DEPRESSION

[Music] 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-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. Oh, a great welcome to you. I am so grateful for you. I'm grateful that you love God. In fact, you not only love Him, you are hungering for more and more of what God has for you. God would like to use today to teach you more about His love for you and His plan for your life. May your heart be humble and ready to learn. And I want you to know that you didn't love God first. Huh-uh. Nope. God loved you first. And we love because of His love poured out upon us. That's 1 John 419. We love Him because He first loved us. Isn't that beautiful? So you're not the instigator of all this. God, your father, your Heavenly Father is. Oh, you are blessed to dispense for in Him you live and move and have your being. And I want to tell you that this week has been absolutely a joy for me because Kimberly has been in the studio with me all week long. And I didn't expect that. Isn't that a marvelous surprise? It is. I think I kind of had that expectation. I like being here, especially. Okay, so selfishly in the summertime. It's really nice to be in Colorado rather than Oklahoma. Matthew was telling me that at 10 o'clock last night, he walked outside and it was still 102 degree heat index. That is so warm at 10 o'clock at night. Yes. And your humidity is way high there. So it's a little uncomfortable. We get through that season and then we have a glorious fall and winter. Yes, it is. But we have to kind of endure about eight to nine weeks of this kind of heat in the summertime. So it is always nice when I get to stay a little extra in the summertime. Yes. And I'm glad that I'm still here. And it's not even a worry or a concern to me or to Matthew about the van not performing, you know, up to its standards and having it in shops and trying to find the right people to fix it. Yeah, it's not even a concern. So we're just glad to be here. I'm glad I'm here. But you didn't have to go, you know, and look up different places because Matthew and his friend Nate had given you two really good places here for your Honda van. Well, yeah, because my husband is a BG rep. Yes. And that is an additive for automobiles. He has a lot of contacts. Yes, he does. I am grateful for that. Very, very great. Yeah. In fact, when you went into the pro body shop, the pro auto body shop today on Dalian, that's for any of you that ever have some car issues because it looks really nice. And you walked into the place and you saw some of the features of BG products. In fact, all over a little rain drop is a little oil drop. An oil drop is one of their symbols. And so why did you say to the people where they all turned their heads and looked at you? Oh, I just said, wow, you guys have their BG menus up. And there's a BG oil drop sitting right there on your desk and they all turned because most people don't know what BG is, let alone a woman walks in and starts talking about it. But when you're married to a rep, you kind of have that on your mind. And with automobiles, we expect our cars to run well for us. There's a blueprint that those cars were made by and we expect them to run well for us. And you get a few miles on them and they start wearing out. And that's just one of those laws, one of those scientific laws that the older something is, it wears out in this life. And I was waiting for you today at seven o'clock this morning and while you went in to get your van to take it to pro body. And there are a lot of cars that came in there. They aren't, you know, guaranteed to drive really well and all the time. They don't last forever. They need maintenance. They need repairs at times. And so we need that too. We need maintenance. We need maintenance and we need repairs. And our best maintainer is our Lord and His Word. And that is the maintenance that we have every day is getting in the Word of God. His Word is so precious to me and it's so refreshing. And when we talk about being made in His image, that's, you know, He has blueprints and we're supposed to run a certain way. We're supposed to actually be sound and to have peace and have joy and to have rest in our lives. And if you're not experiencing that real joy that really is meaningful, that fills you up, that kind of joy that overflows, that kind of joy that you can't even put words on. No matter what the circumstance, that's right. If you haven't felt that, well, then you might need a little maintenance checkup, you know, and maybe you need the mechanic with the capital M to get in there and to repair some things that need to be repaired in your heart and your mind. Because we want to have that joy and that peace in this life. And it's very possible. And it really is available to us. Even in times when our bodies don't operate, maybe like our brothers and sisters, as we were watching the chosen, and I had to kind of focus in on little James. Because he walked with the limp all his life. And here Jesus was healing all kinds of people and little James had that limp. It reminds me kind of of who is the prophet. I can't think of him right now. Well, it's good to remember that this is their take to the chosen is choosing to portray little James as someone who has pain and who walks with the limp, even though he was a disciple of Jesus. And they're portraying it that way, not because they read it out of the Bible. They're portraying it that way so that we, the viewers, would actually hook into a greater plan. And