"Heaven Came Down & Glory Filled My Soul!"

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1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. 9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. 11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5:1-11 NRS)

"It wasn't anything I did, for He knows the life I led. It was because of the wrong choices and hateful decisions I made that I ended up right next to Him, and I truly deserved it! It was a miracle I could even hear Him speak for the crowd was so loud in their jeers and mocking, and it didn't help that our partner there joined in and he with a request that if He wanted, He could get us off that cross; I felt at that moment that though I truly deserved to die I also believed He did not and I also believed He was the Messiah, so I got out the words that said, 'Jesus, remember me, when You come into Your kingdom.' And here I am, in the Kingdom. I don't know a thing about church doctrine or creeds or confessions; all I know is that I said for Him to remember me, and He did."

This, dear friends, is justification by faith which brings us peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ as the Apostle Paul wrote in that first verse. He was another one who understood that our salvation comes through faith alone; not works. And here we will discover more of what Jesus shared with Paul about this reality.

Opening: The Verse at the Center of Everything

Romans 5 is one of those passages where Paul builds an argument the way a master builder lays a foundation — course by course, each layer resting on the one beneath it, until the structure rises to a height that takes your breath away. And at the very center of this passage, holding up everything on either side of it, is a single verse that connects Pentecost to the deepest experience of the Christian life.

“Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Poured into our hearts. The same word — the same outpouring — that describes the Spirit at Pentecost. The rushing wind and the tongues of flame were not a private event for the upper room. They were the visible, dramatic announcement of something that was about to happen personally and intimately in every believer who would ever call on the name of the Lord. The love of God, poured out like water, poured out like fire, into the interior of a human life.

This is where Pentecost lives. Not only in church history. In your heart.

Peace, Access, and the Ground We Stand On

Paul opens with the result of justification by faith: peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Not the peace of resolved circumstances or calmed emotions, but the peace of a relationship restored — the hostility between a holy God and a sinful humanity ended, the enmity gone, the distance collapsed.

And then he adds something that should stop us: “through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” Access. The word carries the sense of being introduced into the presence of royalty — brought before someone before whom you could not simply walk in uninvited, granted an audience you could not have arranged for yourself. Through Christ, we have been brought into the very presence of God and given a place to stand there. Not as visitors. Not on probation. In grace.

This is the ground beneath every Christian’s feet. Not our performance. Not our consistency. Not our feelings about our own spiritual health on any given morning. Grace. We stand in grace, which means that what holds us there is not our grip on God but his grip on us — the same grip that held through the cross, through the resurrection, through Pentecost, and through every difficult season his people have ever walked through.

From this ground — peace with God, access through Christ, standing in grace — Paul builds his argument toward the hardest part: what we do with suffering.

The Long Road Through Suffering to Hope

Paul’s claim that we boast in our sufferings is one of the most challenging sentences in the New Testament. Not endure our sufferings. Not accept them stoically. Boast in them.

He is not celebrating pain for its own sake. He is tracing a chain of transformation that runs through suffering rather than around it: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. The chain is not automatic or painless. It requires something from us at every link — the decision to endure rather than collapse, the willingness to let difficulty do its forming work rather than fighting it off or numbing it out, the patience to wait for the hope that lies at the end of the chain.

But here is what makes the chain hold. Here is the Pentecost center of the whole passage: “and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

The hope does not fail — not because we are strong enough to hold onto it, but because the love that is its foundation has been poured into us by the Spirit. The Spirit is not a distant resource we can access in emergencies. He has been poured into our hearts. He is an interior presence, a permanent indwelling, the love of God made personal and immediate and real in the deepest part of who we are.

When Paul says God’s love has been poured into our hearts, the verb is in the perfect tense in Greek — which means it describes an action completed in the past with effects that continue into the present. At Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out. At your conversion, the Spirit was poured in. And the pouring has never stopped. The love of God is not being rationed. It is not running out. It has been poured, and it abides, and it is the reason that the hope at the end of the suffering chain does not collapse under the weight of what we have been carrying.

While We Were Still Sinners

Paul then offers the proof of the love he has just described, and it is a proof that goes all the way to the bone.

“But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

Not when we had cleaned ourselves up. Not when we had demonstrated sufficient remorse or spiritual readiness. While we were still sinners. While we were, as Paul says just a few verses earlier, weak and ungodly — not merely imperfect but actively contrary to the purposes of God. The timing of the cross is the measure of the love behind it.

We would understand a love that waited for the beloved to become more loveable. We would understand a love that required some minimum threshold of worthiness before it gave itself away. What we cannot fully comprehend — what Paul himself seems to reach for without quite being able to hold — is a love that moves toward the enemy, the sinner, the ungodly, and gives itself away before there is any reason to do so except the love itself.

This is the love that has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit. Not a smaller version of it. Not a diluted form for daily use. The same love that sent the Son to the cross has been poured — lavishly, without reservation, into the interior of your life by the Holy Spirit given to you.

