In this enlightening episode of The Flatline, Rick Hughes delves into the essence of finding God’s plan for your life without falling into the trap of self-righteousness. Drawing from biblical teachings, Rick highlights the importance of understanding the true power of Christ and how grace is perfected in our weaknesses. Listeners are encouraged to reflect on their spiritual journeys and consider whether their self-image aligns with divine expectations.
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.
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Good morning and welcome to The Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick around. As we say every Sunday, 30 minutes of motivation, inspiration, education, and no manipulation. Because we don’t solicit money. We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re not trying to hustle you. We’re just going to give you some information. That information hopefully will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life. And if you do that, then you have the privilege to orient and adjust to the plan if you want to do so. It’s up to you. It’s your life, your decision. But we on the Flatline are here for that purpose and that purpose only. And let me remind you that we have a lot of available material available for you. You can always go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org. Do not go to Richard Hughes Ministries. That is not me. That’s someone else. But rickhughesministries.org, and you can find all of our material. great books that we’ve written free of charge, Christian Problem Solving, Practicing Your Christianity, Crash Course in Christianity, A Divine Pardon, Life’s Toughest Years, all available. Plus we have our transcripts from all of our radio shows from 2018 to 2021. That’s every radio show in printed form so you can read them. You might not be able to listen to them, but you can read them once a day or something like that. I hope you take advantage of that. And if you ever need to call us, you can always just pick up the phone and dial 1-800-831-0718. 800-831-0718. Let me remind you, I’m not a counselor. I’m not here to tell you how to handle your problems. I’m here to give you biblical resources. I’m looking for positive volition. I’m looking for those of you that listen to this radio show, whatever city you may be in, that are hungry to grow spiritually, that are willing to dedicate your life to growing in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s what I’m looking for. And I have presented over 900 Flatline messages over the airwaves in the last 17 years. We’ve done all of that by faith and depending on God’s grace and God’s grace alone. 52 shows a year for 17 years equals over 800 shows. And now we’re closing in on this show today, a show 911. So you can see how long we’ve been presenting this Flatline show across the airwaves of America. they’ve been directed towards you so that you would be encouraged to receive the lord jesus christ as your savior and that you would begin to learn about all of your divine operating assets he provided on your behalf i know a lot of people say well i’m already a christian and i don’t doubt that but if you’ve never considered the claims of christ please think about that because he said i am the way the truth and the life and no one can come to the father but by me If you’re interested in knowing God, if you’re interested in understanding God’s plan for your life, if you’re interested in tapping into the resources God made available to you, you must come through the door of faith alone in Christ alone. I did that when I was 22 years old. I simply asked the Lord Jesus Christ to save me. I admitted in a prayer that I was a sinner and I was willing to seek salvation. And I just prayed a simple prayer. and it worked. I didn’t see angels and I didn’t hear harps and the lights didn’t flash, but it worked. God transformed and changed my life as I began to grow in the knowledge of my Savior and began to study the Bible. I understood what it meant to be filled with the Holy Spirit and operate under the ministry of the Holy Spirit and grow in grace. I got under a great pastor who taught me the Bible, taught me line by line, word by word, what was there in the 52 years he pastored his church. And much of the information that I give you, I learned under his tutelage. So these shows have been directed towards you so you can come to know Christ as your Savior. Paul called the assets that God provides for us the power of Christ. These are our assets called the power of Christ. That’s found in 2 Corinthians 12, 9, where he said these words, wrote them to the church at Corinth. And God said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in your weakness. Therefore, Most gladly, I will rather boast in my infirmities that the power of Christ, whatever that is, that the power of Christ may rest on me. Paul wrote that about the thorn in the flesh he had, something that was troubling him and bothering him, and he had gone to the Father three times, different times, deliberately asking for the Father to take it away, and the Father wouldn’t do it. And so he learned his lesson and the Father said, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength will be made perfect in weakness. And he said, so because of this, I will therefore enjoy the power of Christ as it rests on me. As you listen to me this morning, do you understand what I’m telling you? I’m not trying to be dramatic. I’m not trying to be a spiritual big shot, but what I’m trying to be is very, very accurate. I have social media just like many of you do and I see people preaching and they are sensational preachers. Raise their voice, dance around on the stage, move back and forth. And sometimes sensationalism doesn’t mean accuracy. So if you will listen closely to me, you may hear something you’ve not heard before. The question I want to ask you is what are you going to do with the deposit that I’m