Join Rick Hughes on this enlightening episode of The Flatline as he explores the profound nature of the human soul and spirit. Delve into the biblical perspective of self-consciousness, spirituality, and the real essence of who you are beyond the physical. Rick also touches on vital topics such as the impact of parental guidance in shaping our soul’s awareness and the transformative power of renewing one’s mind in alignment with divine principles.
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, stick around. We always tell you this, but I’ll say it again. Motivation, inspiration, education. That’s what this show’s about, but no manipulation. We don’t con you. We’re not trying to solicit money. We’re not trying to sell you a book or a t-shirt. We’re just trying to give you some information. Information that I pray will help you verify and identify the plan of God for your life. If you’re able to do that, you’ll orient and adjust to the plan. That’s my prayer for you. Excuse me. Okay. I want to make an announcement. We’ve done some new revisions of our book, Christian Problem Solving. And we’re gonna have that book out from the press by the end of June. You can get it early on our website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org. We have the book Christian Problem Solving there in a PDF file. And you can print it out if you want to get an advance copy of it before the printed copy. I think you’ll find it a great resource. There is a detailed chapter for each problem solving device we teach along with supporting scripture. And as I said, it should be available in early June, so contact us if you want a printed copy. We’ve also done a revision to our book, Divine Pardon, for those that are incarcerated or their loved ones. And if you need this book, let us know. We’ll send it to you as well. So thank you for your patience. Thank you for your prayers. Thank you for your support. Thank you for your encouragement. Now, let’s get into the real you. The real you. Who in the world is the real you? Have you looked into a mirror lately? If so, here’s the question I want to ask you. Are you seeing the real you? Or is it just part of you? I mean, if your face were distorted in a tragic accident, would you still be you? What if you had a heart transplant? Would you still be you? The truth is this, here it is. The real you is not visible. Only God can see the real you. And that’s because the real you is in your soul’s mentality, not the body. The body houses the soul. So what exactly does the real you look like? In Genesis 1.26, here’s what the scriptures say. God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. In Genesis 2, 7, then the Lord formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. The words we’re concerned with are image and breath of life. The Hebrew word for image is a masculine noun, salim. God said, let us make him after our likeness, another Hebrew word. But does this mean if we have seen mankind, then we have seen what God looks like? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. Because God does not look like any mortal being. We know God is eternal life, and we know the human body does not possess eternal life. We know this body that we inhabit is destined to return to dust. The scriptures tell us in Ecclesiastes 12, 7, then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it. You’ve heard that term, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. I’ve heard it as well, but it’s not found in the Bible. It’s often quoted at funerals from the angelic book of common prayer used by many preachers at funerals. But in Genesis three 19, the Bible does say these words by the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food. That’s when man came under the curse until you returned to the ground. Since you were taken from dust, you are going back to dust. You will return. So now remember you have three parts. You have a body going back to dust. Eventually you have a soul and you have a spirit. So in Genesis 1.27, when it says God breathed the breath of life into a body of dust, the breath of life is what we know to be the soul and the spirit. The soul and the spirit. There is no human being unless these components are put together. And the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the creator of the universe, put them all together. He formed the body from the dust of the ground, and he breathed into the nostrils of Adam the breath of life. Until the placing of the soul in the body, no human being can exist. Now here’s what’s interesting. Man and woman, husband and wife, can certainly create biological life, but only God can give that biological life a soul and a spirit. Mankind does not, and I repeat, we do not have the ability to create an eternal soul. Only God can do that. We can create a body, but God has to impart the soul. The body itself is not immortal, but the soul and the spirit most definitely are because they were created by God and they live on forever in eternity. The human spirit is the immaterial part of man designed by God to convert, to store, and eventually utilize spiritual phenomena. But without a human spirit, man is incapable of worshiping God. That human spirit I’m talking about is given to the spiritually dead individual at salvation when he is born again. So when you’re born again, you’re born spiritually alive. When you’re born the first time, you’re born physically alive, but spiritually dead because of Adam’s original sin. But you do have a soul. We’ll see that in a minute. So because of Adam’s original sin, we’re born spiritually dead. Thus the need for us to be born again. So in John 4 24, God is a