The Birthday of the Church!

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1 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. 5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" 13 But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine." 14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17 "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19 And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20 The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. 21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.' (Acts 2:1-21 NRSV)

I love the connection people feel when you speak their language. I love being bilingual and knowing some phrases in other languages for the connection one feels. It's usually a smile or a surprised look then a big smile. And if you think about it, God's biggest smile is when we connect with Him and lead others to connections with Him. I don't have the space to list all the connections I've made, but I am sure you have your own. At the very least I pray that you're open to the idea of enjoying others connect through language. My fondest was working at the company where my Dad worked for a summer with a fine gentleman named Charlie Kucera, a Czech son of Texas. Charlie taught me how to say a greeting in Czech. At various cafes and restaurants it has made people smile and reflect. The biggest connection was at a General Conference where at an elevator I saw a delegate from the Czech Republic and greeted him. He relied with a joyous loud exclamation and then a barrage of other Czech words I did not know. He knew enough English to let me know he was happy and excited to hear and be greeted in his language after being away from his home for many days. He gave me pamphlets and brochures so I could distribute to Czech people in Texas.

We have read in today's passage God's Great Connection with humanity. First the background:

For fifty days they had been waiting. Easter was behind them — the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, the forty days of the risen Christ walking and eating and teaching among them, and then the Ascension, the cloud, and the angels asking why they were still staring at the sky. They had returned to Jerusalem as they were told. They had gone to the upper room. They had prayed, constantly, together.

And then the morning of Pentecost arrived. And nothing was ever the same again.

What Luke describes in the opening verses of Acts 2 is not a quiet spiritual experience. It is an event — sudden, loud, visible, and impossible to ignore. Wind that filled the whole house. Fire that divided and rested on each of them, one by one. Languages pouring out of Galilean fishermen that pilgrims from across the known world could hear in their own mother tongue. The crowd that gathered was not drawn by a compelling worship service. They were drawn by the sound.

Pentecost was the day the promise came. The Spirit that Jesus had breathed and prayed and spoken about throughout his ministry arrived in fullness — and the church, that small, praying, unlikely community of one hundred and twenty, was never the same again. Neither was the world.

Luke reaches for two of the most ancient symbols in all of Scripture to describe what happened: wind and fire.

Wind — the same Hebrew word, ruach, that moves across the face of the waters in Genesis 1, bringing order out of chaos. The same breath that God breathes into the dust of Adam, and the man becomes a living soul. The same wind that blows through the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision, and the bones come together and stand up as a vast living army. When the Spirit comes as wind in Acts 2, Luke is signaling that what is happening is not a minor religious experience. It is a new creation event. God is breathing life into a new humanity.

Fire — the pillar of fire that led Israel through the wilderness at night. The fire on Sinai when God gave the law. The refiner’s fire that purifies silver. And now, divided tongues of flame resting — not on the altar, not on the high priest alone, but on each one of them. Every person in that room. The fire of God’s presence, which had once dwelt in a tent and then in a temple, was now coming to rest on human beings, one by one, making each of them a temple of the living God.

Together, wind and fire signal that something irreversible has happened. The presence of God, once mediated through institutions and intermediaries, has become intimate and personal and universal. What was poured out that morning was poured out on all — and it has not been poured back.

The miracle of languages is at the heart of what Pentecost means, and it is worth pausing here because we can too easily let it become background detail.

Jerusalem at Pentecost was crowded with pilgrims from across the known world — Luke gives us the list, and it spans the compass of the earth: Parthians and Medes, Egyptians and Romans, Cretans and Arabs, people from fifteen different regions all gathered in one city. And suddenly, out of a group of Galileans — whose accent, whose education, whose social standing marked them as provincial and ordinary — comes the gospel in every language at once.

The crowd’s question cuts to the heart of it: “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” Not a trade language. Not a lingua franca that everyone had learned to get by. Their own native language — the language of home, of childhood, of the words their mothers had used to sing them to sleep. The most intimate register of human speech.

This is not an accident of the narrative. It is the entire point. The Spirit does not meet people at the level of formal religion, dressed in the language of the educated and the powerful. The Spirit meets people where they actually are — in the mother tongue of their deepest identity. The gospel has always been, from the very first morning of the church’s life, a word that crosses every barrier of language and culture and background to find the person in their own particular humanness and say: this is for you.

Some in the crowd were amazed. Some were perplexed. Some sneered. That has also been the pattern ever since. The Spirit’s work divides rooms. It does not leave people indifferent. And the question the bewildered crowd asked — “What does this mean?” — is the question that Peter’s sermon, and the whole of the book of Acts, and the whole of the church’s witness ever since, has been answering.

Peter stands up — this same Peter who had denied Christ three times by a charcoal fire not seven weeks earlier — and raises his voice over the crowd. And the first thing he does is reach back to the prophet Joel.

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

All flesh. Not the priests. Not the prophets. Not the spiritually elite or the theologically trained or the culturally respectable. All flesh. Sons and daughters. Young men and old men. Slaves, both men and women. The Spirit of God, which in the old covenant had come upon specific people for specific tasks, was now being poured out without reservation on every person who would receive it.

Peter is telling the crowd: what you are witnessing is not a breakdown of order. It is the fulfillment of the oldest hopes of Israel. This is what the prophets saw from a distance. This is what the festivals and the rituals and the temple were always pointing toward. The age of the Spirit has arrived. And it has arrived for everyone.

And then the passage closes with a line that is at once the simplest and the most far-reaching promise in the entire text: “Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Everyone. The invitation of Pentecost is as wide as the word everyone and as personal as your own name spoken in your own mother tongue. The Spirit has been poured out. The door is open. And it has been open ever since that morning in Jerusalem when the wind came and the fire rested and the church found its voice.

