Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Okay, I hope you guys are well. Welcome back to another episode of Grace and Grit Mindset podcast. And I'm Shannon Williams, your host.
[00:00:10] And we have been in a, in a series called the Steadfast One.
[00:00:15] And we have been looking at the different, I guess, symbolic metaphors that we could, could attribute to God or, well, different ways that we could look at him.
[00:00:30] My intention with this series is to cultivate or develop the practice of meditation in all of us. I have been really struck by this lately. The Lord has been bringing it to me a lot, this idea of meditation. So the very first episode in this series, I talk about meditation, biblical meditation, and what it is and how it is all through the Bible.
[00:00:57] And we live in such a fast paced world that what's happening is our brain's getting hijacked by the world systems, by the stress that we're under, by the lies and the deceit that's everywhere around us. We are not focusing in on the truth of God. And although we may be reading our Bible a little bit, we may be trying to pray, we're not really engaging at the level that it takes to really pull that into ourselves. And when we do that, it causes us to live in a way that's more Christlike, but also where we can enjoy peace and joy and we can have a life that's more centered and more focused and less stressed out when we learn how to meditate on these promises, on these truths of who God is.
[00:01:52] So if you have not listened to any of those other episodes, please go back and do that today. I want to talk about God is my rock.
[00:02:02] And just like last week, we talked about God is my refuge, baby. Is that right? The week before that we talked about God is my shepherd.
[00:02:13] What is so cool about all of these symbolic ways that God presents himself is we see them woven throughout scripture. It is not just in one place or the other, meaning it's not just in the Old Testament. And then in the New Testament you don't see it again or vice versa.
[00:02:33] So what we see is the New Testament revealing what was conceived in the Old Testament and what was concealed in the New Testament. Old Testament is getting revealed. I don't know if I just said the same thing twice, but we see this revelation and we see the fulfillment of the prophecies of Jesus through so much and so many of these.
[00:02:57] I don't want to call them titles, they're not titles of God, but ways that he presents himself.
[00:03:03] And so we're talking about God is my rock and this idea of God being the rock is all through scripture, David talks about God being his rock and his fortress.
[00:03:17] And then we see it some more in some of these other.
[00:03:22] I'm going to read you just a couple of these places that you'll find it.
[00:03:26] Probably my favorite one.
[00:03:28] It's very messianic in nature.
[00:03:32] Why wouldn't it be? Right? Because it's testifying to who the Son of God is going to be so that he could be recognized, even though the Jews did not recognize him mostly. This is Isaiah 28:16.
[00:03:46] Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion a stone, a tested stone, precious cornerstone of a sure foundation.
[00:03:59] So here you see the Lord saying, he's prophesying. Isaiah is prophesying that God has already laid a foundation in Jerusalem. And it's a stone, it's a tested stone, it's the cornerstone, and it's a sure foundation. So the idea of cornerstone is really interesting, and it's not something that we understand today as. As is most of the stuff that we've talked about with the shepherd and all that.
[00:04:28] You know, cornerstones are not something, to my knowledge, that are really used today.
[00:04:34] But back in those days, in those ancient times, they didn't have a lot of the same, you know, tools that we have and the ways that we have to build things and machines and things like that. So they would take what they would call a cornerstone. And it was a very tried and tested stone that could handle the supporting weight.
[00:04:58] It had to be able to support the weight of everything above it. Not only that it was the reference stone. It was laid in such a way that it would allow two sides of the foundation to connect on top of it.
[00:05:13] So this rock and this stone has to be extremely durable, strong, tested, level, straight, plumb, all the things that it needs to be, because everything is built around the cornerstone.
[00:05:30] So we see in Isaiah 28:16 that God is saying, I'm not just laying down a stone to build a foundation on, I'm laying the cornerstone. And it's already been tested and it's sure.
[00:05:43] And then we see in Psalm 118, it's another prophecy that Jesus is going to say this later about himself. He said, and this is what it says in Psalm 118. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. So he's saying, he's prophesying, God's laid this stone. We see this in Isaiah, but this is saying, they're going to Reject it. The people that are building God's temple are going to reject God's very own cornerstone that he has given to lay the foundation of his church.
[00:06:24] But then, remember, I said, this is this thread you will see woven throughout Scripture. You see, in Matthew 21:42, Jesus says after he's talked about the parable of the wicked tenants, he goes back and he quotes Psalm 118. He says, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. So he's saying of himself, I am the stone, the rock that the builders have rejected, and I've become the cornerstone. So the people hearing this would have known what he was saying, more than likely. And it probably would have been offensive to the religious people of the day. But the ones who could look at him and say, yes, I see who he is, this would have been like welcome news. And it would have been probably confirmation that he is who he said he was.
