[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. I want to tell you today that neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, Jesus, your Lord. It’s so important that you know that friend. So important. Romans 839. You need to know that and nothing can separate you from the love of God. Nothing at all. You are blessed to dispense for in Him you live and move and have your being. And I’d like to remind you one more time about our meeting on Saturday, August the 10th. We’re going to have a great time. Kimberly and I are looking forward to it. Yes, I hope you’ll make it. I hope you’ll come. Yeah, we’re going to the grocery store this afternoon. Yeah, and I’m talking to you that’s listening right now, whoever’s listening. I hope you will come. We would love to see you. Yes. And if you’ve never been before, I would love to meet you. Yes, and you’re living right in Denver and you have never been to a Call to Freedom meeting. Yes, we invite you. And that number is 877-917-7256. Jimmy will give it to you at the end of the program. But yes, come. And you don’t have to bring anything for lunch on the patio. Kimberly and I have some ideas. We’re going to shopping. We’re going to go shopping. But if you would like to bring a salad or a dessert to share. That’s right. We always have plenty. We’re going to have a little keish in the oven and it’ll be good and be something it’s going to be 80. So it’ll be something to warm your tummy, but also some cold things also. So salads. Yeah, salads. So come and join us on Saturday, August the 10th. Again, that number is 1-877-917-7256. God bless you. Hope to see you there. I hope so too. The worship is just that much better when we all get together. It’s so wonderful to worship corporately. It’s one thing to worship the Lord to sing praise songs to Him individually, in your car, in your shower, you know, at home. But when you get together with others, there’s an energy there that’s like nothing else. That’s right. I love that. In our choir a couple of weeks ago, we were all worshiping together and the presence of the Lord was so strong that we all became so silent. I don’t think we’ve ever been that silent before. And we’ve been singing together for many years. But it became so silent and none of us wanted to move and then just tears, real quiet tears. And the Holy Spirit was healing hearts in that silence. And it’s so wonderful just to feel His presence when we gather together like that. It is. So good. Nothing like that. How I crave that. I do too. Oh, it’s… And what He has in store for us here on this planet as we choose Him is so much better than what we have in store for ourselves. Our plans are great and He doesn’t mind when we have plans, you know, like renovating a kitchen. He doesn’t mind when we have a plan like that. No. But He did not want me to put the kitchen in front of relationships and building bridges with people and with Him. And getting to know Him more and more. He didn’t want that. That’s not the point. Yeah, that’s right. As we were sitting here, I was writing down August 8th and I said, “Oh, this is Grandma’s birthday.” And she’s with the Lord. So she’s beautiful and honored. Yes, my mom. It’s her birthday. And we were remembering in 2008 when she was 88 and we met at my home with a lot of friends. Just had a great time. And then I thought, “August, August 8th.” Oh, I missed Darren’s home going. And it was such a blessing, Kimberly. He went to be with the Lord on August 5th. And I’ll always count August 5th. Some of you have that tendency to remember all the dates of all the people and especially those who went away. When there’s been loss. When there’s been loss that day. Our human nature actually logs it. We have a log in our brain that remembers when that loss happened. Yes. So Kimberly just reached up with her hand and we clapped hands because I have a kind of a new perspective about that date. Darren is beautiful. He’s young. He’s healthy. Yes, he’s vibrant. And where he needs to be, God loved him so much. He sent him home. God loved your dad, Kimberly. So much that he brought him home. And I think of people like Keith Green. Oh Lord. When he was so young. Oh Lord, you’re beautiful. Your face is all I seek. Well God loved Keith so much and his two daughters. He just brought him early. Yeah, early. So I think we need to readjust our sorrow and grief to a point where we become ecstatic over the possibilities of the hope that lies before us. Now that might, if you’re listening to us and you are experiencing grief or sorrow, that might sound impossible. And I’ve been in that place where it sounds impossible. And I remember thinking, okay, I need the joy of the Lord as my strength. And I had that scripture memorized. The joy of the Lord is my strength. But how do you do that? How do you walk that out practically when you are feeling so low and you’ve had such a hit and there’s been so much loss? How do you do that practically? And it is by asking him to move the mountain of grief. Yes. What we were celebrating with our high five just here just a few minutes ago was celebrating the fact that the grief had moved so completely. We don’t even remember the date when he died. And some of you might say, oh, you guys, that’s so gross. You feel like you need to remember. Well, we did for a long time. It’s been 15 years since Darren’s been gone. And the freedom when you finally get to let it go is amazing. That is the joy of the Lord. And truly that joy is our strength. And I opened up my Bible before we started today and it fell open to Romans 