Pentecost is not history to be admired from a distance. It is the event that defines what the church is and what every believer has access to right now.

The wind is still blowing. The Spirit poured out on all flesh has not been gathered back. The presence of God that came to rest on each of those one hundred and twenty people in the upper room is the same presence available to every person who calls on the name of the Lord today — in their own language, in their own circumstances, in the mother tongue of their deepest need.

The question the crowd asked is still worth asking: What does this mean? It means that you are not navigating your life in your own strength. It means that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, who blew through that upper room, who gave Galilean fishermen the words of every language under heaven, is the Spirit who lives in you. And the life he came to give — the rivers of living water, flowing from within — is not something you have to manufacture. It is something you have already been given. Receive it. Live from it. Let it flow.

PRAYER: Come, Holy Spirit — wind and fire and living water — pour yourself out afresh on all of us today, so that the world around us hears the good news of Jesus in the language of our lives. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Ask the Holy Spirit this morning to make you aware of one person in your world whose native language of need you can speak into today — through a word, a text, an act of care — as a living sign that the Spirit poured out at Pentecost is still moving.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh."

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Held by the Healer: Finding God’s Peace in the Middle of the Unknown

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“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:6–7 (NIV)

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The Room Where Uncertainty Lives

You know the room. It may be a doctor’s waiting room with chairs that are too firm and a television no one is really watching. It may be the room at home where you lie awake at 3 a.m., running through the same fears on an endless loop. It may be the room inside your own mind where the test results, the diagnosis, the unanswered questions take up more space than you know how to manage.

Uncertainty about our health — our own or someone we love — has a particular quality of weight to it. It is not just the fear of what might be wrong. It is the helplessness of not knowing, the exhaustion of waiting, the way it can quietly crowd out everything else until the uncertainty is all you can see.

If you are in that room right now, this devotional is written for you. Not with easy answers or tidy reassurances, but with the word of a God who has been meeting people in exactly that room for thousands of years — and who has never once left without leaving something behind. His presence. His peace. His promise that the one who holds the universe also holds you.

Let us open the Scripture together and hear what he has to say.

He Knows What Your Body Needs

“Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me.” — Psalm 30:2 (NIV)

David wrote Psalm 30 from the far side of a serious illness — looking back at a time when he had been close to death and crying out to God with everything he had. What strikes us, reading it now, is not the happy ending but the rawness of the middle: he called to God for help. He did not compose himself first. He did not clean up his fear before bringing it to God. He cried out, exactly as he was, from exactly where he was.

And God heard him.

The God of Scripture is not a God who requires us to be well before he will attend to us. He is the God who bends toward our weakness, who inclines his ear toward the cry of the sick and the frightened. Jesus, during his ministry on earth, moved consistently toward those whose bodies had failed them — the leper who was untouchable, the woman who had bled for twelve years and spent everything she had trying to get better, the man who had lain by the pool for thirty-eight years. He did not wait for them to come to him in strength. He came to them in their weakness.

He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He knows what your body is carrying right now — the diagnosis, the treatment, the side effects, the exhaustion, the fear underneath all of it. And he is not standing at a distance, observing. He is near. He is the Lord who heals.

That does not mean he heals in the way or on the timetable we would choose. But it means that healing — in all its forms, physical and emotional and spiritual — flows from the nature of who he is. He is a healer by nature. And your need has his full attention.

He Carries You When You Cannot Walk

“He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” — Isaiah 40:29–31 (NIV)

Isaiah wrote these words to a people who were exhausted. Not lazily tired — exhausted in the way that only comes from a long and grinding season of difficulty, from carrying more than they were built to carry for longer than they thought they could bear. He addresses them with a word that acknowledges the reality of their depletion before he offers the promise of renewal: even youths grow tired and weary. Even the strongest stumble and fall. Weariness is not a failure of faith. It is a human condition.

And into that condition, God speaks his promise: those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

The word translated hope here carries the sense of waiting expectantly — not passive resignation, but the active, forward-leaning posture of someone who is certain that what they are waiting for is coming. It is the posture of the patient in the waiting room who knows the doctor will come. The hope is not wishful thinking. It is confidence in the character of the one who has made the promise.

When your strength is depleted by illness or by the anxiety of waiting for answers, God does not ask you to manufacture more of your own. He offers his. The strength that renews the weary is not a self-improvement program. It is a gift from the one who gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.

You do not have to soar today. You do not have to run. Sometimes the promise is simply this: you will walk and not faint. You will make it through this day. And the God who holds you is strong enough to carry what you cannot, for as long as it takes, all the way through to the other side.

His Peace Stands Guard When Your Mind Will Not Rest

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:6–7 (NIV)

Paul wrote these words from prison. Not from a comfortable study or a season of spiritual retreat, but from a cell, under arrest, uncertain about his own future. When he tells us not to be anxious, he is not speaking from a position of ease. He is speaking from a position of practiced trust — the kind that has been tested in exactly the circumstances that produce anxiety, and has held.

The instruction is not “stop feeling anxious,” as though anxiety were simply a switch we can turn off by trying harder. It is a redirection: in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Bring the anxiety with you into prayer. Name the fear. Lay the diagnosis on the table before him. Tell him about the test results and the sleepless nights and the questions that have no answers yet. He already knows — but there is something that happens in the act of bringing it to him, consciously and deliberately, that shifts the weight.

