BUILDING12: Do Not Worry - Trust God's Provision

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25 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, "What will we eat?' or "What will we drink?' or "What will we wear?' 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today. (Matthew 6:25-34 NRS)

May the grace and peace of the Lord Jesus be with you, dear Friend. As you read this, it is Good Friday, a solemn day, tragic in all respects, but claimed by the Church to be a Good Friday for what Jesus did on our behalf. Never forget it was love that put Jesus on the cross, though driven there by our sins.

Are you an over-thinker? Which is a good name for people who worry too much. Yes, it's good to analyze most things and to design plans or goals to address your goals or even your daily chores; but if you do it without prayer, listening and reflection, it will lead you to a place of anxiousness and worry. Fret is a four-letter word and it means Forgetting Reliance Erases Trust. Our reliance is on the Lord Jesus but many times we place that on a second tier. Yesterday we spoke about putting God's Kingdom first which means asking God's presence and peace in our lives; fretting tends to place God behind us and not in front of us. Here we find Jesus teaching His disciples and we, His followers some Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth; DO NOT WORRY. TRUST GOD'S PROVISION.

Most commands Jesus gives feel difficult but achievable — love your neighbor, forgive others, serve the least. This one feels different. Do not worry lands on the anxious heart less like an invitation and more like an accusation. As if the person in the grip of genuine fear simply hasn't tried hard enough to stop. Gulp! Is that me He's talking about? (Put your hands down, you in the back!)

But Jesus is not scolding. He is diagnosing — and then offering a cure. The passage that follows is not a lecture on the weakness of anxious people. It is a careful, tender, almost pastoral argument designed to shift the center of gravity in a human life from fear to trust. He is not demanding that we manufacture a feeling we do not have. He is pointing us toward a reality larger than our fear, and asking us to look at it long enough for it to change us.

The word translated worry in the ancient form means to be pulled in different directions, to be divided, to have the mind fractured by competing concerns. Anxiety, in this sense, is not simply a feeling. It is a divided self — a person being pulled apart by the gap between what they need and what they can secure on their own. Jesus addresses it not with a pep talk but with a reorientation toward the Father.

Jesus does something unexpected here. He sends His listeners outside, a field trip as it were, though they were more than likely outside to begin with.

Look at the birds of the air — really look at them. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns. They have no savings account, no retirement plan, no stockpile against an uncertain winter. And yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Then He turns to the wildflowers — the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, dressed in a glory that outshines Solomon's finest court robes, here today and gone tomorrow. Had Jesus been in Texas He would have pointed to our bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes!

The argument is not that birds and flowers are carefree and therefore we should be. It is the argument of how much more. If the Father tends to the birds — creatures of negligible eternal significance — how much more does He tend to you, whom He has made in His image, for whom He gave His Son? If He clothes the grass of the field, which is here and gone, how much more will He clothe you?

Jesus is pointing us to creation as a sermon — a living, daily demonstration of the Father's provision for what He has made. Every bird that finds a worm, every wildflower that opens in the morning, is a small piece of evidence in the case against anxiety. Creation is telling us something about God, if we will stop long enough to look.

We rarely stop. Which is precisely why Jesus says look and consider — active verbs, deliberate attention. He is prescribing the practice of noticing what God is already doing as a remedy for the fear that He will stop.

"And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?"

It is almost gently comic — the image of a person hunched over their anxiety, working furiously at it as if the effort itself will produce the security they are seeking. And gaining nothing. Not an hour, not a cubit, not a single increment of the safety they are laboring toward.

Worry is the great pretender. It mimics control. It feels like doing something — like responsible, serious engagement with the real threats of life. But it produces nothing except the exhaustion of a mind running on a wheel that goes nowhere. Jesus is not telling us that the threats aren't real. He is pointing out that worry, as a response to them, is functionally useless. It does not add. It only subtracts — from our peace, from our presence, from our capacity to actually live the day we have been given.

If worry cannot add a single hour to your life, then every hour spent in worry is an hour taken from the life you actually have. The anxious person, in a very real sense, is not fully living in the present at all — they are living in an imagined future where the worst has happened and they are trying to manage it in advance.

Jesus is calling us back. Back to this day, this hour, this moment — where the Father is already present and already providing.

"But Strive First for the Kingdom"

The pivot of the passage comes in verse 33 — and it reveals what Jesus understands to be the root of anxiety. Since this was our topic yesterday, I remind us that anxiety is a symptom of a misplaced priority; when our priority should be the loving, real presence of our powerful God.

The passage closes with one of the most practical sentences in all of Scripture.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is sufficient for the day.

There is almost a dry humor in this — an acknowledgment that today already has enough difficulty without borrowing tomorrow's in advance. Jesus is not promising a trouble-free future. He is not saying the hard things we fear will never arrive. He is saying: they are not here yet. And when they arrive, the Father who is providing for today will be the Father providing for that day too.

The discipline of living in the present — of refusing to let the imagination run ahead to the worst version of tomorrow and live there instead of here — is one of the most quietly radical things a follower of Jesus can practice. It is the daily, concrete application of trust. The Father has given me today. He will give me tomorrow when it comes. I do not need to carry both at once.

This is what the birds know instinctively, and what we must learn by grace: to live in the day we have been given, sustained by a Father whose provision does not run out. PRA

YER: Loving Heavenly Father, I confess that I have been carrying tomorrow before it has arrived. Forgive my anxiety and the small faith beneath it. Teach me to look at what You are already doing — in the birds, in the flowers, in the daily gifts I have stopped noticing — and to trust that the God who provides for these will not abandon me. Quiet my divided mind and bring me back to this day, where You already are. This I pray in faith, in Christ Jesus' strong name, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Name the worry that woke you up this morning. Write it down, hand it to God in prayer, and then — just for today — refuse to carry it. When it returns, hand it back again. Practice trusting the Father one day at a time.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Bless someone with calm today!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

BUILDING12: Seek First the Kingdom of God

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33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:33 NRSV) Dear Friend, as we pray, please pray for the family of Carrol and Kathleen Erwin, who died close to each other, Kathleen dying on Wednesday, April 1, 2026 at 3:30 am. Carrol and Kathleen are uncle and aunt to our sister, Donna Hisey. Pray God's comfort be with all the family and all who loved them. God bless you for all the prayers you lift up for others!

