The Samaritan’s Heart: Compassion as a Bridge

SPEAKER 01 : 0:10

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 : 1:04

Well, yesterday it was raining like crazy. Today the sun is shining. I mean, in Colorado, just wait 24 hours. Oh, welcome to Calda Freedom. It was for freedom that Jesus set you free. I don’t want you timid or shrinking back or hesitating one more day. It’s a time in our lives when we go for it. We really go for it. As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved. Know that, my friend. You are holy and dearly loved when Jesus is your Savior and Lord. Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. And that’s from Colossians 3.12. Oh, we need to learn to be here for each other. We’re here for you. If you have a need or anything, you can email us at Kimberly at FreedomStreet.org or Barbara at FreedomStreet.org on your telephone or any one of your devices or hello at freedomstreet.org and you can get to our website freedomstreet.org it’s simple it’s great and listen to radio shows newsletters blogs and other things get our bible guide so you can read through the bible with me this year oh it’s it’s my 51st year of reading through the bible and It’s not to be a proud kind of a thing, but I have needed 51 years of the Bible. I was a stubborn, proud person, and God has just really disciplined me and corrected me and matured me and established me. And I am so grateful. I am truly grateful. And I just pray for you every day as I see your name. Yes, Holy Spirit brings your name up. And as you send donations, whether it’s online at freedomstreet.org or whether it’s through the post office. And I’ll tell you, after 30 years of receiving mail in the post office, they have a great record with Call to Freedom. Never have had any stolen or anything like that. So I am so grateful for those ways of getting your mail and you receiving the newsletter. and I just put the newsletter in at the post office for October. Can you believe this? Right before the show, I said, Rachel, you just put September up on the monitor for me in the studio, and in four days, you’re going to have to put October up.

SPEAKER 1 : 3:31

Go figure.

SPEAKER 02 : 3:33

Oh, God is truly collapsing the time here, folks. He really is. And we’ve got so much to do as followers of Jesus Christ. You are blessed to dispense for in him you live and move and have your being. Oh, what a wonderful thing to know that Christ’s explosive power infuses us to conquer any difficulty, any difficulty in our lives. And that’s from the Passion Translation of Philippians 4.13. I want you to remember that along with our verse for this week from Romans 15, verse 13. Now may the God of hope give you joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of Holy Spirit who is in you. He is in you today. And Kimberly and I come on the air to let you know how wonderful it is to serve Jesus. And we pray that we edify you, we build you up, and we encourage you. That’s what we want more than anything else. We aren’t basically evangelists, although when you come on board, if you want to accept Jesus as your Savior, we would be happy to pray for you on the air or by email or other devices. So thank you so much for listening to Call to Freedom. I just feel a new surge. of hope and wonderful realization of who Jesus Christ is. Even when our country is being torn apart, it’s not going to be long, folks. It’s not going to be long. Jesus is going to set everything straight and everything right, and he’s going to reign in Jerusalem. I hope you’re there with us. I hope you join us there in that beautiful city. Well, Kimberly. Welcome. Welcome to Call to Freedom. In fact, I don’t know if I should say welcome. You’re a part of the program and the show and the radio broadcast, but welcome. Thank you for including me.

SPEAKER 03 : 5:25

I do love being a part of this family. And I didn’t even ask you about your memory verse. Romans 15, 13 is one of my all-time favorites. Oh, yeah. Because I really do believe. Believe. It’s in believing. And because I believe, I am being filled with joy and peace constantly, no matter what my circumstances are. And that’s what I pray. Oh, I pray that over you, over the listeners. I believe that as you continue to grow in your relationship with the Lord, that you will be filled. with joy and peace and hope that your hope abounds in the power of the Holy Spirit, that as the Holy Spirit is speaking to you on a daily basis and letting you know everything’s going to be all right. I just keep saying that out loud. Everything’s going to be all right. We’re going to be all right. I think that’s one of your favorite stories you like to tell about me when I was two years old. I was in the dark with you and dad and I just told you both, we’re going to be all right.

