In this inspiring episode of Call to Freedom, Barbara Carmack and her guests delve into the themes of faith, trust, and personal growth. Listen as they discuss how the Holy Spirit guides us through life’s challenges and the importance of maintaining faith during tumultuous times. They share personal stories and biblical insights that highlight the significance of seeking God’s wisdom and staying the course even when life feels like a roller coaster.
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 04 :
Welcome to Call to Freedom. Oh, God bless you for your effort and for your blessing to Call to Freedom. I look forward to going to the post office. You would get me wrong. My motives are not just to get donations. I want to make that clear. I love to read your notes, your edifying notes, the things that you’re talking about. One dear lady says, I don’t have TV, I don’t have computer, but I listen to you in my Jeep while I’m doing errands around town. So we know how important radio is for some people. And I’m so grateful that Call to Freedom has helped. corroborated with Crawford for so many years now. First, it was Darren live in Denver, and I appreciate so much Darren teaching me about the things that are important in life. And Holy Spirit’s going to teach you more things that are important in life. And just because these last days are characterized by frequency of events and intensity, we can still learn moment by moment every day from Holy Spirit. I know that when President Trump takes over, that first day is going to be a mind blower for most people, because we realize that these last three and a half, four years have been dominated by a man and an administration that were slower. in what they were willing to tell the people. And it is going to be wide open, and it’s going to be so many frequent events happening, and it’s going to be intense. So hang on, hang on, and you’re going to see some mighty things happening in these last days. I hope your prayer with me today is search me, oh God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. And we all have those. Those thoughts come in on a daily basis, moment by moment basis. See if there is any offensive way in me. and lead me in the way everlasting. Now that’s from Psalm 139. But it reminds me of Psalm 19, verse 14. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock. That’s something you can hang on to. You can stand on. It’s solid. My rock and my redeemer. Praise the Lord for God. Praise the Lord for his loving kindness for us every day. You are blessed to dispense for in him you live and move and have your being. And I’m so grateful that Call to Freedom can come to you live every day, Monday through Thursday. It’s been quite an adventure and an effort to do that every day. But I’m so grateful. that I can come to a place where the atmosphere is wonderful. It’s been a great journey for me. I was just telling my daughter, Kimberly, who is on the air, by the way, that I’ve always worked for family. From the 70s, I worked for my father in the Bible book house. That was absolutely marvelous. And then I was working with John on the road for many years. And then not only… with John in the Music Center till 1990, till he went home to be with the Lord. But then along came Darren, and I started working with him. I always have enjoyed working behind the scenes, but it got to the point where he wanted me to co-host with him. So it It was a nervous proposition for me. But I am so grateful because now that he’s gone, I have all of you. I know you’re praying for me. And it’s a wonderful thing to know that as we’re getting older, our brothers and sisters in the Lord are praying. We’re praying for each other. And I’m so grateful for that. Praise the Lord. Well, one more day and you can get your 2025 motivational calendar. Yes. If you date your check December the 31st, I will honor that. So send me send me a donation before the well, this is the 31st and I will send you a wonderful 2025 motivational calendar. I love sending those things out. So thank you so much for your giving to call to freedom. You will never. know the effort that you have put into writing that check or that money order, how people are responding to the word of God on the air. So thank you so much. And welcome to the program, Kimberly.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you. I am looking at your calendar. I got one. I got one in the mail for you. And I’m looking at it right now. And December, it is the last day of December, but December here is saying challenge. And it’s the ability to accomplish the impossible. And I love that you shared your story because where God has taken you from, did you hear that? I just, I accidentally knocked the calendar off the wall there. Okay. But where God has taken you from and where he’s brought you to might have looked impossible to you. If he had tried to lay it all out for you in a map early in your life, you probably would have said, no, thank you. And walked away. So he is kind to us. He’s very patient with us. And he only gives us little glimpses of what comes next. And sometimes just the next step, the very next step for that day and it can feel truly like wilderness. You know, that’s what the Israelites were led into wilderness where they just knew the next step for that day. And this past year might’ve felt like real wilderness for a lot of us. And maybe we feel like it’s still today wilderness, but we can be a voice that will declare from the wilderness, That’s what John the Baptist did. From the wilderness, he was a voice crying out. And we can be a voice crying out and saying, we can have faith here. We know who our God is. He has been so faithful. And we can prepare ourselves and prepare others to clear that way for God himself. Learning to have faith that this path you are on is the path to faith. This is it’s where you’re at already. So why fight it? You’re on the path.
