In this episode, Kimberly joins the conversation to further discuss the spiritual lessons drawn from biblical references to water. With engaging dialogue surrounding scriptures like John 3 and 1 John 5, Barbara and Kimberly illuminate the necessity of spiritual rebirth through water and the spirit. They share personal stories and insights about clearing life’s earthy obstacles to access the wellspring of divine truth within us. As they recount biblical accounts and personal anecdotes, listeners are invited to reflect on their spiritual journeys and seek a deeper connection with God.
Welcome to Call to Freedom with Barbara Carmack. This is Jimmy Lakey, and I’m delighted that you are joining us for this half hour. You can reach Call to Freedom at Box 370367, Denver, Colorado, 80237, or by going to the website at www.freedomstreet.org. If you want to leave a message or order a Word Power Daily Reading Bible Guide or a Freedom Street Express newsletter, you can call us toll free at 1-877-917-7256 and leave your name and address including your zip code. If you want to talk to Barbara right now, she is expecting your call. You may call that same toll-free number, 1-877-917-7256 to speak to her. And now, let’s join Barbara in the studio.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Call to Freedom. It’s so good to have you join us today. I loved what the Churches of Christ Choir was singing right before the 1 o’clock program on Wednesday. And they were singing a song. Of course, they sing a cappella. And the complexity of the harmonies was just really great. But the words reign in me again, because we can just be so caught up in this world that we live in, and we have to travel. Some of you have to really go to work. I have one precious sister who is a year older than I am, and she’s still working 40 hours a week. Oh, God has given her strength to not retire from her work but to continue in it. I just pray for you today, all of you listening, that God would reign in you again and bring truth into your life. I was looking at the scripture in Philippians 419. My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus. I know that Paul was specifically talking about the offerings and the giving. God will meet all your needs. But I think our needs go far beyond the finances, friends. It goes to wisdom. God will meet all your needs through wisdom, through understanding, truth. Truth come into our hearts today and flood our hearts with good and new things, new revelation in Jesus’ name. Oh, thank you, Lord God. So God will meet all those needs that you have in your life, not just the financial, friend, but everything that… Kimberly’s going to have such a great teaching today and probably tomorrow about getting rid of all the dirt in our life and getting into the wonderful living water that we need to live by. So thank you so much. God bless you for listening in and giving to Call to Freedom. If you’d like to give online, you can go to freedomstreet.org and you can click on that donate button.
SPEAKER 03 :
and give that way you are blessed to dispense for in him you live and move and have your being and welcome to the program Kimberly it’s such a joy to have you join us today thank you I love that you were listening to that song I was to the rain in me yes and yes the way that you tied that in with the scripture my God will meet all your needs according to his riches he is so full and so abundant and He desires to live in us and make sure that that abundance is available to us. So yes, rain in me again, God, rain in me and clear out all of the cobwebs and the old dirt that’s in the way, clear it out and spring up, oh well, within my soul. Spring up and make me whole. That’s a song we sang when I was a kid. Yes. I think you did too when you were a kid.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, after we talked about what you’re teaching on today, guess what? I was humming the whole, the last two hours. I was singing that old song. Yes. Gotcha. I was talking about this. Well, yeah, gotcha.
SPEAKER 03 :
We used to do that. Yeah. I was talking about this very thing with Matthew yesterday and he came home last night and he goes, man, I was singing that song all day. Spring up, oh well, within my soul. Spring up, oh well, and make me whole. But you know, how many of us need to feel that wholeness right now? We’re lacking, and we’re weary, we’re tired, and we don’t understand, and there’s chaos all around, and we want to feel whole. We want to feel that. And it is God reigning in us that makes us feel whole again.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. Didn’t you love the harmonies, too? I mean, it was just such a great song. And I had never heard it before. Have you? No, I have not heard that. That’s right. Yeah, that was beautiful.