I was called into ministry when I was in the eleventh grade. I resisted and did not commit to it right away. Long story short; here I am! But it's been wonderful how God has provided for me every step of the way. I remember seeing couples gathering at a singles event and one of the guys who had a fiancée, came to me and asked me if I needed a wife. I know needed ia a tough word, but I said that yes I would like to one day be married and this friend said, “And my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:13). That moment stayed with me and more so because years later this same guy is in the insurance business, and of course I thanked him again for having given me hope and he asked, "Did I say that?" But in 1977 I was an intern minister in Mission, Texas. The church provided a converted garage as my apartment and I got a stipend of $120 a month. All for 80 hours of work per week. Believe it or not, I did not care about the money. I was more worried about whether I was in the right place or not; if ministry would be what God truly wanted from me as I explored the many exits out of Mission. But God provided out of His riches a young lady who caught my attention right away. I wanted to date her immediately and she said no. She was on the Staff Parish Relations Committee and said it would not be ethical. "Who's worried about ethics," asked I? Hey, I was young and lonely! Had I truly been thinking about this situation, $120 then in 1977 would provide for maybe two dates a month, but I knew God would provide a way. I knew that if Nellie was the one whom God was providing I would have more than half of the battle won in having her by my side. I knew her heart to be right, for when I asked about her, my pastor who suggested I call her (I didn't need that suggestion - I was on the case!) said, "She's a teacher. She's a woman of prayer, and she's a tither! She's the kind of woman who will be praying for you all the time, especially as you travel for the Lord." Gulp! I replied, "Sign me up!"

As Jesus prepares the Twelve for ministry, He shares this verse at the end of His discourse on many important things that had people of HIs day, and even today, worried and stressed. Jesus has been watching people. He has watched them exhaust themselves in the pursuit of security — storing up treasure, serving money with the devotion that belongs to God alone, scanning the horizon of the future with the panicked calculation of those who are not sure anyone is in charge. And He names it directly: you cannot serve God and wealth. Not — you should not, or it would be better if you didn't. You cannot. The two masters make mutually exclusive demands, and every life will ultimately reveal which one it has actually been serving.

Then He pivots to anxiety — the internal experience of a life organized around the wrong center. Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. He points to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field — creatures and flowers that do not produce or spin or stockpile, and yet are fed and clothed by the Father's provision. The argument is not that work is wrong or that planning is faithless. It is that the frantic, stomach-tightening anxiety of those who believe everything depends on their own management is a failure to reckon with who the Father actually is.

And then, having named the wrong orientation — wealth, worry, the anxious striving after things — He names the right one. Strive first for the kingdom of God.

Jesus does not say strive only for the kingdom — as though the practical concerns of daily life are irrelevant or unspiritual. He does not say strive eventually for the kingdom — as though it belongs at the end of the agenda, after everything else has been settled. He says first. Before the other things. Prior to them. As the orienting priority from which everything else takes its proper place.

Jesus diagnoses this arrangement as the source of the very anxiety He has been addressing. Anxiety is what happens when the wrong things are first. When security, comfort, and the management of outcomes sit at the center of our lives, every threat to those things becomes a threat to everything. The soul that has organized itself around God's kingdom, by contrast, has a center that cannot be shaken by market fluctuations, health crises, or an uncertain future — because the kingdom of God is not subject to any of those things. I have a friend whose father-in-law used to tell debt collectors, "If you guys don't back off I'm taking your name out of the hat!" They would ask, "What hat?" "The hat where I put all of the names of my debtors; I draw one or two names a month depending on who I can pay; and if your name is not in the hat you won't get paid!" This from a generation that used to see men in suits knocking on doors trying to collect debts. And little ones were taught to fib about mom or dad being home! First is not just an instruction about priorities. It is the prescription for the anxious heart.

The kingdom of God is not primarily a place. It is not a future destination we are waiting to enter after death, though it has a future dimension. It is the active, present reign of God — the reality that comes into being wherever God's will is done, wherever His purposes are accomplished, wherever His character is reflected in human life and community.

Jesus announced that the kingdom had come near in His own person — that wherever He was, the reign of God was breaking in. Where He healed, the kingdom was present. Where He forgave, the kingdom was present. Where the hungry were fed, the excluded were welcomed, and the captive were freed — there the kingdom was happening. To seek the kingdom first, then, is to align our lives with what God is doing in the world.

Righteousness here is not merely personal moral rectitude — the avoidance of individual sin. To seek God's righteousness is to care about what God cares about: the poor, the marginalized, the truthful ordering of human community, the dignity of every person who bears the divine image.

You cannot genuinely seek the kingdom while remaining indifferent to the things the kingdom is concerned with. The one who seeks the kingdom first will find themselves increasingly shaped by kingdom concerns: mercy, justice, peacemaking, purity of heart, the love of neighbor that costs something. The righteousness we seek is not our own — we do not generate it by effort. We seek His righteousness, which means asking God to form His character in us and to align our lives with His justice in the world.

All these things refers back to the practical concerns Jesus has been addressing — food, clothing, the daily necessities of physical life. The promise is not that those who seek the kingdom first will become wealthy, or that faithful Christians are exempt from hardship and want. The history of the saints will not support that reading, and Jesus Himself walked to a cross. The promise is that the Father who clothes the lilies and feeds the birds is the same Father who knows what His children need — and that the one who trusts Him enough to put the kingdom first will find that the Father's provision, in one form or another, does not fail. But the one who has genuinely released the anxious grip on self-provision, who has handed the management of their life to the Father, will discover that the Father manages it — often in ways that could not have been engineered from below. There is also a deeper promise embedded here. The one who seeks the kingdom first discovers, over time, that the kingdom itself becomes the thing they most deeply wanted.

The traditional Lenten practices — fasting, prayer, almsgiving — are not ends in themselves. They are instruments of reordering, tools designed to loosen the grip of the wrong things and strengthen the grip of the right one. When we fast, we practice the truth that life does not consist in bread alone. When we pray, we practice the truth that our deepest need is God Himself. When we give, we practice the truth that we are not the owners of what we have been entrusted with.

All three practices are, in their different ways, acts of seeking first the kingdom. They are the deliberate, repeated choice to put God at the center and to let everything else arrange itself around that center.