about to make into your soul this morning. What will you do with that? Because these shows are designed not only to give you an objective view of the future of this nation, but also to encourage you to look at your own life objectively and evaluate just where you stand before God. Remember, you have volition, and that volition will determine your destiny both in time and eternity. Volition is part of your soul, the makeup of your soul. You have mentality, you have volition, you have a conscience, you have self-consciousness, but God did not make you into a little robot. He gave you free will, free choice. and your choices will determine where you spend eternity and how you will spend your life living in time. The dumbest decision anyone could ever make is to reject the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s a dumb decision. That’s saying you’re smarter than God and you don’t need God and that’s nothing but the epitome of arrogance in your life. So if you’re gonna evaluate yourself properly then you must not have an unrealistic self-image of who you are. Let me demonstrate what I mean with a scripture passage that Lord Jesus Christ taught in Luke 18, verses 9 through 14. I’ll read it to you. Also, he spoke this parable, he being Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. and despise other people. So here’s the parable. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. God, I thank you I’m not like other men. I’m not an extortioner. I’m not unjust. I don’t commit adultery, even as this tax collector does. I fast twice a week. I give a tithe of all that I possess. And then here’s what Jesus said about the tax collector. The tax collector standing afar off would not so much even raise his eyes to heaven, but he beat his breast and he said, oh God, be merciful to me, I’m a sinner. Jesus said, I tell you, this is the man that went down to his house justified rather than the other one. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and the one who humbles himself will be exalted. In that parable, the Pharisee evaluated his spiritual life based on his own misguided judgment. In other words, he had an unrealistic self-image. My question is how would you evaluate your spiritual life? You’ve been going to the same church for many years. Probably even had several different pastors come and go. How’s that working out for you? Do you have any doubts? Do you have any regrets, any frustrations? Do you think God is impressed with your spiritual life? Or do you even know if you have a spiritual life? You see, that is totally different than your physical life. Your spiritual life is lived in your soul, the invisible, immortal part of you. Your spiritual life controls what the physical life does. So this Pharisee was convinced by his own judgment that he was in good standing with God. And that was all based on misguided judgment. I want you to notice now he went to God in prayer just like you may have done on many different occasions. He went to God and he prayed and his prayer was completely ineffective because it was based on a misguided assumption. He assumed that he had a relationship with God. He assumed that God was impressed with what kind of person that he was and the things that he did. But without proper procedure, prayer is nothing more than an exercise in a religious ritual with which you are convincing yourself you’re in God’s will and you’re in God’s plan. That prayer went no higher than the ceiling. Because if you’re not a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s not going to be able to answer any prayer except one. Lord, please save me. He’ll answer that one. But if you’re not his child and you want to go to God and pray, that prayer is not going to be answered because the Holy Spirit intercepts those prayers and delivers them. The Romans tells us that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be uttered. If you’re not a believer, you can pray all you want to and it’s not gonna be answered. So without proper procedure, that is faith alone in Christ alone and then the filling of the Holy Spirit, then your prayer is nothing more than an exercise in some sort of religious ritual where you are seeking to convince yourself that you are okay with God and you’re in God’s will and God’s plan. And in this case, he was praying, that Pharisee was praying to convince himself of his own righteous standing before God. The mistake he made was evaluating his life on the scale of the law, and he saw he was fulfilling his pharisaical duties. That doesn’t get you saved. Here’s a principle you must remember. Never, never, never Never assume you are impressing God because you followed certain religious rituals. Listen to 2 Corinthians 10, 17 and 18. But he who glories, let him glory in the Lord. For not he who commends himself is approved, but whom the Lord commends. That Pharisee was glorying in himself, not in the Lord. He was glorying in what a good person he was. How often he prayed and he fasted and he tithed and he looked over at the tax collector and said, I’m not like that pitiful soul over there. He evaluated his spiritual life, comparing his life to the life of another person. Unfortunately, he was convinced that his law-keeping rituals had him righteous before God. Not so, doesn’t work that way, didn’t happen that way, and he was in serious trouble. Because the only way you can have a righteous standing with God is through 2 Corinthians 5, 21. For he, God, made him, Christ, who knew no sin to be sin for us, so we might become the righteousness of God in him. Technically speaking, we have no righteousness. I would call that minus R, negative righteousness. God has perfect righteousness, or plus R, absolute righteousness. And the only way we can have a relationship with God is to equal his righteousness. And the only way that can happen is to come through Jesus Christ. Listen to the verse again, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. If you’re to have a relationship with God, it must come through Christ and his righteousness accredited to your account, not your righteousness trying to override what he did on the cross. So the question you have to answer is this simple question. Why do smart believers do these stupid things? Why do they do these things? Well, the answer is self-righteous people often pray dumb prayers. Self-righteous people often pray dumb prayers. Proverbs 28 verse nine, he who turns away his ear from listening to the law, even his prayer is an abomination. The Hebrew word for abomination is to’eba. To’eba, it means disgusting. So if you’re not approaching the throne room of God correctly, your prayer is disgusting to God. The Bible tells you all of our righteousnesses are like a filthy rag in God’s eyes. There are none that are righteous, no, not even one. There’s no way that we can compete with the righteousness of God or equal up to the righteousness of God. I don’t care how much you try to fulfill the law. So again, Proverbs 28, 9, remember this. He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, that’s the scripture, even his prayer is disgusting. There it is. I read it to you. And so that prayer that that Pharisee was praying was disgusting to God. These types of people, self-righteous religious people, they try to convince themselves that they are in God’s will. The reason is they have a misguided judgment, or maybe say it this way, thinking in terms of human viewpoint rather than divine viewpoint. They don’t think properly. They don’t think correctly. They think human viewpoint rather than divine viewpoint. Human viewpoint says if I’m good and I don’t do too many bad things, in the end it’ll all equal out and I’ll get to heaven. That’s not what divine viewpoint said. Divine viewpoint said I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me. So if you have the wrong motivation, then you’re gonna have a wrong conclusion. And that equals you wasting your time in God’s time and you being condemned from your own guilt. So in regards to yourself, how many times have you messed up thinking you’re going to make the right decision, but you based it on your own human intuition or your own human viewpoint evaluation? How many times have you done that? Like this Pharisee, you figured that you were in a good standing with God and everything was fine. You think you should do this because God’s impressed with you. I run into people constantly that go off on a binge, Christian binge. They decide they want to do something for God. Maybe God’s not even in it, but they’ve convinced themselves that he is. And off they go, raising money, doing whatever they do, trying to promote whatever they want to try to promote, messing up, making a wrong decision, basing it on their own human viewpoint evaluation of what God wants them to do. Have you ever convinced yourself you’re in God’s directive will for your life? Have you ever, quote, prayed about it to convince yourself of a false conclusion? I hear that all the time. I prayed about it. I think I’m supposed to do this. I prayed about it. Really? Well, were you in fellowship when you prayed? Or were you out of fellowship? Because remember the Bible said, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord won’t hear my prayer. So let’s assume you were in fellowship and you prayed. You were doing the right thing, you were praying, that’s the right thing, but you were doing it in the wrong way. Because you were trying to convince yourself and thus manipulate God, and that didn’t work. And you will find out somewhere down the road you did a stupid decision, you made a dumb decision. And what I mean by that, I mean you’ll waste time and money and effort. And you don’t bring God any glory by wasting his time, his money, and your effort. So don’t try to convince yourself you’re in God’s directed will for your life. There’s a way to know what is the will of God. There’s a way to know God’s geographical will, where he wants you to be. There’s a way to know what God wants you to think. There’s a way for you to understand these things. And there is a will for God. Divine Guidance is a wonderful book you can order. Divine Guidance will tell you how to understand the will of God. If you need to get that book, contact us and we’ll put you in touch with the right people. I didn’t write it, my pastor wrote it years ago, but Divine Guidance is a great book to understand God’s will for your life. So if somebody tells you they think this is God’s plan for your life, whoa, wait a minute. If somebody tells you they think this is God’s plan for your life, stop and consider how they came to that conclusion. Again, I hear people say, brother, maybe you were called to the ministry. The call to the ministry, that’s a big thing in some churches. The call to the ministry. Sometimes that’s a complete farce. The people that are in the ministry are the people that have communication gifts. The gift of pastor, teacher, in the Greek New Testament, or the Greek word , the evangelist. Those are two communication gifts. If you are called to the ministry, you’re either an evangelist or you’re a pastor teacher. There is no gift of missionary. There is no gift of performer. Those are not spiritual gifts. A missionary may be an evangelist. His objective is to establish a local church, locate those that get saved and raise up indigenous teachers of the word of God and move on. So don’t listen to someone that tells you they know what God’s plan for your life is. That’s a good way to get in trouble in a hurry. I had someone try to convince me one time to do something and it was completely illogical and I knew it. And I told him so, not harshly, but I said, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that’s for me. So if somebody tells you they think this is God’s plan for your life, stop and consider how they came to that conclusion. What did God tell them he didn’t tell you? So anytime there’s a push