Hi, my name is Pete Cousero. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

Podcast. Great to be with you. Our topic today is do the work before you work. Doing the work

before you work. Now, we have many sayings in emotionally healthy

discipleship. It's been called Skadaroisms that have developed over the last 30 years. Things

like be before you do or Jesus may live in your heart but grandpa's in your bones.

Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It's not possible to be spiritually

mature while remaining emotionally immature. Or God's will often comes disguised in the gift of limits.

And a list goes on. But another one I believe now is that I've been thinking about for quite a long

time is this phrase, do the work

before the work. Doing the work before the work, which is the title of this podcast. It's very

difficult for us to slow down and pause enough to do the work before the work, all kinds of work.

In other words, that we're living the same on the outside that we actually are in the inside,

that we're congruent, and we're not being same on the outside that we actually are in the inside, that we're

congruent, and we're not being influenced by other people's expectations of us or projections

of us. And so we lead from a place deeply from the inside out. We're anchored in the father

because we've done the work before the work. So today I want to bring you into that what this all

means and tell it to you

in a kind of a slanted way by not just looking at the life of Jesus, which we'll do just in a few

moment because he's always our model, but actually looking at an ancient poem from ancient China

called the woodcarver. So in Jesus, we see this congruency. He's someone who does the work,

internal work, with the father before he does his external work. So, for example, we see him,

he goes out into the wilderness for 40 days. He's led by the spirit. And he's doing all's

...