SPEAKER 04 :
Why fight it? Yes. Yeah. When we acknowledge the Jesus as Savior and Lord, we better just tighten that seat belt and go on with him. It’s like once you get in the roller coaster, you just go up and down with that roller coaster. You can’t quit midway.
SPEAKER 1 :
You can’t.
SPEAKER 04 :
Or you’re going to get smashed on the ground or something. So we know that once we fasten that seatbelt, we’re going. We’re going with him.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so stay in your car. Stay strapped in. We might have a few more hills to climb and valleys to plummet into. But the faith that we are building, the faith that we are growing, that is what is making us like God more. He is forming us in his image, and he’s using this very journey that you are on to do it. And trusting that this is the path, that’s a step. Trusting is a step in growing in faith. We forget that our God is a God of faith. That he has faith that we will all learn to trust him and that we’ll draw closer to him and that this plan of his will bring about his desire for a bride, his desire for a best friend, his desire for a new Jerusalem. He is believing in faith that this is going to work out. And he’s asking us to believe, too. So if you’re in the middle of a situation that feels impossible, you’re in the very best place to grow your faith.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, that’s so good. Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
I was just listening to the teacher right before us here, and he was talking about this. Well, I don’t know if he said it this way, but it made me remember as a kid, sometimes we would play with each other and go, open your mouth and close your eyes and you will get a big surprise. Yes. You know, you are not going to open your mouth for somebody that you do not trust.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
And God wants to fill our mouths with good things. And he is worthy to be trusted. And so sometimes when he’s asking us to open our mouths so that he can fill it, we’re not trusting that. You know, and sometimes that comes across in our daily time with him, whether it’s reading the word or confessing the word. Open your mouth. Confess the word. Open your mouth and pray. Let him pray through you. Let him give you the ideas of what to pray. Open your mouth and you will be surprised at what God does to fill your mouth.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, that’s so good.
SPEAKER 02 :
You and I were talking earlier, Mom, about the word allow and that when people say that God allows us, you know, sometimes we have bitter things that enter our mouths, that enter our lives. They’re bitter or really hurtful and really broken. And I heard someone just mentioning that the word allow kind of triggers them, like God allows us to experience love. some things that are pretty rough in this world. And it makes it sound like he could stop that, that God could stop it. And yes, he is God, he is big. We forgot. We are forgetting that He gave us control. He gave us free will. So He is not always in control. We talk about Him like He is always in control. I think I’ve said it myself a lot. But I want to start looking at it as the fact that He is still on the throne. He is still God, and He is still working for good. We have a lot of control, and we make decisions in this life that are hurtful toward other people. I’m just talking about human beings in general. Now, I don’t try to make decisions to hurt others, but it happens all the time. Even my very best intentions end up hurting somebody. And we forget that that is the freedom God has given to us to make those choices. Well, he has faith that we’re all going to learn to walk this out the way he wants it walked out. That we’ll start to listen to him more and be in fellowship with him. And so when I think of God allowing something, I’m actually thinking of him sitting back and allowing himself to observe all this pain. It’s a lot of pain because it’s a lot of brokenness in this world. And he’s not just sitting back passively. He is grieving with you, with every person that experiences something painful, something hurtful, betrayal, rejection, trauma, abuse. With everyone who’s experiencing that, he is feeling it even more deeply. Yeah. And He is grieving with you. He’s angry with you. He hurts with you. And that’s the kind of allow that I think of. that he allows human beings to continue to make all these choices when it’s hurting his heart so terribly and he’s letting us know that he’s not finished he’s not just sitting there passively when we give these situations to him we’re giving him some freedom of his own to work And the way that he works is compassionate, full of mercy. The way that God is still ruling and reigning is to work all things together for good. He’s doing it constantly. He’s picking up the pieces of everything that we are exploding everywhere. And he’s picking them up and he’s making something new out of them. Yes. It’s the most beautiful picture to see him like that. And he is trusting that we are finally going to wake up and have the faith that he is good. He has a really good plan here and we can join him in this plan. Join him in declaring that this is working. Some of you know my story of my marriage and how five and a half years ago Matthew gave me divorce papers. And some of you know, if you’ve been listening, that he did move back in this past year, and he’s back in the home. And I know that that looks like, oh, yes, there’s victory there. There’s still a lot of wilderness in it. We’re both still just trying to find our way after… 30 years is a long time to have a messed up routine, to have some messed up ways of thinking and messed up expectations. And so trying to just put that back together, it’s messy. So we are both voices in a wilderness. Our marriage is still a wilderness and yet we can both declare the goodness of God, how he is holding our hands and making sure that we’re getting through this with him in mind, not just our own agendas and our own ideas and counseling. You know what? That is a great option. If you have been in counseling as long as Matthew and I were, which was 10 years, and we didn’t just go through the counseling, we went through all the classes that would certify us to counsel as well. Great information.
