[Music] Welcome to Call to Freedom with Barber Car Mag. 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-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, such a joy to have you come and listen and long for God’s Word. I think it’s so important when we hunger and we thirst for God’s Word more than our necessary food. More than the three squares we get most of us every day. And I’m so grateful, Lord, that you have enfolded all of us and wrapped you around in a wonderful shroud of love. I praise you, Lord God, and thank you for the listeners that listen to Call to Freedom. Oh, and friends, may you be blessed by every little thing that you do every moment of every day. I know it’s hot, it’s warm again, but I realize how I need to enjoy the heat because pretty soon here in Colorado, especially you’re going to see the leaves falling in October and you’re going to see colder weather. So I am so grateful that it’s going to be 93 today and yesterday it was 95 and it’s okay. It’s absolutely okay. So when we can say, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on me. When we say that to God, to Holy Spirit, then we allow him to work in us and that’s what is so beautiful about Acts 17, verse 28, that in him you live and you move and you have your being. And that’s why you’re blessed to dispense because if we could no longer live and move and have our being, we would need even be able to dispense what God has given us into the kingdom of God. So praise the Lord for that. Second Corinthians 12, 9, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest in me. And thank you so much for your online donations. More of you are joining and that’s marvelous. That’s wonderful. I’m appreciative of all that and especially Call to Freedom and all the expenses that we have these days. You know, you’ve had to stretch that dollar over more days and over more things that you’re buying. And if you would like to, so many of you who donate online, you don’t say anything. So if you’d like to leave a message or anything, you can email me at Barbara Carmack at freedom street.org. I would love to hear from you and see what you’re doing. Give me a little idea of what your days are like because you hear on my days are like, but I don’t get to hear how your days are like. So if you have any prayer requests or even praise reports, you can email me at Barbara Carmack at freedom street.org. God bless you and Kimberly is with us today. She left on Tuesday and now she is here again. Yes, yes, yes. And I just wanted to also join you in saying thank you for the donations. We are thankful. We not just do we are thankful for those donations because it this is all because of your support. So we’re just really glad that we don’t have any other subsidizing. It is all your support. So we’re just really thankful. And we do pray over every one of your donations and bless that back to you that this would be good ground for you to sow in. And that you would receive a harvest on what you’ve sown into our lives. We’re so thankful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Well, you are home. You are home. I am. I’m home in Oklahoma and Monday you and I started talking a little bit about my testimony and things that happened five years ago that were very unexpected. And I felt a little like we didn’t complete that idea. That thought and so I wanted to continue a little bit today about that testimony and kind of wrap it up. I listened to the Lord and I thought that we would be able to continue that yesterday and really the Lord confirmed that I needed to be back on the road and get back to Oklahoma. And so that’s why I left yesterday just listening to him. Sometimes I feel like that has consequences where I wasn’t able to inform everyone there before I left. Yes. And I’m just all of a sudden gone. Yes. And so for that I apologize. You their friends and listeners. I’m sorry they didn’t let anybody know, but I didn’t know until the last minute because I have learned to listen. And I am thankful for that when we listen to the Lord where actually cultivating relationship with him. It’s so much more than just following a set of rules. And that really does it plays into the testimony that I was sharing on Monday. Honestly, Matthew and I needed our lives to be shaken up and we needed to be able to hear God not just follow a set of habits or a set of ideas or a set of rules. But here to actually cultivate relationship with the Lord and then with each other and not just continuously do a habit. You know, habits with talking to each other in the morning or having dinner at night or whatever habits that we fall into. It becomes routine very often. Life becomes routine and then it doesn’t feel very meaningful anymore. That’s right. That’s right. So it was a blessing when all of that was shaken five years ago. That was a huge blessing. That’s why we started talking about Matthew 5, 3 through 5. You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope with less of you. There is more of God and his rule. And Jesus said, you’re blessed. You’re blessed. How can you be blessed if you’re at the end of your rope because you give it to him. It’s like relinquishing and yielding and surrendering. We sing about it. We talk about it. But until we come to the end of our rope, Kimberly, I think most of us, we want to stay in that old routine, that old scheduling. We’re not people that love change. We