And then the promise: the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Guard. The word is a military term — a sentinel standing watch, posted at the gate, keeping out what should not enter. The peace of God is not a feeling that descends when the circumstances improve. It is a presence that stands at the door of your heart and mind even when the circumstances have not changed at all. It makes no human sense. It transcends understanding. It is available to you right now, in the middle of the uncertainty, before the results come back, before the treatment is over, before any of the things you are waiting for have arrived.

You can have the peace of God in the waiting room. In the 3 a.m. darkness. In the middle of the hardest season your body has ever put you through. Not because the hard thing is not happening, but because the one who guards your heart is greater than the thing that frightens you.

He Has Not Forgotten You

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”— Isaiah 49:15–16 (NIV)

In the long and frightening waiting seasons, one of the most persistent lies is this: God has forgotten me. He is busy with the world. My situation is too small, or too ordinary, or too complicated. He has moved on. I am alone in this.

Isaiah 49 speaks directly into that lie with one of the most intimate images in all of Scripture. God takes the most powerful human image of devoted, unbreakable love — a mother nursing her infant — and says: even if that were to fail, I will not forget you. And then he adds something extraordinary: I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

Engraved. Not written in pencil. Not entered in a database. Engraved — permanently, irreversibly, carried on his very person. Your name. Your face. Your diagnosis. Your fear. Your specific, unrepeatable story is engraved on the hands of the God who made the world.

Those hands, the New Testament tells us, are the hands of Jesus — and they bear the marks of the nails. The one who carried your name on his hands went all the way to the cross and through the resurrection carrying it. You were not forgotten then. You are not forgotten now. You will not be forgotten in whatever is coming next.

The uncertainty about your health does not separate you from the knowledge of God. It does not move you out of his sight or off his hands. You are seen. You are known. You are held by the one who engraved your name before you ever had a name to give.

Application

Four anchors from the Scripture for the days ahead.

When your body is struggling — remember that the Lord who healed in Galilee is the same Lord who bends toward your weakness today. He is a healer by nature, and your need has his full attention.

When your strength runs out — remember that he gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. You do not have to soar. You just have to hope in him, and let his strength carry what yours cannot.

When your mind will not rest — remember that the peace of God stands guard. Bring the anxiety to him in prayer, name it, lay it down, and let the sentinel take up his post at the door of your heart. The peace that transcends understanding is available to you right now.

When you feel forgotten — remember the palms of his hands. You are engraved there. Permanently. Irreversibly. The God who went to the cross and back has never once let go of you, and he is not starting now.

You are not alone in this room. The Healer is here. The Sustainer is here. The one who guards your heart and has engraved your name on his hands is here. And he will be here tomorrow, and the day after, and all the way through to the other side.

Closing Prayer Lord and Healer, we bring you every fear, every unanswered question, and every weary place in our bodies and our hearts, trusting that your peace stands guard, your strength renews, and our names are forever engraved on your hands. You know us by name and by need; to You we entrust all that You trusting in You for your healing and peace; in Christ Jesus' strong name we pray, Amen.

Today

Write down the one fear or uncertainty you have been carrying alone, bring it to God in prayer by name today, and leave it in his hands — trusting that the peace which transcends understanding is already on its way to guard your heart.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18 (NIV)

I love you and I pray for you! You matter to God and God wants you whole. You matter to me, and I pray for your wholeness.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

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Stop Looking Up!

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6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” 12 Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city. 13 When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. 14 They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. (Acts 1:6-14 NIV)

Have you ever been so fixed on what you were waiting for that you forgot what you were supposed to be doing? That happens to me just by walkiing into another room. What did I come in here for?

That is exactly where we find the disciples in this passage. They have just spent forty days with the risen Jesus — eating with him, listening to him, watching him open the Scriptures and speak about the kingdom of God. And when the moment of the Ascension arrives, when the cloud takes him from their sight, they stand on the hillside and stare. Just… stare. Necks craned upward, eyes fixed on the last place they saw him, frozen in place.

It takes two angels to break the spell. And the question they ask is one that echoes down through every generation of the church: “Why do you stand here looking into the sky?”

It is a question worth sitting with today. Because the church, in every age, has a version of this problem. And this passage has a bracing, clarifying, ultimately hopeful answer to it.

When the disciples gather around Jesus before the Ascension, they bring him the question that has been burning in them for three years: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

It is an understandable question — even a faithful one, rooted in the deep hope of the Hebrew prophets. But it is still the wrong question. It is focused on timing and on a national story, when Jesus is about to commission them for a global one. They are thinking about a calendar. He is about to hand them a calling.

His answer does two things at once. He closes the door on the when: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.” The schedule is not theirs to manage. And then he opens a door they were not expecting: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Notice the word but. Not a calendar — a commission. Not a timeline — a territory. And the territory is breathtaking in its scope: starting where they are standing, rippling outward through Judea and across the hostile territory of Samaria, running all the way to the edges of the known world. The kingdom Jesus is building is not smaller than their hopes. It is vastly, unimaginably larger.

And the power to participate in it is not something they can generate. It is something that will be given — the Holy Spirit, coming upon them, equipping them for a mission they cannot accomplish on their own. Their part is not to figure out the plan. Their part is to be witnesses. To be people whose lives and words point, consistently and credibly, to the risen Christ.

That commission has not expired. It was not issued to eleven people on a hillside in first-century Palestine and then retired. It is the standing commission of the church in every generation. You will be my witnesses — where you are, in the circles where you live and work and belong, and outward from there to wherever the Spirit leads.

And then he was gone. Luke describes it simply: he was taken up, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

The cloud is not incidental. Throughout Scripture, the cloud is the sign of the divine presence — the pillar of cloud in the wilderness, the glory-cloud that filled the tabernacle and the temple. When the cloud takes Jesus, it is not an ending. It is an enthronement. The risen Christ is not disappearing into absence. He is being received into the fullness of the Father’s glory, taking his place at the right hand of power, beginning his reign as the ascended Lord over all things.

