00:13:33 Mending Family Relationships Through Faith
00:19:09 Letting Go of Anger and Trusting God’s Justice
00:23:33 Perseverance and Faith in Everyday Challenges
SPEAKER 03 :
Welcome to Call to Freedom with Barbara Carmack. This is Jimmy Lakey, and I’m delighted that you are joining us for this half hour. You can reach Call to Freedom at Box 370367, Denver, Colorado, 80237, or by going to the website at www.freedomstreet.org. If you want to leave a message or order a Word Power Daily Reading Bible Guide or a Freedom Street Express newsletter, you can call us toll free at 1-877-917-7256 and leave your name and address, including your zip code. If you want to talk to Barbara right now, she is expecting your call. You may call that same toll-free number, 1-877-917-7256 to speak to her. And now, let’s join Barbara in the studio.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Calda Freedom. Oh, today and always may you experience God’s love and joy. And may your life be filled with the blessings of his goodness and grace. I’m so glad you joined us today in the studio. It’s a wonderful, sunny, windy, but sunny day. And I praise God for every day that he has made. He is in every day that we live through, friend. You are blessed to dispense for in him you live and move and have your being. And I’d like to give you, before Kimberly and I get into the study, I’d like to give you a little update, or maybe not update, but background on Elon Musk. He was with President Trump the other day, and he’s such a fascinating man. And Kimberly, if you want to join in, you just join right in to this little discussion that we have about Elon. His great-grandfather was such a wonderful Christian. Born again. So it’s got to come down. I’m praying that it’ll come down through the family into his heart. Right. Yes. I want to tell those of you listening, when Musk was in the beginnings of his remarkable career, he was sleeping on his office floor. Yes. He didn’t have anywhere to go, kind of like the Lord Jesus. He didn’t have a home of his own. And he now lives in a $50,000 ranch-style house in Texas. And I know the prices are a little bit less in where you live, Kimberly. You can get more of a house.
SPEAKER 01 :
In Oklahoma. Yeah, in Oklahoma and in Texas. The cost of living is much less than it is here. But it depends on, you know, if you’re in rural areas or if you’re in the city. Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
So when Elon bought Twitter, now X… for $44 billion in 2022. He wasted no time slashing the budget, and he says no budget cuts are too small. He got rid of top executives within hours and laid off half of the staff within days, but he didn’t stop there to save money. And I remember him coming into the lobby of Twitter with the kitchen sink. He was coming in with a sink into the lobby. He’s just such a strange man, but he’s so interesting to listen to. Employees resorted to bringing their own necessities to work that an office should supply. Because Musk stopped paying for Twitter’s janitorial services, it all winds up to be good because now… They’re enjoying such great times. And in the New York office, trash cans toppled over with garbage in bathrooms, ran out of supplies. When Musk founded SpaceX, he believed he could make less expensive rockets than the U.S. government. A contractor told Musk the fuel tanks for the first rockets would cost around a million dollars. He was outraged. It so offended Elon that he said, if it costs that much, I will eat my ball cap. And then Chester Cronin, executive at Moog, which makes high-performance parts for spacecraft, told the New York Times a similar story. Krohn told the New York Times that he sold devices to Musk for one of SpaceX’s first rockets. And after their initial purchase, Musk asked for the price to be drastically reduced. We don’t want it for $100,000, SpaceX executives told him. We want it for $10,000. And at the end of the day, if Elon doesn’t like the price point that he’s getting from his supply maker… He will figure out an alternative, and that’s what all his executives now know. He had a goal in mind. He’s figured it all out, as we all know, seeing SpaceX achieve things that the U.S. government has not been able to do. He had a goal in mind, and even in his office before he started all this, he had a large map of Mars in his office. He has goals that he sets. And he doesn’t delineate from those goals. That’s why he’s been so gung-ho about getting rid of waste in the U.S. government. He sees what dishonesty and cheating can do to the country he loves. And I agree so much with his philosophy because in a Christian walk, we have a goal. We have a goal in Jesus Christ. We have a goal to clean up our budget and clean up the things that are keeping our house from being efficient. We have all those kinds of goals. I’m so grateful. So I just wanted to let you know, Elon is a marvelous example for some of the things that we should do in our own lives of cleaning up and staying away from the waste.
