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[Music] Welcome to Call to Freedom with Barber Carmac. 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 370-367 Denver, Colorado, 802-37 or by going to the website at www.freedomstreet.org. If you want to leave a message or order a word-powered 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. Welcome to Call to Freedom. What a wonderful day to be praising the Lord, thinking about Him. Oh, His thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts and His ways than our ways. So we’ve got to kind of delve into our spirits and say, “Father God, I’m hungry for more of you. I want more of you. I’m tired of my own plans.” And so today is a good day for you to be listening to wonderful Christian television and radio. And I hope you’re including Call to Freedom. Life is God’s precious gift to you. May you spend it bringing glory to Him. Oh, that’s so important that we give God the glory. You are blessed to dispense for in Him you live and move and have your being. I’m so grateful that Call to Freedom can come to you live every day, except Friday. And as most of you know, and most of you are not only commenting about Friday’s show, but telling me how much you enjoy it, all those encore shows with Darren. So on Fridays, it’s Darren Carmack with Darren Live and on Monday through Thursday. It’s live. So if you want to call us at 1 o’clock, a Denver time, Monday through Thursday, then you can get us in the studio. And if you go to FreedomStreet.org, you can listen to previous radio shows if you don’t get to hear it live. And then you can also give online. Yes, you can hit that little donate button. If you’re enjoying what you’re learning and what you’re what we’re teaching from this studio, then you can give online to Call to Freedom. So I appreciate so much your giving hearts and your sacrificial heart in giving. But God is going to reach and I should I shouldn’t say but and God is going to return to you all your giving 30, 60 and 100 fold. That’s a promise. That’s right. That’s a promise. I’m so glad to have you here again, Kimberly. Two. Your vehicle is kind of in the garage. I know. Yeah, it’s kind of fun. It you know, it is a miracle to get to the place where something breaks down and you’re not worried about it. I was just telling you, I feel like it’s a miracle that God has brought me to a place where the van can have an issue or break down. And I can say, oh, well, I wasn’t expecting that, but I know you, Lord, I know you. And I know you always have good things in store. Yes. And you are on the other side of every situation. And then you were talking about even being in pain or being in discomfort that we can trust him. And you are clinging to a verse Psalm 62 1 that you will wait as long as it takes for his deliverance because you know he will deliver. That’s right. He will deliver. When you know the Father’s heart, you’re not worried. That’s right. You got a text today from a friend and she said, I’m so glad you’re stuck here. It’s stuck here. It’s in quotes, right? And it doesn’t feel like stuck for me. It just feels like extra vacation. So, yeah, it’s good. It’s been for me too, also. So thank you for being here, Kimberly. You could be off shopping somewhere or doing something different, not even being being interested in what your mother is doing every day on the radio. You could be one of those children because there are many around there that don’t want to have anything to do with mom and dad and what they’re doing. Sure. And I went through that season that I didn’t really think much about what was going on here in your life. I had enough going on in Oklahoma. I had four children. Yeah, you were homeschooling. And so I didn’t think about that. But I can’t imagine that now. So I’m thankful. I’m thankful that we have this connection. And today we were reading in Isaiah a little bit. Oh, love it. Isaiah 118 is, “Come, let us reason together.” And you and I, we do a lot of reasoning together. We talk a lot with each other. And I have come to realize that in the reasoning what we’re doing is we’re learning each other’s hearts. And that is what the Lord is asking in Isaiah 118. “Come, learn my heart. Let us come to an understanding.” That’s what the Tanakh says. The Hebrew version of Isaiah has been translated into English by the Hebrew people. And they chose English words that they felt were the most accurate. And it says, “Come, let us reach an understanding,” says the Lord. “Before that, Kimberly, as if the Jewish people, they were not godly people at this time.” They were compromising all over the place with heathen countries that had influenced them. And God says in the 14th verse, “God, this is God. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts. They’ve become a burden to me, capital M. I’m weary of bearing them. So when you spread out your hands in prayer, like a sincere, they’re not sincere. God is saying here, you’re not sincere. You’re doing it as a tradition. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. So you’re right, Kimberly, there’s got to be an understanding, a hungering for God, more of God. Yes, so when he asks us to come and reach an understanding with him, he’s really asking for friendship. Let us be friends here. Let’s keep talking about this until we reach an understanding. And then, right after that, it says, “Even though your sins are as scarlet, I will make them white as snow.” In the conversation, we as human beings keep bringing up what we think is best in this life. What we, our opinion is just so great, isn’t it? Our human opinion. Our human perspective. It’s so great to us. We have done a lot of studying. And we have gained a lot of knowledge, haven’t we? Aren’t you impressed? I’m so impressed with myself. I’m saying that sarcastically. I hope you’re catching that as you’re listening, because you can’t see the look on my face, the look of disgust, because it is disgusting for me to think that I have gained so much knowledge that I might have understanding that could be comparable to the God of this universe. And he is my father, and he has a lot of grace and mercy to sit and listen to my opinions, my perspectives, my ideas, what grace, what kindness, what tenderness. It’s when we choose to lay those down, to lay down our perspective, to lay down our opinion, and not lean on our knowledge that we’ve gained. Not lean on our own understanding. That is when we start acting like the humble people that he created us to be. Not needing a platform, not needing to be recognized by all the people. Not needing to be right. Not needing to be right. Not Kimberly, how could you say that? We spend all our lives in education and in learning, so we can be right. Our human tendency is to gain information and then constantly test it. In science class, if you remember, you would come up with a hypothesis of what’s going to happen, and then you create all of these experiments to test your hypothesis. In chemistry. That’s how we gain knowledge, and then we think we’ve come to this one conclusion, and we can make a law. Now we can make a scientific law, because we’ve come to this conclusion. And God’s ways are so much higher than our little experiments. I know you should have, all of you listening should have been in our chemistry class in our little school, and there were 10 of us. I am so appreciative. Miss Wrongkeep was from the University in Greeley. We always had great teachers, and so she’d give us these formulas, and we’d be mixing stuff up. Oh, the smells. We had to clear class several times because the boys, they were always mixing these things to see what the smell was going to be like, or sulfur, you know, baking. So we had all those wonderful little experiments, and none of them really came out right, because we weren’t putting the formulas together with the hypotheses, with the results to get the right. There are just too many other factors that we do not take into consideration. That’s right. And in Isaiah 55, the Lord tells us, “My thoughts are not like your thoughts. Neither are my ways like your ways. They’re different. They’re different, and they’re not even of this realm. They can override this realm at times, and some of you out there have seen miracles that have completely superseded this realm. You have no explanation for it. And that is our God showing us that He has ways that are higher than the ways of this world. His ways are as high as the heavens are above the earth. So my ways and my thoughts are higher than yours,” says the Lord. There is this competitive nature in human beings that it turns into siding with or siding against. We really try to find these things or laws or understanding that we want to siding with. Oh, that makes sense to me. So I’m going to siding with that. That’s going to be my platform now. Without any evidence, really. And we can think that we’re siding with God when we find scriptures and understanding in the scriptures, and we might not realize that we have actually sited against Him. That can happen. You know, when you consider Paul the Apostle, he really did think he was siding with God. He thought he was doing God a favor by executing Christians and the people of the way, because it was so against the laws of the Pharisees and Sadducees. And he just thought the law was it. He was right. And God had knocked him down off of his whatever horse, donkey, whatever it was. Right. And knock him down to the ground. And not only that, but make him blind, because it is blind people that can’t see God’s ways and God’s thoughts above their opinions or their research or all of this. Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. And having blindness keeps you humble. You’ve got to lean on someone else, rather than yourself. So that’s really good that you brought that up. Yeah. I believe the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus day, they thought they were standing for God’s ways. And they missed the way. That’s all together. They were persecuting the way. Yeah. And that’s why Jesus gave us the teaching of the sheep and the goats, the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. And he gave us that teaching in Matthew 7 of the people who will come and say, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not cast out demons in your name and do many miracles in your name?” And he will have to say, “Depart from me. I never knew you.” I think what’s important to notice is that these people were so sure of themselves. And that’s what gaining knowledge can do to us. We can be studying the scriptures and gaining knowledge and looking into all kinds of Hebrew and Greek. I’ve done it myself. And we become so sure of ourselves. And when we do that, we don’t even realize that we are leaning toward pride. And humility has gone out the door. It is so important for us to stay humble. Stay humble. Because these people that he says, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” That’s what stood out to me. If they were so sure that they had been prophesying, they had been doing miracles, they had been casting out demons in his name. And yet he could say he never knew them. Wow. Where does that leave the majority of us? And still, Kimberly, because of the