But the disciples do not see it that way. Not yet. They see the last place he was, and they keep looking at it. Luke says they were looking intently — the word suggests a fixed, concentrated, unbroken gaze. They are doing what grief does to us: holding the eye on the place where something was, hoping it will come back.

And into that frozen moment, two men in white appear — and ask the question that is almost gentle in its plainness: “Why do you stand here looking into the sky?”

It is not a rebuke, exactly. It is more like the kind of thing a wise friend says when you are stuck and you need someone to name it out loud. He is gone — but not in the way you think. He will return — but that return is a promise to live toward, not a cloud to stare at while the mission waits. The angels free them from the upward gaze so they can turn back toward the city, back toward the work, back toward the upper room where something is about to happen that will change everything.

There is a version of the upward gaze that the church still practices. It shows up when our focus on what God will do someday becomes a substitute for doing what he has already told us to do today. When thinking about the return of Christ crowds out the witness to Christ. When waiting becomes an excuse for standing still.

The angels’ question is still being asked: Why are you standing here? You have a commission. You have a promise. Go back to the city.

What happens next is the quiet center of the whole passage, and it is easy to rush past it in our hurry to get to Pentecost.

They returned to Jerusalem. They went to the upper room. And they prayed — constantly, together, all of them.

Look at the names Luke gives us: Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, Judas son of James. The women. Mary the mother of Jesus. His brothers. One hundred and twenty people in all, Luke will tell us in the next verse.

This is not an impressive roster by the world’s measure. There is no wealth, no political influence, no military power in that list. There is a fisherman with a history of failure under pressure. A doubter. A former revolutionary. A handful of women who had no legal standing in the public square. A mother whose son had been executed as a criminal. Brothers who had not believed in him during his ministry.

And to these people, the mission of the risen Christ to the ends of the earth is about to be entrusted.

But notice what they do before any of that happens. They do not strategize. They do not organize. They do not write a mission statement or form a committee. They pray. Constantly. Together. They make themselves available to the one who promised to come, in the only posture that makes any sense when you are waiting for something only God can provide.

This is where every great movement of God begins — not with a plan, but with a people on their knees. The upper room is not the waiting room before the real work starts. The upper room is where the real work starts. Availability before activity. Prayer before power. Presence before proclamation.

The same Spirit who came upon that praying community is the Spirit who equips the church in every generation. And the same posture that positioned them to receive him — humble, together, persistent in prayer — is the posture that positions us.

Application

Three gifts from this passage for the life we are living right now.

First, a reoriented question. The disciples came to Jesus asking about timing. He sent them away with a commission. Whenever we find ourselves preoccupied with the when of God’s plans — when will things change, when will this season end, when will the kingdom finally come — this passage gently redirects us. You have a witness to bear. You have a territory. Start where you are standing and work outward from there.

Second, a corrected gaze. The upward stare is not where the work is. The work is in the city, among the people, in the ordinary places where witness is needed. The return of Christ is real and it is coming — but it is a promise that frees us for engagement, not a spectacle that paralyzes us in place.

Third, a right beginning. They returned and they prayed. Before the wind and the fire of Pentecost, before the three thousand converts and the explosive growth of the early church, there was a room full of ordinary, unlikely people making themselves available to God in prayer. That is still the beginning. That is always the beginning.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, turn our gaze from the sky to the streets, fill us with the Spirit you promised, and make us faithful witnesses — starting right where we are. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one person in your Jerusalem — your neighborhood, your workplace, your family — and pray for one opportunity this week to be a witness to them, not with a rehearsed argument, but with the honest, unhurried story of what the risen Christ has done in your life.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! “You will be my witnesses — to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

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The God Who Restores

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12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. 14 If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you. 5 But they will have to give an accounting to him who stands ready to judge the living and the dead. 6 Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. 7 Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. 8 Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. 10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. 11 To him be the power forever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11 NRSV)

In the movie I recommended a few days ago, the true story it was based on was about a group of Christian missionaries, these of the Catholic Church, who went into Japan during a time they put to death those who did not adhere to their faith and the methods of torture were quite cruel and severe. The priests, just like their converts, had to refute Christ by either stomping on a mat that had the image of Jesus on it, or to spit on the crucifix. Many were the times the Japanese converts were killed by the refusal of the priests to deny Jesus. There were two young priests who went in search of one of their mentors and teachers in the faith, who had disappeared and was feared murdered by the regime. While it seemed easy for me to sit in front of my television on my favorite couch and say that I would never refute Jesus, I still wondered how reality would pose that to me?

Peter writes the sort of letter one never hopes to write to a people who are in the middle of something genuinely hard — not the ordinary friction of daily life, but the kind of difficulty that makes you question everything you thought you knew about how God works and whether he is paying attention.

First Peter is that kind of letter. It was written to communities of Christians scattered across the ancient world who were experiencing what Peter calls a “fiery ordeal” — social hostility, public shaming, the daily cost of belonging to a movement that the surrounding culture regarded with suspicion or contempt. These were not people facing abstract theological questions. They were people wondering, in the most practical and immediate terms, whether their faith was going to hold.

And Peter writes to them not with easy comfort or tidy answers, but with something more durable: an honest, unflinching, resurrection-anchored word about what suffering means when you belong to the risen Christ.

We are in the season of Easter. The alleluias are still echoing. And yet the passage before us today does not let us stay in the pleasant warmth of Easter morning. It pushes us out into the Monday-morning world — the world where the fiery ordeal is still happening, the roaring lion is still prowling, and the God of all grace is still, always, at work.