they present a greater plan through Jesus and through what God is doing. They present that in this show. I'm really thankful for that because then it does cause us to go ahead and say, well, if there are those that live in pain and you, you are a God who heals and restores and relieves, then how do you want to use this pain? What do you want to do with this to bring the ultimate joy that I can't even put words on to bring the ultimate peace that I'm so settled and I'm so okay. And having you noticed in years past in our younger years, when we've had pain, physical pain, that we can be in worry and anxiety about that and it can cause even more pain. And it can also make us feel like we are limiting our life because of some kind of infirmity that we have that we're limited, that we're limited. And we aren't necessarily limited. No, no. And I do believe that our Lord allows some of that pain and suffering for a season to help us become unlimited in our thinking and in our prayers. And the slate today, right before the one-on-clock show, when I gave this slate, I said, the suffering won't last forever. It won't be long before our generous God will have you put together and on your feet for good. That's right. That's right. And we want to believe that even in the midst of the unrest and the worry and the anxiety. And what we have found when we have grown and we've gone through a few seasons of suffering and a few seasons of some pain, we can then enter a season that we might be feeling that again, feeling some suffering, some loss, some pain, but be much more at peace. And the pain is not nearly as great. It doesn't become our focus. That's right. And we have help in it. We have help in that time of trouble. That help brings us a peace that is so much greater and a joy that is so firm. We can really hold on to that joy. I heard somebody say that the Father and the Son, our Heavenly Father and His Son, have completed their work. And they both sat down. So when our Father completed His work and sat down to rest, Jesus completed His work and sat down at the right hand of the Father, they invited us to enter their rest. That's right. And we did. And that is not what we all do. We don't always enter their rest when we're in full of worry or doubt or anxiety or fear, then we're not focusing on their rest. What we want to do is be able to focus on the rest that they have for us, that they've completed what needs to be accomplished in our lives. And when we come into agreement with that, that's how we come to that understanding like we were talking about in Isaiah yesterday, Isaiah 1. Come let us reason together. Let us come to an understanding together. When we agree with Him, with our Creator, with our Father, then we have that understanding. And in that understanding, we can enter His rest. Yes. If we don't have that understanding, we can remain in anxiety. We can remain in fear. And that's not what they're inviting us to. They're inviting us to overcome that with them. I believe in our imaginations, and He gave us our imaginations, that when Ephesians 2 says that we are seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. When we see ourselves doing that, we can endure almost anything knowing that we are seated at the right hand of God, the Father, with our Lord Jesus. Yeah, you're really talking about that there's two of us, right? There's the one that's here in this realm. That's right. This one that sees you, I see you across from me right now, and we're having this conversation. That part of me can have feelings and senses that go against the part of me that's seated with Him in heavenly places. And so I'm just talking about bringing this one that's in this realm into agreement with the one that's already seated with Him in heavenly places. Yes, they've given us that place right next to them in rest, in peace, in joy, and we just want to be able to come into agreement with that. Okay, some of you listening might think we're just talking like we're out of our minds. Like this is just crazy. There's two of us. There is. There's the physical part of us, and there's the spirit being that knows there's more than all of this. Yes. We're made for so much more than all of this that we're looking at right now. And we want to keep that in our hold it in our hearts. And remember, we're made in his image for good things, for good things. Yesterday, when we were talking about trying to find the right way in life or trying to find the right team to stay with, you're just trying to find the right. And I'm using the word right because that can kind of be a clue for us. When we're looking for something that's right, we might have another agenda on our mind. When we're looking for the Father's heart, and we really just want to be in his image, in his will, here to do the will of our Father. If that's all we really want, then that's when the true joy and the true peace comes. If we're looking for what is right, and we're pairing it up against what's wrong, and we're trying to stay away from the wrong, and we want to stay on the right, we can fall really easily into religion. Yes. And Jesus stands so strong against religion. You were reading about that. Yeah, just read Matthew 22 and 23 when he's talking to the Pharisees. It's not the love that we see from Jesus most of the time, saying to his sheep, "Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He comes right out and he says, "You have denied me, and I am going to tell you." In 23, he gives