SPEAKER 01 :
I love that there is a lot of. energy put toward cleaning up this planet. And people, even on their properties, just wanting to clean it up and make it look nice. You’ve got all these different road programs, those little blue signs that you see that somebody has adopted the highway for the next mile or two, and they come out once a month and clean it. At least we have that in Oklahoma. And I really do appreciate that there is a caring for the environment that way. And the Lord would want us to care for what he’s given us. Right. So I love your memory verse that you have for this week. We haven’t really talked about it every single day. I missed it on Tuesday. But from Psalm 35, let them shout for joy and rejoice who favor my vindication and let them say continually, the Lord be magnified, who delights in the prosperity of his servant. He delights that we are prosperous and that we are caring for what he’s given us. That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Because everything works together for good, for his servant. And you are his servant, my friend. You’re listening. If you know Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, you are his servant. And I’m so grateful for that. Would you also read the Passion Translation for Psalm 35, 27 and 28, Kimberly? Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, that’s beautiful. Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I hope that some of you have these translations. They’re so good. We kind of combine them every once in a while to get the best meaning out of each verse that we read. And it just isn’t a story that we read. We study. And I know, Kimberly, you study also. You do a lot of study in the Word of God.
SPEAKER 01 :
I love it.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s my favorite thing. Yeah, you go to the Hebrew and the Greek, and you remind me of my favorite teacher, Creflon. Creflon. Creflo. Creflon. One day he was saying, oh, people have come against me because they say, look at your last name, dollar. That’s all what you’re here for, to get the dollars. It’s just amazing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Our opinions, our human opinions get in the way so much. This memory verse that starts out in verse 27, it’s about the Lord’s vindication. on somebody. So when someone is vindicated, it’s not because they get it for themselves. The Lord brings vindication. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. And we want to let that happen. And then the Lord’s righteousness will be the theme of our life. I really love knowing that, that when something is not going well in our lives and we’re really hurting, we can let go of that. Truly choose to forgive. In fact, the program right before us, they were talking about that with a mother-daughter situation and how the mother was not loving. And so the daughter did not learn how to love and found herself being not loving toward her children. And the way that God’s love came into their life and broke that curse, that generational curse, so that love could come in. But she had to do the work of forgiving, forgiving her mother, and didn’t even realize that her mother had walked through something in her own childhood like That was so devastating, disparaging. Yes. That she was not able to show love either. She had never been loved either. So often we’ve, we’re blaming somebody for something we’re holding on to bitterness or resentment, and we don’t realize where they’re coming from, what has happened to them and being able to release that, let the Lord deal with it. So that his righteousness can come to you. I’m moving from Psalm 35 over to Isaiah 51. And in verse 3 it says, Indeed the Lord will comfort his people. He will comfort all her waste places. OK, our our lives can feel like waste places and even the journeys we’ve been on and broken dreams or dreams that have never been realized that we’ve hoped for. We we all have imaginations. We’ve all imagined what we’ve wanted in life or what we would like to have. We all compare. We look at other people and we have these comparisons going on in our hearts and in our lives. And the Lord is saying he will bring his comfort to his people. He will comfort her in all the waste places, the wasted imaginations, the wasted dreams, wasted hopes, wasted whatever you think are wasted. He will comfort and bring righteousness and bring salvation to all of those places of our lives. And her wilderness will make he will make like Eden. I can’t even imagine what the Garden of Eden looked like. And how full it was with so many fruits, so many vegetables, so many grains. Trying to imagine the Garden of Eden and the beauty. It wasn’t just for food. It was to be delighted, to be in it. Yes. And surrounded by beauty. That’s right. I will never forget walking into a garden in Oklahoma. Someone had spent years putting it together, and it was finally opening day, and they opened it up, and the rocks and the water features, and it’s so hard to even describe it. It was so beautiful. The moment I walked through the gate and around the corner, I just started crying and I was, I was asking myself, why am I crying? This is amazing. Why am I crying? And when I asked that question, the answer came because this is what you were made for. You know, many of us are, are in these routines and in these waste places of our lives and and they’re dry and we feel burdened and we feel tired and worn out. I love that Jesus says, come to me, come to me all who are weary and worn out. I will give you rest. I have Eden. I will comfort you in all your waste places and your wilderness. I’ll make it like Eden for you. Your desert I’ll make like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in you. I think that’s what happened when I walked into that garden. So much joy bubbled up in me that I couldn’t even contain it and it came spilling out as tears. So beautiful. Thanksgiving and a sound of a melody will come from you instead of a place of waste, instead of bitterness. or resentment. Don’t hang on to the places and the times that have hurt you. Let that just be the wilderness that it is. Come to the Lord and let him make that an Eden for you, a garden of the Lord. Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
King David did not have that. He did not have a garden of Eden. He did not have the gladness and the joy. He actually, from his own spirit, brought forth the praises of God through his verses of scripture that we read every day. I’m so grateful that he wrote them down. I don’t have any idea how he spent the time, but he did. He wrote the scripture down after he was in such a dysfunctional mess with his own family. And I know some of you can really relate to that, that dysfunctional mess that you’ve gone through, just like this woman at 1230 before our one o’clock show. when she gave the most beautiful little testimony about the love she didn’t receive until she was 30 years old, Kimberly. She had never heard her mother say, I love you. Or give her a hug.