The question Lent presses us to ask is not merely theoretical. It is practical and personal: what is actually first in my life? Not what I say is first. Not what I intend to make first eventually. What is actually, functionally, operationally first — revealed in how I spend my time, my money, my attention, my energy at its best? And then: am I willing to let it be the kingdom?

PRAYER: Father, forgive me for the things I have placed before Your kingdom — the securities I have chased, the anxieties that reveal where I have actually put my trust. Reorder me. Make Your kingdom genuinely first — not in name but in the actual shape of my days. I trust that You know what I need, and I release the management of those things to You. In Christ Jesus' strong name I pray, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Look honestly at where your best energy went yesterday. Then ask: what would it look like, in one concrete way, to redirect that energy toward the kingdom today? Do that one thing.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Bless everyone with the peace you have from Jesus!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

BUILDING12: Pray with Faith and Persistence

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9 "Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. (Matthew 6:9-13) 1 He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." 2 He said to them, "When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3 Give us each day our daily bread. 4 And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial." 5 And he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, "Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.' 7 And he answers from within, "Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.' 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs. 9 "So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:1-13 NRSV)

The main purpose of prayer is to love God since God first loved us. I was blessed to have a mother, father, and grandmother who prayed. And thanks to them I learned to pray and to rely on prayer my entire life. All the prayers lifted up served to change me for the better.

Of all the things the disciples could have asked Jesus to teach them — how to preach, how to heal, how to lead — they ask Him to teach them to pray.

They have watched Him. They have seen Him slip away before dawn to be alone with the Father. They have witnessed the way He moves from those solitary hours with a settledness, a clarity, a groundedness that nothing seems to shake. Something is happening in those moments that they want access to. And so they ask — Lord, teach us to pray.

It is one of the most honest requests in all of Scripture. It is the request of people who recognize that they do not yet know how to do the most important thing. And Jesus, characteristically, does not lecture them about prayer. He shows them. He hands them a pattern, a shape, a way of orienting themselves toward God — and then He tells them a story about what kind of God they are orienting themselves toward.

Both matter enormously. The prayer without the story leaves us with a formula. The story without the prayer leaves us with a theology we do not know how to inhabit. Together, they give us everything we need.

The Lord's Prayer in Luke 11 is slightly shorter than Matthew's version, but the structure is the same — and that structure is itself a teaching about the proper ordering of prayer.

It begins not with our needs but with God. Father — the intimacy of the address is startling. Jesus is inviting His disciples into the same relationship with God that He Himself enjoys. Not a distant deity to be approached with elaborate protocol, but a Father — present, personal, disposed toward His children with the warmth that the word implies.

Hallowed be your name — before we bring a single request, we are oriented toward who God is. We are reminded, gently but firmly, that prayer is not primarily a delivery mechanism for our wishes. It is an encounter with a Person — holy, sovereign, worthy of reverence — and that encounter reorders everything else.

Your kingdom come — we pray ourselves into alignment with God's purposes rather than asking God to align Himself with ours. This petition is the surrender of the prayer, the moment where we acknowledge that the agenda we are bringing to God is subordinate to the agenda He is already working out in the world.

Only then — after God has been honored, after the kingdom has been invoked — do we bring our needs. Give us each day our daily bread. Not a year's supply. Not a guaranteed future. Just today. The prayer cultivates a daily dependence that keeps us returning to the Father rather than stockpiling enough provision to become self-sufficient.

Forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. The relational clause returns — as it does in Matthew — linking what we receive from God to what we extend to others. Forgiveness is not a private transaction between the soul and God alone. It is a posture that shapes the whole of our life together.

Do not bring us to the time of trial. An honest acknowledgment of our vulnerability. We are not strong enough on our own. We need the Father's protection, His guidance, His hand between us and what would destroy us.

The prayer is brief. It is complete. And it ends where it begins — with dependence on God rather than confidence in ourselves.

Immediately after giving the prayer, Jesus tells a story — and the story is designed to answer the question that the prayer naturally raises in every honest heart: but does it actually work? Does God actually respond?

A man comes to his neighbor at midnight needing bread for an unexpected guest. The neighbor is already in bed, the door is locked, the children are asleep. He does not want to get up. Do not bother me — the Greek carries a tone of genuine irritation. This is an inconvenient request at an inconvenient hour.

But the man outside keeps asking. And Jesus says — and here the translation matters — the neighbor rises and gives him what he needs not because of friendship but because of the man's persistence. The Greek word is anaideia, which is better translated as shamelessness or audacity. The man outside has no embarrassment about the hour, no hesitation about the imposition, no polite willingness to go away empty-handed. He keeps knocking because he needs bread and he knows his neighbor has it.

Jesus then draws the comparison — carefully, and in a direction that is easy to miss. He is not saying God is like the reluctant neighbor who must be worn down into helping. He is arguing from the lesser to the greater. If even an inconvenienced, irritated, reluctant neighbor will eventually get up and give what is needed simply because of shameless persistence — how much more will your Father, who is neither reluctant nor irritated, who is awake and attentive and already disposed toward you with love, give what you need when you ask?

The parable is not a portrait of God as difficult to reach. It is a portrait of God as infinitely more generous than the best human neighbor — and an invitation to approach Him with exactly the shameless, audacious persistence of the man at midnight.

The three imperatives that follow are among the most well-known words Jesus ever spoke — and among the most misread.

Ask, and it will be given you. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened.

They have sometimes been lifted out of context and made into a blank check — a guarantee that whatever we request in prayer will be delivered. That reading cannot survive contact with the actual experience of prayer, nor with the rest of what Scripture says about how God answers. But the opposite misreading — dismissing these words as merely figurative, not really promising anything — does equal violence to the text.

The Greek verbs here are present imperatives — they carry the sense of continuous, ongoing action. Not ask once and wait. Ask. Keep asking. Search. Keep searching. Knock. Keep knocking. The persistence of the man at midnight is not an embarrassing extreme — it is the model. Prayer is not a single transaction but a sustained relationship, a continued turning toward God with our needs and our trust.

And the promise — it will be given, you will find, the door will be opened — is grounded not in the quantity of our asking but in the character of the one we are asking. Which Jesus makes explicit in what follows.