SPEAKER 03 :
Good song to hear today. Yes. So in thinking about God being the water of our life, in fact, we could just start there. Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3, that we need to be reborn. We need to be born again. And that is of the water and the spirit. I just think it’s interesting that Jesus is talking about water and spirit. You know, because why did Jesus want us to know that we are born of water and spirit? Why didn’t he say breath? Because breath, the breath of God was breathed in us. So why not breath and spirit? But he says very specifically in John 3, as he’s talking to Nicodemus, that we are born again of water and spirit. And that’s how we come to him. That’s how we come to the Father, when it’s water and spirit. And, you know, I’ve just been paying attention more to all the different places in the Bible that talk about water. and how important water is. You found some other verses just to collaborate with that scripture in John 3.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. Yes, in 1 John 5, the wonderful disciple of Jesus Christ, John, He wrote, Who is the one who overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one, and he’s talking of Jesus, who came by water and blood. Jesus had to be born as a human being through the birth canal of a woman. And that’s the water and the blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and with the blood. It is the Spirit who testifies because the Spirit is the truth. So that’s another way we can talk about the water, as Jesus did in John 3.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. You know, just as you said that, it also reminded me that his life ended with someone piercing his side and water and blood flowed from his side. And I’ve heard some people mention that because that is what we see in the birthing process, that Jesus was giving birth to the body of Christ, to the church. The church was then formed and Christ followers who really believe that he is the son of God, that he is Yeshua HaMashiach, that he is the Messiah. Those who believe can look and see that when the water and the blood flowed from his side, there was a new creation. A new birthing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, praise God. That’s beautiful. So, yeah. And water, water is just so important to our lives as human beings. Water is needed for every living thing on the planet, whether whether it’s a plant or or it’s just more necessary than food. It’s more necessary than bread. I was looking it up and I found that humans can live for two to three months without food, but they can only live three days without water.
SPEAKER 02 :
That even seems impossible, but I know it is possible to go on to a fast or even some people who have been hostages or been held have gone without food for months.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I’ve heard, I have never tried to go three days without water, but I have heard that it is more painful than going without food. Oh, I can’t imagine. You know, when I think back, Nineveh, when Jonah was sent to Nineveh, the king of Nineveh told everyone in the city not to eat or drink. And even the beasts… could not have any water for three days. That’s how they showed repentance.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. And Queen Esther also the same thing. She fasted and she had everybody fast around her for three days. Yes. No food or food or water. That’s right.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
So that has to be painful. You’re bringing a human body right to the brink of death, saying we’re serious when you’re fasting like that. We’re serious. We really are repenting. We’re willing to die to see you come through, God. And I have never tried that. I’m not asking anyone out there to try that. So don’t read into what I’m saying. Don’t try that.
SPEAKER 02 :
And just like other people have, I remember hearing of a woman who drank too much water and she died. We have to have a good balance there because we cannot be abusing our bodies in any way by drinking too much or not drinking enough. And God will be the one who shows us. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. And honestly, I just brought that up to say that we have to have water to live. We’ve got to have water. And our creator, our maker, did not want us to just be alive. He did not create you and then just take his hands off and say, there, let’s just see what you do in this world. No, he cares a whole lot more than you think. And he wants you to have an abundant life. He wants you to truly live and not just exist, not just be alive. So when we remember that about him, then we know that he is providing water. And we’re coming back now to the water, the fountain, the spring, the well, the streams. In Song of Songs 415, I was reading that and it says, and this is the groom talking to the bride in Song of Songs. So the picture that we get is Jesus talking to us. He is saying, you are a fountain of gardens, a garden spring, a well of living waters and streams from Lebanon.
SPEAKER 04 :
Praise God.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, here in the West, we don’t really know what Lebanon is. I looked that up, and it refers to the highest places in the Promised Land. And those high places often had snow on them, so they were pure white. So purity, it represents the best and highest attributes, like state-of-the-art quality. It represents excellence. in beauty, in fragrance, in pleasure and vitality. So here’s Jesus saying, you are all that to me. You are such wonderful fresh water and you flow down from the purest place, the most beautiful place, the most pleasurable place, that you are the state-of-the-art quality to me.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, that’s beautiful. And we know that, Kimberly, the land of Lebanon, physically speaking, The land of Lebanon used to be a garden. It was gorgeous, beautiful until the enemy came in and now it is almost completely destroyed. And that’s so sad. God is going to replenish that again one of these days because I believe it’s going to be a part of the Israel that Jesus is going to rule. But Lebanon right now is just a desert. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, and, you know, here’s Jesus speaking of his bride. How many of us feel like we’re just a real desert ourselves? Yes. You know, I’m just a dry. I don’t have anything to offer you, Jesus. And here he is, the one saying, oh, but you are a fountain of gardens. You are a fountain that can feed many gardens. You are a well of living waters. He’s looking at us and calling us that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s amazing to me. And we are fresh water to him. He loves living his life in us. And that fountain, that spring, that well, and that stream that are all mentioned in this song of songs, chapter four in verse 15, they appear to be four separate things, right? It’s four separate entities, but they’re all one. They’re all water. and water is more necessary than bread in this world and evidently it’s very necessary for jesus it’s very necessary for our creator because he put that in us each one of us have this well of water and and so with the way that you were opening up at the beginning let him reign in me it’s himself the image of god is a wellspring of living water deep on the inside of us So spring up, oh well. Spring up and make me whole. That’s what we want. We want to draw from the water that’s deep within us that knows who we were made for, that knows why we were created.