This is not the devotional we always want. It may be the one we most need.

Do Not Be Surprised

Peter opens with a word that cuts against everything our instincts tell us about how life with God ought to go: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.”

Do not be surprised. It is a remarkable instruction, because surprise is precisely what most of us feel when difficulty arrives. We are surprised because, somewhere beneath the surface of our faith, we carry an assumption that has never quite been examined: that following Jesus should make life smoother, that God’s blessing should look like comfort and ease, that the fiery ordeal is a sign that something has gone wrong.

Peter says: it is not strange. Do not treat it as strange. The fiery ordeal is not evidence of God’s absence or his displeasure. It is, in some sense, the expected terrain of the life that belongs to Christ.

This should not surprise us when we remember who we are following. The one we call Lord was himself no stranger to the fiery ordeal. He was misunderstood by his family, opposed by the religious establishment, betrayed by a friend, abandoned by his closest companions, and executed as a criminal. The path of the master ran through the valley of suffering, and Peter is telling us plainly that the path of the disciple does not automatically bypass what the master endured.

But Peter does not stop at do not be surprised. He takes the next step, which is even more astonishing: “Rejoice insofar as you are sharing in Christ’s sufferings.”

Sharing in Christ’s sufferings. The language of participation, of solidarity, of a suffering that is not endured alone but is somehow connected to the suffering of the one who has already gone through the worst and come out the other side. This is the Eastertide reframe that changes everything. The suffering of the believer is not a random affliction with no meaning. It is taken up into the larger story of a crucified and risen Lord — and that means it has a destination. The cross did not end at the cross. It ended at the empty tomb. And suffering that shares in Christ’s suffering shares, also, in the trajectory that leads from the cross to the resurrection.

Peter promises: “so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.” The joy is coming. The glory is coming. The fiery ordeal is not the final chapter. It is, for those who belong to the risen Christ, the chapter before the last one.

And until then, Peter adds something quietly extraordinary: “the Spirit of glory and of God is resting on you.” Even now, in the middle of the ordeal, the Spirit is not absent. The Spirit is present — resting, dwelling, sustaining the one who is suffering for the name of Christ. The fire does not burn unaccompanied. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is resting on the one who is walking through the flame.

The Mighty Hand and the Anxious Heart

Peter shifts now from the community to the individual, and the shift is pastoral and tender. He has spoken about the fiery ordeal as a shared experience. Now he speaks to what that ordeal does to the interior life of the person who is living through it.

“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.”

Humbling yourself under the mighty hand of God is not a passive resignation to whatever comes. It is a deliberate act of trust — a choice to stop fighting against the circumstances God has allowed, to stop demanding that the story go differently than it is going, and to place yourself, consciously and willingly, under the authority and care of the one who holds the outcome. It is the posture of a person who has decided, against all the evidence that fear presents, that the hand that holds them is mighty and good.

And then, immediately, Peter makes one of the most practically important statements in the entire letter: “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”

All your anxiety. Not the manageable anxieties, not the ones that seem spiritual enough to bring to God. All of them. The 3 a.m. ones. The ones about money and health and children and the future and the thing you cannot stop turning over in your mind. Peter uses the language of casting — the same word used for throwing a net or hurling a stone. It is not a gentle handing-over. It is an act of force. You take the weight of your anxiety and you throw it, deliberately and completely, onto the one who is strong enough to carry what you cannot.

The reason Peter gives is as simple as it is profound: because he cares for you. Not because it is his duty. Not because you have earned his attention. Because he cares. The God of all grace, the God who called you to his eternal glory, the God whose mighty hand is the very hand you are resting under — that God is not indifferent to your anxiety. He is not too large to notice your fear. He cares for you. The word in Greek suggests a warm, active, personal concern — the kind of caring that leans in rather than standing back.

In Eastertide, this word carries the full weight of the resurrection behind it. The God who cared enough to raise Jesus from the dead cares for you in your sleepless nights and your unresolved fears and your hard seasons. The same power that broke open the tomb is available to the person who is casting their anxiety on him right now. These are not separate categories of divine activity. They are the same God, caring with the same inexhaustible love.

The Lion and the God Who Restores

Peter then introduces an image that is arresting in its vividness: “Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.”

We are not accustomed, in much of contemporary Christian life, to speaking plainly about spiritual opposition. It can feel unsophisticated, or dramatic, or the province of a kind of Christianity we find uncomfortable. But Peter, writing to people who are in the middle of a genuine fiery ordeal, does not soften the picture. There is an adversary. He is active. He is looking for vulnerability. And his preferred targets are the isolated, the exhausted, the anxious, and the surprised — which is precisely why Peter has spent the earlier part of this passage addressing all four of those conditions.

The instruction is direct: “Resist him, steadfast in your faith.” Not by spiritual heroics, not by a triumphalist confidence in your own strength, but by steadfastness — the quiet, stubborn, day-after-day refusal to let go of the faith that has hold of you. Steadfastness is not dramatic. It is the person who shows up again, who prays again, who opens the Scripture again, who returns to the community of faith again, even when the fiery ordeal has made all of it feel dry and distant.

And Peter adds a word of solidarity that is easy to miss: “for you know that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.” You are not alone. Your suffering is not unique to you, not evidence that your particular life has been singled out for misfortune. The community of faith, scattered across the world and across the centuries, has been walking this same road. The fiery ordeal is the shared experience of the people of God. And there is a strange, deep comfort in knowing that you are not the first, and not the only, and not abandoned in it.

And then — and this is the word that the whole passage has been building toward — Peter gives us the promise that anchors everything:

“And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”

Four verbs. Four promises. Each one worth sitting with.

