Bonus: God is Enough (Part 2) - The Father is Enough For Your Present

Barbara Rainey's Top 10 Interviews

Click Here to Listen to the other parts in the series
God is Enough (Part 1) - The Son is Enough For Your Past
God is Enough (Part 2) - The Father is Enough For Your Present
God is Enough (Part 3) - The Holy Spirit is Enough for Your Future

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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The Father is Enough for Your Present

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: God is Enough (Day 2 of 3)

Air date: August 2, 2018

Bob: Do you find yourself thinking that God is responsible for the blessings in your life and someone or something else is responsible for the trials and the challenges? Barbara Rainey says a careful reading of Scripture will lead you to a different conclusion.

Barbara: “I am the Lord who creates darkness, who causes well-being and creates calamity.” I didn’t like that so much. That felt really disconcerting to me. It was stunning—it was shocking. It’s like, “God creates calamity?” For years I thought that the only person who created calamity was Satan, and I thought it only happened to bad people— not good people. I certainly didn’t think God created calamity.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, August 2nd. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.

Whether it’s a sunny day where you are or there are storm clouds on your horizon, Barbara Rainey wants to remind you that God is in control.

1:00

Stay with us.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. We’re spending some time hearing from your wife this week about the sufficiency of God. You know, I think about what the Bible has to say about God having given us in His Word everything pertaining to life and godliness. It takes time—but over time, hopefully—we learn that once you realize God is all you have, then you realize God is all you need.

Dennis: And He’s patient with us as we come to that conclusion. The cool thing is you’re going to hear from a very wise woman whom I love dearly—Barbara Rainey. I was thinking, Bob, some of our listeners can remember this—most of them don’t have any idea what I’m talking about—but there used to be an advertisement that started like this, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”

Bob: I remember that, yes.

2:00

Dennis: Yes. Some of our listeners are going, “What’s E.F. Hutton? Does it even exist today?”

Bob: “Who was he talking about?”

Dennis: He’s a stockbroker.

When Barbara talks, I listen, because she’s very thoughtful—very precise—and I can promise you what you’re about to hear in this message—and the first part of the message we’ve already heard—but she talks about how you can view the present and the future—as a woman or a man, as far as that goes—and trust God with what you’re facing today. She’s a real student of the Bible, so she has some really gritty stuff to say from the Scriptures.

Bob: This was a message that she gave to a group of women at a retreat at The Cove—in Asheville, North Carolina recently—and it’s all about God being enough. As you said, we’ve already heard about how God is enough for our past, and now we’re going to hear about how He is enough for the present. Here’s Barbara.

3:00

[Recorded message]

Barbara: Number two—our second story—is going to show us God the Father is enough for our present tense—for our todays—every day.

When Dennis and I were raising our kids, one of the things that we did pretty regularly was we went out for a weekly date night. It was life for me. One night we went out for our weekly date night—we always did Sunday night because our church didn’t have Sunday night services—and that was the easiest night for us to get away that was usually open on the calendar.

We—at that time—only had two teenagers left at home, they were 14 and 15. As we walked out the door for our weekly date night, we said to the girls—the two girls, “Now, you have homework to do, we want you to do your homework—we want you to get your work done, and then you can read a book—but no TV. Got it?”

“Oh yes, sure, we got it.”

Dennis and I walked out the door, and as we walked out the door—

4:00

—I called over my shoulder, before the door slammed, I said, “Don’t forget, what did I say? No TV, right?”

“Got it, no TV.”

Dennis and I went to dinner, we were gone about three hours—maybe four—I don’t know. We came home, and as we were coming in Dennis said to me—he looked at me and he said, “I’m going to turn the lights off on the car, and let’s just kind of slide in quietly, stealthily, and see—let’s just check on the girls.” [Laughter]

So he turned off the lights and we rolled down the hill really quietly, turned the car in, and parked—of course, they didn’t know we were there because they didn’t see anybody coming. We got out of the car and we walked around to the front of the house. Our sidewalk went across the front, and we stopped in front of the dining room windows, and we looked in the dining room windows, and there, through the dining room windows, and beyond the dining room was our kitchen. In the dining room windows we could see this bright blue glow. [Laughter]

It was a dead giveaway, and as we looked we could see they were propped up in the kitchen, glued to the television.

5:00

So Dennis said to me—he said, “You stay here and keep watching them through the window. I’m going to go around back and come in the back door, and you see what happens.” I said, “Great.” [Laughter]

This is one of those times when parents get the upper edge, and it felt so good. I have to tell you, it felt so good, because I can’t tell you how many times we had no idea who did what, who was right, who the guilty party was—and this time we knew. There was no dispute.

So, he walked around to the back door, opened the door, jingled his keys for a while, and said, “Girls, we’re home!” I mean, they jumped as quick as they could. The TV went off, the books were open, they were sitting there, studious, just little angels—little angels. [Laughter]