On Pentecost Sunday, that is the truth we are celebrating. Not an event in history, though it began in history. A present, personal, interior reality — the love of God, poured out and abiding, the hope that does not disappoint, the peace in which we stand.

For Reflection

Romans 5 gives us three things to carry from this Pentecost Sunday into the week ahead.

The ground to stand on: peace with God, access through Christ, grace as the floor beneath our feet — not performance, not consistency, not feelings. If you wake tomorrow with no sense of God’s presence, the ground has not moved. You are still standing in grace.

The chain to trust: suffering is not outside the purposes of God. The Spirit who has been poured into your heart is at work in the hard places, producing endurance and character and a hope that will not collapse. You do not have to manufacture your way through the suffering chain. You have to stay in it, trusting the one who walks through it with you.

The love to receive: God proved what his love is made of while you were still a sinner. Nothing you have done since, and nothing you will do, changes the quality of that love or diminishes the fullness of the Spirit poured into your heart. Receive it. Live from it. Let it be the answer you give when the world asks why your hope still holds.

PRAYER: Spirit of God, poured out at Pentecost and poured into our hearts, make the love of God so real and so present in us that our hope holds firm through every suffering, and we boast in nothing but the grace in which we stand. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one place in your life where hope has been fading under the weight of suffering or disappointment, and this week deliberately receive the love of God poured into your heart by the Spirit — returning to it in prayer each day as the ground that does not shift.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God, and you matter to me! Hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured out into our hearts!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

From Compassion to Commission

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Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd… “Freely you have received; freely give. Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts — no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep. Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their house until you leave. As you enter the home, give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet… “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you… The one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 9:35–10:8–23 NIV)

Happy Monday, dear Friend! I pray you all had a relaxing and renewing of your lives during this weekend. Nellie and I were blessed in taking our two oldest grandkids to Fredericksburg to tour for the first time, the National Museum of the War in the Pacific, which was very interesting, and which I really encourage you to see. It's quite the museum with plenty of exhibits. One part made me sad, for it was a photo of Hitler Youth, the Nazi group formed for teenagers in Germany in support of Adolf Hitler to join and fight. It made me sad for I remembered my Church History professor, Dr. Klaus Penzel, who was in that group and deployed to fight in France where he was captured and put in a camp. It was at that camp where he met Jesus and became a believer and later felt led to get educated in the history of this movement that he now loved. He was a super smart individual and I admired him and his love for the Lord Jesus. It took me a couple of weeks while sitting in his lectures to realize that when he said, "Christian face," he was talking about the Christian faith. Boy was I perplexed! I had to confess I looked around at my classmates to see which ones truly looked like Christians, all the while trying to remember what I looked like! This will all part of my getting ready, being prepared to go forth and do what the Lord had called me to do. It was fun. It was not fun. It was challenging and it was sometimes truly difficult. Many were the days of those 48 years that I had to share with Nellie and others, "They don't pay me enough!" But the days when I would gleefully say, "I can't believe they pay me to do this!" were more.

Opening: The Briefing Before the Road

In any mission, there is a moment when the one who sends gathers those being sent and tells them exactly what they are walking into. No glossing over the risks. No false promises of smooth roads and friendly crowds. Just the honest, clarifying truth about the territory — and the equipment they will carry into it.

That is what Jesus is doing in these verses. The compassion of chapter nine has already moved him. The twelve have already been named and commissioned. The authority has already been given. And now, before they set one foot on the road, Jesus briefs them on what the journey will actually look like.

It is one of the most honest mission briefings in all of Scripture. And precisely because of its honesty, it is also one of the most reassuring.

Travel Light: The Theology of Empty Hands

The first instructions Jesus gives are about what not to take. No gold or silver. No copper. No bag, no extra shirt, no sandals beyond what they are wearing, no staff. The list is striking in its thoroughness — Jesus seems determined to send them out with as little as possible between them and their dependence on God.

This is not asceticism for its own sake. It is a theology carried in a traveling posture. When you go with empty hands, you cannot pretend that the provision you receive along the way came from your own preparation. When you arrive at a home with nothing to offer but the message and the peace of Christ, the welcome you receive — or the rejection — tells you immediately where the soil is open and where it is not.

The instruction to find a worthy person in each town and stay there, giving your peace to the household, is a model of what missiologists today call relational mission — going not as a parachuting authority who delivers a message and departs, but as a guest who enters a home, receives hospitality, and lets the relationship itself become the vessel for the gospel. Jesus’ peace, extended to a household, is not merely a greeting. It is a real spiritual reality — something that either rests on the home or returns to the sender, depending on how it is received.

And when a town refuses to receive them — shake the dust off your feet and move on. There is no instruction to argue, to escalate, to stay and wear the resistance down by force. The commission is not to manufacture receptiveness. It is to offer the gospel genuinely and let people choose. The workers’ job is to go and give. The harvest belongs to the Lord of it.

