Where are the Men – Part 5
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 570 aired on July 31, 2016
Good morning and welcome to The FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next few
minutes, please stay with me. As usual, it’ll be about 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration,
education, all done without any manipulation. This allows us to focus on God’s plan, not on
man’s plan, not on some gimmick or some game or some solution that I’ve conjured up but on
God’s plan. My hope is that I can verify and identify this plan for you and if I can, then you have
the opportunity to orient and adjust to the plan, that’s up to you. My job is to get it accurate, to
get it straight, not to try to trick you, not to appeal to your emotions, but to give you the facts. It’s
interesting how God the Holy Spirit can take the facts and do the convincing. It’s not my job to
convince anybody of anything. It’s my job to be accurate, to get it straight. If you’ve listened to
The FLOT Line for the last few weeks we’ve been doing a series called
Where Are The Men.
We
wound up last week talking about Gideon and Gideon’s son and the task that Gideon had
assigned to his son to take care of the two jerks that had killed his brother. His son didn’t have the
courage to do it so Gideon stepped up to the plate and took care of the two guys. Now I want to
move into what we must understand, the invisible trait that God is looking for.
The invisible
trait that God is looking for in any person is faith because the Bible tells us,
“Without faith
it is impossible to please God”
(Hebrews 11:6).
Gideon, the man of faith, had this invisible trait.
It was known to God. His potential was known to God. He had humility. He claimed to be the
weakest one in his family,
“I am the least in my father’s house”
(Judges 6:15) and by the way
Moses spoke similar words when he said,
“Who am I that I should be the one to go and lead the
Jews out of Egypt?”
(Exodus 3:11). This is a principle to think about, many invisible heroes are
known to our Father and you might be one of them. You are listening and you may be invisible to
the world.
The world might not know anything about you, but God knows everything about
you, and you may be just the man God is looking for.
Listen to 1 Corinthians 1:26-29.
“For
consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise,
and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the
base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He
many nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God.”
It’s evident that only
God could use someone like me, Rick Hughes, or someone like you because we are both full of
flaws, character flaws, because we have a sin nature.
“Not many wise men according to the
flesh,”
not is the strong Greek negative
ouk
and
wise is
sophros
. If this nation is going to be
delivered from what we are facing, we must have men of faith, not men of human brilliance, not
mighty men, not rich men. We need to have men of faith.
You don’t have to be the smartest guy
in your class nor the most influential guy in your circle, nor have the highest family pedigree to
be used by God.
As a man (or woman), you must have a willingness to adhere to the protocol
plan of God and develop your spiritual life, because without faith, you will never please
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God.
You’ll never be used by God. Listen to the mandate that Moses gave to the Jews that were
being pursued by the Pharaoh in Exodus 14:13,
“Do not be afraid! Stand still and watch the
deliverance of the Lord which He will accomplish for you today.”
This required faith, not panic,
because they were looking death in the face.
Thus the principle is that the man God uses must
be able to focus on the solution not the problem.
You must look at the solution. God cannot
use a coward, it’s evident. In Luke 12:4,
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after
that have no more that they can do.”
In 2 Timothy 1:7,
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear
but of power, of love, and of clear sound thinking,”
a sound mind. A coward is not going to be
used by God and if you are a coward you have to learn to trust the Lord. There is nothing wrong
with being afraid every now and then but this doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. A lot of men
in combat have had fear, but they still have gone on to be great combat veterans. Fear doesn’t
overcome the man of faith.
God cannot use a self-centered man.
That’s the man that’s
preoccupied with his own affairs and we see this in Luke 12:16-21. Jesus told a parable talking
about a rich man and how the rich man stored up all his riches and said he would retire and he’d
take it easy from then on. “
The Lord said, ‘No you’re not, this very night your soul will be
required and now who will own everything you’ve prepared?’”
That’s the one thing we don’t
have. We don’t have a guaranteed date of departure do we? Some of us as we talk, you, me as
you listen, we don’t know when we’re going to die. It could be today, could be tomorrow, so if
we put our confidence in the future and any physical assets we have, it’s a mistake. This is not
what God is looking for.
