envelop spinner search close plus arrow-right arrow-left facebook twitter

Day 45: Understanding

Has the spirit ever helped you understand what God is bringing about?

by David Joynt on May 24, 2016

Day 45: Understanding

JOHN 16:13

The Spirit meets us in our limitations and “guides us into all truth,” declaring the “things that are to come.”  One consistent limitation in our understanding is our very limited grasp of the future. If you doubt this, just consider how difficult it is to get agreement about the past where there is lots of evidence. Our lack of knowledge about the future can be confusing in the present. The persecution Jesus warned his disciples about in the Final Discourses, and elsewhere in the gospels, is an example. Persecution is difficult and destructive, and after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D., it must have seemed to the first generation of disciples like the end of the world. Rejected by the Jewish authorities they were scattered by the Roman oppressors. What they could not see in the future was that this disaster and their dispersion would spread the Jesus movement all over the Mediterranean and beyond.  

Tags: devotional, encountering, understanding

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.

More from Pastor Joynts Devotionals

return to Pastor Joynts Devotionals