SPEAKER 01 :
She had never had a hug from her mother until she was 30.
SPEAKER 02 :
I know. And it started out with just a Bible study. She says, Mom, we’ve got to start learning the Bible. Let’s get together with a Bible study. And they started with just a few because her mother did all the baking and the coffee and Well, she got a guy, a professor, to teach them the Bible. And it started with just a few wound up with hundreds of women who were hungry.
SPEAKER 01 :
Isn’t it wonderful what God does? So he does. He makes a garden out of waste places. He multiplies in our lives. And he’ll do that for you as you’re listening. And you’re right about David. Such dysfunction and such a mess in his family with his sons coming against him. And you’re right. He was not hanging on to any kind of unforgiveness or bitterness or resentment toward his sons. He was pouring his heart out in psalms of praise to the Lord. Go ahead. I know you have Psalm 3 there.
SPEAKER 02 :
Psalm 3. Yes. He was running from Absalom. Well, first of all, we know that Amnon raped his stepsister Amnon. Tamar. And Absalom, who was the brother of Tamar, heard about this crime of sin, of fornication. It wasn’t even fornication. It was literally rape. And women in those days, Kimberly, if this happened to them, they would be closeted for the rest of their lives, not get married. So she stayed with her brother Absalom. Well, Absalom got even.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, and he didn’t have a heart like David, right? He decided, I’m going to be resentful, I’m going to be unforgiving, and I’m going to take my own vengeance, thank you very much, instead of trusting the Lord.
SPEAKER 02 :
And the guys that were with him, that were following Absalom, They conspired with him against his brother Amnon, and he was killed. So when King David wrote this Psalm, Kimberly, he had not only seen his daughter Tamar raped, but his son Amnon, who was killed. And now Absalom was conspiring against his own father to kill him. Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking situation. And listen to these words, my friend, my dear friends. If you are in a situation where everything seems hopeless, listen to these beautiful words from David. Oh, Lord, how my adversaries have increased. Many are rising up against me. Many are saying of my soul, there is no deliverance for this man in God. Oh, I’m sure he was bent over with sorrow at this point. And he says, I lay down and slept. I awoke, for the Lord sustains me. Well, you know, Kimberly, when great things happen, when emotional things, traumatic things happen, we lose sleep. We can’t sleep. And he just rested in God during this time. Yes. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me round about. And there were many people that were following Absalom, who were leaving King David. I will not be afraid. Arise, O Lord, save me, O my God, for you have smitten all my enemies on the cheek. You have shattered the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Your blessing be upon your people.” Oh, that’s so beautiful. Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
I love that. He, in fact, I was looking at a different version here and he says that now I’ll lie down and sleep like a baby. And I’ll awaken safety. I love that when you find that place of peace, that beautiful garden that is instead of the waste place. When you are with someone who’s so secure, maybe they’ve been through something like what you’re going through, and they are able to tell you, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be okay. When you hear it’s going to be okay from someone who knows that it will be okay, it’s and that you’re going to be just fine, that peace, if you will let it come to you, that peace is so beautiful. It’s so sustaining. And it’s what we find when we are in the presence of the Lord. I know David, he experienced the presence of the Lord. How could he not have and write these Psalms? And so he’s just saying, okay, now I can just stretch out. And just sleep like a baby. I can be at total peace because God’s got this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Now, we see in the age of grace that, praise God, we’re living in, that anger does not do anything for you. It really doesn’t. Hatred and anger are not godly things. They are not things of the Lord. They are things of the kingdom of darkness. And so in Hebrews 12, we see how the writer of Hebrews, and so many people think it’s Paul, that they are sometimes angry. They’re expecting something in their life, and it doesn’t work out that way. And, you know, maybe they’re expecting to get married or if they’re married to have children and it doesn’t work out. And so they’re angry about them.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, I was just looking at Matthew 20 earlier this morning. And that’s what you’re talking about right there. In Matthew 20, this is when the man was going and looking for workers to go work in his vineyard. Oh, uh-huh. The laborers. Mm-hmm. And boy, did they have expectations. Yes. You know, each one had expectations of what they would be paid and they made agreements on what they’re going to get paid. Right. And throughout the day, this man kept going back and finding more people standing around. So he kept. All day long, he kept finding others. Well, you go to my vineyard, too. And then later in the afternoon, well, you can go work, too. And the last hour of the day, he still found people that were just standing around. And he had the work for him. Yes. So he said, go work in my vineyard. That last group only worked for one hour. And here are people with expectations of how they’re going to be treated in life and how they’re going to get paid. I don’t know that the ones at the last hour had expectations, but they got paid the same as the ones who came the very first, the very first of the day.