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?

The images are almost darkly comic — a parent handing a child a snake when they asked for dinner, a scorpion when they asked for breakfast. No parent does this. Even the most imperfect human parent, operating with all the limitations and selfishness of fallen human nature, does not weaponize their child's hunger against them.

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

Two things deserve attention here.

First, the phrase who are evil is not a harsh condemnation. It is a sober, realistic acknowledgment that every human parent — however loving — operates from a nature that is compromised, limited, and self-interested in ways we cannot fully see or control. And yet even so, we give good gifts to our children. The comparison establishes a floor: if we, with all our limitations, manage to give good things — how much more the Father, whose nature is entirely good, whose knowledge is perfect, whose love is without limit or shadow?

Second, notice what Luke says the Father gives: not whatever you ask for in a general sense, but the Holy Spirit. Matthew's version says good gifts. Luke narrows it to the best gift. The ultimate answer to persistent, faithful prayer is not a list of granted requests. It is God Himself — His presence, His Spirit, His life inhabiting ours. This is what prayer is finally reaching toward, even when it does not know it. Every legitimate request is, at its deepest level, a request for more of God — more of His provision, His healing, His justice, His nearness.

The Father gives the Spirit to those who ask. Which means the one who prays persistently, faithfully, shamelessly — day after day, returning to the Father with need and trust — is not merely waiting for answers. They are being formed. Being filled. Being drawn deeper into the very life of God.

These two passages, read together, give us the two pillars of a prayer life that holds.

Faith — the settled confidence, rooted in the character of God revealed in Jesus, that the one we are praying to is good, is present, is attentive, and is more disposed toward our wellbeing than any human parent has ever been toward a child. Faith does not require certainty about outcomes. It requires trust in a Person. It is what allows us to pray your kingdom come and mean it — to genuinely release our preferences into God's purposes without despair.

Persistence — the shameless, audacious, returning-again refusal to give up on prayer even when answers are slow, even when the silence feels long, even when the door seems closed. Persistence is not a failure of faith. It is the expression of faith over time. The one who keeps knocking is the one who still believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that someone is home and that the door will open.

Neither pillar alone is sufficient. Faith without persistence drifts into passivity — a vague trust in God that never actually brings anything to Him. Persistence without faith degrades into anxious repetition — the frantic knocking of someone who is not sure anyone is listening. Together, they describe the prayer life Jesus is inviting His disciples into: bold enough to ask shamelessly, grounded enough to trust the Father with the answer.

Lent is an invitation to examine both. To ask honestly: have I been praying at all? And if so: am I praying with genuine faith in the Father's goodness, and with the persistence that refuses to give up?

The door is not locked. The Father is not asleep. And He gives good gifts — the best gift — to those who ask.

PRAYER: Father, teach us to pray — not as a religious exercise but as a genuine turning toward You with everything we are and everything we need. Where our faith has grown thin, renew it in the knowledge of Your goodness. Where we have given up asking, restore in us the holy audacity of those who know You hear. Give us not only what we ask, but Yourself — the one gift that is better than all others. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Return to the Lord's Prayer today — slowly, one phrase at a time — and let each petition be genuinely meant rather than merely recited. Let it be the beginning, or the renewal, of a persistent and faithful conversation with your Father.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Bless your world with prayer!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

BUILDING12: Forgive Others

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14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6:14-15 NRSV)

Dear Friend, as we pray today, please pray this request shared by a dear friend and former DS in another conference: "Prayers for Bruce, a dear friend, a believer, a Vietnam vet, in Methodist Hospital in DesMoines for Cancer treatments. Peace, Dave." May our voices ring in heaven asking that Bruce receive healing and new strength! Prayers also for this old man as I will preach at Pilgrim Presbyterian Church on April 12th. May the Lord give me a word!

My favorite movie of all time, until it changed, was Monty Python's Search for The Holy Grail. It came out when I was in seminary in Denver,Colorado. I guess being far from home, single, lonely, and eager to entertain myself, I went to see the movie and loved it, and returned a totatl of sixteen times. Money well spent says I! There is a scene in the movie where the seekers (looking for the Holy Grail) are stopped by an old knight known as The Black Knight, who simply says, "None shall pass." *link below to see that scene. And this verse is saying the same thing!

There are passages in Scripture that comfort. There are passages that instruct. And then there are passages that simply stop you where you are and refuse to let you pass until you have dealt honestly with what they are saying.

Matthew 6:14–15 is the third kind.

Jesus has just finished teaching His disciples to pray — the prayer we call the Lord's Prayer, the one that has been on the lips of the church in every generation since. And embedded in that prayer, almost in passing, is a petition that most of us recite without fully absorbing its weight: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It is a remarkable line — the only petition in the prayer that comes with a built-in condition. We are asking God to treat us the way we treat others.

And then Jesus steps outside the prayer and underlines it. Twice. Once positively, once negatively. As if He knows — because He does know — that this is precisely the place where His followers will be most tempted to make an exception, to find a footnote, to quietly decide that this particular teaching does not apply in their particular case.

There is no footnote. There is no exception. There are just these two verses, standing like a door that must be walked through. This comes, believe it or not, at the heart of Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount and the seriousness of the Lord's words is what we shall study; for Jesus was speaking not only to the gathered crowds, but to the !2 especially. "For if you forgive others their trespasses..."

The word translated trespasses is paraptōmata — literally, a falling beside the path, a deviation, a stumbling. It is a word that captures the way human beings wrong one another — not always with calculated malice, but with the ordinary failures of selfishness, carelessness, blindness, and broken promises that accumulate in any relationship over time.

People will wrong you. Some will do so casually, without realizing the damage they leave behind. Some will do so deliberately, with full knowledge of what they are taking from you. Some will betray your trust in ways that alter the course of your life. Some will wound you in the very places where you are most exposed — precisely because they were close enough to know where those places are.

Jesus does not minimize any of this. He does not say the trespasses are small, or that they don't matter, or that you should simply pretend they didn't happen. He acknowledges that there is something real to forgive — a genuine wrong that has been committed, a genuine debt that is owed. Forgiveness is not the denial of injury. It is the decision about what to do with an injury that is real.