spirit. Those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. If you don’t have a human spirit, you can’t worship God. And that is given to you the minute you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and are born again. So Adam’s original sin is what causes us to die to start with, Romans 5, 12. Therefore, just as through one man’s sin entered into the world and death by sin and thus now death spread to all men because all have sinned. And that’s our identification with Adam. We’re all born sinful and dead spiritually and the need to be born again. so that we will have a body, a soul, and a spirit. That human spirit that I’m talking about, that immaterial part of man that defines him as being spiritually alive, and it’s the human spirit that enables us to understand and relate to God, and it is separate from the soul. The moment any individual believes in Christ, the very moment, that Holy Spirit will create a human spirit And it is to this human spirit, not the body, it’s to the human spirit that God imparts eternal life. It’s called the second birth. At death, the believer’s immaterial human spirit is separated from the material body along with the immortal soul. So at death, both the soul and the spirit go into heaven to be face to face with the Lord. And I have news for you. I don’t want to burst your bubble. But Uncle Joe’s not up there watching you and cheering you on and helping you win some event. Now let’s examine the soul. In 1 Peter 1.9, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. The word soul is pronounced in the Greek New Testament, psuche. But what exactly is the soul of a man? If you let me define it for you, it is the intangible, immortal essence of man that comprises the real person, giving him rational and moral and relational capabilities. So possession of a soul is what distinguishes man from all other living creatures. Unfortunately, animals that we love do not have a completed soul. By that, I mean if you put a dog in front of a mirror along with several other dogs, he cannot pick himself out. He does not have self-consciousness. They also don’t have the ability to build vocabulary storage. It’s clear they can express emotions, and our pets do that, very loyal, and it’s clear they have limited memory functions, but our pets do not have a human spirit nor a completed soul. You and I certainly hope they’ll be with us in heaven, but no one… Nowhere does the scripture tell us that our deceased pets are gonna be in heaven with us or that our pets need to actually be born again to go to heaven. I do remind you that in the millennial reign of Christ, you will be here with him in a resurrection body for 1,000 years. So in the course of that 1,000 years, you can have a lot of pets. You’ll be on the earth and you’ll be here with the Lord Jesus Christ doing whatever he assigns you. So the essence of the human soul includes self-consciousness, self-consciousness. You and I are completely aware of our own existence, and we know we are alive, and at some point, maybe you wonder, like I wonder, how we got here, where we came from. This is how we become God-conscious. Psalm 19, one through two, tells us there is a God out there who created every bit of this. Listen to it. Psalm 19, one and two, the heavens declare the glory of God, The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech, and night after night, they reveal knowledge. So anyone, anywhere on planet Earth can look up at the sky and realize something created this. And they can choose to want to know that, or they can choose to worship a rock and say the rock created it, the tree created it, the fish created it. But no, who really created that? Now going back to animals, the animals do have consciousness, but they don’t have self-consciousness. Keep that in mind. We have self-consciousness. We know who we are. You can go into your yearbook and find your picture and pick it out. If your dog has a book of pictures of a bunch of other dogs and put his in the middle, he can’t pick himself out. That’s self-consciousness. Now our soul also has mentality. What’s that? That’s the thinking part of each individual. The New Testament identifies the mentality as the mind and also the heart. And it appears in the New Testament that the heart of man contains the memory center where our vocabulary storage is, where we store our norms and our standards. It’s in the mind, pronounced noose, and the heart, pronounced cardia in the New Testament, cardia, cardiac, cardiology. It’s in the mind that we comprehend and understand, but it’s in the heart where we store and use the information we comprehend. The Greeks recognized this distinction and referred to this information understood as gnosis, G-N-O-S-I-S. Gnosis is the word knowledge. But they also had another word for knowledge pronounced epi-gnosis. And the epi is a preposition meaning full knowledge. The difference between knowledge and full knowledge is critical because knowledge is something you hear and you understand. Full knowledge is something you hear, understand, and apply. So it’s in the mentality of your soul where the sin nature battles the Holy Spirit. in your mind, in the mentality of your souls where the fight goes on. It’s where the sin nature fights you every day. Ephesians 4, 17 refers to the vanity of the mind. And that’s referring to an empty void that’s easily defeated. Unbelievers can have a vanity in their mind, a void in their mind. They have no defense mechanism. You see, Satan’s primary objective towards the believer is to stop you from becoming spiritually autonomous are reaching any sort of spiritual maturity. And the Bible tells you in Psalm 23, seven, as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. So