[00:07:13] So Peter is also seen or, you know, we see references of Peter talking about who. By the way, Jesus says, you know, to Peter, you are Peter upon this rock, which is Peter means rock, I will build my church. So there's a lot of contention about that. I'm not going to get into what that means.
[00:07:34] A lot of people think that it means Jesus is referring to Peter. He was going to build the church on Peter. Or a lot of people say, no, he was just saying, you know, no, Peter just said, you are the Christ. That's the revelation. And then Jesus says, oh, upon this revelation or this rock, I'll build my church. So I don't know, it may be a bit of both. Maybe Jesus is saying, I'm the cornerstone and you're just, you're a foundational stone that I'm going to use to build my church. That's kind of what I think it means. But Peter starts elaborating on this later on.
[00:08:06] We'll see him talk about it in Acts 4:10 through 12, where he's telling the religious leaders that Christ is the stone that you rejected the builders. And now he's become the cornerstone. So he's kind of re quoting, so Psalm 118. And then he says, there's salvation in no one else.
[00:08:24] But also in first Peter, he starts to kind of develop this even more. He starts saying, you know, Christ is the living stone that was rejected by the people. He was chosen and precious to God. He became the cornerstone. And it was also, this is interesting, also a stone of stumbling to those who reject him. I'm going to have to find that scripture and read that to you in just a minute. So. So not only is the cornerstone the foundational stone, but it also is the stone that some people are going to stumble over is a stone of stumbling when they come in contact with him because they're offended by him.
[00:09:06] These were the religious leaders of the day. And even today we see this stone of stumbling.
[00:09:11] Some people just reject that he is the foundational cornerstone of everything, that every thing God has built has been on Christ.
[00:09:19] And then on top of all this, the believers, we become the living stones that we're being built into a spiritual house. So this is really cool because you have Christ who's the cornerstone, and then he's using us and we're becoming living stones and we're building on top of him into this beautiful spiritual house.
[00:09:39] So we're a part of this too. It's not like Jesus is just saying, I'm the cornerstone and there's nothing else. No, I'm. He's saying I'm building something, but I am the foundation and everything will be built on me. And I just want to say this real quick because there's a lot of teaching out there, a lot of false teaching, in my opinion, that says that the church is lost and it's hopeless and why bother? And just. Just kind of this derogatory shaming of the church in general. And that is not what I see when I read scripture. Jesus is very clear that he's building a house and it will not fail. And it's built on him. It will succeed. That doesn't mean there's not going to be a big. A great shaking.
[00:10:30] And it's going to cause people to fall away who are never really part of the. Part of the vision anyway, not part of the building anyway, but the church. You can. You can take this to the bank. The church is going to. Is going to stand. It's going to be built the way that he wants it to be built. We're not building it. He's building it.
[00:10:48] We are not building it. He is building it.
[00:10:51] So Christ is the cornerstone of God's house.
[00:10:54] And Peter even goes on to say, sorry. Paul goes on to say that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. So now we have Paul talking about it. And then he also says, in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple.
[00:11:14] So now we're moving from language of house. Now we're building a temple, a holy temple, which makes sense because Christ threw. Dwells The Holy Spirit dwells within the believer. Right.
[00:11:28] So, and then I want to just touch on real briefly and then I'm going to jump into maybe some more personal application of what this means for you and I. So what's interesting is in Daniel 2:34 through 35, some of those areas, Daniel, he has this vision and he sees a stone that's cut out by no human hand.
[00:11:50] He sees that stone, it strikes the great statue representing these human kingdoms.
[00:11:57] The stone then becomes a great mountain that fills the whole earth.
[00:12:02] So what Daniel is thinking this means, he interprets it as the kingdom that God's going to establish shall never be destroyed.
[00:12:11] So there again, this kind of also supports what I just said a minute ago, that the church that Christ is building, it cannot be destroyed. Jesus said, the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
[00:12:24] And I'm going to just bring that into a little bit of a personal application.
[00:12:28] So if Jesus said the gates of hell cannot prevail against my church, are you not part of that? Are you not part of his church?
[00:12:39] Then there's no way that the gates of hell can prevail against you individually either.
