Join Barbara and Kimberly as they explore the infinite desires implanted in us by an infinite God and how these can only be fulfilled through dependence on Him. This episode encourages listeners to let go of finite worries and embrace God’s complete work in our lives. They share heartfelt listener stories and personal insights on trust and relinquishing control, painting a vivid picture of the rest we find in God.
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 called a freedom. Oh, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfect perfecter or finisher of our faith, because it is in Jesus that we are strong and courageous for the Lord. Your God goes with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. So why worry about anything? Yeah, he’s going to go ahead of you. He’s behind you. He’s your rear guard. And let’s just enjoy the life that Jesus has given to us. Oh, I am. It’s been a long haul, but I am beginning to truly enjoy the Lord Jesus like I’ve never enjoyed him before, and I’m so grateful God is still teaching me. I hope he’s still teaching you. You may be advanced in age, or you may be just young in the Lord Jesus, but he knows exactly where you are. He’s going to teach you gently. He’s going to teach you with such wisdom that that you won’t even realize that you are being changed from the inside out, and people are going to begin to recognize that. Oh, God bless you as you listen to this half hour with Kimberly teaching. You are blessed to dispense, for in him you live and move and have your being. Thank you so much for your giving, for your prayers. Just this morning, and I know you’re on the line, Kimberly, just this morning I got the sweetest message on the office phone. And it was involved you too, Kimberly. It says, Barbara and Kimberly, I just want to tell you, I am so thankful for you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I just had to tell you that. And that’s all she really had to say. And she was so emotional. I am so blessed. Just so blessed. I had to tell you that. Thank you.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s so good when we get to hear from our listeners. Mm-hmm. We love to hear from you. We love to know when you are learning and hearing from the Holy Spirit. So always feel free to let us in on how the Holy Spirit is speaking to you. That blesses us. And if you don’t want to leave a phone message, you can email us at Barbara Carmack at Freedom Street dot org or Kimberly at Freedom Street dot org. Yes. And just let us know what you’re learning and how you’re growing. We’ve learned so much from you, and it’s really wonderful to be a voice back on the air. Selena, you’ve been one of those listeners who has shared articles with us, and that’s where I believe you got the information about the lamb’s blood that you were talking about yesterday, Mom. Yes. And I have also been gleaning from a book that Selena mentioned to me, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. And I have really enjoyed just learning from this book. So anytime you listeners have something that’s on your heart, please feel free to share it because I do like to know what’s going on out there. And before we get into this idea of resting, And Sabbath, what the Sabbath is for man, that gift for man. Oh, you mentioned something at the top of the hour here about God going before us and going behind us. And I just immediately remembered the Passion Translation of Psalm 139, verse 5. And the way that this beautiful verse, it says in the New American Standard, you have enclosed me behind and before and laid your hand upon me. So it’s talking about going behind us and going before us. But the passion translation. adds a few more words and it says, you have gone into my future to prepare the way before me. And in kindness, you follow behind me in my past to spare me from the harm I’ve done in my past. Oh, that’s wonderful. He has covered it all. He has covered everything that is necessary for the future and everything that we need in the past. And when we really get a hold of that, when we understand that, when we, when we meditate on it and sit with it and choose to believe it, that is when we enter his rest because he said it is finished. Yes. Jesus said it is finished. Yes. And I think we don’t really trust what that means in every realm, in every dimension. It is finished. And so that is why we continue to just go and go and run and run. We’ve got lists of things to do and things we want to accomplish. And we forget that Jesus in Mark 2, 27, he said the Sabbath was made for man. That’s a day of rest. That Sabbath day was made for man, a gift from God to man. Not man for the Sabbath. We’re not the ones that are in bondage to a day of rest. The day of rest is a gift to us. As humans, we like to be the one who accomplishes or completes a project. And we like the feeling of success, receiving the credit when we have accomplished something. We like that feeling. We like it even if nobody else is looking and we just pat ourselves on our own back and just say, ha, you did it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, you did it. I don’t use the I word anymore, Kimberly. We did it, Holy Spirit. Because I gets in the way. It really does. The ego gets in the way. So I have realized that it’s a team effort. And he’s at the head of this team. And so every time I accomplish something, every time something has been accomplished, I give him all the glory. Because we’ve used I too much. Yeah, I have used I too much. That’s going to take me a while, but I want to try. I know.
