Hi, welcome everyone to the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast. So great to be with you.

Today, the title of our podcast is The Upside Down Gift of Stones in Your Life,

the upside down gift of stones in your life.

Now, I've been holding this sermon message in my back pocket over the previous

eight-plus weeks, as I have been sharing with you some of the nuggets from the emotionally

healthy discipleship book, different chapters, and inviting you to a radically different journey with Jesus, both as a

follower of his as well as a leader. And so this message comes out of Mark chapter 12,

the parable of talents, and in particular a verse that Jesus shares to the religious leaders of

his day that he quotes out of the Psalms, and it reads as follows,

the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The Lord has done this, and it is

marvelous in our eyes. And the issue for David in the Psalms as well as here in Jesus is that the very stone that

has been rejected is actually marvelous before the Lord.

And so this is a truth that I studied and preached years ago, but only with time as it

deepened in me as I might find myself returning to it over and over again and sharing it

with other pastors

and leaders around the world. And the stone, of course, is Jesus, who was rejected as well as unseen

by the folks who knew the Bible in his day. And stones come to us all the time. Jesus comes to us

all the time. Little stones, big stones throughout our lives. And most of us,

we reject most of those stones, or we don't see them as coming from God at all. And Jesus spoke of

his kingdom and his coming as a mustard seed repeatedly, that in other words, it's almost

imperceptible, it's apparently powerless and looks so defeated so unlike

the intellectual uh power of athens or herod's massive palaces or you know rome's great empire and

...