The condition Jesus sets — if you forgive — is a present, active, ongoing posture. Not a single dramatic moment of release, after which forgiveness is permanently achieved, but a continued orientation of the will toward the one who has wronged you. Forgiveness, in this sense, is less a feeling and more a decision renewed as often as the wound resurfaces.

"...your heavenly Father will also forgive you..."

The promise here is as clear as anything Jesus says. Forgiveness extended to others is met by forgiveness from God. The one who releases others from what they owe finds themselves released from what they owe. Grace given flows into grace received.

The heavenly Father's forgiveness, in other words, is not simply the reward for our forgiving others. It is the source from which our forgiveness of others must flow. We forgive because we have been forgiven. We release because we have been released. The grace we extend is always a secondary grace — a passing on of what we ourselves have first received.

"But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." And here is where the passage refuses every comfortable shortcut.

This is among the most unsparing things Jesus says in the Gospels, and the church has wrestled with its implications in every generation. Is Jesus saying that our forgiveness of others earns God's forgiveness of us — that it is a precondition we must satisfy before divine mercy is available? The more faithful reading understands the connection differently. An unforgiving heart is not a heart that has genuinely encountered the grace of God. It is a heart that is still operating by the logic of debt and merit — still keeping accounts, still insisting on what is owed, still measuring relationships by the ledger. And a heart still operating by that logic has not yet fully received, or has not yet fully internalized, what forgiveness from God actually means.

The refusal to forgive is not merely a moral failure. It is a spiritual one. It reveals a heart that has not yet stood honestly before its own need and received, with open hands, the mercy that was offered.

Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Reconciliation requires two parties — the one who forgives and the one who receives that forgiveness with genuine repentance. Forgiveness can be granted even when the other person is absent, unrepentant, or no longer living. You can release someone from your inner ledger without having a restored relationship with them. Sometimes, especially in cases of abuse or betrayal, restored relationship is neither possible nor safe — and Jesus is not commanding it here.

Forgiveness is not the erasure of memory. The wound does not have to disappear for forgiveness to be real. Grief and forgiveness are not opposites — you can mourn what was lost while simultaneously choosing not to hold the person who caused the loss in a posture of resentment.

Forgiveness is not the pronouncement that what happened was acceptable. It does not declare the trespass to be no trespass. It does not minimize the harm or excuse the failure. It says, rather: this was real, it cost me something, and I am choosing not to let it define the posture of my heart toward this person going forward. That is a profoundly costly choice — and Jesus never pretends it is otherwise.

Forgiveness is not a feeling that arrives after sufficient emotional processing. It is a decision of the will, made often in the absence of any feeling that supports it, and then renewed as the feeling of injury reasserts itself — which it will, sometimes for years. The willingness to keep forgiving, to refuse to let resentment rebuild what grace has torn down, is the ongoing work of a lifetime.

Lent is precisely suited to this passage because Lent is, at its core, a season of honest self-examination in the light of the cross.

The cross is the place where God's forgiveness of us is most fully displayed. Jesus, in the moment of His execution, prays for His killers: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. He practices what He preaches, at infinite cost. And the entire movement of Holy Week — from Palm Sunday through Good Friday to Easter — is the story of how far God was willing to go to forgive us. While we were still sinners. While we were, in the deepest sense, the ones who put Him there.

To sit with Matthew 6:14–15 during Lent is to hold it up against that reality and ask: in light of what has been forgiven me — the full weight of it, the cost of it, the grace of it — is there anyone I am still refusing to forgive?

You do not have to pretend the wound is not there. You do not have to manufacture a feeling you do not have. You simply have to be willing to begin — to bring the unforgiveness before the God who has forgiven you everything, and to ask Him to do in you what you cannot do in yourself.

PRAYER: Father, You have forgiven me more than I can fully reckon with. Soften whatever in me is still clenched around an old wound, and give me the grace to release it — not because it didn't matter, but because Your mercy toward me is greater than any debt owed to me. In Jesus' strong name I pray, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Bring one name before God — the person it costs you something to forgive — and simply say: I am willing to be made willing. Let that be the first step.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Lead the way with love!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jiRcreu7WEE

BUILDING12:Humility and Servanthood

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43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." (Mark 10:43-35 NRSV)

Dear Friend, a most marvelous of Mondays be yours! A reminder to pray for Mrs. Marie Currie as she undergoes knee replacement surgery in Gonzales, Texas. May the Lord bless this operation to bring healing and wholeness to Marie. Prayers for her husband, Emmit as well. Please pray for Jeff and Sammie Massie. Jeff will be having a steroid epidural shot in his back next Tuesday morning and on April 14 he'll be having shoulder surgery. Please pray that both of these procedures are successful and allow for relief of his pain.Please pray for those who have asked prayers from us through our church's prayer list. Always remember why we pray! Because God answers prayer!

This is a message I need to hear. Often. I am part of a society where the old phrase is still current and applicable; the rat race. I feel it every time I get behind the wheel of my vehicle. It seems drivers in our region are in a hurry and sometimes I'm leading the pack. I'm thankful my loving wife still coaches me on my driving. I need to hear her comments as I am one, like most of this region's drivers who want to get where we are going as quickly as we can. And, given we live in a construction zone that won't be finished until the year 2525, lane changes are a way of life and most of them without notice and usually in the blink of an eye. And that's the blink you'll see as most cars on the road today don't have blinkers! And on a national scale the political climate is far from perfect or peaceful. And here we have Jesus sharing with His disciples and with us, a better way to live.

I remind us that the disciiples were not perfect people because they suffered from the same condition as us; being human, and with that the usual symptoms and desires. Though the phrase "Looking out for number one" was not yet invented it was still very much in use. The reason Jesus addresses this need for humility and servanthood was because two brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come to Jesus with a request. They want the best seats in the kingdom — one on His right, one on His left. They want to be, when all is said and done, the greatest. And before we judge them too quickly, we ought to sit with the uncomfortable recognition that their ambition is not alien to us. The desire to matter, to be recognized, to occupy a position of significance — this is not a peculiarity of first-century fishermen. It is the persistent hum beneath most human striving.

When the other ten disciples hear about the request, Mark tells us they are indignant. Which almost certainly means they are angry not because James and John were wrong to want greatness, but because James and John asked first. The whole group is infected with the same ambition. They have been arguing about who is greatest since at least chapter nine. The question of status and rank has been running beneath the surface of the entire journey.