seven woes, W-O-E-S, to the Pharisees, the Sadgeses, and the Council. It's just over and over. And what he's doing is he's confronting these ideas that are based on right and wrong. They're based on the law, and they're not based on seeing someone's heart. They're not based on seeing the Father's heart. And our Creator, our Father, is our Creator. He wants us to be like Him. He is full of compassion and mercy. Matthew 5, 45, Jesus tells us, "So that you may be children of your Father in heaven." He's talking to us and he wants us to be like our Father in heaven, his children, act like his children. He, the Father, makes his Son rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. He sends it on everyone. So every time that Jesus teaches us, when we've had somebody harm us and do something evil against us, don't repay evil for evil. Don't try to get them back. Act like your Father. Bless them. Bless those who curse you. And when you choose to do that and let it go, let your Heavenly Father take care of the rest of it, you can start seeing all the blessings coming back towards you. We so blessing and we reap blessing. We're not doing it just to reap blessing. We're doing it to be like Him. Yes. That's His, His heart's desire. And His dream, oh, you know, I heard somebody say that Jesus has not received His full inheritance yet. Because this, we're still all in the making. We're still all being molded. So Jesus has not received His full inheritance. And here we are wanting things to be a certain way on this planet. We want a healing or we want a certain level of power. We want a certain job, a certain degree and letters behind our name or healthy bodies. Strong healing. You know, we want all these things. They're not bad things. It's okay to want those things. But our very first and keeping first things first is to want the will of the Father, to want Him to have His inheritance, to want Him to have His dream come true. Before mine. Before mine. Because honestly, He dreams bigger than we dream. You know Isaiah 55 that says, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways, your ways for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways, above your ways." You can put the word dreams in there. You know, as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my dreams, above your dreams. So any dream that we have, when we try to put it above His, it really doesn't get us anywhere in this life. It's like craving a mud puddle over the ocean. You know, you don't want to go scuba diving in a mud puddle. You're not going to see anything in that. You want to scuba dive in the ocean so you can see the beauty around you. You know, so we don't want to be clinging to our mud puddle of a dream when He has a whole ocean of dreams for us. Praise the Lord. There's a little verse here in 1 Peter, 4 verse 12, "Friends, when life gets really difficult, don't jump to the conclusion that God isn't on the job. Instead, be glad that you are in the very thick of what Christ experienced. This is a spiritual refining process, and that's what you're talking about, Kimberly. You're talking about our lives here on earth are a process. With glory just around the corner, if you're abused because of Christ, count yourself fortunate. It's the Spirit of God and His glory in you that brought you to the notice of others. And if they're on you because you broke the law or disturbed the peace, that's a different matter. But if it's because you're a Christian, don't give it a second thought. Be proud of the distinguished status reflected in that name. It's judgment time for Christians. We're first in line. I mean, judgment does start in the household of God. It says in Peter, "So if good people barely make it, what's in store for the bad?" We've got to think about that. Even if that man is abusing me, I need to pray the kind of prayer that is going to get him out of that horrible perspective that he has about life, that he can be angry, that he can throw rocks. Praying people through and speaking good things over them. Isaiah 5, verse 7, "This is a section of the Bible that's describing a vineyard that God gave a lot of care to and the master attended this vineyard and gave it everything that it could possibly need. And when he went to look for the fruit instead of producing good grapes, it brought sour grapes. He's talking about us. And in Isaiah 5, 7, it says he looked for justice, but there was only murdering of others. He hoped for fairness, but there were only cries from people that were being treated badly. In the good news translation, it says, "He expected them to do what was good, but instead they committed murder. He expected them to do what was right, but their victims cried out for justice." When we are made in the image of God, we start looking at how much mercy he shows us. He really does show us so much mercy. And he wants us to look like him. You know, if you've ever chosen a pet and you want to bring that pet, welcome that pet into your home. Your hope is that that pet will be friendly, that it will let you pet it and be a friend to it, and that it will sit with you. And it will obey cat. It will be on your lap and you can pet it. You know, you're not hoping to bring a cat in and have them destroy your furniture and your drapes with their claws, you know, swiping at your family members and at your guests that come into your home. That's not what you hope for with a cat. You don't hope that they're going to vomit up on your decorative rugs. That's