SPEAKER 02 :
When your grandpa, when my dad was looking for farms to live and we had been living in Brighton at the time and we went to probably three or four farms And he was looking for a farm that had water, Kimberly, that had a good aquifer underneath the ground. And he found the farm then north of Pierce, northeast of Pierce, that had three wells on that farm, deep, deep wells, 75, 100 feet deep. And that’s the farm he bought because he knew he needed water for those crops that he was going to grow. Yeah, so… We need that water.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, we need that water. We do. We do need that water. Yeah. So speaking of wells and needing that water, I was reading in Genesis 26. And this is where Isaac is finding his own place in the world. And he starts redigging wells that his father Abraham had dug. And they needed to be redug because If we read in Genesis 26, verses 14 and 15, it says the Philistines envied Isaac. And all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of Abraham, his father, the Philistines stopped them up by filling them with earth. Oh, wow. So Isaac had to re-dig those wells because the enemy had filled the wells with earth. And this caused me to think about the well of living water on the inside of us, that the only way we can really get to it is to dig away the human nature in us. And that’s the dirt. And we are a piece of dirt. We were made from the dirt. And so get the dirt out of the way And, you know, the thing is, we can’t do it on our own. We can just recognize that there’s some dirt in the way and we can ask Holy Spirit for help. And he will do that work. He wants to. But that’s the joy of it. The joy for Holy Spirit and for Jesus and for our Father God. You know, three in one, we serve a three in one God. The joy for them is for us to recognize that our human nature is getting in their way. And when we recognize it and say, oh, I don’t like that. I want it out of the way. Will you help me? Will you get it out of the way? Then we are having that conversation, that divine conversation that we were meant to have. That’s what we were made for. And we’re asking them to do that. what they’ve always wanted to do. Now we’re coming into agreement with them and we’re saying, you know what? I like your water better than my earth. So let’s get the earth out of the way and re-dig these wells down to the depths of goodness. the depths of the goodness of God. And as we’re redigging it, you’re right, the enemy will constantly try to fill in any progress that we’ve made to expose that fresh water, that spirit water in our life. And he argues with us about who the water belongs to, and he fills the wells back in that we’ve dug up with earth and dirt. And human beings just have that human nature of going back to the dirt, back to the human ways, the fleshy ways, the earthy ways. And then we just need to dig through that dirt again to find the fresh water that our maker has hidden down deep in us. is why Jesus tells us that we need to be born of water and spirit in order to enter heaven. We get rid of the dirt that’s in the way, get rid of the human nature, the human opinions, the human agendas, the human ideas, get them out of the way and adopt the ideas and the agendas of heaven, which is a wellspring of water on the inside of us.
SPEAKER 02 :
Praise God. And you know, Kimberly, in this portion of scripture in John 3, Nicodemus was a very learned scholar. He probably knew the first five books of the Bible by heart. And yet he was ignorant in the spiritual things. And sometimes we think that we know so much. And yet we’re ignorant in the spiritual things that really count. And he said to Jesus, how can this be? Can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb, can he? And Jesus is speaking on a different level. And Kimberly, I want to get to that level where I can hear him spirit to spirit, as John is saying, spirit to spirit. Oh, I want to get there. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Praise the Lord. Rain and me again.