don’t really care for change. So it’s true about us. It’s very true about us and it might look to you like there are no more options for you. It might look like you have reached the end of your rope. But that is when life gets good. I promise. It gets really good when the end of your habits, the end of your routines, the end of the way that you think and all of the processes of your brain just are interrupted, it becomes really good to be free from that. And that is part of what I’m looking at in Deuteronomy 11. In Deuteronomy 11, starting in verse 10, it says that the land which you are entering to possess is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come. And you might think that I’m not on the same subject anymore, but I am. The land which you are entering to possess is not like the land of Egypt. The place that God wants you to be thinking from is from your heart and relationship to Him. And you’re entering this new relationship with the Lord. And it’s not like the land of Egypt, the slavery land, where you’re just a slave to your routines, you’re a slave to your addictions, you’re a slave to your habits. And that’s not where God wants to leave us as human beings, we’re made for so much more than that. So that’s why I’m bringing up Deuteronomy 11. The land you are entering into to possess, the promised land, is not like the slave land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and watered it with your foot laboriously as in a garden of vegetables. That’s where you were striving, you were working so hard to gain what you thought you needed to have in this life. I worked so hard to have a family that was close, that would eat dinner together every night and have breakfast in the mornings and devotions at the tables and I was working so hard to have that. And don’t you hear what I’m saying? That’s not a bad thing to work for, to have a close family that’ll read devotions together, that’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing. But where was my striving? Was it in my own effort or was it really listening to God every day? I can tell you it was in my own efforts. Even though it was good and I was reading from the Bible every morning, that was good, it was still in my own efforts that I was making a routine out of it. And for whatever reason, not everyone in the family was able to hear God speak in that routine. When the routine just becomes a whole bunch of words that you’re just listening to every day and it’s not piercing your heart, that’s not good. So it needed to be shaken up so that the words could actually pierce the hearts. So in Deuteronomy 11 it goes on to say, “But the land into which you are about to cross to possess it.” So what I’m talking about today is the new habits, the new thoughts that will come to your mind as you are at the end of your rope. You’re leaving your slave land of your old routine, your old job, your old relationships, your old schedules, whatever the old is. You don’t have to be afraid to leave it behind because you are crossing over into a new land to possess it, a promise land of new habits, new relationship with the Lord where you hear His voice. And it is a land of hills and valleys. I love that that phrase is put into Deuteronomy 11. It’s a land of hills and valleys. It kind of just stops in the middle of the sentence and says, “Hey, land of hills and valleys, just describing it. We can have our highs and our lows and God is prepared to give us water, to give us rain from heaven, to rain and water the land of hills and valleys. It doesn’t matter if it’s high, it doesn’t matter if it’s low. And really, I visited Israel. I can tell you it is all hills and valleys. There’s just not much flat land in that area. That’s a hard place to water. Yes. When you live on a hill and you’re trying to water your lawn on a hill, it just runs off. And I’m sure they got used to a country where it was flatter. It was maybe more arid and they had to get used to a new land that God had promised to them. I think, really, there’s so much in this message of how we can put aside the things that we are so used to. We don’t even second guess. We just get up, we run to the refrigerator or run to our phones or run to the TV. And we don’t even second guess what God would like us to do for our day. So I’m so glad you’re talking about this. Yes. Well, we want to learn to listen. And in this new land, this new place that you’re about to cross in and possess it, this is where we learn to listen. And this is where we learn to trust that God is bringing the rain from heaven and that we get to drink from that rain and so does the ground around us, drinks from his rain. And it’s no longer in our own striving that we’re watering the garden. We don’t have to come up with an irrigating system to feed it. God is the one who will take care of the land. For his eyes are on it always, from the beginning even to the end of the year. Yes. That is such a good passage. Deuteronomy 11 is a wonderful passage to read if you need encouragement. That God is in control. That he knows exactly how to bring about good things for us. And in Deuteronomy, it’s really interesting because in Deuteronomy 1 verse 11, it says you’ve gone around, well, not exactly verse 11, but in Deuteronomy 1, the Lord is saying to them, you’ve gone around this mountain long enough. And sometimes we build ruts around our mountains because we are so afraid of