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Growing Joy June 3 Devotional

by David Joynt on June 03, 2023


ACTS 2:12-13 | 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

 

Life and history are not self-interpreting. Two people can see the same miracle and assess it differently. One can be amazed, dumbfounded, overwhelmed, and deeply moved. Another can be cynical, doubting, and dismissive. So it was with Pentecost. Some  celebrated this amazing moment of divine intervention and spiritual awakening. Some sneered that it must be the drunken   after affects of the previous evening’s revelry. The world tends to reduce and minimize the Spirit’s work, to mock and reduce it to the world’s own terms. But the joy of the Spirit beats any mere buzz!

 

Has your experience of God ever been mocked or reduced?

 

 

Gracious God,

Grant us patience with critics and skeptics. Let us remember the indescribable quality of our joy.

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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