Sheep Among Wolves: The Company That Makes It Possible

Then comes the line that sets the realistic frame for everything else: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.”

Jesus does not say this to frighten them. He says it to prepare them — and to introduce the two qualities that will make the difference between faithful witness and foolish vulnerability: the shrewdness of snakes and the innocence of doves. These two are not in tension. The snake’s shrewdness is the wisdom that reads a situation clearly, that does not rush naively into danger, that navigates the landscape of opposition with intelligence and care. The dove’s innocence is the purity of motive that cannot be compromised, the refusal to meet hostility with its own methods, the integrity that remains intact when everything around it is corrupt.

The church in every generation has needed both. The witness that is only shrewd becomes cynical and calculating. The witness that is only innocent becomes naive and easily crushed. Jesus asks for both at once — clear-eyed about the wolves, unstained by them.

And then the warnings deepen: councils, synagogues, governors, kings. The twelve are being prepared not for a comfortable village tour but for a mission that will, in time, bring them before the highest authorities of their world. This is not a failure scenario. Jesus describes it as witness — “on my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles.” The opposition itself becomes an opportunity. The arrest becomes a platform. The trial becomes a testimony.

But the promise that holds all of it together is the one Jesus saves for last: “when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”

The sheep among wolves are not alone. The Spirit of the Father goes with them into every courtroom, every hostile village, every moment when their own words run out. They are sent with empty hands and a full presence — the presence of the one who sends them, speaking through them, in every situation the road brings.

For Reflection

Jesus ends this section with a word that carries the weight of everything that has come before: “The one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Standing firm is not the same as standing still. It is the ongoing, daily, sometimes costly choice to keep going — to keep offering the gospel in the face of indifference, to keep traveling light when the temptation is to accumulate more security, to keep trusting the Spirit to provide the words when our own words are not enough.

The commission of Matthew 10 is not a first-century document that expired when the twelve returned. Jesus’ instruction to pray for workers and his sending of the twelve are the beginning of a pattern that has never stopped. The harvest is still plentiful. The wolves are still real. The Spirit of the Father is still speaking through ordinary, sent, empty-handed people who go in the name of Jesus.

We are those people. We carry the same commission, the same authority, and the same promise: it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. You do not need to be eloquent. You need to be willing to go — and to trust that the one who sends never sends without accompanying.

Travel light. Extend the peace. Shake off what does not receive it. Stand firm. The Lord of the harvest is with you on the road.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, send us out with empty hands and your full presence, shrewd enough to navigate what we face and innocent enough not to be stained by it, trusting that the Spirit of our Father will speak through us in every moment our own words fall short. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, go to one conversation, one relationship, or one need in your world with empty hands — no agenda to protect, no outcome to control — and trust the Spirit of your Father to provide the words and the welcome that only he can give.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! “It will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” Matthew 10:20 (NIV)

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

God Needs Nothing

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The God of gods — it’s God! — speaks out, shouts, “Earth!” Summoned from east to west, from desert to ocean, he shines out from Zion, resplendent. Our God makes his entrance, he’s not shy in his coming: Starblaze and earthfire are his advance guard, a flaming cavalry escorting him in. He summons heaven and earth as a jury, he’s taking his people to court: “Listen, dear people. I am God, your God. I’m not cross with you. I haven’t come to ruin you. But it’s time we had a talk, you and I. Your worship is about what I want and accept, not about what you think I want. Your whole life and everything in it is part of the offering. But honestly, do you think I need your sacrifices? Do you think I need the meat of bulls and goats? Every animal in the forest is mine, the wild animals on the hills. I know every mountain bird by name. The whole world is mine, and I can do what I want with it. Do I need your burnt offerings? No, I don’t. If I were hungry, would I ask you for food? The world is my restaurant! It’s the praising life I want, not more religion. I want you to offer your life to me, your thanksgiving life. Pray to me in your time of trouble. I’ll help you, and you’ll honor me.” (Psalm 50:1-15 The Message Bible)

I am thankful for the way I was raised. My life was pretty much centered around church. My grandmother came to faith in Jesus thanks to a Quilting Circle at El Buen Pastor Methodist Church (before Unification in 1968) and through doing something she loved, she came to know the love of her Savior Jesus Christ. Her oldest daughter, my aunt Sylvia Valverde was invited to be a part of the MYF which in those days included "kids" up until 25 years of age and the carload of girls that came to pick her up caught the eye of my Dad, and so Dad started to attend youth and through youth came also into faith. We were the church every time the doors were opened, so Sunday twice a day, Wednesday night worship and any other event no matter the day or time. I can't say that I ever disliked church but I do remember after coming to faith myself, loving the church more. And today's passage was written some many years by a man who loved God and God's Church which he found in the fields, the temple, the battlefield and wherever he was. May this bless our journey.

Opening: When God Calls a Meeting

There is something almost startling about the opening of Psalm 50. God does not whisper. He does not suggest. He shouts. The God of gods calls out “Earth!” — summons the entire creation as a courtroom, with heaven and earth as the jury — and announces that it is time for a conversation with his people.