SPEAKER 02 :
Spring up a well. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. Right. I’m glad you brought up Nicodemus again, because I learned something just recently that he was considered the teacher of teachers. He was high up in the Pharisee ranks. Yes. But the name Nicodemus is not a Jewish name. That’s a Roman name. And I just thought I would point that out today because the way that Jesus seeks out people, he was seeking out his own, yes, the Jewish people, he was seeking out his own, but he really went out of his way very often to find the others, the other nations, the other people and invite them in to the kingdom. That was the whole purpose of Jesus’ life to just start calling all of us to him.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s right. I love where the chosen has taken a particular moment in Nicodemus’ life when Jesus told him to join them, and he sees all of them traveling, walking to a new destination, and he is back there in tears. He’s around the corner and just regretting not being able to go with Jesus because he His wife and all of those people that surrounded him, they were focused on the physical things that were happening, the importance of his position in the hierarchy of the Jewish community. And he had to say no. And he was weeping. He was weeping.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I enjoy that moment, too. And at the same time, I also know that our purpose, exactly right where we’re at, Nicodemus was needed in that circle. And the way that he stood his ground and stood for Jesus and Jesus. and made his voice heard in his circles was important and valued.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m glad you said that because sometimes we think we’ve made such a terrible mistake or done something that we can’t redo or re-dig and we think, oh, we’ve lost it. we’ve lost our purpose. There’s always fresh water.
SPEAKER 03 :
There’s always fresh water to find in the place that we find ourselves. So whatever that mistake, you know, we can call something a mistake. God truly works all things together for good. And that means that that’s not just plan B. Here’s some more fresh water for you. He loves living his life through you. Just the way that it is, the way that it is. And God, I love knowing that there’s so much redemption every day. When he talks of his loving kindness being new every morning, every day there’s fresh water available. I was looking at a well’s purpose, a purpose of a well. The well’s purpose is to provide water from deep in the ground. Usually you’ve got to go pretty deep to get to that water.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I think earlier in the week you were talking on Monday about going down to the bedrock, you know, to have your foundation on the bedrock. Well, when you dig that far, you’re probably going to hit some water. Yeah, that’s true. Yes. Yeah. And so you want to go deep to get to the water and it’s earth that is in the way or the earth obstructs the flow of water and it must be dug out of the way before that fountain head can be revealed and accessed. So That’s what I like to think of spiritually. We’re digging this earth out of the way, this human earth, the human reasoning, the human senses, the things that make sense to us. We’re digging them out of the way to find that fountainhead. That water that is living water that Jesus talks about. This wellspring is the hidden treasure that God has placed in every human. And when we remove the obstacles just by noticing they’re in the way and I think it takes humility to notice that my pride is in the way or to notice that my self-pity is getting me down all the time or to notice that my jealousy is not accomplishing anything or my coveting someone else’s things or whatever it is, my gluttony, I overate, that’s getting in the way. You know, I think it takes humility to just admit it and say, wow, this is not helping me find your living water. So, God, I need your help to remove this dirt from my life, to remove the human tendencies so that I can get to that fresh spiritual water that you are talking about. And that will flow from my life to others and make this earth a garden once again. Oh, praise God. When a wellspring is concealed, man receives no benefit from it. So there might be water right underneath your home that you’re living in, but we’re not receiving the benefit from that. There’s a well just down the street from us. We used to love to get the water from that well. It tasted so good and they covered it up. They completely covered it up and pulled all of the mechanics from it. So it’s no longer accessible. So when it’s concealed, we have no benefit from it. And we might even think that it doesn’t exist. You know, we don’t even know it exists, but once it is revealed, then it serves its purpose. That’s what we want in our spiritual lives. The water of the word, the water that’s living water to our soul. We want that revealed and we want it serving a purpose. It does exist. And we can actually be asking for it to be revealed. And if it’s just a few drops and you want more, you can ask for more. And Holy Spirit loves to answer those kinds of prayers. Those kinds of requests are his favorite. Please, I want more of you. I want more of your water.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. My God will meet all my needs according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. All my needs. When we feel weak, his strength is made perfect in our weakness. Oh, this has been so good, Kimberly, and you aren’t even halfway through your notes that I have down for you.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I’m asking you to come forward to, yes, being with you tomorrow. Thank you for that. I so appreciate your time that you give me on this station. We just love you listeners so much. We just say to all of you out there, take joy.
SPEAKER 1 :
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SPEAKER 01 :
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