SPEAKER 02 : 6:34

Your dad was driving down this long, dark lane getting to Uncle Kenneth’s house in Whitefish, Montana. It was late at night, maybe early morning. And there you were standing between us because then we didn’t need seatbelts. I don’t know why. Children are just put into these seats. I mean, they are put down and strapped down. And then you were just standing, your hand on Dad’s shoulder and the other hand on my shoulder. And you were saying, we’re going to be all right. We’re going to be all right. Yes. Right.

SPEAKER 03 : 7:10

And that is the message that I want each one of us to receive, especially when we feel like our boat is about ready to capsize in the storm of life. We want to know everything’s going to be all right. You might not need that boat. It’s okay. You can be given the power to walk on water. It’s okay. Whatever you’re experiencing, you’re going to be all right. And that verse in Romans 15, 13 is one of my favorite to remind me that he is the God of all hope. And he fills us with his joy and his peace. That is not a fragile kind of peace. It is a really solid peace. And that is my prayer and my hope for everyone who’s listening. I think it just goes really nicely hand in hand with Philippians 3, 13 and 14 that I’ve been meditating on. I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do. Forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

SPEAKER 02 : 8:27

And our prize, Kimberly, is going to be seeing Jesus. That’s our prize. You know, they say we’re going to have crowns. I’m going to throw my crown at his feet because I don’t deserve a crown. But oh, what a prize we’re going to see in our Lord Jesus Christ. Wow. He is. He is our.

SPEAKER 03 : 8:47

prize he he is our prize and having relationship with him and being able to be his partner for the rest of eternity oh i and and it’s not the kind of partnership like you know like a business partnership that we experience here as humans where you’ve got two human beings that might not always agree and so there’s conflict you know it’s not that kind of partnership it’s so much better we’re being invited into something so much better than that And as I was meditating on this verse, actually, I’ve been meditating on what I heard from the memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday. That was such a beautiful service. And one of the teachers from Hillsdale College, one of the professors, Dr. Arne? He is the president. Larry Arne.

SPEAKER 02 : 9:44

The president of Hillsdale College.

SPEAKER 03 : 9:47

So when he spoke, he mentioned a ladder that reaches up to heaven. And at the bottom of the ladder are images of many good things. There are beings, and we name them. We name these beings. These images are all figments or facets of God himself. And the only way to climb that ladder and be closer to heaven, closer to the image that we were made for, is through suffering. And we all climb. This is what I’ve been meditating on, how we all climb this ladder. Whether we want to climb it or not, we climb this ladder. The way that we start out in life, it quickly disappears from us. What we knew as children or toddlers, it’s gone. Our elementary school years are gone. Our middle school years, our high school years, it’s gone. We’re not going through that again. We don’t get to step on those rungs of the ladder ever again. So we are actually really being forced to climb upward. It is what we do in life. I’m struggling with my words for this just because I don’t like the word forced, but we really are compelled to move because we have lost the rungs behind us. And when we see that there’s no more years of schooling or no more… whatever it might have been, no more job like that one job that you had that you really loved or no more relationship like that one relationship that you might think of that was there for a while and now it’s gone. We can choose to move upward with bitter emotion, with regret or blame or resentment at being forced to leave those beloved images behind. or we can climb that ladder with forgiveness and letting go of what lies behind. And that’s what caused me to think of Philippians 3, 13 and 14, that I may not really be good at this yet, But I am not depending on my own strength to accomplish it. And I have a compelling focus. It’s Jesus. And I forget all the things of the past. And I fasten my heart to Jesus. I fasten my heart to the future instead. And I run straight for that divine invitation of reaching the heavenly goal and gaining the victory prize. And that is Jesus. jesus he’s he’s my prize praise the lord so that’s how that’s how i am moving up this ladder there are others that move up this ladder differently um And I believe that our choice of how we view it, that’s what belongs to us. That’s what our respondability is. You know how I don’t really like putting responsibility on people’s shoulders because that can feel like a real heavy weight. But we get to choose how we respond. So we have this respondability. We can respond to this movement with faith and hope. and joy and trust. Or we can respond with regret and resentment and bitterness or blame even. But when we see that this is the way of life here, this earth is the temporary realm that we live in, and God’s dream is to connect this temporary realm with His heavenly realm that is eternal. His realm is never going away. His realm is not temporary. It is eternal and it’s beautiful and it’s really good. And this ladder is really you and me. It’s us. We are the ladder and we connect heaven with earth. We fuse the two together. The fusion is God’s dream. When Jesus taught us how to pray that the Lord’s kingdom come, the Lord’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. It’s fusing this earth with heaven, and we get to do that. That is our purpose. It’s our identity. It’s our job. We get to help with the connection of heaven to earth to make this world a dwelling place for God. Yes.