This is not the gentle shepherd calling his sheep. This is the judge of all the earth arriving with starblaze and earthfire as his escort, in a scene that The Message renders with a vividness that is hard to shake: “Our God makes his entrance, he’s not shy in his coming.”

And when God speaks, the first thing he says to his people is both unexpected and clarifying: “I’m not cross with you. I haven’t come to ruin you. But it’s time we had a talk.”

What follows is one of the most direct and penetrating things God says anywhere in the Psalms about the nature of worship — what he actually wants from us, and what he does not. And it turns out the two are very different things.

The God Who Doesn’t Need a Thing

God’s challenge to his people begins with a question that cuts through centuries of religious assumption: “But honestly, do you think I need your sacrifices? Do you think I need the meat of bulls and goats?”

The people had been bringing their offerings. The ritual calendar was being observed. The sacrifices were going up. From the outside, everything looked appropriately religious. But God pulls back the curtain and reveals the faulty premise underneath all of it: the assumption that God needs something from us — that our worship is a supply chain, filling some divine deficit.

He dismantles it with a sweep of his hand. Every animal in the forest is already mine. Every mountain bird, I know by name. The whole world is mine. The Message captures his point with characteristic directness: “If I were hungry, would I ask you for food? The world is my restaurant!”

This is not God being dismissive of worship. It is God correcting a fundamental misunderstanding about what worship is for. Worship does not give God something he lacks. It does not replenish a supply or satisfy a need. The God who made the world out of nothing, who owns every creature and every mountain and every sea, is not waiting on our offerings to meet a deficit.

So why worship at all? Because worship does something to us, not to God. It reorients us. It reminds us of who is actually large and who is actually small, who is the owner and who is the steward, who is the source and who is the recipient. Worship is not a transaction. It is a reorientation of the whole person toward the only one worthy of ultimate allegiance.

The Praising Life, Not More Religion

Having cleared away the misunderstanding, God tells his people what he actually wants. And it is simpler and more demanding than any sacrificial system.

“It’s the praising life I want, not more religion. I want you to offer your life to me, your thanksgiving life.”

The praising life. Not a praising hour on Sunday mornings, not a praising posture in the sanctuary that evaporates in the parking lot. A praising life — the kind of orientation toward God that shapes Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, that flavors ordinary conversations and daily decisions and quiet moments when no one is watching.

The Message’s rendering of “thanksgiving life” is worth sitting with. Thanksgiving is not a feeling that arrives when circumstances are good. It is a posture — the deliberate choice to receive the whole of life as a gift from the God who made it, who owns all of it, who gives us breath and food and morning and relationship not because we have earned any of it but because he is generous. To live a thanksgiving life is to be the kind of person who is genuinely surprised and genuinely grateful, all the way down.

And then God adds something that reframes prayer entirely: “Pray to me in your time of trouble. I’ll help you, and you’ll honor me.”

God is not asking us to pretend trouble does not exist. He is not calling us to a relentless positivity that denies the reality of hard seasons. He is inviting us to bring the trouble to him — to cry out to the God who shouts “Earth!” and whose entrance is escorted by starblaze and earthfire — and trust that this same magnificent God will help. And in the bringing and the trusting and the receiving of that help, we honor him. The praising life is not just the shout in the sanctuary. It is also the honest prayer in the hard place.

For Reflection

Psalm 50 is a psalm for anyone who has ever confused the performance of religion with the reality of relationship. God does not want more activity on his behalf. He does not need to be supplied or satisfied or appeased. He wants us — our whole lives, offered in gratitude, turned toward him in the good days and the hard ones alike.

The question this psalm leaves us with is a searching one: is the worship we offer God a transaction — something we bring in exchange for something we want — or is it a reorientation? Is it the praising life, or more religion?

The God who makes his entrance with starblaze and earthfire, who knows every mountain bird by name, who owns the whole world and has no needs we can meet — that God wants our thanksgiving. Our honesty in trouble. Our trust that when we call, he will help. He wants, in short, a relationship that runs all the way through our lives, not a ritual that runs one hour a week.

That is simpler than religion. And it is far more demanding. It asks not for our sacrifices but for ourselves.

PRAYER: God of gods, teach us to live the praising life — bringing you our thanksgiving in the good days, our honesty in the hard ones, and our whole selves as the only offering you have ever actually wanted. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Choose one ordinary moment this week — a meal, a commute, a morning cup of coffee — and receive it consciously as a gift from the God who owns everything and gives freely, letting that moment become the beginning of your thanksgiving life.