8. That must be one of my favorite places. And you can tell, it’s all marked up. It’s a mess. In your tiny little printing, it’s all over. You print like your father did. Yes, he has teeny tiny writing. And it says here in Romans 8 verse 18, “I am convinced that any suffering we endure.” Any loss we endure here is less than nothing compared to the magnitude of glory that is about to be unveiled within us. That’s here. Yes, it will be then when we’re done on this planet too in the other realm. But it’s also here. We have a magnitude of glory to look forward to when the mountains are moved in our life. That is a wonderful thing. You know what we need to do though is look back one verse. I just read from Romans 8, 18. Let’s look at 17. Because it says, “And since we are his true children, we qualify to share in all his treasures. For indeed we are heirs of God himself. To Christ we also inherit all that he is and all that he has.” We will experience being co-glorified with him. Okay, that’s a lot of words that might not mean anything to you. But just listen to this. We get to experience this treasure, this magnitude of glory. We get to experience it with him provided that we accept his sufferings as our own. The reason why we go through loss here is because he suffered great loss. Our God created such a lovely world, such an amazing world all with us in mind. He wants a perfect partner. And that’s us. Yes. We are the perfect partner. Yes. some call us the body of Christ. He’s the head and wear his body. Okay, that’s very closely connected. And he created something so beautiful to be his body. That’s right. And then we threw it away. We’re the ones who turned. We’re the ones who caused the suffering. And when we look at it that way and let ourselves sit for just a little bit with how we betrayed him. As human beings, in the garden, Adam and Eve, turned from what he asked of them. He asked of them and said, “No, we want to do this our own way.” He can turn it around in restoration. Yes, that’s the point. Last night as we were watching this documentary called The Hope about the country of Israel becoming a nation. And all that was thrown at them by the Arabs who inhabited the land at the time were rocks and sand hills and all kinds of stuff that they couldn’t grow anything on. So they threw it to the Jews that were coming back to Palestine. And what did the Jews do? And you reminded me this morning that it was Ben Gurion, the first president of Israel. He said, “Well, we’ll take it. We’ll take all they can give us. Little by little. Little by little. We’ll take it.” He turned it into absolutely prosperous and lush things, orchards and vineyards and even people from Europe, this one billionaire, Rothschild. And we know that Rothschild was a man who had five sons and they own all the banking, literally, probably. And so he gave the Jewish people his vineyards from Europe and now they send 40, did they say, “40,000 bottles of this wonderful wine around the world.” They are so prosperous. Yes. And it comes right out of rock. I’ve been there. You were saying, “Mom, you would not believe. You go some places and there are rocks. It’s not dirt. It’s rocks and trees growing right up out of the rocks.” Everywhere. It is truly amazing. So what we want to remember is that it might feel limiting to lose something or to be given something that just looks like a bunch of rocks. And it feels very limiting but we don’t have to be afraid of limited things. And when we lose something and we feel very limited now because of the loss that we just experienced, we can remember that God limited Himself when He created us and gave us free will so that we might turn away from Him. The suffering that caused Him, when we’re willing to share in the suffering and say, “Okay, I can go ahead and grieve this, but now let me look at how God can restore.” Because He is full of hope and the joy of the Lord is our strength. God limited Himself also to be God with us, to be Emmanuel, and to stay with us all the time. We brought that up yesterday, eight billion people that He said, “I will be with you. I will be with you.” And that’s limiting for Him. And each person has a different personality that God has to contend with. And I realized when Darren left this earth, the thing that really made me hesitant in what I was doing was the inadequacy that I felt, I felt inadequate until God said, “Barbara, I’m in you, I’m with you, I’m going before you, I’m surrounding you. You will never be without.” And I realized that as I led the grief and sorrow, fall to the ground that God was going to take up the slack, that I felt so inadequate. Oh my goodness. And we might not feel it right away, but we choose to believe over what we feel. Because faith, we don’t walk by sight and we don’t walk by our feelings. We walk by faith. That is what we choose. Today we choose to believe that what God has said to us is more true than what we’re feeling. That’s right. When He sees us choosing to limit ourselves that way, we’re not grabbing for our own comfort and our own way to fix our situation, but we’re just choosing to believe Him. When He sees us limiting ourselves, we can start turning things off, shutting things down in our lives, turn off the social media, turn off the news. And that feels limiting because you might be used to hearing that noise in the background. Yeah, and some people do. They like that continual noise in the background, feeling that they’re not alone. Sure. There they are. Sure. But when He sees us limit ourselves to His Word and His ways, then