SPEAKER 04 :
We want to try that.
SPEAKER 02 :
We did it. We did it.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s really good. That’s really good. When we do allow someone else to accomplish something, we tend to feel like we’re lazy. Like if I’m letting someone else do a project or finish something up that I might have started, it might even feel a little offensive if somebody else steps in to finish it up. I might feel like I’m slacking in my responsibility. And I think that’s just a human nature kind of thing across the board. That’s how I hear people talk about it. Well, I started that, so I’ll finish it, you know, and you might feel lazy if you are not the one that finishes that project.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, or people that say, I have made my bed, and I’ll sleep in it. And I’ll lay in it. I’ve made this mistake, so I’m going to just punish myself over and over. That’s sinful, Kimberly. That is sinful, not allowing the Lord Jesus. As you said, it is finished to complete that work.
SPEAKER 1 :
Oh.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. And when we follow Christ’s example, when he was living here, he was constantly just hearing from his father and only doing what his father told him to do. And not anymore, not any more than that. So it seems like the real lesson to me is not to become more responsible for all those projects, but to become more dependent by resting in what God has already done and let him be the one who gives directions.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
In Exodus 20, verses 8 through 11, we read, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or… or your cattle, or your sojourner who stays with you, your guest, your house guest. Nobody gets to work. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” The word Sabbath in these sentences does not just mean rest. That’s not the only definition that that word can have. It can also mean delight. And in this society, we are so driven to accomplish our list of things to do that we forget to stop and enjoy what we have accomplished. Yes. God knew how to enjoy what he had accomplished. He took that seventh day to just enjoy, enjoy what he had done, to just sit and listen to the birds singing and watch the horses run over the hills and enjoy the foods and the flavors.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, that’s our verse for this week. It’s Psalm 18, verse 19. He brought me forth into a broad place. That means my eyes have been awakened to something brand new that I hadn’t even thought of before. And he rescued me because he delights in me. And David said that before Holy Spirit came to live in us. So, Kimberly, God, we know that our Father God delights in us, loves us and delights in us. Oh, what a joy. What a joy. It is a joy.
SPEAKER 04 :
And then he has given us that same gift, that same ability to rest and enjoy what we have accomplished, to just drink it all in. We’ve made the preparations in our backyards or in our kitchens or in our workplace. We’ve made the preparation. Now just sit and enjoy that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. I was in the middle of watering today and I was in the backyard. And as I went back into the house, I looked up on the roof and here is a brand new roof covering my house. It’s covering every little inch of my home. I did not have anything to do with it. That is so marvelous. Isn’t it wonderful when God brings people in to accomplish something that we know needed to be done, and it is all done, and done well.
SPEAKER 04 :
And you could just step back and just look.
SPEAKER 02 :
Enjoy.
SPEAKER 04 :
Just look at it and enjoy it. It’s His day. The Sabbath day was His day first. And we want to remember that we’ve got to join Him in the rest. in order to truly enjoy. There are so many times when we might plan a vacation and we’ve got so many things that we have on our list to do. You know that the trip that I took a couple years ago to Israel, That was an intense trip. I’m still trying to go through all the notes that I took. Sometimes we busy ourselves with trying to see every site available on our vacation brochure. And we’re so exhausted from trying to check all that off of our list that we need a vacation from our vacation. Yes. That’s right. Amen. The Sabbath is different than just going on vacation. The Sabbath is a true time of resting. We want to be able to learn how to do that. Unfortunately, human beings are so programmed to get to the next thing on our list that we don’t learn to truly rest. And part of that programming is fueled by desire. I’ll call it desire. We have desire. Human beings have a desire. We have a desire to accomplish, a desire to see things, to hear things. We want to do new things. And those desires, and this is part of what I learned in this book as I was reading The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, the human desire is infinite. Those desires that are planted in us are planted by an infinite God to meet His infinite desires. So we have desire that is infinite. Isn’t that something to think about? Yes. Our desires are infinite. And so when we try to meet those desires and fulfill them with this finite world, we become frustrated. That’s right.
