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Broken and the Blessed Week 4, Day 7

by David Joynt on February 04, 2017


DAY 28

1 CORINTHIANS 1:4-10

As alien as “collective identity” feels to us, think of the power of “cultural influence” that we experience. How many of our desires, right now, are truly “individual”? How many of them arise from the influence of advertising or peer pressure? We take individuality for granted but much of what I want and desire comes out of collective pressure. Individuality is not a promise or an assumption but an achievement. We become truly individual only when we have an independence from cultural values. The church is crucial in this, providing a counter-culture that centers on different goals and standards and serves a different Lord.

Read this passage and turn it into a prayer for VPC and for your own life.


FAMILY TIME—
What do most people your age (however old you all are) feel pressure to do or buy? Where does the pressure come from?

Tags: community, devotional, the broken and the blessed

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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