SPEAKER 04 :
Then you realize how different each individual truly is, how different their minds operate, how different they think and they talk. And, oh, Kimberly, if you’ve been through 10 years of therapy and it’s still a mess, then the only alternative.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and at the end of the 10 years, right, at the end of the 10 years is when he gave me the divorce papers, you know. Okay. You know, we’re already talking about it. Thank you for laughing. I love that we can actually have joy in this and not take it so personally when we see how many ways we try to divorce ourselves from God and how that breaks his heart.
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, I was telling you today about a movie that I watched. I love Westerns and John Wayne is just one of my favorites. And so in this one Western, Angie Dickinson was his female love. And when she first kissed him and she did it, he wasn’t cooperative. And she said and then he kissed her again a second time later on in the movie. And she said, the first time, you weren’t involved in that kiss. The second time, you were really involved. So it takes two people working together and going in the same direction to make something work. And if they’re not cooperating and going in the same direction, then, Kimberly, you do have a mess. Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and that’s such a great picture. I’m glad you brought that up because it is God who has kissed us with his breath to breathe his breath into us and give us his life. And he is longing for us to be in agreement with him and to reciprocate that kiss and to say, I trust you. And sometimes it puts us in relationships that feel like wilderness so that our eyes will be open to, oh, How have I done this to you, God? That’s the point, is realizing that we are never alone on this journey. We are never alone in our circumstances that are so hurtful and confusing and chaotic. We’re not alone. We have got someone with us who wants to be our best friend. And when we start trusting, like him, that this is going to work out, we don’t have to work it out. We can’t work it out. No, we can’t. It’s impossible for us.
SPEAKER 04 :
We can’t, yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
But there’s nothing impossible for him. And when we start trusting that and saying that, every time I do feel like Matthew and I… You know, get the whole family together and try to cook in a brand new kitchen where you can’t find anything because you don’t remember where anything is. And the wires are going to get crossed and there is going to be some confusion and conflict. and that’s what happened on christmas day you know you don’t want the conflict to be there but here it is here it is it’s right in front of us the beauty of that is being able to see that god has dreams for us and he doesn’t want us to continue to live in conflict to his dreams he wants us to join him and be with him in that kiss in that trust that this looks impossible it feels impossible But I have one inside of me. Greater is he who is in me than anything this world will throw at me. And he knows how to work the impossible and make it possible. Keeping that kind of faith, that’s what makes us a voice in the wilderness. That’s what causes us to call out and say, I know someone who’s greater than your situation. I know he is working it for good. And all of that counseling that Matthew and I went through, we were introduced to boundaries. We were supposed to have boundaries here, and these boundaries would create more expectations, I think. And those expectations led us to create more boundaries. Because you weren’t meeting my expectations. So, you know, those boundaries then would lead us to separate rooms. And you were talking about how Darren would call people, married people who lived in separate rooms, they were really just married singles.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
And these are walls. These are walls that are created by defenses. And I said this before, I’m not against boundaries. It’s just that Jesus didn’t come with a whole lot of boundaries. He chose to come as a really vulnerable baby, and He remained vulnerable all through His ministry, through His growing up years and His ministry, and He remained vulnerable all the way to the cross, hanging on a cross. That’s not a boundary. He didn’t draw a boundary. He allowed something that looked impossible. to become the resurrection life. He allowed it so that we would become like him. So here’s this word, allow. It might be something that triggers us, but wow, what our God has allowed for himself to walk through so that we would become like him. He became sin so that we could become like him. that’s amazing when you think about that and he wants to do greater things jesus told us look it up he said that we would have the authority the same authority he would give to us and we’d have the authority to do the things he does and greater things Well, we’re not going to have that authority if we don’t believe, if we’re full of doubt and we’re just shrugging our shoulders and we’re just going down into a pit of hopelessness and despair. That’s not how we have authority to do greater things. Our authority comes from believing, if we believe. And it’s our choice to believe that he can do the impossible in our situation that might look impossible.