not what you're hoping for. They're not behaving the way you hoped. Oh my goodness, how much more our father who created us wants us to behave in a manner that is a blessing to him and a blessing to all who come around us. That's right. That's what he's longing for. So, you know, if your cat is causing problems in your home, there are consequences to that. You're either going to drug the cat or you're going to take it and have its claws removed, you know, decline cats is a pretty common thing now. But that's a consequence of a cat using its claws. It's, oh no, we're not going to have that. There are consequences when we act outside of what we were made for. And you know, while I'm talking about pets, if you do have a pet that's having a really hard time right now and you, you might be frustrated with your pet, just start speaking to it. You know, Romans 8, I believe it's verse 22 talks about how the universe is in agony and all creation groans and longs to see the unveiling and revealing of the sons and daughters of God. And what I understand there is that when we are behaving like our father, as sons and daughters of God, and we're revealed as that, whereas we're unveiled and all the masks are coming off of us and the anger comes off of us and the frustration comes off of us and the lust and the greed comes off of us. And we're truly revealed and unveiled to be his sons and daughters, then we can speak good things over creation. Creation is longing for the unveiling and the revealing of the sons and daughters of God. And just like with my birds years ago when I started speaking to those birds, welcoming songbirds back into our area, our sanctuary, it was quiet for many years. And I started welcoming them back and they started coming back. But with them came the predators and the hawks came in and I started speaking to those hawks. This is not your territory. You know, when you have thoughts and maybe even pets that are irritating and frustrating, you tell them this is not how we function. This is not how God made our earth. That's right. He made us in peace, He made us in joy and we get to rest in those things and start speaking those things over your pet, over yourself, over your thoughts, over your family members. I remember when you had Katie and she was beautiful, absolutely long hair beautiful, long hair cat. Yes, long hair cat. And what you do is you just lift that little brush up and she comes alongside and just she brushes herself. Do you remember that? You know, having Katie and talking to her and just giving her a whole lot of love speaking over her, it created an environment that felt like heaven. And instead of holding her down to brush her, I would just hold the brush up. That's right. I would just hold it up in the air and she would walk by and go back and forth, back and forth on that brush and she'd end up brushing herself. That's right. She did. She always hold the brush. That's the kind of pet you want. Yeah, you want something that's loving. Yes, loving time. And you just want that kind of a heavenly environment around you, you know, and being able to bring that from your imagination, you know, you were saying earlier, we can imagine sitting in the heavenly places with our creator, with our father. Well, bringing that kind of an environment here, we can imagine it and the way that it comes about is not through tough. I know love sometimes has to be a tough love. I understand that. But what I'm talking about is not through the chastising and the constant holding on to these rules and laws that hurt people's hearts. Sometimes when we hang on to absolute law, it does more harm than good. That's right. Or being able, even at a restaurant, being able to, if they, if they kind of botch up your order, you can say, I'm sorry, I'm going, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try to eat what you brought me instead of, oh, this is not what I ordered. Send it back. I don't want this. Yes. And you hear that from people. So I had somebody mess up my order. I ordered a Greek salad with hummus. And you know, it has kind of a vinaigret dressing on it usually. They, they messed up. Whoever was in the kitchen didn't grab the vinaigret. They grabbed the poppy seed dressing, which is really sweet. Oh, yeah. I got all over my salad. And I got my salad. And I was expecting a real earthy and kind of a, I don't know what kind of a, not, not sour, but, but I wasn't expecting sweet. Let's say it that way. I wore like a vinegar acidic. Yes, acidic. Thank you. I was not expecting sweet. And you know that sweet flavor with the real earthy flavors of the hummus and the pickled tomatoes and other things that I had on the table. Tomatoes and other things that I had on there. It was so good. I went back to the kitchen and I said, I just want you to know someone messed up and put the wrong dressing on my salad. And it was the best mistake I have ever had. And I'm going to order my salad this way from now on. And I have ever since every time I go to that restaurant, that's how I order it. And they just smiled. You know, bringing joy to others in the midst of this broken life is so important. We want to keep spreading joy and spreading love. So concentrate on being made in the image of your God. He's merciful and compassionate, full of love and full of joy. And that's what we love to say to you at the end of every program. Instead of taking care and anxiety and fear in your life. 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]