or whether it’s an overt sin, whatever sin you commit, when you fail to rebound, God will warn you. The Holy Spirit will convict you. You will know you have broken God’s law. You’re out of fellowship. This doesn’t mean that you’re out of fellowship because you ate one too many pieces of chicken or because you drank one too many sodas. That’s not what I’m talking about. When you sin, mental sin, worry, fear, antagonism, hatred, bitterness, When you sin of the tongue, gossip, malign, criticizing, backbiting. When you sin overtly, stealing, murder, murder, I mean stealing and murder and other overt sins that may go along with something like that. Adultery, fornication, things like that. These are overt sins. So the Holy Spirit will nail you. He will tell you, you just blew it, buster. You just committed a sin. And when you don’t rebound, when you don’t admit the sin to God, when you forget it and go on down the my way highway or you cover it up, you are guaranteeing one thing. The hammer is going to fall in your life. And that may be why you’re suffering today. Maybe you’ve been so arrogant. You’ve never admitted that. But the hammer may be on you right now and God may be driving you six feet under eventually. Because warning discipline leads to intense discipline. Hebrews 12, 6 says, those that I love, I scourge. Sometimes he really puts the hammer to us. Why? Because he’s mad at us? No. Because he’s trying to keep us from self-destructing. You may be on the road to self-destruction right now. And the warning discipline of God and the intense discipline of God may be trying to deliver you from sin nature domination. And unless you rebound, unless you recover, unless you make a course correction, unless you begin to take in the Word of God on a consistent basis, you will not last much longer. You’re gonna ruin your life and probably ruin the lives of those associated with you because of your own arrogance and what a shame it is. So that is the law of volitional responsibility for you and for me. We, me and you, we both have the ability to destroy our lives and destroy the lives of those associated with us. We can’t let that happen. We have to have positive volition. Listening to the word of God. Following the leadership of God the Holy Spirit. Not listening to the sin nature and the lies that Satan may perpetuate. Like, this will make you happy. That will make you happy. You know, the happiness is related to people or circumstances. That’s just not true. So, under the law of volitional responsibility, we inflict on ourself unbearable suffering by personal sin. Sometimes we get into moral or immoral degeneracy. And by living in the cosmic system, the devil’s world, we wind up quenching the Holy Spirit, grieving the Holy Spirit. Thus, we wind up with any lack of common sense and make a lot of bad judgment. because we get very subjective. You see, if you overestimate your own ability, or you fail to see yourself in light of reality, you’re just gonna destroy any opportunity you have for happiness in your life. If you overestimate your abilities, fail to see yourself in light of reality, you’re gonna destroy any capacity for happiness you could ever have in your life. Because both believers and unbelievers do function under this law. What law? The law of volitional responsibility. Believers and unbelievers, not only from sin, but also people can violate the laws of divine establishment. These are the operational laws for the entire human race within the framework of a national entity. The laws of divine establishment, freedom, marriage, family, nationalism, and there’s intense suffering from violating these laws and from violating the sacredness of life and property and privacy by means of criminal acts there’s also suffering from the rejection of responsibilities it’s all volitionally related it’s all part of your volition if you stole you chose to steal if you injured you chose to injure if you lied you chose to lie If you got drunk, you chose to get drunk. If you committed adultery, you chose to commit adultery. See, many of our wrong decisions come from our own arrogance. We don’t see ourself as we really are. We see ourself as we think we are. Or we don’t want to look at all at ourselves. We just want to feed our desires. And we’ve all been there. I’ve been there. You have too. And so many wrong decisions come from arrogance. And God can protect us from this. He has. He gave us parents. He gave us pastor teachers. He gave us coaches, bosses. I mean, what happens is God puts us under legitimate forms of authority. That’s not to intimidate us. That’s to protect us from who? From ourself. That’s why you have parents. That’s why you have police officers. That’s why you have pastors, to protect you from yourself. You know why? Because we’re just naturally fools. We’re fools since the fall of Adam. Adam was a fool to ever do what he did, but he chose. He made a volitional decision. He took a look at Eve, took a look at the forbidden fruit. He recognized that she was in deep trouble, and maybe if he just went ahead and took a bite, they wouldn’t both get fined. Whatever his motivation was, he fell for the lie. The lie is that God is trying to keep something from you and he doesn’t want you to know these things, Satan told Eve. And if you eat this, you’ll be just as wise as God is. And she took a chump and she found out she was not as wise as God. Many wrong decisions come from our own arrogance because we’re just fools. This is proved by the tremendous amount of suffering we experience, not only in our own personal lives, but in our nation. all throughout human history. You know, history proves one thing, it repeats itself. And if there’s ever been a nation that’s foolish, it’s America. Because we make a lot of foolish laws, legislate a lot of foolish things that are completely opposite of the establishment principles taught in the Word of God. And if we can continue to exist as a free nation for the next 20 years, it’ll be a miracle. And you need to prepare your children and your grandchildren for what’s coming because if you look at the news, And you pay attention, you can see what’s around the corner. And we are in a critical time in history. So we’ve all been born with this handicap. You know, a genetic handicap sometimes. Maybe your parents were alcoholics, so if you take a drink, you’re gonna be alcoholic. But you can also inquire environmental flaws. You know, you can get into a pattern of doing things And the end result is you get hooked on them yourself, like drug abuse. And you may start into drug abuse and get hooked on it, and you’re having a flaw that you’ve acquired. You inquired a flaw. Genetically, it’s out there, but some people just acquire it by their own decision. It all ends up being suffering. It all ends up being a miserable life because we manufacture our own problems. And we manufacture our own suffering. Here’s what God manufactures. Listen carefully. God manufactures solutions and blessings in the middle of your suffering because only God has provided a system to turn that cursing into blessing. Did you know that? When you rebound, when you confess your sin to God, he can turn the cursing into blessing. Now, there are a lot of ways to make yourself miserable under the law of volitional responsibility. And I’m going to have to come back next week and maybe talk about some more of this. But let’s talk about turning cursing into blessing. If you’re under discipline now, if you’re suffering now because of your continual bad decisions, if you will go to your father and admit your sin, he will be faithful and just to forgive you. What happens is you’ve acquired scar tissue in your life. You wound up searing your soul. You wound up quenching and grieving the Holy Spirit. So the first thing is to get him back in control by confessing your sin. And the second thing is to purge yourself with the Word of God. to cleanse out that evil, wicked, wrong thinking by the pure water of the Word. 1 Peter talks about this in 121. So that’s your option. You can continue the life you’re in, continue to be miserable until you wind up self-destructing, or you can confess your sin to God, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, reboot your life, and change your course by thinking divine viewpoint, learning God’s Word, and applying it into your life. It’s a short solution, short message, short answers. There’s much more to it, I assure you. But at least maybe I got you thinking. I hope so. If you want to know more, contact me. And until next week, I am your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you so much for listening to The Flatline.
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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.