SPEAKER 02 : 14:34

Oh, I agree with that so much, Kimberly. I received a video from Dana, your sister and my daughter, and her son is working with the deaf people, deaf communities all over. And she said, Mom, I just have to show you this video of Caleb working. helping this blind, deaf woman up this wall. And it was a wall like the Marines go up. They go up a wall and over. And she showed me how Caleb had strapped the lines to himself. And he has her with his arms around her. And she’s also strapped with lines in case anything happens. But he helped her up that wall. It was probably a 25 foot wall and up and over and it gave me such a wonderful visual of what Jesus does for us climbing up those like you’re talking about today up that ladder that we need to climb up into the future that he has for us not stopping not falling down because he’s got his arms around us oh beautiful beautiful example of Jesus yeah

SPEAKER 03 : 15:46

That’s good. And what I know of Caleb, you’re talking about Caleb taking that woman up the wall. He actually is helping those people who would like to learn to climb. They’ve heard of it. They’ve got a concept of it, but they’ve never been able to climb because of their disability. And he loves letting them climb. He lets them climb. He gives them the instruction of where to put their hand next, where to put their foot next. And what a patient person to help someone who is deaf and blind go up the wall. He’s giving instructions through tapping on their backs or on their arms, and he taps and lets them know which direction to move their foot or their hand and get up that wall. That is such an amazing concept to me. I love picturing that with you, that that is how Jesus is with us. He wants us involved. He wants us to be able to climb. He might be gently whispering to us or tapping, and I’m constantly asking him, to open my ears so that I can hear him better. I want to hear his guidance and his direction. This is how we move. We move upward on this ladder and it fuses, like I said, it connects heaven and earth. And I really believe that this fusion, and Dr. Arndt from Hillsdale College mentioned it on Sunday at the memorial service, it is accomplished through suffering. There’s no way around the suffering. There’s going to be suffering. And I’m picturing Caleb again, trying to help this young woman up a wall, climbing this wall, And there had to be some fear on her part. There was definitely a lot of unknown. There was risk, you know, and then trying to even form a relationship or a bond enough with that person who’s helping you to trust them. I would call that a little bit of suffering in that process because as we’re learning in those areas, there’s some discomfort for sure. And that discomfort or suffering is what causes us to move. It’s accomplished. This movement and this climbing and the fusion with heaven and earth is accomplished through suffering. And I believe that’s how we can do what James tells us to do. When we encounter the trials and the tribulation and the suffering, we can count it all joy because it is movement on this ladder that’s fusing heaven and earth. And this is a really important job. This is a pivotal job. This is amazing. It’s a miraculous job. We are meeting God’s need to connect heaven with earth when we are doing this with him. We encounter these trials, these tribulations, but we look to him and we climb toward him, choosing to leave the past behind and live. for that prize, that goal. Jacob saw this ladder when he was running from his twin brother in Genesis. And he was leaving behind his familiar home and his parents, and he was looking ahead to unknown. Unknown. He was starting over. And I believe that there was a definite form of suffering for him to leave behind what he loved and be looking at something completely unknown. Yes. As I was reading about this ladder and Jacob, I learned that Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather, was called out of Haran. We read about that, how God called him out of that place, Haran. And when Jacob had his vision of this ladder, he was actually on his way back to Haran. He was returning to that place that his grandfather had been called out of. And this ladder was actually God’s encouragement to Jacob that he did not intend Jacob to be out of this place where there were people who worshipped idols. He wanted Jacob in the middle of that confusion, in the middle of a place where there might be immoral people, and he wanted him to connect heaven to that earth, that earthly place where there was immorality and idolatry. And that’s who we are in this world. We are connectors of heaven to earth in the midst of the most chaos and confusion. And you know what? My life does have a lot of that. My life has chaos and confusion in it. But when I choose to keep my primary focus up, upwards toward that prize. And I leave behind the things that I might want to be whole for me here or healed for me here. You know, and we all have those longings. We want a better job or a better home or a better relationship or better health. We want better finances. That’s a form of wholeness, a form of healing that we would really like to have. Sometimes we’ve got to leave those ideas like we’re leaving the rungs of a ladder. And we leave them and say, you know what? I’m just trusting you, God. I’m trusting you with my life, with my job, with my relationships and with my health. And this is where the Lord was giving encouragement to Jacob, saying, Jacob, you’re going into a place where you might not see wholeness, but you’re going to connect heaven with earth here.