He will restore you — the word suggests mending what has been broken, setting right what has been dislocated, repairing what the ordeal has damaged. He will support you — the word carries the sense of being placed on a firm foundation after being shaken. He will strengthen you — the infusion of power into what has grown weak. He will establish you — the permanent fixing of something that has been unsteady, so that it will not be moved again.

And notice who does this: not a principle, not a process, not the passage of time. God himself. “Will himself restore.” The God of all grace — grace that is not rationed, not exhausted, not contingent on your performance in the hard season — is personally, actively, purposefully at work in the life of the one who has been suffering for a little while.

The phrase “a little while” is not dismissive of the real weight of what Peter’s readers are carrying. It is an eternal perspective — the perspective of the one who has already seen the end of the story and knows that the fiery ordeal, however long and hot it burns, is not the final word. The God of all grace has called you to his eternal glory. That is where the story is going. The suffering is real, but it is not ultimate. The glory is coming, and it is ultimate.

Peter closes with a doxology that is also a declaration: “To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.” Power — not to the ordeal, not to the adversary, not to the anxiety, not to the suffering. To him. The power belongs to the God of all grace. The lion prowls, but it does not reign. The fire burns, but it does not win. The God who raised Jesus from the dead holds the power forever and ever, and that power is being exercised, right now, on behalf of his people.

For Reflection

This passage does not let us stay in Easter morning indefinitely. It follows us into the week, into the month, into the season when the resurrection feels more like a memory than a present reality and the fiery ordeal feels very much like the present reality.

And what it says to us there — in that harder, quieter, more demanding place — is this: do not be surprised. Do not treat the difficulty as evidence that something has gone wrong with your faith or with God’s plan. The path runs through the valley. The master walked it first. The Spirit is resting on you in it. And the God of all grace — the same God who raised Jesus, who holds eternal glory as your destination, whose mighty hand is the hand you are resting under — will himself restore you.

PRAYER: God of all grace, we cast every anxiety and every fiery ordeal at your feet, trusting that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the same power at work right now to restore, support, strengthen, and establish us. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Name one anxiety you have been carrying alone, and this week deliberately cast it on God — speak it aloud, write it down and release it, or tell it to a trusted brother or sister in faith — and let the act be an Easter declaration that the power belongs to him, not to your fear.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! We have seen the Lord! Alleluia, He is risen!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The Prayer Jesus Prayed for Us

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1 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. 6 “I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. 8 For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. 9 I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. 10 All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. 11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. (John 17:1-11 NIV)

My paternal grandfather led an interesting life. Carlos Valverde, Jr., never knew how to read until he was retired and attended night school to learn to read. By that time he had given up drinking and was re-married and had adopted a little girl with his new wife. He also took up the faith he had mocked in my grandmother. The first time I had seen my Dad cry was the day he was told they had divorced; and it took some time before he forgave his father and once again welcomed him into our family. He loved me and when I married attended our wedding and loved Nellie and our daughters very much. One night we had to stay over his house and once the lights were out and we were trying to sleep I heard him talking in a very loud voice! I wondered who or what he was about and Nellie said, "Popó is praying!" And so he was. I know God heard him quite clearly as did his neighbors. He mentioned all family members by name and lifted them up. He prayed for many things and many people; and although it made me proud I felt a bit funny overhearing what I knew as his private time to pray to his Heavenly Father. I was blessed and thankful. As we should be having heard the prayer Jesus prayed for you and me.

This prayer is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in all four Gospels, and reading it feels less like studying a text and more like pressing your ear to a door that has been left slightly ajar. We are, in a sense, overhearing something we were not meant to hear — or perhaps something we were meant to hear more than almost anything else.

The setting is the night before the crucifixion. Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet. He has spoken the farewell discourses — those long, luminous chapters of John 14 through 16 filled with promises about the Spirit, about the vine and the branches, about a peace the world cannot give. And now, as the evening draws toward its terrible conclusion, he looks toward heaven and prays.

Not to the crowd. Not for their benefit. He is talking to his Father. And John lets us listen.

Theologians have called this passage the High Priestly Prayer — because what Jesus is doing here is what a great high priest does: standing between God and the people, interceding, presenting them, asking on their behalf. It is the most intimate window we have into the inner life of Jesus in all of Scripture. And what we find there, when we lean in and listen, is something that should stop us in our tracks during this season of Easter.

We find that Jesus was praying for us. Specifically, personally, urgently — on the night he was handed over to suffer and die. We were on his mind and on his lips before the cross. And the risen, ascended Christ, Hebrews tells us, is still interceding. The prayer did not end. It continues.

Let us listen to what he was saying.

Jesus opens the prayer with words that would have chilled the air in that upper room if the disciples had understood them fully: “Father, the hour has come.”

Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus has spoken of “his hour” — the moment toward which his entire ministry has been moving. At the wedding in Cana, when his mother pressed him to act, he said, “My hour has not yet come.” When the crowds tried to seize him in Jerusalem, John notes that no one could lay a hand on him because his hour had not yet come. The hour is the cross. The hour is the passion. The hour is the thing that everything else in his ministry has been pointing toward.

And now it has arrived. And Jesus does not flinch from it. He does not pray to be spared from it — at least not here, not in this prayer. He prays into it. “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.”

This is a staggering reframe. The cross, which looks to every human eye like the ultimate moment of shame and defeat, is the moment Jesus calls his glorification. Not in spite of the suffering, but through it. The glory of God — the full, unveiled, radiant expression of who God is — will be displayed in the death and resurrection of Jesus more completely than in any burning bush, any parted sea, any fire on any mountain.

