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Day 18: Direction

Do you love courageously or do you like the waters smooth at any cost?

by David Joynt on April 27, 2016

Day 18: Direction

JOHN 13:34
JOHN 14:8-10

How then does Jesus love? What is distinctive about His way of loving others? One element is the courageous way He loves. Jesus takes the risk of connecting with people who sometimes reject him, as many in Israel did in the end. He embraces the emotional and personal risk entailed in opening your heart to others. Sometimes we are misunderstood. When Philip asks to see the Father, Jesus’ replies with some disappointment—”I’ve been with you all this time and you still don’t know me!”

Courageous love in the style of Jesus is honest, not sweeping issues under the rug, not avoiding confrontation, not allowing barriers to intimacy to build in favor of undemanding silence.

 

Do you love courageously or do you like the waters smooth at any cost?

 

 

 

Tags: devotional, direction, encountering

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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