mercy, grace, and love of God, he can turn right around if that person that he said, “I never knew you intimately.” That’s annoying him intimately. So many say, “Oh, I love God. How do you love God? How deeply do you love him?” They can turn around and be accepted by God by a change of heart, by a change of attitude. That’s why he’s asking in Isaiah 118, “Come, talk to me. Let’s reach an understanding here so that you will see my heart and know my heart. And are you willing to be in discomfort?” We were mentioning that at the top of the hour. We can be uncomfortable in life and maybe be experiencing a little more pain for a season. And we might think, “Oh, no, what have I done wrong? Well, maybe what have you done right?” Maybe this is a season that we can trust God more fully and completely as long as it takes, like it says in Psalm 621. Yes. Jesus could have said that very thing as they were mocking him, spitting at him, hitting him in the face, crucifying him on the cross. “Father, what did I do wrong?” Yeah. He knew it was his divine will. And some of this we’ve got to go through, because the result we know is going to be a fine tuning in what we’re doing with God. Fine tuning. That’s what they’re doing in the garage with your vehicle. They want it to be a fine tuning, so it will run right. Certainly hope so. Well, it will. But we need fine tuning. And some of us need surgery. Right. We need surgery. Exactly. Yes. Yes. God is there all the time. Yes. One of the things that I’ve learned as I have been studying Hebrew and studying Greek, I took years of that too, that there are so many different perspectives. And honestly, you can’t throw them all out, because it’s not about finding one right answer. It’s about finding the father’s heart and really knowing his heart for any given situation or for any given individual. Knowing that all of us are on a little bit different path, and we all have different personalities, and understanding that someone who has a real strong idea of wickedness being punished, they’ve come from a background where they need to see. They need to know that our God is a just God that will punish the wicked and the evil because they’ve been so hurt, so abused and traumatized by wicked and evil. So we want to see that end. And then there are those who are so compassionate that we might not need to be assigning wickedness to individual people. Okay, get the wicked out of that person, but that person, can you save that person, Lord? Can you save their hearts? That is the compassion in me. Yes. And the desire of God is that none would perish. So he’s going to go that extra mile, even that extra inch to get our attention, that extra love, that extra mercy, that extra grace. Oh, what would we do without those wonderful, significant parts of who God is? That’s his character. Yes, it is. So in Isaiah 1, when he’s saying, “Come, let’s reach an understanding. Your sins are really bloody, and they have wounded my heart.” Yes. And why does snow just come talk to me? And where you have fallen and tripped up, I can make this beautiful again. That’s what he’s saying. Yes. He longs to do that, and only he can do it. We can’t do it in our own works. And that’s why yesterday when I was talking about the 10 virgins, and how the wise ones went into him, you brought up the fact they were all sleeping. We were talking about that. And I love the message. It’s just not saying wise and foolish, because you get different connotations. But in the message, Dr. Peterson says, “Five silly virgins.” So you have just a very different view of those virgins that didn’t bring oil, because maybe they’re procrastinators, and all of us have procrastinated. At one time or another in our lives, we know what it is to not make a date, or to not be able to make an assignment, or not be there when we are needed. So, five silly. And yes, Kimberly, they were all asleep. And it’s really interesting to know that we may be working, eating, sleeping, or pursuing leisure activities when Jesus comes. He’s not going to put us down for any of those things, because he knows those are vitally in our lifestyles. He does. He knows that we are human, and that we have human needs in this realm. There are needs that we have even to fall asleep. We need to just fall asleep. We can’t stay alert all the time. And we might be found sleeping. And what makes foolish, to me, stand out, or silly, I like that word, what makes them silly is that they didn’t trust that he is the source. That his heart is so good and so kind, that to just walk up to him and say, “I ran out of oil.” He would give you the oil, because he is the source of the oil. Yes, Holy Spirit is the source, yes. He is the source for all things in our life. And you know, even if you have come to a place where you are so weak, that all you can do is crawl in, see it takes humility to walk in and say, “My hands are empty.” All I have is myself, and I just want to be with you. Do you think he is going to turn somebody away like that? Some people, Christians, believers, they are kind of scared at Holy Spirit. They haven’t had a huge teaching about Holy Spirit. They haven’t known everything there is to know about him, that he was from the beginning. He is the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is that third person of the Trinity. So maybe that silliness could be as a result of people not recognizing Holy Spirit in their lives. Maybe it is also neglecting putting any Scripture in your life. Maybe you have not filled your little lamp, you haven’t filled your extra oil store by filling yourself with the Word of God. Does that make them