And this is exactly where Eastertide stands. We are the people who have seen the other side of the hour. We know what happened after the cross. We know that the tomb is empty, that the stone was rolled away, that the risen Christ appeared to Mary in the garden and to the disciples behind locked doors and to five hundred people at once. We are the people for whom the hour has already passed — and we know what it produced.

The glory came. It came through the very thing that looked like the end. And the Christ who prays this prayer is the same Christ who now sits at the right hand of the Father, the hour behind him, the glory permanent and undiminished.

Then Jesus says something that should rewrite the way we think about eternal life entirely: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

In much of our popular Christian imagination, eternal life is about duration. It is about what happens after we die. It is the life that begins when this one ends — the endless continuation of existence on the other side of the grave. And that is not entirely wrong. But Jesus here defines eternal life in a way that has almost nothing to do with length and everything to do with depth.

Eternal life is knowing God. The Greek word for know here is not merely intellectual knowledge — knowing about, the way you know about a historical figure. It is the intimate, relational, personal knowing of one who has been met, encountered, loved. It is the kind of knowing that changes the one who knows. It is the knowledge of a child who knows a parent, a friend who knows a friend, a beloved who knows the beloved.

This means that eternal life is not something that begins when we die. It is something that begins the moment we come to know the only true God through Jesus Christ. We are not waiting for eternal life. We are already in it. The quality of life that belongs to the age to come — the life of unobstructed intimacy with the Father — is already available, already present, already being lived by every person in whom the Spirit of the risen Christ dwells.

Eastertide is the season to reclaim this. The resurrection is not merely a promise about what happens to our bodies after death. It is the announcement that the life of the age to come has broken into the present age right now. When Jesus walked out of the tomb, he did not simply survive death. He inaugurated a new kind of life — the life of God himself, available to every person who believes.

The invitation of this passage is to live as people who already possess what the world is still searching for. Not to wait for eternal life. To receive it. To inhabit it. Today.

The prayer now turns — and this is the moment that should make every one of us catch our breath. Jesus says: “I pray for them.”

Not for the world in general. Not for an abstraction. For them — the ones the Father has given him, the ones who have received his words, the ones who have come to know with certainty that he came from the Father. He is praying for his people. For the community of those who belong to him. For the church — that small, frightened, deeply imperfect group of people gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem who have no idea what the next twelve hours will bring.

And then he says something that ought to silence every anxiety about our standing before God: “All I have is yours, and all you have is mine.”

Do you hear what Jesus is claiming in that sentence? He is describing a total, unreserved, mutual belonging between himself and the Father. Everything the Father has belongs to the Son. Everything the Son has belongs to the Father. It is the language of the most complete union imaginable. And the people he is praying for — these imperfect, wavering, often-confused disciples — are held within that union. They are given by the Father to the Son. They are the Father’s, and they are the Son’s, simultaneously and completely.

There is no more secure place in the universe to be.

The prayer then narrows to a specific, urgent request: “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.”

Jesus is about to leave them. He knows it. He knows what is coming — the arrest, the trial, the scattering, the grief that will hollow them out. And so he asks the Father for two things: protection and unity. Keep them. Hold them together.

These two requests are not incidental. They go to the heart of what the church needs in every generation. We need protection — not from all hardship, but from the things that would destroy us: the lies that make us doubt God’s goodness, the fears that make us forget whose we are, the pressures that would pull us away from the one in whom we live. And we need unity — not the unity of uniformity, not the peace of a group that has ironed out every disagreement, but the deep, organic, Spirit-wrought unity that mirrors the unity of the Father and the Son.

He prayed for both. And the risen, ascended Christ — Hebrews 7:25 tells us — always lives to make intercession. This prayer did not expire at Gethsemane. It continues, right now, at the right hand of the Father. Jesus is still praying for his people. He is still asking the Father to protect them, to hold them, to keep them one.

He is still praying for you.

For Reflection

John 17 is sometimes called the Holy of Holies of the New Testament — the innermost room, the place where the curtain is pulled aside and we see, as clearly as we can see anywhere in Scripture, the heart of Jesus.

And what we find there is this: on the night he was betrayed, with the cross hours away and the full weight of what was coming already pressing down on him, Jesus was thinking about us. He was praying for our protection. He was praying for our unity. He was placing us into the hands of his Father with a confidence that the Father would hold what the Son had given him.

That is the word of this passage for Eastertide: you are held. Not by your own grip on faith, not by the strength of your own devotion, not by how well you have performed the Christian life this week. You are held by the intercession of the risen Christ, who gave you to the Father and asked the Father to keep you, and whose prayer has never been denied.

Eternal life — the real thing, the deep thing, the knowing of the only true God — is already yours. It began not at death but at faith. And it will not end, because the one who secured it is seated at the right hand of the Father, alive forever, interceding always.

You were on his lips on the night he suffered. You are on his lips still.

PRAYER: Holy Father, we receive with wonder the truth that your Son prayed for us before the cross and prays for us still — and we rest today in the protection of your name and the unity of your love. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Spend five minutes this week simply resting in the fact that Jesus is interceding for you right now — not striving in prayer, not composing the right words, just sitting quietly in the knowledge that you are held, prayed for, and kept by name.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

A Song for Every Season of Motherhood

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8 Praise our God, all peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard; 9 he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping. 10 For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver. 11 You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. 12 You let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance. 13 I will come to your temple with burnt offerings and fulfill my vows to you— 14 vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke when I was in trouble. 15 I will sacrifice fat animals to you and an offering of rams; I will offer bulls and goats. 16 Come and hear, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me. 17 I cried out to him with my mouth; his praise was on my tongue. 18 If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; 19 but God has surely listened and has heard my prayer. 20 Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me! (Psalm 66:8-20)

Dear Friend, praise God from Whom all blessings flow! Please indulge a proud grandpa, but last night our firstborn grandchild, Saraí Evangelina Cortez, daughter of Eric and Saraí Cortez, led her team to her university's first National Championship in e-sports (The game they played is Marvel Rivals). It was a great game against Oklahoma City University, a Methodist school no less. We are so proud of our baby girl and can't wait to see her this weekend when she comes home for the summer. Prayers for her dad's safe trip to Portland to pick her up and return home.

