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Stress Test Devotional April 18

by David Joynt on April 18, 2024


MATTHEW 6:32 | 32 For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

 

Fasten your seatbelts. Worry is more than a health hazard and a producer of lines on our faces. Worry is functional atheism.

 

Spiritually speaking, worry arises when we fail to trust God. Some of us are overconfident, thinking we don’t need God and we find ourselves in messes bigger than our resources. Some of us lose faith that God is either willing or able to help us. Either way, we stop relying on Him and trusting in His direction and provision. This is functional atheism, for we are then living and acting as if His arm is too short to save! Where worry predominates, faith is enfeebled. 

 

Do you lean more toward overconfidence or lack of trust?

 

 

Gracious God,

Save me from functional atheism! Grow my faith and trust in You, today.

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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