God is looking for a man that is willing to lay it all out for Him. He
can’t use a quitter.
In Philippians 3:12-13,
“Not that I have already obtained it or have already
become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by
Christ Jesus.”
Then he said these words,
“I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet
[that’s spiritual maturity],
but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching
forward to what lies ahead.”
If you keep looking back on your failures, you’re going to be
preoccupied with guilt and that is exactly what Satan loves to do. You don’t look back, you
rebound, problem-solving device #1,
“If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive
us”
(1 John 1:9). Rebound and look forward. The dust clears, you’re still alive, God still has a
plan for your life. If you focus on your flaws, if you focus on your failures, you’re never going to
override guilt and you will not use rebound. Use rebound, confess your sin, confess your flaws
and your failures and then get up and get moving.
God cannot use a deceitful man.
Psalm 5:6,
“You destroy those who speak falsehood. The Lord abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit.”
God cannot use a double minded man,
a man that has two souls,
dipsuchos
in the Greek New
Testament. A double souled man, a person who is double minded is unstable. He doesn’t have
any confidence in his prayers. He asks God to help him but then he looks for human solutions. It
doesn’t work.
God cannot use a foolish man.
Proverbs 14:16,
“A wise man is cautious and
turns away from evil, but a fool is arrogant and careless.”
Wise, that’s a word, an adjective
meaning intelligent, learned, shrewd. That the wise man is cautious meaning reverent. He has a
clear set of norms and standards that’s formed in his soul so he has enough insight to avoid
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trouble when he sees it coming. A wise man is cautious and turns away. That verb in the Hebrew
is a qal active which means he avoids, he takes a right turn. When the trouble is coming from the
left, he turns to the right. He sees the wreck coming, he avoids it. He doesn’t risk everything over
something that is not essential. Then we have the conjunction of contrast,
“The fool is arrogant
and careless”
(Proverbs 14:16). Fool is the masculine noun in the Hebrew,
ksil,
meaning the
stupid person, the simpleton, and that’s usually the person that acts on his emotions and does not
think clearly. Many a man has died from this type of irrational thinking. When you don’t think,
when you let your emotions rule you, you will do stupid things. You may be in trouble today
because you let your emotions override your thinking. There are two ways to make decisions.
You can make a decision based on what you think or you can make a decision based on what you
feel. If you make a decision based on what you think then you’ve got to either think divine
viewpoint or human viewpoint. If you made a decision based on human viewpoint and you let
your emotions dictate that decision, then you may be in a jam right now. You were arrogant and
careless. That’s typical of a person that doesn’t think because he crosses over the confidence
barrier. Oh, he’s confident that his plan will succeed. Here’s another one,
God can’t use a self-
righteous man.
Any arrogance parlayed into self-righteousness is often nothing but legalism.
What kind of man is God really looking for? Allow me to tell you. You can see in Matthew
7:24-25 with the words of Jesus Christ our Lord,
“Everyone who hears these words of Mine and
obeys, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the
floods came, and the winds blew yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock.”
In
Proverbs 1:5,
“A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will
attain wise counsel.”
God is looking for a wise man, a man who has wisdom.
What exactly is
wisdom? It’s from the Greek word
sophia
and I’ll try to explain to you what it is. The Bible says
there is the difference between knowledge and full knowledge. Knowledge is Biblical
information you’ve heard but you don’t process it, you don’t apply it. Full knowledge is Biblical
information you’ve heard, you’ve processed, you’ve stored and you apply. You stored it in your
memory center and there it is called wisdom. When you get into a situation and you need an
answer, you go back to your memory center, you pull up what you learned, the wisdom that you
learned, and you apply it. That’s the mechanics of how it works.
God is looking for people who
make good decisions based on the wisdom of His Word in their souls.
Here’s some wisdom. I
asked a friend of mine who just recently retired after many years of military service, what makes
a great spiritual man? He referred me to a statement made by Teddy Roosevelt when Roosevelt
was asked a similar question. What makes for a great American man? Roosevelt gave a simple
answer, he said, “Well first you must be a pretty good American boy. Being a great American
man starts with a great American father.” Paul addresses this in Ephesians 6:4. I want to ask you
today, are you a father? I am a father. Yes, I have four children. They are all grown and have all
left the nest. Do you have children still at home? If you do this is important.