changing that routine or that schedule. Oh, that’s good. Deuteronomy is so good. Yes. Yes. You’ve gone around that mountain long enough. That’s really good. Yes. Going back to Deuteronomy 11, it says, it shall come about if you listen obediently to my commands, which I’m commanding you today. Now, this isn’t just about the rules and the laws, okay? Because if you listen obediently to my commandments, to love the Lord your God and serve Him with all your heart, this doesn’t say to love the laws and the rules I’m giving you and serve the laws with all your heart. It says to love the Lord your God and serve Him with all your heart and all your soul. Then He will give you rain for your land in its seasons, the early and late rain. That you may gather in your grain and your new wine and your oil, and He will give grass in your fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. What are those seasons? It’s in every season that He will bring what you need. If you are in a season where it seems really dry, He will bring you rain if it’s really cold. He will bring away for you to have water in that cold season and to warm you with His love. He knows how to bless us. He knows how to care for us, provide for us, shelter us. He’s a cloud by day when it’s really hot. He is a fire by night when it’s really cold. He knows how to take care of His people. We just need to learn how to trust that. We’re not going to trust it if we stay stuck in our routines. Stuck in that slave mentality, that Egypt mentality. We have to be taken out of Egypt, thrown into some circumstances that seem very wilderness to us. That seem like they’re uncertain. I really like the ad right before we came on today. Let me see if I was trying to type it and I don’t think I got it word-for-word. But it said, “When our certainty is shaken, God has a chance to make us sure in Him.” Yes. It’s really good when we are shaken because then we can become sure in Him. That’s what we want to be sure of is God Himself as our Father, as our provider, and as our best friend. We want to become that perfect partner that can be a friend to Him. I heard somebody say that Jesus wants you to be His prayer partner. Jesus is at the right hand of the Father every day interceding for you. He wants you to be His prayer partner. Join Him in that. How are we going to do that if we stay in our old routines and our old mindsets? Yes. Going back to Matthew 5, you are blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you, there’s more of God and His rule. Verse 4 says, “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the one who is truly most dear to you.” I like how this verse says that you’re blessed when you feel like you’ve lost what’s most dear to you. Because we can feel like we have lost things. We can feel like this is really bad. We can feel like, “Oh, this was not supposed to happen this way.” But when we base our conclusions on our feelings, that’s shifting sand. That is not solid rock. We want the rock under our feet and that rock is our Lord. That rock is Jesus Himself. So we don’t want to just feel like we’ve lost everything that is dear to us. We want to know that we serve a God who there’s never a mistake. There’s never a loss that he can’t override and then bring something back into our lives. It’s even better than what we imagined. That’s right. I have seen you. And that’s what happened to Matthew and I. I’ve seen you over the past five years. As a first Levi, he said, “Mom, I’m for you.” Then Jonathan comes along and says, “Mom, I support you.” It was in fragments of steps one year and then two years. And then Sarah came and joined in on just relating to you and speaking to you. Because for a while they didn’t. You didn’t get anybody speaking to you. And then lastly, there’s been a real healing between you and Hannah. And even though she and Colton are living now in North Dakota, you’re hearing from her more often. And that’s a delight. It really is. So that is. I’m glad you brought that up because it is a delight. However, I was not even needing that anymore. Isn’t that interesting? When you’ve got your eyes set and your focus is set on a certain goal, you really just want healing with someone in a relationship. And that is where you really want to see that healing is in that relationship or in your finances or your job. You can kind of just use this in any area of life. When your focus is on that, then you feel like you have to have that. There’s something even on the inside of us as human beings that starts thinking, “Oh, I have to have this fixed. I have got to have this fixed. This has to be the way that I’m envisioning it.” Yeah, and there are a lot of eyes there that you were just saying. When you get to the end of “I,” when you get to the end of yourself and you say, “It doesn’t have to be how I want it,” the word “I surrender now.” And I no longer live. I let you have the wheel. You take the reins here. You can be the one in control. And if I never have those relationships with my children again, which that was not an easy thing to come to. I did a lot of crying. That was something I always wondered about Abraham when he was taking Isaac up that mountain and sacrificed him where there are a lot of tears on that journey. Because that was a lot of tears for me to let go of my vision of family, my vision of being a mother and having a good relationship with my kids. But when I let