if God wants to look at you, he’s looking to not look at your image and your style, not at what you’re wearing, he will look at what you’re thinking. The soul also consists of your volition. And what is that? That’s your ability to choose either for or against anything in life. You may want to be a Republican, You may want to be a Democrat. You may want to be an independent. That’s your volition. Your volition, not your environment, determines your soul’s worth and your soul’s destiny. So much of the suffering that you and I endure comes from when we make bad decisions. We might choose to mismanage our health. We may choose to mismanage our finances. And these sort of bad decisions stem from negative volition to the mandates of God’s word. But we also use our volition to choose our very own eternal destiny. And that’s why the Lord Jesus Christ asked the Pharisees in Matthew 22, 42, what think ye of Christ? Their volition was challenged right there. And their answer demonstrated their rejection of his claim to be the Son of God. And this is a rational question you yourself must answer. What think ye of Christ? I encourage you to choose carefully. Either he is the anointed son of God who he said he was, or he is a big giant imposter. You must decide because your eternal destiny depends on that. The soul also contains consciousness, not self-consciousness, but consciousness. And that’s the evaluation center of life where all your norms, all your standards are stored. When you’re little, your parents taught you to brush your teeth, make your bed, clean your room up, take a bath, take a shower, put on deodorant. Those were norms and standards that taught you how to live life. Respect the privacy of other people, don’t lie, don’t steal. Norms and standards, you should have those in your soul. When too many bad decisions invade the mentality of the soul, then your thinking will get clouded and will be distorted. So you cannot afford to have your values distorted or clouded. Your volition, I will. Your self-consciousness, I am. Your mentality, I think. And your consciousness, I ought. I ought to do that. So your soul’s content is revealed by what you say and the way you act. But your sin nature is not part of your soul. It’s not. It’s not part of your soul. It is genetically formed in the cell structure of your flesh or your body. And it is destroyed along with your body at death because the body is not saved because the old sin nature resides in it. In eternity, a living soul is given a new body, a perfect body, a body minus Adam’s original sin and minus any human good. So the sin nature that you have and I have battles for control of our soul’s mentality by appealing to our emotions. Without the word of God in the consciousness of the soul, the sin nature is free to manipulate us, to manipulate our thinking, since there would be no main line of resistance. But the individual who has no divine viewpoint to guard his mentality will always wind up with some sort of scar tissue and complete unrealistic self-image. Listen to what Paul said here about the Gentiles. So I say this, and I affirm this in the Lord, prepositional phrase, in the Lord, that you are no longer to walk, that means live, you’re not to live your lives like the Gentiles live their lives, in the futility of their mind. The futility is the void, an emptiness mind, no barriers, no divine viewpoint. And if that’s true, if they have no divine viewpoint and no breaks in their soul, they become darkened in their understanding, verse 18 says, Ephesians 4, and they are now excluded from the life of God because of ignorance that’s in them. ignorance in them, and that can happen to you too. If you’re ignorant of the plan of God, you’re not gonna be around very long. The ignorance that is in them because of the hardness of their heart, scar tissue, and they have become calloused and have given themselves up to indecent behavior to practice every sort of impurity with greed. So basically, what we’re talking about here is a runaway soul. A runaway soul has a potential for a great disaster. And I know you’re saying, what is a runaway soul? I consider a runaway soul to be a soul that has no brakes, B-R-A-K-E-S, brakes, like brakes in your car. That means that the conscience of that soul has no norms and no standards programmed into the mentality. The job of the parents is to equip the children to handle future once mom and dad are no longer around. And the most important thing for the parent to place in the soul of their child is an awareness of God or God consciousness. Why is that? Because from this platform, there becomes a need for salvation. If the parent does not prepare the soul’s mentality of their children, then they guarantee their child will have no breaks, B-R-A-K-E-S. They will have no breaks. And they will eventually crash into some disaster of life, be it social, financial, even criminal. And that’s why Proverbs 22, 6 says, train up a child in the way that he should go. And what happens if you do that? Train up a child in the way that he should go. And when he’s old, he will not depart from it. Ephesians 6.4 says, Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. The great news is that through salvation and through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, any divine viewpoint the children did not receive from neglectful parents can be overcome by learning and applying the scriptures. This is exactly what happened in my case. After my salvation at the age of 22, I had a lot of blanks to fill in. Why should I or why should I not do something? Thank goodness God gave me a great pastor who taught me the mechanics of the Christian life