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Questions Week 15, Day 3

by David Joynt on August 08, 2017


MARK 9:42-48


Jesus has a clear strategy for helping people discover the abundant life. He teaches, and he invites, demonstrating God’s love and mercy. But he also warns that lives lived against God’s will end in destruction. Would it not be unloving to fail to warn people about the reality of judgement? In our passage today, we see hyperbole used in the service of this warning. Jesus doesn’t want us to selfamputate, but to take seriously the way we can make choices that enslave and corrupt our own souls.

Notice that this sober teaching is in service of the safety and protection of “little ones” vulnerable to exploitation.


There is nothing worse than arbitrary power. But can we not trust our loving God, who made and redeemed us, to judge well and truly?



FAMILY TIME— What kind of exploitation most disturbs you?

Tags: love, mercy

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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