SPEAKER 04 :
I believe that one of the things that we have against us is that that control spirit says, well, I only give you so much of my life, Lord, because you can’t touch this other part of my life. And I remember when Darren was on Darren’s coffee shop and this lady called in and she had an issue with her legs walking. And he said, well, I believe it starts in the back. And she says, I don’t want you praying for my back. That’s where I get my disability. Can you believe that? Yes. Yeah. And so Darren says, it’s all or nothing at all. You make the decision. And so then she had him pray for her, her back that even she got her disability from her back, which was the problem for her legs. And so that’s a good example. We all do it. Yeah, we all do it. Yes. Lord, I want this, but I won’t allow you into this part of my life. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just amazing.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s our own reasoning. That’s our own understanding. And Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 tells us not to lean on our own understanding. It’s just going to get us in trouble. And I remember years ago when I looked up all the Hebrew words for each word in Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, when I got to the word lean, and I can’t remember it off the top of my head as I’m talking to you right now, but that word in Hebrew means I was reading all the different places where that word appeared. And Saul, King Saul, he leaned on his sword. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, when we lean on our own understanding, we’re really committing suicide.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, that’s right.
SPEAKER 1 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
we are not entering into the life that god has given us when we lean on our own understanding for a situation it’s self-effort it’s it’s a way of thinking and doing things that is in our flesh mind and self-effort if we can just define self-effort as not trusting god to do his work Because we’ve got some kind of work in mind that we want done. That’s right. Like the lady you were talking about, she wants to continue getting disability for her back injury or whatever was happening in her back. And that’s her way of doing the work. It’s her own self-effort there, not trusting God to do it in a supernatural way. So then it’s not entering his rest.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Working toward a goal that you’ve convinced yourself is the right way to go can keep us out of God’s rest. And we convince ourselves that we can reach this goal in our own strength with our own ideas. But Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 says, do not lean on your own understanding. It is only God who will clear out the obstacles and clear the path and direct you in the way that you should go so that you will end up as his best friend, as his bride, made in his image. We are being made like him, like God. And you know how compassionate he is? Psalm 103 verse 14 tells us that he is remembering all the time that we are dust and we need him. And so our self-effort and ambition gets us into trouble and we begin to try things that we wouldn’t normally try. That’ll lead us into sin. It’ll lead us into hurting other people. We won’t be led by love and peace and joy. We’ll be led by selfishness and greed. And the fruits of the Spirit have been given to us to lead us in a new way this new year. Let’s say goodbye to this year of wilderness and this year of pain and suffering. And let’s say hello to something brand new, a millennia, a new millennia where Jesus reigns. This is the dream. It’s his dream. And we each play a part in bringing this dream into reality. God’s effort will continually work with our brokenness and give us a new way of thinking. Bring us into something where he’s in control. That’s what we’re waiting for.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. Oh, thank you for this wonderful teaching, Kimberly. It just helps us to get entering into the new year, a year of hope, a year of great expectation in what God is going to do. Oh, I’m excited. And I know you are, too.
SPEAKER 02 :
I am, too.
SPEAKER 04 :
So, well, I just want to say happy birth. Happy birthday. Happy New Year to all of you. And if you some of you have a birthday, happy birthday to God bless you as you enter into this new year. And the last thing we want to say to you, our friends, is take joy.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to Call to Freedom with Barbara Carmack. You may get in touch with Barbara at Call to Freedom, Box 370-367, Denver, Colorado, 80237. Or you may leave your message at 1-877-917-7256. Call to Freedom is a listener-supported radio ministry. Barbara and her Power Partners invite you to come on board with us and become a network of hands holding up Call to Freedom ministry. Power Partners support Call to Freedom with prayer and monthly financial support. You will be blessed supernaturally. We invite you to visit Call to Freedom’s website www.freedomstreet.org where you can hear Barbara’s daily radio broadcast 24 hours a day or order materials. You may share your praise reports and heart cries by mailing them to Call to Freedom, Box 370-367, Denver, Colorado, 80237. Or you may email us at barbracarmack at freedomstreet.org. Until next time, remember, Jesus loves you, Barbara loves you, and take joy.