and prepared me to make these tough choices. So where does sin originate from? It comes from the mentality of your soul. In order to control the lust patterns of the soul’s mentality, We, the believer, must learn a new way of thinking. We must change the way we think. In Romans 12, one through three says, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world. Don’t think like the world thinks. But be transformed, listen, listen, listen, by the renewing of your mind. Change the way you think so that you may be able to prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Because I say to you through the grace given to me, everyone who is among you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, this arrogance. But think soberly that humility as God has dealt each one of us a measure of faith. Those verses I read Romans 12 one through three are a divine mandate for us to avoid the trait of arrogance, which is basically having an unrealistic self image because arrogance and the mentality of your soul will eventually destroy you. It’s under the influence of arrogance that you will consistently justify your bad decisions and you will convince yourself that you’re right and the rest of the whole dang world is wrong. Yeah, right. The arrogant unbeliever, not even a Christian, but unbeliever, he will justify why he doesn’t need God. He doesn’t need God’s forgiveness that is offered in Christ. And the arrogant unbeliever will justify his actions by evaluating others and seeing himself as better or at least equal. The arrogant soul of the believer, on the other hand, will convince himself that certain parts of the scripture don’t apply to him. If he’s a believer, he often winds up doing right things but in the wrong way. A good example is don’t be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. So a guy and a girl meet, one’s a believer and one’s an unbeliever, and they say, I’m gonna fall in love and get married. And the Bible says don’t do that, don’t do that. Marry a believer. And millions of people have ignored that. This arrogance of the soul’s mentality unfortunately is very contagious. Another person’s arrogance may in fact infect your soul if you’re not careful. So be aware that very often you’re being recruited by the arrogant evangelist who will try to convince you that wealth does not require any honor or that success does not require integrity or that love does not require virtue because virtue, honor, and integrity are basic traits of humility. And humility is the standard that God is judging you by. Humility is the believer’s attitude stemming from your personal love for God. That’s why the Bible says in 1 John 5, 3, if you love me, you will obey me and my mandates are not hard. So James 4, 10 says, humble yourself, humility. Humble yourselves before the Lord and then he will exalt you. So the key to being humble promoted in life, the key to being successful in life is humility. And the key to destruction in life is arrogance. As far as the nation goes, national humility is required, it’s a required virtue for a nation under divine discipline. It’s a required virtue. Listen, Second Chronicles 714. If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves, there’s humility, admit their sin, admit their wrong, if they will humble themselves and pray and seek my face, turn to the word, turn from their own wicked ways, that’s human viewpoint, then I will hear them from heaven and I will forgive their sin and heal their land. So the answer to what’s going on in America is a spiritual revival, spiritual revival not among lost people, but among believers who have walked away from the doctrine of the word of God and are so arrogant they no longer seek to know what God’s word says. This arrogant soul’s mentality is exactly the spiritual disease that’s destroying America today because our soul’s mentality can be easily recruited by concepts of evil, which is simply the operating system of AKA the devil. See, the genius of the devil is demonstrated by deceptive forms of evil. For example, many believers are lured away from the plan of God for their lives by moral sounding forces of evil. And this is best seen in the forces of religion that convince individuals they must earn God’s forgiveness. This particular ploy has misled thousands of people into thinking they’re saved because they’re moral and very giving. When the Bible clearly tells us there are none that are righteous, though not even one, Romans 3.10. And yet many people still seek to add good works to salvation. For example, some misguided soul is told he must repent of his sin to be saved. The Bible does speak the word repenting, but it’s a reference to changing the way you think. You are an unbeliever. When you change your mind, you become a believer. Repent is a compound word. It forms from meta and then noeo, which means to change the way you think. The evil here is convincing you you’re responsible for your salvation by repenting of your sins. That’s not true. Because the Bible does not teach man is condemned to hell for his sins, but rather for his unbelief. John 3.18, he that believeth on him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. So much more to say about this. So much more to teach about the soul and the working of your soul, and the real you is inside your mind. And this is where God checks you out. He wants to see what you’re thinking. This is where all your volitional decisions come from, your mind. So think about these things, pray about them, And I hope you’ll join me next week at the same time, same station. This is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you 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.