And then Jesus calls them together — all twelve — and upends everything they thought they understood about power, greatness, and what it means to lead.

"You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them." v. 42) Jesus begins by naming the world's model of greatness honestly and without sentimentality.

The Gentile rulers — the Herods, the Caesars, the Roman governors they have all watched operate — exercise power in a particular direction: downward. Authority flows from the top and presses on those beneath it. Greatness is measured by how many people are below you, how completely they are subject to your will, how thoroughly your preferences shape the lives of others. The great ones lord it over — the Greek is katakurieuousin, to dominate, to exercise power over — and the great ones are tyrants, katexousiazousin, those who press the weight of their authority onto others.

This is not a crude caricature. Jesus is describing a system of power that was everywhere visible in the ancient world and has lost none of its familiarity in our own. The hierarchy of domination — where greatness means being served, where leadership means leveraging position for personal gain, where the measure of your importance is how many people exist to meet your needs — is not a relic. It is the default operating system of human institutions, including, if we are honest, many of our churches.

Jesus does not say this system is surprising. He says: you know this is how it works. Of course you do. You have grown up inside it. You have been shaped by its logic. And it is precisely this logic that James and John have carried, without realizing it, into their request for seats of honor.

"But it is not so among you..." Four words that change the entire architecture.

It is not so among you. Not: it should not ideally be this way. Not: try to do a little better. A flat, declarative negation. The community gathered around Jesus operates by a different logic entirely — not a modified version of the world's system with the rough edges softened, but a genuine inversion of it. The kingdom of God does not merely improve on the Gentile model of power. It overturns it.

This is one of the most radical claims Jesus makes in the entirety of His ministry, and it is delivered not in a formal theological discourse but in response to a squabble among His closest friends about who deserves the most honor. The ordinariness of the occasion makes it more remarkable, not less. This is not abstract teaching for later application. It is the direct correction of an actual failure happening in real time among real people.

And the you matters enormously. Jesus is not speaking about the world in general, or about what society at large ought to look like. He is speaking about the community of His followers specifically. The church — the gathered people of God — is called to be a living demonstration that a different way of ordering human life is possible. Not because Christians are inherently better people, but because they follow a Lord who has shown them a different way and calls them to embody it.

"...whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant..." Jesus does not abolish the desire for greatness. He redirects it.

He does not say: abandon your ambition, suppress your desire to matter, make yourself invisible. He says: if you want to be great — and greatness itself is not the problem — here is what greatness actually looks like in the kingdom. The desire to matter, to make a difference, to lead well, to be significant — these are not sins to be extinguished. They are energies to be reoriented.

The word translated servant is diakonos — from which we get the word deacon. It referred to someone who waited on tables, who attended to the practical, unglamorous needs of others. It was not a position of honor in the ancient world. It was the work of those who had no status to protect.

To become great in the kingdom, Jesus says, is to become this. Not to perform servanthood as a strategy for eventual recognition — doing visible good works with an eye toward how they will reflect on your reputation. But to genuinely orient your life around the needs of others, to find your deepest satisfaction not in being served but in serving, to measure your days not by what you have accumulated or achieved but by what you have given.

This reordering of ambition is not natural. It runs against the grain of every instinct that has been formed by a world that measures human worth by output, status, and recognition. It requires a sustained, daily, Spirit-enabled transformation of the self — which is precisely why it belongs at the heart of a Lenten devotion. Lent is the season in which we examine what our lives are actually oriented toward and ask whether it matches what our lips confess.

"...and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all." Jesus escalates the language deliberately.

From servant — diakonos — He moves to slave — doulos. In the ancient world, this was not a subtle shift. A servant had some degree of social standing. A slave had none. A slave's time was not their own, their preferences were irrelevant, their existence was entirely structured around the needs of another. By using this word, Jesus is not endorsing the institution of slavery — He is reaching for the most extreme image of self-giving available to His audience to make His point impossible to soften.

The one who would be first — who would lead, who would hold the highest place in the community — must be the one most completely given over to the wellbeing of everyone else. Leadership in the kingdom is not a privilege to be enjoyed. It is a burden to be carried on behalf of others. The higher the position, the greater the obligation to serve. The more authority entrusted, the more completely that authority must be wielded for others rather than over them.

This inverts every natural assumption about what leadership is for. Power, in the kingdom, is not a reward for faithfulness. It is a tool placed in the hands of the servant for the sake of those who cannot serve themselves.

"For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." And here is where the teaching ceases to be merely ethical instruction and becomes gospel.

Jesus does not say: this is a good principle, now go practice it. He grounds the entire inversion in His own person and His own mission. The reason the community of His followers is called to this radical servanthood is not that it is a philosophically superior ethic. It is that He came to serve. The logic of the kingdom is not an abstraction — it is an incarnation.

The Son of Man — the title Jesus most consistently uses for Himself, drawing on Daniel's vision of the one who receives an everlasting kingdom — came not to be served. The one who had every right to every honor, the one before whom the whole creation will one day bow, the one at whose name every knee will bend — He came to serve. He came with a basin and a towel. He came to touch lepers and eat with sinners and weep at tombs. He came, ultimately, to give His life.

A ransom for many — the Greek word lytron was the price paid to free a slave or a prisoner. Jesus is using the language of His own approaching death and giving it its meaning before it happens. He will not be merely the victim of unjust execution. He will be the servant giving everything — His very life — in exchange for the freedom of others.

This is the ground of all Christian humility and servanthood. We do not serve to earn our salvation. We serve from a salvation already given, at infinite cost, by the one who bent lowest of all so that we could stand.

The cross is the ultimate act of servanthood. And every act of genuine, self-giving, ego-surrendering service by a follower of Jesus is a small reflection of it — a tiny echo of the great self-giving that purchased our freedom.

The Mirror This Passage Holds Up It is worth pausing here, in the Lenten spirit of honest examination, to let this passage ask its questions directly.

Where in your life is the world's logic of power — the expectation of being served, the protection of status, the quiet insistence on recognition — still operating? Where do you find yourself indignant, like the ten disciples, when someone else receives honor you felt you deserved? Where do you lead with position rather than with a towel?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are the questions this passage will not let us avoid. James and John were not villains. They were people who loved Jesus and had nonetheless absorbed the world's assumptions about greatness so thoroughly that those assumptions shaped even their prayers. We are not so different.