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

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Go and Receive a Lot

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1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” 4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. 9 Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. (Genesis 12:1-9 NIV)

I have been blessed to live in many parts of the state, and once out-of-state for school, and all have been wonderful in their own regard. Some areas have struck me as places where not all the kids want to stay in, and kids that would never ever ever consider living any place else. Among those are kids who have never left the area. I was so amazed to take university students from the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio or Hunt, Texas, that had never left the Valley. Their excitement was awesome! I myself, considered Kingsville back in my day, as a paradise of sorts. I had a creek to spend my days; family members near enough to see on a regular basis, especially the only grandmother I ever knew and both of my grandfathers. When the economy in Kingsville went south and my Dad was unemployed and trying new job after new job, when he finally got a good job in Houston, Texas, it was not a complete surprise that we were having to move from paradise to the evil empire of the north. This passage introduces us to Father Abraham, who is invited by God to move. Away. From his country. From his people. From his father's household. To an unknown land. v There is an argument to be made that Genesis 12:1 is the most consequential sentence in all of human history. Not because of its length — it is a single command with a single destination that is not yet named. But because of what hangs on it.

Everything that follows in the biblical story — the covenant, the exodus, the prophets, the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, Pentecost, the church reaching to the ends of the earth — hangs on this moment. One man. One call. One act of obedience in response to a promise he could not yet see fulfilled. And through that one man, all peoples on earth would be blessed.

It begins with a word that God has been saying to his people ever since: Go.

Leave What You Know

The call God gives Abram has a shape that is worth sitting with, because it is the shape of almost every genuine call God gives. He does not begin with the destination. He begins with the departure. v “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

Three things are named in what Abram must leave, and each one is more intimate than the last. His country — the geography that has shaped him, the land he knows how to read. His people — the community that has formed his identity, the faces that have always been there. His father’s household — the inner circle, the family, the root system that holds a person in place in the world.

And the destination? The land I will show you. Not named. Not mapped. Not explained in advance. Abram is being asked to release his grip on everything that has given his life its stability and shape — and to walk toward a place God has not yet described, on the strength of a promise God has not yet proved.

This is the grammar of faith in every generation. God rarely gives us the whole map. He gives us the next step and the promise, and asks us to move. The call always costs something. It always involves leaving something behind. And what it asks us to leave is almost always the thing we were most holding onto for security.

Abram was seventy-five years old. This was not a young man’s adventure. This was the uprooting of an entire established life, at an age when most people are settling in rather than setting out. And yet: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” No argument recorded. No negotiation. He went.

The Promise That Makes the Going Possible

The call would be unbearable without the promise. And the promise God makes to Abram is staggering in its scope.

I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great. You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. And — the line that reaches all the way to Pentecost and beyond — all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Seven times in these few verses the word bless or blessing appears. The God who calls Abram out is not a God who takes and takes and takes. He is a God who gives — lavishly, expansively, with a generosity that runs further than Abram could possibly imagine standing in Harran at seventy-five. The blessing that begins with one man is designed to flow outward until it reaches every people on earth.

This is the great missionary promise of the Old Testament, and it is the promise that Jesus tells his disciples they are standing inside when he sends them to the ends of the earth in his name. Paul quotes it directly when he argues in Galatians that the gospel was announced to Abraham in advance. The blessing of Abraham has come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost on all flesh is the fulfillment of the promise God made to one man on one day in Harran.

Abram could not see any of that. He could not trace the arc from his departure to Calvary to the upper room to the ends of the earth. He only had the promise. And the promise was enough — because the one who made it is the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

For Reflection

The passage ends with a quiet and beautiful detail. As Abram moves through the promised land — still occupied by Canaanites, still not his — he builds altars. At Shechem, where God appears to him and renews the promise. At Bethel. He pitches his tent and builds an altar and calls on the name of the Lord.

He does not build a house. He pitches a tent. He is a pilgrim in the land he has been promised, and he knows it. The altar is not a claim of possession. It is an act of worship in the middle of not-yet — a declaration that the God who called him is present and worthy of praise even before the promise has been fully delivered.

That is the posture this passage leaves us with. Most of us are living in some version of the not-yet. We have heard a call. We have received a promise. But the land is still occupied by other things, the destination is still only partially visible, and the distance between where we are and where God is taking us is still real and sometimes long.

Abram’s answer to that in-between space was to pitch a tent and build an altar. To keep moving and keep worshiping. To hold the promise of God in one hand and the reality of the not-yet in the other, and to call on the name of the Lord in the gap between them.

That is still the faithful response. Go, as the Lord has told you. Build your altar in the not-yet. And trust that the blessing promised to one man in Harran is still flowing — through you, toward all peoples, all the way to the ends of the earth.

PRAYER: Lord, give us the faith of Abram — to go when you call, to leave what you ask us to leave, and to build our altars in the not-yet, trusting that your blessing is already flowing further than we can see. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one step God has been calling you to take that you have been holding back from — one “go” you have been postponing — and this week take it, as Abram did, on the strength of the promise rather than the sight of the destination.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Like Abraham, go to where God leads you!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The God of the Living and The As Good As Dead

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13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. 16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, 17 as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations")—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations," according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be." 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." 23 Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. (Romans 4:13-25 NRS)

Dear Friend, is your Check Engine light on or off? I have a dear friend, who, like me, is of a certain age and not too long ago as we spoke to catch up on the telephone, he said that he knows that his Check Engine Light is on now and must handle his body accordingly. This passage will address those who are living and as the scripture itself says, those who are as good as dead. Regardless of where you think you are, God is with you!

