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Detecting Christmas November 29 Devotional

by David Joynt on November 29, 2023


LUKE 3:23 | 23 Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of Joesph son of Heli,

 

LUKE 3:36-38 | 36 son of Cainan, son of Arphaxad, son of Shem, son of Noah, sone of Lamech, 37 son of Methuselah, son of Enoch, son of Jared, son of Mahalaleel, son of Cainan, 38 son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.

 

Luke’s genealogy takes a different approach from Matthew’s. He begins with recent generations and goes back to Adam! Without devaluing the Jewish roots of Jesus, he is insisting that the Messiah also belongs to a shared human history. Underneath human difference and diversity there is a common story. Geneticists have traced human origins to a single area in Africa. We have a single human genome.

 

Ultimately the larger human story is universal. We all share a need for grace and mercy, we all require a solution to mortality and death, we all can find ultimate truth and meaning within the creative, redemptive, and renewing actions of God.

 

Do you sense a kinship across differences?

 

 

Gracious God,

Help me to understand my life as a part of your work of redemption and renewal. Help me see my connection to others. Amen.

 

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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