The invitation of this passage is not condemnation. It is reorientation. The same Jesus who corrected His disciples corrects us — not to shame us, but to show us a better way. A truer way. The way He Himself walked, all the way to the cross.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, You are the one who came not to be served but to serve, and You gave everything — held nothing back. Forgive me for the ways I have sought the seat of honor, protected my own status, and measured my worth by who serves me rather than by how freely I serve. By Your Spirit, reorder my ambitions. Make me genuinely, practically, daily a servant — not for recognition, but because You first served me at the cost of Your life. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Find one concrete, unannounced act of service to perform today — something that costs you something, that no one will likely notice or praise, and that is done entirely for the good of another.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Bless someone with hope today!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

BUILDING12: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

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39 And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' (Matthew 22:39 NRSV)

To be a disciple of Jesus, Jesus taught them that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. For some it might have been a reaffirmation, but Jesus wanted them ot know the seriousness of this commandment. If you ever see infants interacting with other infants, you see that they are still at a point where they have not made any judgments about differences and thus no negative thoughts have entered into their mind; how long do you suppose that lasts? Sadly, we all know the answer. It just takes one parent to say something negative about someone else. and the baby has learned something new albeit something awful. And if it isn't the parent, then someone else will step in and begin to teach the infant what the infant would be so much better off not knowing. Interesting that the moment Jesus says this to His disciples is during the last week of His life on earth. Imagine the weight of this moment.

Jesus has entered Jerusalem to crowd-shouts of Hosanna, has cleared the Temple, and is now engaged in a series of increasingly hostile exchanges with the religious establishment. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes come at Him in waves — each group testing Him with questions designed to trap, discredit, or expose Him. The question about the greatest commandment, posed by a lawyer in Matthew 22:36, is one of these tests. It was not an innocent theological inquiry. It was a snare.

And yet Jesus answers it not defensively but with stunning clarity and generosity — first citing the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:5, the heart of Jewish daily prayer, and then immediately adding: "And a second is like it."

That phrase — like it — is everything. The Greek word is homoia, meaning similar in kind, comparable in nature, belonging to the same order. Jesus does not say the second commandment is a footnote to the first, or a lesser obligation to be attended to after the primary one is satisfied. He says it is like the first — cut from the same cloth, inseparable from it in practice. You cannot, He implies, genuinely fulfill one while ignoring the other.

The commandment Jesus quotes is not new. It comes from Leviticus 19:18 — "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord."

In its original setting, the command appeared within a dense cluster of ethical instructions governing communal life in Israel. The surrounding verses address fair wages for laborers, honest treatment of the deaf and blind, impartial justice in court, and the prohibition of slander. The love commanded here was not a vague sentiment — it was expressed through specific, concrete practices that protected the vulnerable and held the community together.

Crucially, in Leviticus 19, the word neighbor initially referred to fellow Israelites — "your people." But within the same chapter, just a few verses later, the command is extended: "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself" (v. 34). Even in its original context, the boundary of neighbor was already being pushed outward.

By the time of Jesus, the question "Who is my neighbor?" was one of active and serious rabbinical debate. Different schools drew the circle differently. Some interpreted neighbor narrowly — fellow Jews, fellow members of the covenant community. Others were more expansive.

Jesus addresses this question directly in Luke 10, where the same exchange about the great commandment is followed immediately by the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When the lawyer presses — "And who is my neighbor?" — Jesus responds not with a definition but with a story in which the hero is a Samaritan, a person the Jewish audience would have considered a religious and ethnic outsider. The neighbor, Jesus concludes, is whoever acts with mercy — and the real question is not who qualifies as my neighbor but whether I am willing to be a neighbor to whoever stands before me in need.

In Matthew 22, Jesus does something equally significant. He links the two commandments so tightly that He can say in verse 40: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The entire moral and spiritual architecture of Israel's covenant life — every command, every prophetic call to justice, every instruction about worship and ethics — is suspended from these two points. Pull them out, and everything else collapses. Honor them, and everything else falls into its proper place.

The standard reading of "love your neighbor as yourself" treats the as yourself as a measure of degree — love them this much, as much as you love yourself. And that is certainly part of it. But there is more here worth examining.

The command assumes a basic, healthy self-regard — not vanity or self-absorption, but the ordinary human instinct to care for oneself, to seek one's own wellbeing, to take one's own needs and dignity seriously. This is the baseline. Now extend that same instinct outward. What you naturally do for yourself — attend to, protect, provide for, take seriously — do for the person in front of you.

This has a disorienting implication: those who genuinely cannot love themselves — who live in deep self-contempt, shame, or self-destruction — will find this command extraordinarily difficult, not because they are morally deficient but because the instrument of measure is itself broken. The pastoral wisdom here is that learning to receive God's love for oneself is not a selfish detour from the command — it is necessary equipment for obeying it.

The apostle John will make this explicit decades later: "Those who say 'I love God' and hate their brothers or sisters are liars" (1 John 4:20). The vertical and horizontal cannot be separated without both being distorted. A religion that is all transcendence and no mercy becomes cold and self-righteous. A social ethic that is all horizontal service with no grounding in God eventually loses its footing — its sense of why human beings are worth loving at all.

The reason the neighbor is worth loving, at full depth, is that the neighbor bears the image of God. Every human being — the agreeable and the difficult, the familiar and the strange, the deserving and the seemingly undeserving — carries within them the imago Dei, the divine image that makes them irreducibly valuable. To love the neighbor is, in some genuine sense, to honor the God whose image they bear. The two commandments are not just companions. They are reflections of one another.

The church in every generation is tempted to redraw the circle of neighbor in ways that conveniently exclude whoever is most threatening, most foreign, most ideologically opposed, or most costly to love. We do this not with malice but with the quiet management of categories — deciding, below the level of conscious thought, who counts and who doesn't, who is close enough to deserve our full moral attention.

Jesus will not allow it. The parable of the Samaritan was told precisely because the original question — Who is my neighbor? — was a boundary-drawing question, an attempt to identify the edge of obligation. Jesus dissolves the question. He refuses to hand over a list. He tells a story instead, and in that story, the neighbor turns out to be the one you least expected, loving the one you would least have chosen. The command is not love the neighbors you have selected. It is be a neighbor to whoever you encounter.

