Yesterday I wrote about casting stones, which is not a good thing. But as I was thinking about stones, I was reminded that there are good ways to use stones in our lives. I remember the house where my dad grew up in Chattanooga. The exterior was made up of small stones that were mortared together. I drove past that house a few years ago. While the shrubs and trees were overgrown and the house looked abandoned, seeing those stones reminded me of visits to see our grandparents.

I’ve collected some stones over the years. The smooth, dark stone near the bottom left was one my dad had on his desk. He told me he picked it up in Chickamauga Creek to remind him of his home. The others are ones I found in my travels. Many of them have a name and date on the back side to remind me of the places I have been privileged to visit. Most of them are from the US, including some lava rock from Maui. But there are also stones from Mexico and Greece and India. When I pick them up and look at them they are reminders of those trips.

God told His people to use stones as reminders as well.

Joshua 4:1–7 When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, “Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan from right where the priests stood and to carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.” So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

A stone memorial was to be a lasting remembrance. It should remind them of the goodness of God, and make them want to live lives that show their gratitude for all His goodness. But it didn’t always work that way.

The problem we often have is we fail to remember. Jesus is the rock of our salvation, but we forget that too often during our daily lives.

1 Peter 2:4–6 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him— you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”

Like all those stones in my grandparent’s house, believers are the stones making up the spiritual house of God’s kingdom, the new Temple if you will. We have each been made into living stones by the one who suffered and bled and died to make payment for all our sin. He is precious because He earned what we could not: our forgiveness. He paid the price to buy us back from sin and death.

I’ll share a few more thoughts on stones tomorrow.