SPEAKER 02 :
I must admit, I would be emotional about that. I really would. I would say, I have worked, and it’s almost exactly the way they’re taught. I have worked all day, and why am I not getting twice or three times more than these men who just started working? You are an unfair master. or an unfair employer, we can’t ask those questions in the Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER 01 :
No. We can’t, Kimberly. No. When you feel yourself get riled up, it’s a good opportunity to take a breath and say, you know what, Lord? Your justice, in fact, going back to Isaiah 51, the Lord says, I will set my justice for a light of the people’s. He’s not saying I’ll set your justice for you. I will set my justice for a light of the people. That just means that his justice looks different than ours.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
And we’ve got to trust it. We have to trust his justice and his vengeance and his vindication. If we’re not trusting that, then we’ve got these grand ideas. I’m putting grand in quotes. How grand can they be? We’re small. We’re human. We cannot figure it out. He’s got it figured out. And it’s when we let go of our understanding and our expectations that that his justice can actually be done, that he can go forth with his right hand and cause his righteousness to come near to us. We want that. Righteousness is a big word.
SPEAKER 02 :
But humbling ourselves is not a natural tendency for the human being.
SPEAKER 01 :
No, it takes practice. It takes a lot of practice. And I just keep practicing that. I just keep practicing, wow, how can I serve you today, Lord? I had my own agendas, but what would you like?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, he’s looking for a harvest of reward for you when you humble yourself. And we don’t realize that. God is making this happen today. And even if it’s hard on us at the moment, he’s looking for a peaceful harvest of right living to those who are trained by him, by Holy Spirit to humble themselves. And when we get tired and exhausted and we feel weak, that could be a resistance against the things of God. But when we begin to, through prayer and worship, begin to climb out of that depression or that feeling of discouragement or this isn’t working the way I planned it. God, in his wonderful love and mercy and grace, just brings us up into a whole new way of living, Kimberly.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s so true. Oh, it is. And he renews our strength. I have found that as I’ve been practicing and just saying, OK, I don’t want my agenda here. I want yours. Whatever your plans are, I’m going to follow you. Because I have certain ideas and I get suggestions from other people around me.
SPEAKER 02 :
You have been painting a little bit in my home. And you have been painting ceiling colors that should be pure white. And at the store where you bought the ceiling paint, it had gray in it. Because ceiling paint now is different than it was 25, 30 years ago. Yes. So you have not gotten discouraged. No. You’ve gone back and gotten more. And we’re going to go back to the store again with an old can of white pure paint. What pure white paint?
SPEAKER 01 :
Don’t get discouraged, folks. Right. When you do get discouraged and you’re not practicing just the adventure of it. Okay, well, this is an adventure. I just love to be in the river of life. And even if I get caught in an eddy and I keep going around and around the same rock of ceiling paint. And I go round and round with it. I don’t have to be upset about that or discouraged. And that makes us, it puts us in bondage. It puts us, it makes us be captives to the feelings of this world. But we are truly free when we let go of that and just enjoy the adventure and the contacts and the connections with people as we’re going through this. And Isaiah 51 verse 14 says the exile will soon be set free. And will not die in the dungeon, nor will his bread be lacking. This is about someone who has been set free from the bondage of the feelings of this life. This is about what Jesus has done. If you know anything about Isaiah, I’m reading from 51, 52, 53. three is talking about what jesus would do to set this exile free so that you will no longer have to be caught in the feelings of this life you can have freedom and joy and peace in abundance that’s right oh praise the lord that was a wonderful lesson we’ve learned from not only david but from isaiah
SPEAKER 02 :
And friend, if you’ll get into the word of God, it will bless you abundantly from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. I pray that you will have a wonderful weekend. God bless you as you listen to his word, as you read his word. And may God keep you strong in everything you go through. And take joy.
SPEAKER 1 :
877-917-7256
SPEAKER 03 :
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.