Abraham was a hundred years old. His body, Paul says with characteristic bluntness, was “as good as dead.” Sarah’s womb was barren. The biological possibility of what God had promised had closed decades ago. By every measurable standard, the promise was over before it started.

And Abraham believed anyway.

Paul holds this up not as an interesting historical footnote but as the defining portrait of what faith looks like — and as the key that unlocks who the Spirit’s promise at Pentecost is actually for. The God who kept his word to a hundred-year-old man with a barren wife is the same God who poured out his Spirit on all flesh in Jerusalem. The God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” is the God whose Spirit is still being poured out today.

This is a Pentecost passage because Pentecost is the fulfillment of a promise that, by all human reckoning, should never have arrived.

Grace Wide Enough for All His Descendants

Paul’s argument in this passage has a Pentecost shape to it that we can miss if we read it only as doctrinal instruction about justification. He is making a point about who the promise is for.

The promise to Abraham, Paul insists, did not come through the law. It came through faith. And this matters enormously for the scope of who inherits it. If the promise required law-observance, it would be confined to those who kept the law — a bounded, manageable, culturally specific group. But because the promise rests on grace received through faith, it is open to “all his descendants — not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.”

All his descendants. All who share his faith. The promise is as wide as faith itself, which is as wide as every person who has ever looked at an impossible situation and chosen to believe that the God who gives life to the dead is still able to do what he has promised.

This is the Pentecost heartbeat. When Joel prophesied and Peter announced that the Spirit would be poured out on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free — they were saying the same thing Paul says here about Abraham’s descendants. The promise was never meant to stay small. It was always meant to reach every nation, every background, every person who comes to God the way Abraham came: not with credentials, but with faith in the one who raises the dead.

Hoping Against Hope

Paul gives us one of the most luminous phrases in all of his letters: “hoping against hope, he believed.”

Hoping against hope. It is the faith that persists after every human reason for hoping has been exhausted. It is not denial — Abraham did not pretend his body was young or Sarah’s womb was not barren. Paul is careful to say he “considered” these things. He looked at the facts. He did not flinch from them. And then he believed anyway, because his faith was not anchored in circumstances but in the character of God.

He grew strong in his faith, Paul says, as he gave glory to God. This is the counterintuitive movement of biblical faith: it does not grow strong by ignoring difficulty. It grows strong by redirecting attention — from what is impossible in the situation to what is possible for God. The giving of glory is not a feeling. It is a choice. A deliberate reorientation of the gaze from the barren womb to the God who opens wombs and raises the dead.

The Pentecost connection here is direct. The Spirit was poured out on a community of one hundred and twenty people who had just watched their Lord crucified and buried. Every human reason to hope had been extinguished on Good Friday. And yet they prayed. They gathered. They waited. They hoped against hope — because the one who had promised to send the Spirit was the same one who gives life to the dead. And on the morning of Pentecost, the impossible arrived.

The same God who kept his word to Abraham, who kept his word to the disciples in the upper room, is the God who keeps his word still. The Spirit poured out has not been withdrawn. The promise resting on grace has not expired. For those who are hoping against hope today — looking at circumstances that say the promise cannot possibly be kept — Abraham’s faith is not a museum piece. It is a living model of how to wait for the God who gives life to the dead.

For Reflection

Paul closes the passage with the declaration that Abraham’s story was written down not for Abraham’s sake alone, but for ours. The faith that was reckoned to him as righteousness will be reckoned to us also — “to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.”

The resurrection is the hinge on which everything turns. Abraham believed in the God who gives life to the dead. We believe in the God who proved that promise in the most public and irreversible way imaginable — by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. And the same God who raised Jesus poured out his Spirit at Pentecost, opening the promise to all flesh, making Abraham the father of a family wider than any nation, any culture, any law could contain.

On Pentecost Sunday, we are invited to do what Abraham did. Not to pretend the circumstances are different from what they are. Not to manufacture a feeling of faith we do not have. But to look at what is impossible and redirect our gaze to the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist — and to give him glory, even now, even here, as an act of hope that does not depend on what we can see.

He is fully able to do what he has promised. He has always been. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the proof.