In our fractured cultural moment — sorted by politics, class, race, geography, and ideology into increasingly sealed communities — this commandment lands with particular force. The person across the aisle, across the border, across the theological divide is not exempted from the second great commandment. They are, in fact, precisely the test of whether we are keeping it.

PRAYER: Lord, forgive me for the neighbors I have quietly decided not to see. Expand my circle. Soften my categories. Make Your love for every image-bearer You have made the love that moves through me. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Think of one person you find it genuinely difficult to love. Pray for them by name today — not that they would change, but simply that God would bless them. Let that be your first act of obedience to the second commandment.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr. TOMORROW: Repent and Believe the Good News

BUILDING TWELVE: Love God Completely

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37 He said to him, " "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. (Matthew 22:37-38 NRSV)

Twelve. An important number. It's the number of the followers called by Jesus to His disciples. Most heard from Jesus' lips, "Come. Follow me." All said yes. None knew the extent of the commitment they were making in saying yes. Not one of the twelve asked to be released. They all followed Jesus for three years and after Jesus' resurrection and ascension into Heaven, still followed. All died for their faith because of the love they had for Jesus.

Today we will look at the first of Jesus's Twelve Major Teachings to the Disciples in hopes of you and me becoming like the original twelve an becoming true followers at Jesus' invitation to transform the world. I want Jesus' teachings to impact our lives in positive and contagious ways, so that in time, you and me will reach at least eleven more and have a band of brothers and sisters to continue the unfinished work of Jesus. I want us built up spiritually and theologically. If you're willing, please continue reading. If you're not, thank you for stopping by and I pray God bless and protect you in whatever path you choose to follow Jesus. Pray for us.

The first major teaching of Jesus was from His own Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures we call the Old Testament. We first find this in Deuteronomy 6:4–5: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” The Hebrew word for "Hear" is Shema and is called "The Shema." Years ago, in Florida, in a Jewish store I made a purchase and the store owner placed in my bag a small copy in Hebrew of The Shema. It was his way of witnessing to his faith. He has "heard," and wants others to hear. And beyond hearing comes obeying and following what the commandment teaches. It was what Jesus held as very sacred and important: We must love God completely. As the ancients wrote it, Jesus taught it and lived it, for it was central to His faith; loving God.

The commandment says this love begins in our heart. With the love that the heart produces, we lift it up to God. Completely. With whatever capacity we hold in our heart should be that which we have towards God. From God we have received all things, and it is only fitting that we return that love to Him. For the Jews, this commandment is recited morning and evening; as a reminder, as a prayer, as a guide for the day's objectives and goals. Could you make that part of your morning and before-bed prayers? Imagine the day and the sleep you will have as you remind yourself of the need we have to love God completely.

In Hebrew thought, the heart — levav — was not primarily the seat of emotion. It was the seat of the will, the place where decisions are made, where intentions are formed, where the self most essentially chooses. To love God with all your heart is to ask that your deepest wanting be reoriented — that what you reach for first, what you return to when no one is watching, what your life quietly orbits — be Him.

This is where most of us feel the gap most acutely. We know what our hearts actually reach for. We know what fills our idle thoughts, what we turn to for comfort, what we quietly treasure above all else. Loving God with the whole heart does not mean those other loves vanish entirely — but it means they are ordered beneath the one love that holds everything together. It means asking, again and again: Lord, be the center. Be what I want most.

The second part of the commandment says we shall love the Lord our God with all our soul. The word here is nephesh — breath, life-force, the animating essence of a person. It carries the sense of everything you are, not merely what you think or decide. Some of the ancient rabbis taught that loving God with all your soul meant loving Him even if He required your very life — that nothing, not even survival, would be withheld from this love.

For most of us, the daily application is less dramatic but no less costly. It means that no part of us is held in reserve, no corner of our life quietly marked off limits to God's claim. Our ambitions, our fears, our identities, our private selves — all of it offered, all of it available. This is not a single dramatic surrender but a thousand small ones, made over the course of a lifetime. It means asking: Lord, have all of me. Even the parts I haven't shown anyone. Again, imagine making this a part of your morning and evening prayers? What could become of you?

The final part is to love God with all our mind. The Hebrew word meod is unusual here — it more literally means "muchness" or "abundance," and it carries a sense of force, energy, and resources. Love God with everything you have to bring: your strength, your time, your money, your attention, your energy at its best rather than its leftover dregs.

This dimension is perhaps the most practical and the most convicting. It asks where we actually spend what we have been given. Not in a spirit of anxious accounting, but in a spirit of honest examination: does the way I spend my days reflect someone in love with God? Does my energy go toward knowing Him, toward the people He loves, toward the work He has given me? To love God with all your might is to ask that nothing be withheld on the grounds of cost.

What makes this commandment finally livable is the recognition that we cannot fulfill it on our own — and that the God who commands it is also the one who produces it in us. The whole of Deuteronomy 6 is set within the framework of God's prior love: He brought them out of Egypt, He chose them, He remained faithful across generations. The commandment to love does not come as an entrance requirement. It comes as a response to love already given.

And so this great commandment becomes, finally, a great prayer. We hold up to God the love He requires of us and confess: I cannot do this. Not fully. Not consistently. Not in my own strength. And we ask Him to do in us what we cannot do ourselves — to reorder our hearts, to claim our whole selves, to become the one our lives increasingly orbit.

This is not a prayer prayed once. It is the prayer of a lifetime, renewed each morning, returned to each time we drift.

PRAYER: Loving God, You alone are worthy of this love, and I confess that I have given You so much less. My heart wanders to smaller things. My soul holds back corners I am afraid to surrender. My strength goes to a hundred lesser purposes. Forgive me, and do what I cannot do for myself: draw me back to You. Reorder what I love. Claim what I withhold. Fill me with a love for You that is not manufactured by effort but kindled by Yours. Make the Great Commandment the great story of my life. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Make the repetitiion of this prayer a daily thing at first awakening and right before bed. Make it a part of your daily prayer life!

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. Build someone up with your faith!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr. TOMORROW: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself!