SPEAKER 01 : 0:08

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.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:23

Good morning and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes. I said flat, F-L-O-T, Flatline. That’s a military acronym for the Forward Line of Troops, F-L-O-T. What we’re trying to say on this show is that you can have a forward line of troops or a main line of resistance in your soul so you can stop the outside sources of adversity before they ever become the inside sources of stress. Because we always say that adversity is inevitable, but stress is optional. Because adversity is what certain circumstances do to you, and stress is what you do to yourself. The only way that’s possible is by using God’s wonderful problem-solving devices, which we call a FLOTLINE. Ten unique problem-solving devices. on the format of your soul when you learn them and you use them, then you don’t have to live a life of worry. You don’t have to live a life of bitterness. You don’t have to live a life of intimidation. You never have to be afraid. You never have to live under guilt. These are all mental attitude sins that the devil can use to manipulate you. So there is a way to live a wonderful, unique life called the Christian life. And that’s what this show is about. You may ask yourself, well, what benefit would it be for me to listen to your radio show? Well, that’s a fair question. As I expand and add additional costs for production and broadcast, I take comfort in God’s grace provisions. because he provides all our finances. You notice we don’t ask for money. We don’t sell anything. We don’t hustle finances. We just trust the Lord to provide our needs. And right now we’re broadcasting in a little over 37, 38 cities across America. But we want to talk about this wonderful treasure that God gives you, the treasure of his word. In 2 Corinthians 4, 7, we have this treasure in our earthly vessels. So the surpassing greatness of the power of God will be in us and not from ourself. So this is a treasure. God’s word is a treasure. In the New Testament, the Greek New Testament, the New Testament was written in Koine Greek dialect. And the word for treasure is a word you’re probably familiar with. It’s called thesaurus, thesaurus. So it’s a word treasure. And the word treasure is the mystery of Christ himself living in you. He’s called in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, Colossians 2, 3. And so in Proverbs 3, 13, how blessed is the man who finds wisdom. And the man who gains understanding, for her profit is better than the profit of silver and her gain is better than fine gold and she, that’s wisdom, is more precious than jewels and nothing you desire compares with her. Wisdom. In the book of Proverbs, wisdom speaks to you as if it were a female. And in Proverbs 8, 17, the feminine part of this verse says, I love those who love me. And that’s wisdom speaking to you. And those who diligently seek me will find me. However, this is Solomon writing for the Lord, and this is God speaking to you in this Proverbs. using wisdom as an analogy. This is God saying, I love those who love me. And that’s the first question you have to ask yourself. Who does God love? Does God love you? Does God love me? Who exactly does God love? Because the Bible says in 2 Timothy 3, 4, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, that doesn’t cut it. Loving the world and not God is a dangerous thing. But we do know that God is a rewarder of those who are always seeking to know more about him. So listen again as I say this verse to you, because we’re going to break it down for you. Proverbs 8, 17. I love those who love me. Do you love God? I’m sure you say, yes, I love God. Yes, I love God. I speak in a lot of churches, and people say, yes, I love God. But do you really love God, or is it just an emotional attachment to God? And those who diligently seek me, diligently seek me, let me say it one more time, diligently seek me, will find me. So here’s some questions. Does lasting happiness come from what the world offers you? No. And here’s another question. Do you understand what it means to actually love God? Because God says he loves those who love him. Are you a lover of God? Most church people that I speak with would say, yes, I love God, but what kind of love is this passage really referring to? And so to do that, we go to the Hebrew from which it was written, and the Hebrew verb for love is Ahab, A-H-A-B, A-H-A-B, Ahab. It’s a fairly common word in the Hebrew. So let’s get a principle here. This is wisdom speaking, and she’s saying that she, or God, has maximum personal love for those who love her or him. Maximum personal love for those that love her or him. So wisdom in this case, point two, can be God speaking through the writings of Solomon. And notice point three, that the love must be reciprocal. I love those who love me. That’s reciprocal. In John 4, 19, 1 John 4, 19, we find this verse, 1 John 4, 19, we love him because he first loved us. That’s reciprocal love. That’s why we love God. Again, Proverbs 8, 17, I love those who love me. God loves those who love him and seek his wisdom. And where is it found? In the person of Jesus Christ and throughout the Holy Scriptures. Remember Problem Solving Device number seven and Problem Solving Device number eight. under those 10 problem-solving devices that make up the flat line on your soul, giving you a main line of resistance. Number seven is your personal love for God, and number eight is your impersonal love for other individuals. Personal love for God is your motivational virtue. This is why you do what you do, why you obey God. because you love him. So impersonal love is the function of your virtue and integrity as a mature believer. And, point seven, God first loved you based on his character. Not your character, based on his character. Divine impersonal love, point eight, means that God loved you even when you were in your sins. And he proved it by the sacrifice of his own son our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 John 4, 10, and he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sin. There it is, it’s demonstrated right there. He proved his love for you and me by providing a propitiation for our sin. Point nine, it was only through this act of unconditional love that we have the opportunity to have a personal relationship with God. So point 10, when he says, I love those who love me, We are speaking of personal love for God being our motivational virtue. Keep this in mind. God loved you with impersonal love. He loved you based on his character, not yours. You were a sinner lost in your sins, destined for hell. He sent his son, he loved us, sent his son, 1 John 4, 10, to be our propitiation. So God demonstrated his impersonal love for us by sending his son to pay for our sin. And when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and receive him as our savior, We become a member of the family of God and we then have the personal love of God as royal family members. We’ll talk about that here in just a second. So that verse said, I love those who love me and those who diligently seek me will find me. The Hebrew verb shakar means to investigate God’s claims, to investigate God’s promises. diligence means to show care and consciousness and it’s really a labor of love and this is not the person who simply goes to church every sunday this is the person who seeks to learn and to understand all that is possible concerning god’s person and god’s plan This person who is diligently seeking him is a person who has an insatiable desire for a close relationship with the God of this universe. You want to be his friend. That’s a wonderful thing. This diligence is a condition that God puts on loving him. He wants you to be diligently. Again, I’ll read it to you so you understand this. I love those who love me, and those who diligently seek me will find me. That’s the condition God puts on loving him, and it refers to a committed search using all of your resources, maximum effort. Where do you look? Whom do you trust? Some people look to nature, and I’ve talked to a lot of people that say, well, when I’m in the woods… Sometimes they’ll say deer hunting, or if I’m out on the lake fishing, or if I’m at the beach seeing the sunset, then I’m really close to God. Well, some people look in nature. Some people look to the stars, and they all testify that there’s someone greater than us who created it. Listen to the Psalm in 19, one and two. The heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring his work of his hands. Day to day they pour forth knowledge and night to night reveal knowledge. Again, the heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. So yes, you can learn about God by looking at the stars. You can realize that someone greater than you put them there. Man has been mesmerized looking into the universe, trying to find it. It’s called the third heaven, and it’s the presence of God. And the ultimate way of learning about God is called pisticism, not rationalism, not empirical data, pisticism, and that’s faith. Using faith, it takes faith to get to know God. So God’s wisdom does not fall into your lap like winning the lottery. God said you must diligently search for it, and he would love you if you love him. When we execute God’s mandates, then we eventually become his friends and the object of his personal friendship. We don’t become great by anything we do, but by functioning in the system which he supplied is a matter of God’s grace. We are saved by grace. We live by grace. We die by grace. We have surpassing grace in heaven. And that’s what God’s looking for, a trusted friend of God, a faithful friend. Is that what you want to be? God’s faithful friend? So wisdom is the byproduct of knowledge and the byproduct of understanding. Proverbs 3.13, happy is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. And this is wisdom speaking. I love those who love me and those who diligently seek me will find me. That wisdom we’re talking about is God. The enemy of divine wisdom is what we call human viewpoints. human viewpoint. Proverbs 3.7 says, don’t try to be wise in your own eyes. You know, this is the humanistic approach to life. The humanist doesn’t actually buy into the Bible and doesn’t buy into the fact that God created the world, that the Word of God is alive and powerful. They think they’re smarter than God, and that’s always a dilemma, to think you’re smarter than God. So being wise in your own eyes means that you approve of your decisions and your actions and you say, well, I know the stars are out there and I know somebody that created it, but it was just all an act of nature. Or, you know, it’s just an act of nature that we’re here. It’s just an accident. I don’t believe all that Bible stuff. I’m wise in my own eyes. What a mistake. What a mistake to think that you are smarter than God. So maximum wisdom is what we’re looking for, to have a maximum relationship with God. That’s what you build your faith on. How? Romans 10, 17. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So maximum wisdom is built on you hearing the word of God and developing faith. And how do you hear the word of God? Well, you can read your Bible, but it’s a textbook, it’s not a novel, I’m telling you. It’s designed to be taught to you by a well-qualified pastor. And when you sit under the ministry of a well-qualified pastor and he explains the scripture to you from the original languages, then you develop faith. Faith comes about hearing. That means you develop more and more trust in God. And hearing comes from the word of God, listening to the teaching of the word of God. So it’s through the teaching or the reading of the Bible that we first learn of God’s impersonal love for us, the sinner. We learned it in John 3, 16. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. That’s where we first learned of God’s impersonal love That impersonal love that God had for me and you provided what we call the divine solution. The divine solution, not a human solution, because human solutions are absolutely no solutions. And divine solutions are the only solutions. That impersonal love God demonstrated is a divine solution to mend our broken relationship with him. Where does it come in the Bible? 2 Corinthians 5, 21. Here’s the divine solution. Listen carefully. For he, that’s God, hath made him, that’s Christ, to be sin for us, me and you. The one who knew no sin, that’s Christ, so we, that’s you and me, could be made the righteousness of God by means of him. In 2 Corinthians 5, 17, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature, Old things are passed away and behold, all things become new. That’s the new birth. That’s the new spiritual birth. That’s the phrase being born again. Technically what it means is that when you come into this world, you come into this world with a human body and a human soul but a dead human spirit. Spiritually dead because you’ve inherited Adam’s original sin. you go to the father and believe the message of the lord jesus christ and put your trust in his finished work on the cross you’re born again not physically spiritually the holy spirit comes to indwell your human spirit and you’re made spiritually alive and it is this human spirit and your soul that will reside with god forever in a resurrection body the old body will go to waste it’ll go back to the dirt But you’ll get a new body, a resurrection body. And that body will be phenomenal. No more pain, no more tears, no more sorrow. The old things will be passed away and all things become new. So being new in Christ is a new spiritual being. And we have to grow. We have to learn how to think, how to have the mind of Christ. We’re like babies in Christ. We’ve just been born again, and we don’t know everything. And this new birth doesn’t mean you’re never gonna sin again. It doesn’t mean that at all. What it refers to is the rebirth of your dead human spirit, which died the very minute that Adam’s original sin was imputed to you at birth. You don’t want to hear that? Romans 5, 12. Wherefore, as by one man, sin entered into the world, and now death by sin. And so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned. So by the act of Adam, you received an imputed sin nature, and you were born again. physically alive but spiritually dead needing to be born again this is what nicodemus got confused about in john chapter 3 when he asked the lord jesus christ how in the world could i go to my mother’s womb and be born again it’s not possible and jesus corrected him and said i’m surprised you being a pharisee don’t know better than this it’s a spiritual birth Thus we see God’s wisdom solving our human problem. How in the world does a sinful man have a relationship with a holy and a sinless God? So we see God loves all men based on his righteousness, not ours, not on what we can manufacture. God doesn’t love you because you don’t smoke. God doesn’t love you because you don’t drink. God doesn’t love you because you don’t say dirty words. God loves you because the righteousness of Christ was imputed to you at your salvation. And he’s loving that righteousness. He who knew no sin was made sin for us so that we may be made the righteousness of God by means of him. That’s what God’s loving. And as you grow and as you mature, as you learn wisdom from the Bible and understanding, then you become the friend of God. And that’s the relationship that we’re looking for. being a friend of God, having that sort of diligence so that you don’t let go, having that insatiable desire to get to know him closer and better. Do you have that? That’s the question for you. This love that we’re talking about is an amazing thing. We can see God loves all men based on his own righteousness, but not on what we try to manufacture. That love, that impersonal love that he had for you is not personal. But once you entered into that royal family of God, once you were adopted, the impersonal love became personal since we now are members of his royal family by believing in Jesus Christ. We were adopted into the family of God. You have a royal family. That’s why we call each other brother and sister sometime. We’re in the family of God. Romans 8, 15 talks about that adoption. It says, for you have not received the spirit of bondage, again to fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we now cry, Abba, Father. Paul writes about it in Galatians 4, 5. He talks about to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons, that we might be adopted into the family of God by means of faith alone in Christ alone. So maximum divine wisdom, seeking diligently after God so that you become a friend of God is built in your soul when you develop this flood line I’m talking about. When you develop a flat line, when you learn these 10 problem solving devices, using rebound to confess your sin, using the filling of the Holy Spirit to maintain fellowship with God, operating under the faith rest drill, using grace orientation and biblical orientation, having a personal sense of destiny, having virtue love for God called personal love and having virtue love for your neighbor called impersonal love, sharing the happiness of God and being occupied with the person of Christ. Maximum divine wisdom is built on those 10 problem-solving devices in your soul. When you learn them, when you use them, you will have insight and discernment into the lure of Satan’s system called the cosmos diabolicus. You may have heard me refer to it as the cosmic vortex, the invisible stream of satanic lure that spins around like a tornado, always trying to suck people into it. The cosmos diabolicus, the cosmic system. This is not what we’re part of. We’re not part of that. We don’t think like they think. We don’t live like they live. We live different. We think different. We think the mind of Christ. We live holy in a separated life. That doesn’t mean we don’t sin. It means that we are holy because we’ve got the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. And when we do sin and when we do fail, we go to God and admit our sin and don’t hide it. So when we have that flat line, we have spiritual x-ray vision. Spiritual x-ray vision. What’s that? It’s the ability to now see by means of wisdom what others who have no wisdom cannot see. By means of your insight and by means of your discernment wrapped in prudence, you can see what the rest of the world doesn’t see. Spiritual x-ray vision. The one thing we’re often blinded to is our own personal sins and our own natural failures, which we often justify as okay, but the Word of God says this. This is what it says. For this is the love of God, that we keep his mandates, and his mandates are not hard. They’re not grievous. We’re not ever allowed to justify our sin. If you love God… If you want to be the friend of God and you say you do love God, you told me that, yeah, I heard you, I love God, listen to this verse again. This is the love of God, you hear that? This is the love of God, that we keep his mandates and his mandates are not grievous. Obedience based on virtue love, personal love for God, that’s where the rubber meets the road. If you can’t obey God, you don’t love God. You’re kidding yourself. For example, the Bible says if you say you love God and hate your neighbor, you’re a liar and the truth is not in you. So God doesn’t tolerate hatred of any form, racial hatred or personal hatred or anything. Human obedience to divine standards always demonstrates personal love for God. one essential divine requirement is that we grow up that we grow up and become mature christians don’t say baby christians peter talks about it in first peter 2 2 where he says like newborn babies we should long for the pure milk of the word so that by that milk you may grow in respect to your salvation. I have a grandson, and he loves the milk of his mom’s breast, and they’ll let you know when they want to be fed for sure. So Peter said we should long for the pure milk. Epipatheo is the Greek word, epipatheo, and it means to desire earnestly or to crave it. To crave what? The pure milk of the Word of God, not something watered down, not some social gospel. Pure, adalos, the Greek word, adalos, unmixed, unadulterated, rich, pure Word of God. and seek it diligently so that we might be his friend. There’s nothing more pure and more clean than being fed God’s word by a well-qualified pastor, one who doesn’t muddy the water, one who doesn’t mix it up, doesn’t misapply the passage. one that can go to the original manuscripts for clarification. Remember Proverbs 8, 17, diligently seeking God. It starts with you longing for the pure milk of God’s word. Psalm 34, 8 continues the milk analogy when it says, “‘Oh, taste and see the Lord is good. “‘Blessed is the man who trusts in him.'” And we know that without pure milk, the baby does not grow. And we are told to grow in the Bible, 2 Peter 3.18. But grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Are you growing spiritually? Look at your life and tell me. Are you growing spiritually? Are you? How can you tell? Can you tell by the way you’re living your life and the decisions that you’re making? Are you being fed by a well-qualified pastor or are you just playing church? Are you hungry to learn more? Do you have an insatiable desire to diligently become a friend of God? If so, you’re listening to the person that can help you with that. I can point you in the right direction as I’m doing here today, giving you instruction, showing you where well-qualified pastors are so that you can grow and be the person God designed you to be. Not some person who falls behind as Hebrews talked about. Hebrews 5, 11 through 16, where it says you’ve been saved a long time now and you ought to be teaching others, but you’re not doing it. You need milk again. You need to go back and be bottle fed. You haven’t grown spiritually. That’s a problem. If you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you haven’t grown spiritually, that’s a problem. Gee, I hope you’ve been listening. I hope you’re learning and I hope you can apply what I’m telling you. Contact me if you have a question, anytime, any day, anytime, okay? Until next week, I’m your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:13

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.