PRAYER: God who gave life to the dead in Abraham’s household and poured out your Spirit on all flesh at Pentecost, strengthen us to hope against hope today, fully convinced that you are able to do what you have promised. In Christ Jesus we pray, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Name one impossible-feeling situation in your life or someone else’s, and this week deliberately redirect your gaze from the barrenness of the circumstances to the God who gives life to the dead — giving him glory in prayer before the answer arrives, as Abraham did.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God, and you matter to me! Hoping against hope, he believed! So can you!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The Holy Spirit in the Margins

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9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” 18 While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples. 20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. 23 When Jesus entered the synagogue leader’s house and saw the noisy crowd and people playing pipes, 24 he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. 25 After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. 26 News of this spread through all that region. (Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 NIV)

My younger brother was a tax collector. He majored in commercial art at a Texas university and got his degree and in a way got into the "family" business, following in the footsteps of our Dad's first cousin, who had led an interesting life in the IRS. One of his daring exploits was being undercover at the Houston Ship Channel on a foreign boat, and he had to escape in a small boat while being fired upon! Thank God my brother, to my knowledge, did not have any shots fired at him, but he spent dangerous time in Afghanistan during crucial times. He said to our Dad he was headed to "Europe," and left it at that. Matthew's job was just as dangerous for what the position entitled him to, and he was called into ministry at just the right time.

In the space of a few verses, Matthew gives us a single day in the ministry of Jesus — and it is a day that looks nothing like what the religious establishment expected the Messiah’s day to look like.

Jesus calls a tax collector. He eats with sinners. He stops for a bleeding woman who touches him from behind in a crowd. He raises a dead girl. And in between all of it, he tells the critics who challenge his table companions to go and learn something — something they should already have known: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

On Pentecost Sunday, when we celebrate the Spirit poured out on all flesh — on sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free — this passage asks us a searching question: where does the Spirit go? To the respectable, the already-gathered, the people who have their place at the religious table? Or to the margins, the overlooked, the ones whom no one else has stopped for?

The answer, in Matthew 9, is unambiguous.

Follow Me — and Bring Everyone You Know

The call of Matthew is one of the most compressed conversion accounts in the Gospels: Jesus saw him, said follow me, and Matthew got up. No deliberation recorded, no conditions negotiated. Just a look and an invitation and a life changed.

But what Matthew does next tells us everything about the Pentecost character of the Spirit’s work. He throws a party — and he invites everyone he knows. Tax collectors and sinners, the socially disreputable, the people the Pharisees would cross the street to avoid. He brings his whole world to the table where Jesus is sitting.

This is what happens when the Spirit moves into a life. It does not stay contained. It flows — like the rivers of living water Jesus promised — outward into every relationship the newly-called person carries. Matthew could not follow Jesus and leave his community behind. He brought them with him, to the only place he knew to bring them: to the table where the one who had called him was still sitting.

The Pharisees’ objection — why does your teacher eat with these people? — is the perpetual complaint of those who have confused the boundaries of religion with the boundaries of grace. And Jesus’ answer cuts through it: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” The Spirit is not poured out on the already-whole. He is sent to the ones who know they need something they do not have. That is not a lowering of the standard. That is the nature of mercy.

Two Interruptions and the Mercy That Stops

On the way to raise a dead girl, Jesus is interrupted by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years.

She is, by the ritual law of her day, untouchable. Her condition has made her ceremonially unclean for twelve years — which means twelve years of exclusion from temple worship, from communal life, from the ordinary human contact that most people take for granted. She has spent everything she had on physicians who could not help her. She is, by every measure the world offers, a person without resources and without access.

And she reaches for the edge of his cloak.

She does not ask. She does not announce herself. She does not go through any official channel. She simply reaches, in faith, toward the one she believes can heal her. And Jesus stops. In the middle of an urgent errand — a synagogue leader’s daughter has just died, the clock is running — Jesus stops and turns. “Take heart, daughter,” he says. “Your faith has healed you.”

Daughter. In a society that had made her invisible for twelve years, Jesus gives her a name that places her inside the family of God. The Spirit who is poured out on all flesh on Pentecost is the same Spirit that animated this moment of stopping — this refusal to let urgency override the person standing right in front of him. The kingdom of God has always made time for the ones everyone else walks past.

And then he goes on to the girl, takes her by the hand — another act of contact that ritual purity laws forbade over a dead body — and she gets up. The crowd that had laughed at him is left with nothing to say. Death itself has been interrupted by mercy.

For Reflection

The Pentecost connection in this passage is not decorative. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit of this Jesus — the one who called the tax collector, ate with sinners, stopped for the untouchable woman, and walked into a dead girl’s room and called her back to life.

When the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, it means exactly this: no one is outside the reach of the mercy Jesus modeled in Matthew 9. Not the socially disreputable. Not the ritually excluded. Not the person bleeding quietly on the margins for twelve years with nothing left to spend. Not the one everyone has already written off as beyond help.

Jesus told the Pharisees to go and learn what mercy means. That instruction has not expired. The Spirit-filled community is still being sent to learn it — to let mercy shape where we go, who we stop for, whose table we sit at, and who we bring with us when we come to the table where Jesus is.

Matthew got up and followed — and brought his whole world with him. That is still the shape of the Spirit’s work. Receive the call. Get up. And bring everyone you know.