SPEAKER 1 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
How will we ever be able to satiate infinite desire with finite things? We can’t do that. It doesn’t work. And that’s why we want to learn how to enter God’s rest. When we see that there looks like no way to be satisfied or no way to be whole, But God, those are just two of my favorite words that we come across all the time in the scriptures. He has ways and thoughts that are so much higher than ours. And when we choose his ways and choose his thoughts over our own, Then we are saved. We are truly experiencing real salvation. We are at rest. Our desire is fulfilled in Him and Him alone. When we consider the kinds of things that we might worry about, for instance, you may have a family member that appears to be completely lost. And the finite situations of this world concerning your loved one, it might cause you a lot of anxiety. Maybe they are far away from the Lord. Maybe they’ve had an encounter with Jesus at one point in their life, and they might be going to church right now, but they still struggle in their daily walk. And you wonder, you wonder about their path and the path of the people around them that they might be affecting. That is a very real situation for all of us. Finite situations can cause us to doubt and to fear. But God, God has heard your prayers. And actually, he has noticed that your prayers are in agreement with his own. his own infinite desires for your lost loved one. He is the good father that is waiting for that lost prodigal to return. And he loves it when you are waiting with him.
SPEAKER 1 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
When you decide that you know he will have his desire, he will get his plan accomplished because he already accomplished it. We’re thinking on this timeline. We’re thinking that our loved ones are running out of time. That is not true. That is just simply not true. That’s right. We have got to be able to trust and have faith that our God is so big and his plans for our loved ones are greater than ours. And we’re the ones, we’re the ones that need to grow in faith.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. We need to trust him. So we don’t look at the things that we see with our physical eyes, Kimberly. We look at the things that are not seen for the things which are seen are temporary. But the things which are not seen are eternal. So, you know, if you are anxious about a loved one. and they are opposing you right now in your godliness. They don’t want what you have. Don’t think about those things that are in evidence right now in the physical, but think of those things that God is working in them. That’s a good word. You’ve got to look above. You’ve got to look above the temporary things going on in your life.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. Oh, God’s infinite desire is for you and for your loved one. And he wants you to learn to rest in what he has accomplished. So we get to join him in his faith. It’s his faith. We’re borrowing his faith the whole time we’re here. That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s Mark 11, 22. Yeah. Have God’s faith. Feel free to read that.
SPEAKER 04 :
We are borrowing his faith and we are just simply learning to trust that his work is complete in each one of us. It’s not on your shoulders to complete the work in your loved one. It’s not about how much harder you can pray, how much longer you can pray, how much more fervently you can pray, how much more you can fast. It’s not about that. It’s about trusting Him. He has already accomplished it. He has a jealous desire for that loved one that far surpasses your own desire for that loved one.