for you to make some kind of quick decision, you can bet God’s not in it. So don’t be impetuous. That’s how you get in trouble. Peter learned that the hard way. When he saw the Lord and he said, Lord, can I walk on the water too? And the Lord said, yeah, sure, come on out. And Peter took about two steps and sunk. And he started calling for God to help him. The prayer of that Pharisee that I just read to you, the parable that Jesus gave was wasted time and wasted breath. And this is something Satan’s good at. Satan’s really good at decoys, using decoys. I have friends, one of my board members is a duck hunter, and they put out decoys and they blow the duck quack thing, quack, quack, quack, and the ducks fly in and boom, they blast them out of the sky. and they have a good meal with them. So the duck thinks it’s a real thing, and this is what Satan does. He can use a decoy to make you think it’s a real thing. Any decision that you make apart from God’s directive will will lead you to a convoluted and a confused life. And I am talking about years and years and years of confusion. So don’t go there. Don’t make a decision apart from God’s directive. If you don’t understand how to know the will of God, get in touch with me and let me send you that book, Divine Guidance. You must understand that because you’re going to be pushed and prompted to do certain things that aren’t even in God’s plan for your life, I promise you. You know, here’s the deal. It’s impossible for a misguided believer like that Pharisee to determine what God’s will is since he or she doesn’t use standard operating procedure before they assume this is the will of God for me. And the great deceiver are their emotions because people that are impetuous, they make permanent emotional mistakes. Sad to say, but it happens every day. Impetuous people get in over their head real quick and make sad emotional decisions. So for example, it’s impossible for a self-righteous unbeliever to know he’s dirty since he compares himself to other people. If he’s not a Christian and he says, well I’m better than that guy over there who is a Christian, and he in fact may be more moral than the guy over there that is a Christian. He in fact may be more successful than the Christian. But if he compares himself to that person, he’s making a terrible mistake. because his relative righteousness does not pass God’s judgment. That’s why I quoted that verse in Isaiah 64, 6. We are all like an unclean thing, and all of our own righteousnesses are like filthy rags. We all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. So in conclusion, let me run a few things by you. How is it you convince yourself you’re doing the will of God? Well, number one, sometimes you base your decisions on your emotions rather than on scripture. Emotions are wonderful when used the right way. They’re the bonafide appreciator of the soul, but they were never designed to be making policy. Emotions are appreciators, not policy makers. When you let your emotions take over and you tell yourself, you know, I think I’m supposed to be a missionary to Hawaii and be a missionary to the people on the beaches or I’m supposed to be a missionary to the Pacific Islands or I’m supposed to be an evangelist or I’m supposed to be a pastor. You can’t base that on emotions. You have to base it on what does the scripture say. When I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, one of the scriptures that I remember was pray for me that utterance may be given unto me that I make known the mystery of the gospel for which I’m an ambassador in bonds. Took me a while to realize it and recognize it, but God gave me the gift of evangelism. That’s my spiritual gift and that’s what I’ve spent the past 50 plus years doing. Number two, how do you convince yourself you’re doing God’s will? You fail to recognize the decoy. that leads to temporal death. Satan has his decoys out there. And if you buy into it, you’re going to be temporarily out of fellowship and dead for a while. I don’t mean dead physically, but I mean temporal death, out of fellowship, carnal, not serving the Lord. And number three, sometimes you look at the circumstances and not the scriptures. So if the circumstances line up for you, you say, well, hey, it’s good. Look what God did for me here. And you convince yourself circumstantially that it’s okay. And then sometimes you will justify why it’s permissible. And you will be blind to yourself by making decisions, not having the ability to make the proper decision, sometimes because you have scar tissue on your soul. And that’s something that we need to talk about. What does it mean to have scar tissue on your soul? Sometimes you’ll buy into a lie that people or circumstances can bring you happiness and fulfillment in your life. And that lie is always based on human viewpoint, not divine viewpoint. Or tragically, you might let Satan dumb you down by distracting you from the Bible class, distracting you from learning God’s Word. So if I ask this question, I want you to answer it for me. Where’s America headed? Well, that’s the wrong question. The real question is, where are you headed? Where are you headed? That’s the real question. I hope you don’t have an unrealistic self-image like that Pharisee. I hope you don’t have a misguided assumption that God’s impressed with you. Think about what I’m saying. Put it into your life and use it. And contact us if we can help you. I’m very grateful to have presented the Flatline for these many, many years. And I pray there will be many more years to come. Your prayers are appreciated. You may feel free to contact us anytime you wish. simply go to the website rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org, or call us at 800-831-0718. Until next week, when we hope to be back, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flood Line.
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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.