PRAYER: Spirit of the living God, pour yourself into us until mercy overflows — until we stop for the ones everyone else walks past, sit at the tables where we are not expected, and bring our whole world to the one who called us. This we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, do what Matthew did — bring one person from your world to an encounter with Jesus, whether through an invitation, a conversation, an act of mercy, or simply by stopping long enough to see someone the world has been walking past.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember the Lord wants mercy not sacrifice.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Sing to the God Who Made Us!

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1 Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright. 2 Praise the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings. 3 Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts. 4 For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. 5 He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. 6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm. 10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. 11 The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations. 12 Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage. (Psalm 33:1-12 NRSV)

Dear Friend, we're about to study a kingly psalm. You will notice the authority and power behind each word, much like it was written by a king, and a king who knows and loves his God. A king who knows all that God has done and is capable of. A king who would not hesitate in giving an order to worship and praise God.

Psalm 33 does not ease into praise. Here is that king's command — rejoice, praise, sing, play — and then immediately tells us why. Not because life is comfortable or circumstances are favorable, but because of who God is and what God has done. The praise is grounded. It has reasons. And the reasons, when we look at them carefully on Trinity Sunday, turn out to be Trinitarian to their core.

The psalmist does not know the word Trinity. But he knows the Word of the Lord. He knows the breath of God’s mouth. He knows the steadfast love that fills the earth. And in naming those three things — Word, breath, steadfast love — he is tracing, however unknowingly, the outline of the God the New Testament will fully reveal as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let us follow the psalm’s own path through the character of God.

The psalm’s account of creation is contained in two lines of extraordinary compression: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.”

Word and breath. Read in the light of the New Testament, these are unmistakably the Son and the Spirit — the two by whom the Father creates, through whom all things were made, by whose agency the formless void became a cosmos teeming with life and order and beauty.

The Word of the Lord is the same Word John identifies in the prologue of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” What the psalmist experienced as the commanding, creative speech of God — he spoke, and it came to be — John reveals as a person: the eternal Son, present and active in every syllable of creation.

The breath of his mouth is the ruach, the Spirit — the same breath that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1, the same Spirit who breathed life into Adam, the same Pentecostal wind that filled the upper room. When God breathes out creation, it is not a mechanical process. It is the personal, life-giving activity of the Spirit who has always been the one who enlivens, animates, and sustains every living thing.

The psalmist is in awe of what this means: “He spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” The universe is not self-generating or self-sustaining. It is held in existence moment by moment by the same Word and breath that called it into being. Trinity Sunday is the day we pause to feel the weight of that — that the ground under our feet, the air in our lungs, the light of this morning were all spoken into being by a God who is eternally Word and breath and the love that sends them both.

Before the psalm moves to creation, it gives us the character of the creator: “He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”

The phrase translated steadfast love is the Hebrew hesed — one of the most theologically dense words in the entire Old Testament. It is covenant love, faithful love, the love that does not give up when the beloved is unlovely, the love that absorbs betrayal and keeps coming. It is the love of a God who pursues his people through the wilderness and the exile and the silence and the cross. It is the love that, in the New Testament, takes a face and a name: Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom all the hesed of God becomes visible and tangible and touchable.

The earth is full of it. Not a corner of creation is outside the reach of the steadfast love of the Lord. Not a person, not a situation, not a season so dark that the hesed of God does not extend there. The psalm is not speaking naively — it knows that nations rise and fall, that human plans come to nothing, that the counsel of the Lord stands while the counsel of the powerful is brought to nothing. But underneath all the turbulence of history, filling the earth the way water fills the sea, is the steadfast love of the God who made it.

On Trinity Sunday, we name that love Trinitarian. The Father’s love that sends the Son. The Son’s love that goes to the cross. The Spirit’s love that is poured out on all flesh. Three movements of the one hesed — the steadfast love that filled the earth before creation and has not diminished by a drop since.

The psalmist ends this section with a declaration that carries the whole passage on its back: “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.”

On Trinity Sunday, we are invited to inhabit that happiness — not a shallow cheerfulness, but the deep, grounded, anchor-holding joy of a people who know whose they are. We are the people whose God is the Lord — the God who speaks worlds into existence by his Word, who breathes life into everything that lives by his Spirit, whose steadfast love fills the earth and has never known a limit.

The new song the psalmist calls for is not a song for easy days only. It is a song that knows what it is singing about — that has looked at the character of God and found there a reason to praise that does not depend on circumstances. Word and breath and steadfast love. Father and Son and Spirit. The same God, always, all the way through.

Sing to him. Play skillfully. Shout. Because the earth is full of his steadfast love — and that, on any Sunday and every Sunday, is reason enough.

PRAYER: Lord — Word who spoke us into being, Breath who animates us still, Love whose hesed fills the earth — teach us to sing the new song that knows your name, and to live as people whose happiness is rooted in you alone. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Find one moment today to stop, breathe deliberately, and name it as the breath of God — then let that awareness open into a word of praise, a note of gratitude, or a new song of your own, however small, offered to the God whose steadfast love fills the earth you are standing on.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Say this out loud: “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.