[00:12:44] And I even love this because this thought Jesus says in his parable where he talks about building your life on the rock, he gives the illustration of, you know, let me just read it. Matthew 7:24. Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. By the way, this is coming at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. So he's given these phenomenal teachings of this Sermon on the Mount that is so life changing to the people that hear it, because they've never heard anyone talk like this before. He's captivating to them when he talks and they know that it's true. And then he says, everyone who hears what I just said and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.
[00:13:38] And the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and they beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock.
[00:13:50] And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell. And great was the fall of it.
[00:14:07] So here's what I notice about this parable as I read it. First of all, I see the thread coming through here of the rock, and essentially Jesus is saying, Hey, I am the rock.
[00:14:22] Because he said, if you hear these words of mine and you do them, then you will be like this man who built his house on the rock. But also we know that Jesus is the word of God.
[00:14:34] So he's making this kind of reference to himself, that he is the rock because he is the word of God.
[00:14:43] And so what I also notice is, I noticed that he says the rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and they beat on the house. So he did not say, hey, you built your house on rock, then none of these things are ever going to come your way. You're never going to have a flood, you're never going to have rain, the wind's never going to blow, you're not going to have storms. It's going to be EAs. You're just going to build your house there. And because you built it on me, it's easy.
[00:15:10] That's not what he said.
[00:15:12] He said those things are going to come and the difference is what you build your house on. Because our lives are going to be hit by storms a lot.
[00:15:25] That's a given. That's the one thing I think every single person on the face of the earth has ever had in common is that we have faced crises, we have faced traumatic events, we've all been through pain, right? Everybody on the face of the earth can say at some point in time in their life something painful happened, maybe something earth shattering, maybe like this story, the rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew. That's going to happen to all of us. That's something we can all identify with.
[00:16:04] But what we all, maybe differently do is how have we prepared for that? Because it will happen.
[00:16:11] It's all about the preparation of what you've built your life on.
[00:16:16] If you have built your life on lies, if you have built your life on half truths, if you have built your life on your own ability or someone else.
[00:16:28] I've seen people who do either or both of those, maybe people who are very strong, have a very strong personality gifting.
[00:16:38] They're just great leaders. They seem to like whatever they do, whatever they touch flourishes. And maybe they're not even Christians. And it's easy to look at that and say, wow, this person must just be really special.
[00:16:50] And but I wonder, has the rain fell, have the floods come and has the wind blown on them yet?
[00:17:00] Because there is no other foundation other than Christ that is sure and tried.
[00:17:06] So the question becomes still, what have we built our house on?
[00:17:11] If you build your house on lies, or you Build your house on half truths or just. There's a lot of, a lot of stuff out there that even in the church world is. It's terrifying to me because.
[00:17:25] And I know we all have our own discernment in what the Holy Spirit may be saying to us, but I just, I cringe at some of the teaching that's out there.
[00:17:36] And then people are building their life on it. And then when the floods come and the rains come and their life falls apart and they realize that what they had built was on sand, it catastrophic, like Jesus said. Great was the fall of it. I'm even thinking about. I mean, just go with me here for one second because I grew up in the Spirit filled world and I still feel that way. I still believe in the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
[00:18:05] I do believe it's been abused in a lot of ways. And I don't agree with some of the things that go on, but that's not really what I want to talk about.
[00:18:17] But a lot of people build their lives on the gifts of the Spirit.
[00:18:24] They build their relationship with God on a prophecy, or they build it on whatever seems to be strong to them. And they get all of their foundation from either maybe a person, this role, maybe a pastor, someone in leadership in their life, maybe an evangelist that came along and they build their life on that foundation as opposed to Christ himself.
[00:18:53] And so when their life falls apart, something comes their way, they actually blame God. And great is their fall. And they end up, I've seen it so many times, they end up walking away from God because they really never had a good foundation.
[00:19:12] And it's sad to me, it's sad to me that, you know, so many ministers and false prophets or whatever you want to call them, have propped themselves up to put themselves in these places of lordship over other people and then they manipulate them and control them.
[00:19:30] You see this in cults a lot too, to where, you know, something shakes that person's life and they realize that they had built their life on sand. But that is not what happens, Jesus says, when we build our life on him and his truth, because he is complete truth.
[00:19:51] There are, there is no fallacy in Him. There is no deception in Him. Everything he says is right and true and pure.
[00:20:04] And so we can build our lives on that.
[00:20:08] And even when floods may become our way, hurricanes, whatever you want to call it, we can withstand it. And I know that I am personal proof of that because of the things I've been through the last seven or eight years. It. It felt like one Catastrophic disaster after another.