we discover it’s really not a limit at all. That is the magnitude of glory that starts being poured into us and we start receiving in ways that we never dreamed we would receive. And then He has more access to us and He has more secrets that He can share with us. Yes. That’s what we want to have secrets from the God of the universe to be whispered to us. Oh, that’s a magnitude of glory that we cannot even begin to imagine in our wildest dreams. That’s right. Oh, it comes to yielding, Kimberly. It comes to yielding and trusting in every area of our life. Yes. And when you first, oh, years ago, you said, well, mom, I don’t eat anything for in the morning. I don’t eat breakfast, usually. So I’m the person that when you were, when I was raising you and your sister and John, we had big breakfast. We had pancakes. We had all kinds of good stuff. We did. I love the waffles. I liked the whipped cream that you would make. We used to play in that. We used to throw it at each other. Yes, you did. And I’ve told the audience too about you throwing spaghetti up on the ceiling. Yes, I know that. But I still do that. And I test to see if it’s done. I do it on my own ceiling just so you know. I was not just ruining your ceiling. Don’t tell me anymore. Okay. Because now you have a beautiful ceiling, Kimberly. I do. No, you can’t do that anymore. I know. We’ve been laughing so much. It’s just wonderful that the memories don’t become those of a solid background, a grief-stricken background. Yeah, or that our memories don’t have regret. Yeah. And some kind of guilt or shame. We don’t want that. Or even becoming bitter about it because it just didn’t work out the way we expected it to. And I both have plenty of stories to tell that it didn’t work out the way we expected it to do. And yet we have joy. Why do we have joy? Well, we eat the meat. We drink the sweet. We share with others and we do not grieve any longer. Yes, the joy of the Lord. That’s right. That’s right. The joy of the Lord is our strength. Yes. And you were just talking about yielding. You yielding to the story that’s in front of us, surrendering to the story that has been given to us. How important that is, that learning gratitude in the middle of your story, where you can say thank you for something that maybe you weren’t expecting. And yes, it does hurt. It’s okay. You can cry it out. But then learn to say thank you. Start looking for the little things. You know, Anvass Camp wrote a book called “1,000 Give.” I believe that’s the name of it. “1,000 Gift.” It’s a wonderful book that will encourage people if you feel like you don’t know how to be full of gratitude and to be thankful for everything around you. This book is a wonderful tool to teach you how to do that. And she gives you a challenge in the book to start writing down every little thing that brings some joy to you. And she called it “1,000 Gift.” Oh, that’s great. Because she ended up writing it out. I think maybe it took her 1,000 before she learned to just start being thankful. I started that. It was many, many years ago that I started writing down all the little things that I would notice, like the ringlets in my daughter Sarah’s hair, or the long eyelashes that my son Jonathan had from the time he was a baby. And just writing down little things that brought me joy, that I received as gifts. From the Lord to give me joy. I started doing it at a time when I was feeling very depressed and it was hard to find the joy of the Lord. Because I started doing it then, I even doubted the whole process. I said, “Well, I like those ringlets in my daughter’s hair and I like those long eyelashes, but is this really giving me joy today?” And I just wrote it down anyway, even though I wasn’t feeling it. Yeah, you go through that. You kind of go through motions sometimes when you want to believe the best. And that’s what believing is. That’s what faith is. You strengthen your faith by doing something that might not make sense, something that you’re not feeling. You just do it anyway. Yeah, journaling has been a really good process for me for 50 years. I’ve journaled. And some of you guys listening to say, “Well, I’m a guy.” Well, Darren did also. He used yellow pads. Yeah, hundreds of yellow pads. Yeah, legal yellow pads. And he did it every day. Every day. So we can, we can as women and men of God do things that you start out doing it and you’re just doing it mechanically, not feeling it. It’s like you brush your teeth in the morning. You do it mechanically because you know it’s the healthiest thing for your breath and your teeth. And then pretty soon, like you said, Kimberly, you’re saying, “Thank you, Lord.” Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Lord. And that is fun. And that feels joyful today. And the reason why we want to do that is because when we, when we first begin our journey with the Lord, you know, it’s like when we first accept Jesus in our hearts and that salvation experience is real immediate. That’s like when the Israelites left Egypt and they came out, you know, it’s the Exodus story. And God’s people were delivered from their bondage overnight. They were delivered from bondage overnight in our salvation experience with Jesus. It’s immediate. And our very kind Lord, He allows us to take what we have learned already with us into our salvation experience. So it’s like the Israelites, they plundered Egypt. They got to take the riches of Egypt with them. They were even taking bread dough in the baskets. Yes. I mean, this was something God said, “Okay, I’ll let you take that. I’ll