Ephesians 6:4,
“Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath but bring them up in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord.”
“Provoke not,”
this is Paul warning Christian fathers starting off with
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the negative
me,
the Greek word
me.
Then he has a verb with it,
parorgizo
which means to
exasperate or to cause wrath.
“Do not exasperate your children.”“Do not cause them to come to
wrath.”
How do you do this? Unfair discipline. What can cause a father to cause wrath? Let’s put
it under some points. What can a father do to cause anger or discouragement in his son or
daughter? Well, he can unfairly discipline them. The strong conjunction,
“Fathers, do not
provoke your children to wrath, but”
and there’s the conjunction. It’s the Greek word
alla
and
means you have a choice. Any father who discourages, who abandons, who ignores, or who
harms his child is not a man. He’s just a male in the body of a man. There are two systems of
teaching available to the spiritual man. Here they are,
“Bring them up in the nurture and the
admonition of the Lord,”
this is for your children.
“Bring them up in the nurture”
is from the
Greek word
paideia
and it means discipline or correction that regulates character. It’s all
designed to break the streak of arrogance that can destroy them due to their rejection of authority.
You must teach your children to respect authority using nurturing, the
paideia
word. You must
use discipline to teach your children to respect authority. When they disrespect your authority
and you say, “Okay, it’s time for a timeout,” sometimes that doesn’t quite get it does it? How
many times do you have to ask your child to do something, four, five, or six times? “Pick it up,
pick it up, pick it up, I told you to pick it up!” Do you do that? Do you yell and scream at your
children? You are not using the right discipline. Getting emotional, yelling, screaming, and
threatening your kids is not the right type of parent. Father, you must use
paideia.
By the way,
we get the word paddle from that don’t we? There is a time when discipline is necessary and we
must discipline our children to teach respect for authority. This is exactly what God the Father
does with us. In Hebrews 12:5-8, “He disciplines the ones that He loves. He scourges us
sometimes.” Listen, God has taken me to the woodshed a lot of times, and I’m sure He’s taken
you too. We are human, we have sin natures, we fail, we have flaws and if He did not discipline
us, our flaws would prove fatal, and we would self-destruct.
This is what’s going to happen to
your children, if you do not discipline them, their flaws will become fatal. They will self-
destruct.
You must teach them respect for authority beginning in the home. The next word in
this passage,
“Bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord.”
Admonition is the
Greek word
nouthesia
and it means exhortation or to call attention to, a mild rebuke or a
warning. If a child makes a bad decision, you use
nouthesia,
you rebuke him. “Don’t do this, this
is dangerous. Don’t put the screwdriver in the wall socket, you’re going to electrocute yourself.”
This doesn’t mean you paddle them because they made a mistake. You see, you teach by using
words in some cases when authority is not violated but once authority is ignored, authority is
rejected, authority is not paid any attention, then you have to use the other system to break the
arrogance. If you don’t break the arrogance the child will be maladjusted to society and will self-
destruct eventually. Any father who is a godly man will discipline and train his children and will
establish a set of norms and standards in their souls that will provide protection for them until
they form their own FLOT line in their own souls, if they desire to do so.
You are to protect
them and you can protect them from themselves by teaching them respect for authority.
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Let’s move on. The man God’s looking for is the man who can take responsibility for his actions.
This is the danger of arrogance because arrogance does not assume responsibility. Arrogance
blames others by what we call self-justification. “The reason I did this is because they did that
and they made me do this.”
God cannot use arrogance. God will not honor arrogance.
Arrogantly self-justifying why you can do something that’s wrong is not right. The arrogant
person not only self-justifies, but he self-deceives and he gets totally absorbed with himself until
he destroys himself. If you’re going to be the man God can use, you must be a man of character.
This means that your actions have to be consistent with what you say. It’s interesting what Satan
will try to do, he’ll try to buy you out. He’ll try to give you security and finances, security and
insurance, education advantages, anything to keep you from doing your job. If you have a
communication gift, if you have the gift of pastor-teacher, evangelist, the world will distract you.