SPEAKER 02 : 22:05

Yes. And it was I also loved. It was a struggle for Jacob. When he got to his Uncle Laban’s, I mean, 20 years of struggle. And Laban stole from him various times during that time. He wanted to marry Rachel. And that was all mixed up and confused. And he was marrying her sister first and then Rachel a week later. So he was met with lots of opposition, Kimberly, lots of opposition. And yet after that 20 years, it came out victorious. It really did. Everything, including meeting his brother again after all those years. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER 03 : 22:50

That is, yes, the reconciliation there is such a beautiful picture of what God really intends and what he wants. And so that ladder, I think, is also a connection of reconciliation, reconciling heaven and earth. It’s a ladder of hope. and trust that God really is working to fuse heaven with the lowest places of earth. In the Hebrew culture, those three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are also representative of three primary emotions. And those emotions, Abraham represents love. Isaac represents awe and reverence for God, awe and wonder. And Jacob holds the attribute of compassion. So I found that really interesting because as the Lord was encouraging Jacob with a vision of a ladder, it really does take compassion to connect to realms or to connect to worlds, to connect to people. It takes compassion even more than love because compassion can be a bridge builder where love, love is a powerful emotion. But in humans, it is limited to feelings of attraction. Love is really selective. It’s based on what people like and feelings that are awakened for reasons that we may not even be able to explain, but it’s selective. Love is kind of selective. You’ve got to be willing to choose love when you’re not feeling it. And compassion can help us.

SPEAKER 02 : 24:37

It’s the story of the Good Samaritan, Kimberly. He chose, when he saw this man lying in the gutter and he was stripped and he was bleeding, he chose to go over there and wrap his arms around him with compassion. He didn’t know him to love him, but he was a compassionate Samaritan. And he came and he even told the innkeeper when he got the man to the inn that, that he would pay for any expenses. Now, there’s love. Love is appearing here in that scene. The compassion and then the love. Yes, for that man.

SPEAKER 03 : 25:15

That’s right. And they were from two completely different communities that did not accept each other well, too. So that’s another way of looking at compassion. Compassion can actually reach out, see somebody suffering, and instead of seeing that they may be an enemy of yours or that they’ve been somebody you’ve been in conflict with, you can see the human part of them and in humanity go, oh, that’s suffering. That is real suffering. And I think that is our prayer right now for the community surrounding Turning Point and Charlie Kirk and his wife and children. that people would be more in touch with their humanity, that the human heart would grow and compassion would grow and then love for one another, that that would be a ladder that connects heaven to earth in these times. chaotic and hurtful times and that we would be able to see a new way, a better way of living life.

SPEAKER 02 : 26:22

Oh, praise God. Well, we’re going to have to continue this, Kimberly, because I’ve got a lot of notes left that you sent me today. So I’m looking forward to tomorrow more about this wonderful compassion that we share with our friends and even strangers. And friends, take joy.

SPEAKER 01 : 26:55

Thank you for listening to Call to Freedom with Barbara Carmack. You may get in touch with Barbara at Call to Freedom, Box 370367, 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 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.

SPEAKER 1 : 28:14

Thank you.