[00:20:32] It felt like either a hurricane or a flood sometimes, or tornado or an earthquake hit my life. And it was just this one natural disaster, not real, but spiritually speaking, in my life.
[00:20:46] And there were moments where I couldn't even catch my breath before the next awful event happened in my life.
[00:20:54] I hope that you cannot relate to that, but if you can just know you're not alone. This. This is. You see this happening to people. It's like, you know, a cascade of events happening that seem to be traumatic. And I often wonder if that's the enemy trying to take them out. Trying to take us out is he plants kind of a snowball against us. But the great thing is, and the beautiful thing is that Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. And we are part of that building. We are these living stones, and we cannot be taken out.
[00:21:23] And so when we build our life on him, even though this stuff happens, he's with us.
[00:21:29] And if you can start to meditate on this truth, and this is really why I'm writing the book and I'm doing these episodes, if you can start to see and picture this in your mind, this beautiful foundation that God has laid, and you are on it. And you. You can picture the winds coming, the storms, the floods rising, but yet you have this peace there. You have this, like. You can picture him sitting there with you in that moment, in that moment, just like when he was in the boat with the disciples.
[00:22:12] He was in the storm with him.
[00:22:15] They thought he was just disconnected. He was asleep, but he was there. He was asleep because he wasn't worried about it. He didn't have to worry about it. As long as he's there, nothing catastrophic is going to happen.
[00:22:31] He can't be destroyed. He can't be defeated.
[00:22:34] And because he's with us, I think we just forget that he's with. With us and that we built our life on this truth, this foundational cornerstone.
[00:22:45] And I think we need to keep going back to this as believers, is that it's been tried and tested.
[00:22:51] How is that Jesus fulfilled all of this by laying his life down. He was tested and he passed.
[00:23:01] He's been tried. He's like. He's like gold, more than gold. There's not. There's not even a pure element or gem or anything that we could think of that would describe who he is, his perfection, his purity, His.
[00:23:19] His strength, his beauty.
[00:23:21] But he is tried and tested of the purest, most rarest, most beautiful gem or metal or stone. That we could ever imagine. He is perfect.
[00:23:35] And because of that, we are not basing our safety on our own ability to keep our house up.
[00:23:43] You know, I think that we see the house and we see the storms coming, and we're trying to figure out a way to shore up the house. You know, it's a hurricane. I need to put the. The. I need to board up the windows. I need to. I need to do whatever I need to do because I see this tomorrow coming and we flinch and we have this feeling of dread, and we just think, oh, my gosh, this is the storm that's going to take me out. I have been there. I have been in those moments where I have said, this is the one Lord that's going to take me out.
[00:24:13] Do you know, not one of them ever did, and not one of them ever will. Because even if I lose my life, the gates of hell have not prevailed against me because I will be with him.
[00:24:25] Same goes for you.
[00:24:27] We'll never be lost when he's with us. We'll never lose when he's with us. We cannot be defeated because we built our house on who he is, not who we are who he is.
[00:24:41] So this is just another picture, another way to see him as the rock.
[00:24:46] He's the steadfast rock that we can build, lives on. And I can stand because of what I built on before the storm came. Same for you. You can stand tomorrow because of what you built your house on today.
[00:25:03] So I encourage you to keep building your house on truth, to keep. To keep seeking him out and searching him out and meditating on him and the truth of who he is. So when those things come, because they are gonna come. I wish they weren't. I wish they. They didn't come our way and. And try to take us out, but they're gonna. They're gonna come no matter what we do.
[00:25:25] But we have this assurance that if I built my house on him, I'm still going to be standing after the storm's over.
[00:25:34] Yep. I'm still going to be standing. And you're going to be standing after this storm is over.
[00:25:39] Praise God for that. Praise God for the chief cornerstone Cor. Who is the chief cornerstone that we can build our life on.
[00:25:47] Yeah. So I pray that this message is encouraging to you. Please share it with someone that might need it.
[00:25:55] Please make sure you subscribe to my podcast wherever you listen.
[00:25:59] I covet your prayers as I'm trying to write this. This book and do all the things that God's put in my heart, which there's like a billion of them.
[00:26:07] So just the wisdom to know what to do next would be great.
[00:26:12] But I pray that you take this truth of God being your rock, Jesus being the chief cornerstone, and you realize that he's building something beautiful with all of us, and he's the foundation of it all.
[00:26:27] So until next week, I pray you're blessed and encouraged.