go. And because that’s right. Because you let go, because you surrendered, because you yielded up to the Lord, then he began working a work that you couldn’t even imagine, Kimberly. But yes, but let me just make sure that this is the focus of it. None of those repaired relationships can compare to the relationship that I have with my Lord now. And the intimacy and the whispers, the way that he speaks to me and the way that I feel like I can follow him. And, “Oh my goodness, the peace that comes with that.” And the joy, it is such an exuberant joy. It’s just far beyond what you can imagine. And there is no healing of any relationship that can compare to that. So yes, I’m watching these relationships be repaired and come back to a healed place better than they were before. I’m thankful for that. And it wouldn’t even… Oh, it’s hard to say this, only because I’m afraid people are going to misunderstand this. It would not be hard for me if they broke again. That actually would not be hard for me because of the kind of comfort and peace and joy that I am talking about in the Lord. He is everything to me now. That’s right. And that is a place that we can get to and you know that also. Yes. When you get to that place, you don’t even need to have that other person back in your life. Well, and if there’s been a loss or if there’s been like the children are involved in this whole new concept of what God is doing, if you want it back the way it was, it never will be because five years in a teenager’s life is a millennium. I mean, they’re going for new jobs, they’re moving out, they’re doing things. And you can’t wish that it was like it was before. It never will be. No, you can’t put it back together again. That’s why. Right. So the idea of getting back to normal, we have to throw that out. Whatever normal is, it’s our minds. We have got to throw that out. Yes. So being encouraged that when we get to the end of our rope, that is such a good place for God to shake up a situation. I’m not saying that he causes all of the bad things that happen to us, but he certainly exploits them. And when he exploits a situation, he causes that situation to become better than you ever imagined. And you end up with a relationship with him that’s vital, that becomes so important to you, and it fulfills every part of you. You feel whole, you feel complete. That’s right. And that might happen in losing a home. I was prepared to be homeless five years ago. And Matthew then, it just turned. He was the one who ended up moving out, and he didn’t have a place to stay for a while. So that was an interesting feeling for him. God used that situation in his life to bring him to the end of his rope too. And it broke that codependent routine that we used to have on each other, which can happen. It doesn’t happen in every relationship, but it does have a possibility and a probability of happening quite often for us humans. And when that’s interrupted, the freedom that comes, that’s the promise land that I’m talking about. You cross over into a new area of your life, and it is better than you ever could have imagined. That’s right. He’s changing. He’s changing everyone involved. He truly is. Yes. He’s in the business of changing us in our relationship to him, because he’s a jealous father. He wants all of our love. And when we give it to him, then everything around us is going to come together. It happens. Right. Kimberly, I can’t explain it. No, we can’t explain it, but it does. It happens. Right. Yeah. I was going to say that it occurred to me that even when Jesus was here on this planet with the disciples around him, that the disciples needed to be shaken up. They had the Son of God with them every day in their midst, but they were still holding on to wrong thinking and wrong agendas. And Jesus loved them so much that he surrendered his life to the kind of punishment that brought him to the cross. Yes. He surrendered. He did not actually defend himself. He didn’t try to stop it. He didn’t fight. He allowed the circumstance to play out. So when you feel like you’re at the end of your rope, when you feel like you’re losing what’s most dear to you, those feelings can cause us to want to fight or defend, but we are called to be like Christ. So circumstances play out. Let the situation play out and entrust it to God’s hands. Don’t put it in human hands. Not your own hands or anyone else. Put it in God’s hands and let him work. He knows how to get you to the Promised Land and he will do it. He will give you daily bread. He will give you water from a rock. He will give you miracles that bring you through this wilderness season. And you will be changed in such a way that you won’t ever want to go back to the way it was. That’s right. Oh, that’s so good. I know that our listeners, many of them understand what you’re saying, Kimberly. And we ask Father God that you would incorporate all this teaching into their hearts. So they are willing to change if need be, to be closer to you. Oh, thank you, Lord. And thank you, Kimberly, for this time. I appreciate it. Yes, you’re welcome. I’m so glad that we could be with you today and we want you to know that you can take joy. 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 partner 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 Barbara Carmack at FreedomStreet.org. Until next time, remember Jesus loves you, Barbara loves you, and take joy. [Music]