let you take the plunder.” Because I know you’re going through a chaotic and a transformation from the life you had in Egypt. So sure, going to all that wealth, all the gold and everything, He had plans. He had plans for a tabernacle, you know, so that they would build a tabernacle and make something beautiful, make a sanctuary for Him and a place to meet with Him. But what do they do? They melt it down and they make an idol. We all do that. We have resources that we bring into our salvation. We bring those resources in and then we lean on them more than we lean on God. It happens to every one of us. And when something happens where we have a loss, experience loss, and then we feel like we’re suffering, we might be mad at God at first. But when we realize we needed to have that thing removed, so our eyes would be really focused on Him, so that there would be the development of that sanctuary in us. That’s what we really long for. It’s just that we become so familiar with those things that we lean on. Yesterday we mentioned real quick at the end of the program, familiar spirits that bring defeat to us. We get familiar with something uncomfortable with something in our lives. And that actually becomes our bondage. And we end up defeated by it. Even in my mothering and what I thought a wife looked like, I became real comfortable with the routine of that. And I was leaning on that to give me a feeling of purpose in life. That all shattered five years ago. I’m so thankful for that. And there is restoration. Restoration is coming. It might not be exactly what I thought it might look like. It’s okay. I love who I am in the Lord now. I can hear His voice more clearly now. I want what I have the magnitude of glory. Yes. And it’s not all about you. No. It’s about your children that were involved in that five years ago. It’s about Matthew that needed to have changes in his life. See God is thinking of each and every person. And we dwell on Me. Yes. It’s about Me. It’s about Me and my desires and my feelings and my hopes and my dreams. You know, you started out talking about your grief. And when we overcome that, when the grief is shattered and that mountain is moved, that is a beautiful place to be in life. Sometimes grief becomes familiar and the me, what like you’re talking about. It’s about Me. No, the familiar things we want to let go of and the ideas and the opinions and even the dreams, the goals that we have. Letting them go, limiting ourselves. Letting them die. Yes. Like your father and I had dreams to sing until we got too old to sing and he could really play that piano. Yeah. And let that die. But if you die. Yes. We do. But the beauty in that is that when you experience that grief and you’ve lived with it for a long time, you can recognize other people who might still be in bondage to it. And then you can start speaking and talking, not even to them. You don’t have to say it to their face. Use their name and pray for them and apply what you’ve learned and say, Lord, you’ve set me for you’ve moved mountains in me, moved those mountains in them. And you can watch it happen. We were talking about that yesterday. We were able to watch that happen in the one that I needed the mountain of judgment, presumption, criticism to be moved in me so that that one person inquired. Could be, could be redeemed from that too. Yes. And she has changed. Yes. She’s so kind to me now. I never got to say that yesterday. Oh, that is an absolute miracle. It is. It is a miracle. It changed heart. Yes. Yes. I never knew that God really could move mountains until He moved the one in me. Yeah. Oh, I love that song. It’s a good song. Yeah. It really is. Thank you, Reed Hess, wherever you are. Yeah. So we know the things of our old life can be following us so closely and we keep them so familiar to us. It’s like a comfort zone to us into our new life. It’s all right to let them go. It’s okay to let it go and to let God do something so new that we experience a magnitude of glory that cannot be compared to the old life that we thought we wanted. And when we allow that wonderful spirit of truth and joy to enter into us, then there’s never a possibility of that root of bitterness to come in and take over. And if you’re listening today and you really have not experienced loss, if you are in a really good place and you are seeing your dreams come true experiencing that, know that God has something in store for you that’s even greater than what you have already experienced in your dreams coming true. And the way that you have built your business, that you’ve built your life and your family, your home, you may have beauty surrounding you. And God has something even greater, a magnitude of glory that cannot even be compared to the beauty you already have in your life. That’s so good. Oh, it’s been wonderful having you here this week and I don’t know what your plans are, but I enjoy every moment with you. So I pray to God. I know what my plans are either either. That’s right. I know. And we remind you again, friends of the meeting on Saturday, come at 10 o’clock and you will have a wonderful experience with like-minded people who love God. So call me at 1-877-917-7256. Hope to see you there on Saturday and thank you again, Kimberly. Yes, I hope to see you on Saturday too. We’re just going to have a good time of worship. And the last thing that we want to leave you with today, don’t be concerned about what you may have lost. Don’t be concerned about what’s coming in the future. Instead, 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]