SPEAKER 02 :
We have heard the word trust all of our lives, Kimberly. And so many times it just goes zipping through our heads and we go on rushing around and around in circles. And when are we going to truly learn what that word trust means? You’re putting everything in God’s hand, not part of it, not just your attic and your basement. No, you’re putting your full life into God’s hands.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, every closet, every dark closet, attic to basement and everything in between. And I think the work of trust comes with realizing that whatever stress or anxiety or worry, whatever doubt, whatever fear we are experiencing, whatever irritation, anything negative. That’s right. You might be comfortable with it because it’s what you’ve lived with all your life. And it’s the way your mother lived. It’s the way your father lived, whatever, you know, your family situation might be. You might be comfortable with it. That doesn’t make it. It doesn’t make it part of God’s plan for you. So the work is being able to catch those negative things, catch them and say, okay, I’ve lived with this so long. This is not lining up with what God tells me he has for me. He says that he has a day of rest for me, a Sabbath day. Today is the day. We’ve read that from Hebrews 4 so many times. Today is the day that I’m inviting you to enter my rest, says the Lord. And so the work is being able to catch those negative things and say, no, you are not lining up with the goodness of God, the gentleness of God, the power of God to bring victory to this situation, and I’m not going to dwell on you anymore. to your thoughts, talking to your mind. We put on this helmet of salvation, right? We’ve talked about the armor of God, and that’s shown to us in Ephesians 6. We have that armor of God laid out for us, and we’ve talked about the helmet of salvation. But what is that? You know, the helmet goes over your head. It goes over your brain. So when we think ungodly thoughts and wonder, if that helmet of salvation is actually protecting us and our loved ones, you know, that’s when we need to realize, okay, some of our ungodly thoughts are what’s leading us out of that hope of that great hope of salvation that Jesus Christ himself accomplished. He did it. He said it is finished. And we have so much hope in that. This is not just a tiny taste of good news. And now for it to be the best news ever, you have a lot of work to do. That’s not how that goes. Jesus did it all. So that helmet of salvation is a hope of salvation. It is done. It is finished for me. and for my household, for all of my loved ones, my neighbors, my friends, those that I have been praying for. It’s done. So why do we think that we want our loved ones to be saved, whole and healed more than Father God wants them saved and whole and healed? I don’t know why humans think that way, but we can choose to be at rest. We can choose to trust him, that his desires are much better than our own, that his plan is better than ours, that he has accomplished and completed and perfected the work that is needed for salvation in our own in our own lives and in the lives of those that we love it’s not us that does it he’s done it the helmet of salvation is for us to quiet our thought life it’s for us to think god thoughts and see the way that God sees and hear His message of salvation that is complete in the infinite realm, despite what we see in this finite realm. Like you were saying before, what we choose to look at, we can’t choose. We can’t just keep choosing to see what the evidence is in this life, in this realm. We must believe that his evidence, what he has done is much greater and far surpasses everything that we would see with our human eyes in this realm.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. You challenged me the other day, Kimberly, by saying we need to surround our life, our home, our surroundings with joy and love. You challenged me because I realized that some of the, for instance, pictures that I have in my family, family pictures that I have in my home, they didn’t bring me joy. The past had caught up with me and said, you know, this is done with. This is gone. So I started clearing out, yeah, photos, family photos of family members that either were gone or, It’s like looking… I remember when your dad was being attacked with cancer. We did not take any photos of him when he was sick. Not one. We don’t have one photo of him. We want to remember him strong and tall and healthy. And so the other day, I just started throwing. I just started throwing with frame and all of family photos that caused me not hurt, but disappointment maybe. Or…
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s interesting that a memory in a picture or in something in your home, it started out really good and that’s why you kept it in the first place because it started out good. But something twisted it, something turned it, something about the journey in this life may have tainted it. And we’re still clinging to what we thought was a good memory. It started out wonderful, but whatever it was that turned it. You know, it’s like when milk turns sour. Milk is wonderful and sweet. Cream can be so sweet and so good, but boy, when it turns…
SPEAKER 02 :
We only have less than a minute, Kimberly, and I just need to invite you back tomorrow if you’ve got some time. We’ve got some more things to talk about. This is such a great needed subject for the church, for the believer, because they are running to and fro. And God says, my thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways. So get into that stream. We talk about live stream. Get into God’s stream. Oh, it’s beautiful. That’s good.
SPEAKER 04 :
I would be happy to join you again tomorrow. And we’ll just be able to talk about his rest. And I like how you were talking about that stream, that live stream. The real life stream is his Sabbath rest for us. And we’re all going to discover more of that tomorrow.
SPEAKER 02 :
God bless you. Thank you, Kimberly. And God bless you who are listening. Oh, we want you to be at rest in Christ Jesus. Oh, have a great day. God bless you and take joy.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you. Thank you. 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.
Join Barbara and Kimberly as they explore the infinite desires implanted in us by an infinite God and how these can only be fulfilled through dependence on Him. This episode encourages listeners to let go of finite worries and embrace God’s complete work in our lives. They share heartfelt listener stories and personal insights on trust and relinquishing control, painting a vivid picture of the rest we find in God.
Learn how to view any situation as a healthy challenge to your growth and spiritual maturity.
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