Family, friends, they’ll all lure you away and the flesh can destroy you with lust and with
arrogance. If you combine these you have a man that’s disqualified from ever being used by God.
We must have men in our pulpits, men that will teach God’s Word, men that are not
distracted by family or friends.
Jesus told the disciples, “You’re going to have to leave your
family behind. You’re going to have to pick up your cross and follow Me” and they did.
The
man that God is seeking must have courage, courage to face adversity without wilting
under pressure.
His life is going to be marked by sorrow but defined by joy. That’s our Lord
Jesus Christ. But this man whoever he is, maybe you, you must take the point. You must walk
out front. You must not be afraid to risk everything for Him and this demands that you have a
lifestyle of trust. Your verse should be Psalm 31:1-5,
“I will put my trust in You, O Lord. Let me
never be ashamed; in Your righteousness deliver me. Lead me and guide me. Be to me a rock of
strength, a stronghold to save me. You will pull me out from the snare of my enemy. Into Your
hand I commit my spirit, O Lord, God of truth.”
Those are the words that Jesus uttered on the
cross,
“Into your hand I commit My spirit, O Lord, God of truth.”
God of truth. Here’s another
principle.
The man God uses must understand the Scripture.
Psalm 119:130,
“The entrance
of Your Word gives light. It gives understanding to the simple,”
and that’s the person who’s naïve
or undiscerning. Proverbs 18:2,
“A fool does not delight in understanding but only in giving his
own opinion.”
And it’s my opinion, I don’t think I’m a fool here, there is a crisis of understanding
in many churches today because many churches have become image based and not Word based.
Paul rebuked the Corinthian church for their lack of understanding in 1 Corinthians 14:20,
“Brethren, don’t be children in understanding, however in malice
[or when it comes to evil]
be
like a baby but in understanding be like a man.”
See, understanding means you perceive the
situation, you pay attention to the details and you use the proper mechanics to solve the problem.
That’s the
sophia
or the wisdom, the application of the Word of God in your soul to the
experience. If you don’t have any wisdom, if you don’t have any understanding, it may be
because you have a lot of scar tissue. People that have scar tissue, Ephesians 4:18 says
“They
have their understanding darkened.”
Scar tissue is when you put things in your life that don’t
belong there and they scar you up.
“Having their understanding darkened being alienated from
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the plan of God because of the ignorance that is in them, from the hardness
[or the blindness]
of
their heart.”
A legitimate prayer is for believers to have an understanding of God’s will. In
Colossians 1:9 Paul prayed,
“For this cause we also since the day we first heard it do not cease
to pray for you and desire that you might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom
and understanding.”
If you’re going to be a man that God uses you must understand your gift.
You must understand what is required of you.
You cannot live off of another man’s
understanding.
You must understand, for example Micah 6:8.
“He has told you, O man, what is
good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with your God?”“To do justice,”
to be fair in dealing with others, treating others correctly.
“To
show mercy and to live humbly with your God.”
Showing mercy is an amazing thing. Showing
mercy is the attitude that requires us to forgive and forget.
Loving mercy, showing mercy,
having the function of impersonal love in your life toward others and living humbly with
your God, genuine humility, are wonderful traits in a mature believer.
These are required in
order to execute the Christian life because there’s nothing worse than a proud, arrogant, self-
righteous Christian. God can’t use you until you get rid of that arrogance. Biblical humility is the
independence of human power and the ability of human power reduced to zero so that we depend
on the power and the ability of God 100%.
1 Peter 5:5 says,
“God resists the proud but gives
grace to the humble. Therefore humble yourself under the mighty hand of God that He may exalt
you in due time.”
“Humble yourselves”
is a mandate from God. It requires you to learn His
Word and apply it. This is what it takes to be the man or woman God is looking for.
I hope
you will tune in next week, same time, same place and listen as we press on in our studies of The
FLOT Line. My desire is that you
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ”
(2 Peter 3:18). Thank you for listening and I ask you to pray for us as we
press on with His plan. Until next week this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for
listening to The FLOT Line.