false believers? No, no. We are just at such extreme levels, and we need to love each other, edify each other, no matter what level. That has been a real issue in my life. Well, you should know script, well, you should know this verse. Oh God, forgive me, because my brother or my sister is just starting out here Lord God. We have a precious friend who she hasn’t been born again, maybe five or six years, and she doesn’t know the Scripture. I’ve been at it for 70 years. So she doesn’t know the Scriptures. We got to have patience for those precious brothers and sisters. Definitely. Definitely. Yes. And then being willing to see that all the different teachings that are out there about the five wise virgins and the five silly or the five foolish ones, that maybe they all actually compliment one another if we’re willing to look at that. And I want to believe that about eight billion different ideas in people on this planet, you know, that there’s something in every individual that can compliment who I am. And what I’m thinking, because we were made for one another, we were made to work together, not to cut each other off and to try to live independently from one another. We’re the body of Christ. So we need each other. Yes. Another way, now this parable, you cannot just take it by one view of who were the five wise and who were the five silly. There are so many meanings in this. It’s so rich in content of these these virgins. And even when the five virgins says our lamps are going out, lend us some of your oil. It’s like you cannot be born again on somebody else’s salvation. Right. They’re not the source. That’s right. You can look to someone else. Absolutely. And that’s another view you can see from this story. Right. Another thing you can take from this. That’s good. This parable. That’s good. Oh, yes. Yeah. And I think going also back to the people who were so sure of themselves in Matthew 7, when Jesus is describing the people who say to him, there will be those who say, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name and do many miracles in your name. So sure of themselves. Well, maybe that’s silliness. It’s pretty silly to be so sure. That’s right. Because he’s saying there of these ones who are so positive that they have done well by him. He’s saying, depart from me. I never knew you. And when we sit with that for a little bit, I can’t say that I’ve cast out demons. I can’t say that about my life and what my experience in my in this life. That’s right. And I don’t know have I worked mighty miracles in his name have have I prophesied in his name, not intentionally, but wow to have that kind of pride that comes up and says, I am so sure that I’ve done this so well. That’s the place where I think we need to look at and say, well, that might be pretty silly to be so sure to be so sure if I come humbly and say, you know what? I’ve never cast out a demon and I’ve never prophesied and I haven’t done many miracles in your name, but I really want to be with you. Yes, it’s like I was repeating the very first part of this program, the 14th verse of Isaiah one, I hate your festivals. I hate you the way you’re raising your hands. So absolutely self righteous in what you’re doing. I hate it. That’s God. That’s the father. And that’s us trying to find a right way to please him where he’s saying, I don’t really care for that. You know, and I go back to the man, the the thieves that were crucified along with Jesus and the one that was on his right, he just humbly turned to him and said, remember me in your kingdom. He didn’t confess Jesus is Lord. He could have known. It was at the point of death. Talk about someone who could not say that they’ve prophesied in his name or cast out demons in his name, you know, and he just simply looked at Jesus and said, please remember me. And yes, today you will join me in paradise. You know, that humble heart that just humbles themselves and says, I deserve to be crucified here. You don’t. I recognize that I deserve to be on this cross suffering. And you don’t. Wow, that’s emotional for me. You know, that’s getting to know the father’s heart instead of trying to find a right way or a wrong way, find his heart and just tell him, I’m wrong. You’re right. And I really want to be with you. Oh, that’s so good. I could just spend the next few minutes just in quietness and thanking God for his wonderful mercy towards me that even when I’m a sinner, even when I’m sinning that he comes in his patience and long suffering and says, I love you. We want to convey that to you today. God loves you so much. Yes. He’s there for you. He’s watching over you every minute of every day. That’s right. We want you to know that. And have the assurance that as you search for his heart in every situation that you will know he has arms open wide for you. He is ready to cover you with his best robe. Put a ring on your finger and say, you’re mine. Amen. Amen. Oh, thank you so much, Kimberly. I love these discussions. I can’t think of another job. Another way to spend our time. Yeah, that I could have in this life. That is more fulfilling than talking about the Lord Jesus. Me too. Me too, mom. Thank you. It’s wonderful. Well, to all of you, we just wish the very best for you today, whether it’s morning or noon or night. And we just say, God loves you and take joy. [Music] 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 phrase reports in heart prize by mailing them to Call to Freedom. Box 370-367 Denver, Colorado 80237. Or you may email us at barbracarmac@freedomstreet.org. Until next time, remember Jesus loves you, Barbara loves you, and take joy. [Music]
