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Day 21: Direction

How do you deal with moments when love’s labor seems lost? Who do you sacrifice for?

by David Joynt on April 30, 2016


JOHN 13:34
PHILIPPIANS 2:5-7

 

How does Jesus love? He loves sacrificially. There is a sacrifice involved in every act of love. The promises to love in marriage exclude other romantic relationships. Parental love involves decades of earning and spending, giving and nurturing, disciplining and supporting, all in the name of love.

Each of us has to spend our time and energy on some activity; this much is inevitable. Spending it on love means it is never wasted, even when outcomes are hard. Loving and leading the people often was hard for Moses, for Joshua, for David. Yet when we have spent ourselves in love, there is a kind of holy exhaustion, a “good tired.” We must be brave enough not to worry too much about the results. Love always involves an emptying, or kenosis, as we take the form of a servant and begin to help those we know and those we meet.

 

How do you deal with moments when love’s labor seems lost?

Who do you sacrifice for?

 

 

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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