I wish every mother reading or watching this, a very Happy Mother's Day! May God bless you and all women who loving share their love with the children in their lives. Yours is a blessed journey of faith!

There is a particular kind of song that only people who have been through something can sing. Not the song of the untested, the comfortable, or the sheltered — but the song that rises from the throat of someone who has walked through fire and water and come out the other side still standing, still praising, still here.

Psalm 66 is that kind of song.

And on a day when we honor mothers, it strikes me as exactly the right text — because motherhood, in all its beauty and cost and complexity, is exactly that kind of journey. It is not only the joy of first steps and birthday cakes and graduation mornings. It is also the sleepless nights and the desperate prayers and the seasons when love costs more than you thought you had left to give. It is fire and water. It is burden and breakthrough. It is the long walk from the hard place to the place of abundance, with God’s hand holding the whole of it.

Today we are not going to offer a tidy tribute to motherhood. We are going to do something more honest and more hopeful than that. We are going to sit with a psalm that has room for the whole story — the testing and the tears and the triumph — and let it speak to every woman in this room, wherever you find yourself on the journey.

Whether you are a mother of young children, exhausted and tender. Whether you are a mother of grown children, proud and still praying. Whether you are a woman who longed to be a mother and that prayer has not been answered the way you hoped. Whether you lost your mother, and today is tender in ways that are hard to explain. Whether you are a spiritual mother — someone who has poured herself into other people’s children with the same ferocity as any birth mother. This psalm has room for you.

Let us read it together and hear what it says.

Tested Like Silver

The psalmist does not begin with hardship. He begins with praise — a great, communal, let-everyone-hear-it praise that rises from a people who have survived something together. But then, quickly, he tells us why the praise is necessary: “For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver.”

Refined like silver. It is a beautiful and brutal image. In the ancient world, silver was purified through an intense process of heat — the ore melted down in a crucible, the dross rising to the surface to be skimmed away, the process repeated until the silversmith could see his own reflection in the liquid metal. The test was not the enemy of the silver. The test was what made the silver silver.

The psalmist continues, almost cataloguing the weight of what God allowed: “You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and water.”

There is something startling about the grammar here. He says you — you brought us, you let this happen, you allowed the fire and the water. The psalmist does not pretend that God was absent from the hard seasons or that the difficulty arrived from somewhere outside God’s awareness. He holds the tension that the people of God have always had to hold: that the testing came, that it was real and heavy and long, and that God was present in every moment of it, working toward something.

Many mothers know this grammar. They have prayed through seasons that did not resolve quickly, held children through suffering they could not fix, carried burdens that no one else could see or fully understand. And some of them have had to learn — slowly, painfully, without neat answers — that the fire they were walking through was not evidence of God’s abandonment. It was evidence of something being forged.

The silversmith image from Malachi and from this psalm suggests that God does not leave the crucible unattended. Ancient silversmiths held the metal in the flame and watched it. They knew the refining was complete not by a timer, but by the moment they could see their own reflection. Perhaps part of the purpose of the testing is that we become, through it, a clearer image of the one who holds us in the fire.

We Went Through — But We Came Out

The pivot in this psalm is one of the most important two-letter words in Scripture: but.

“We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.”

Not around the fire. Not spared from the water. Through. The preposition matters enormously. The promise of God in Scripture is rarely the promise of exemption from difficulty. It is the promise of accompaniment through it, and emergence on the other side. We went through — and then we came out.

The phrase “place of abundance” is sometimes translated “a wealthy place” or “a place of refreshment” — a place where the parched and burdened finally find relief and fullness. It is the language of the desert traveler arriving at water. Of the laboring woman finally holding the child she has carried. Of the grieving heart discovering, after a long winter, that something green is growing again.

For the mothers in this room who are still in the fire — still in the middle of the hard season, still waiting for the but — this word comes as both promise and anchor. The story is not finished. The fire is not the final word. The one who allowed the testing is also the one who determines when it is complete, and who walks you out the other side into the place of abundance.

And for those who have already come through — who can look back on a season of fire and recognize, with the clarity that only distance provides, that something was being refined and not destroyed — the psalm calls you to do what the psalmist does: tell someone. Come and hear, all you who fear God. Let me tell you what he has done for me.

The testimony of a woman who has been through something and come out the other side praising God is one of the most powerful forces in the life of any community of faith. It is not triumphalism. It is not the pretense that the fire was not hot. It is the hard-won, honest, credible witness of someone who can say: I went through, and I am still here, and God did not let me go.

I Cried Out — And He Listened

The psalm shifts in its final movement from the communal to the deeply personal. The psalmist steps out of the “we” of the congregation and into the “I” of his own story. “I cried out to him with my mouth; his praise was on my tongue.” And then the confession that is at the heart of all honest prayer: “Come and hear, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me.”

The word for “cried out” here carries the weight of urgency — it is not a quiet, composed petition. It is the prayer of someone in extremity, someone whose need has outrun their composure. And the psalmist is not embarrassed by it. He broadcasts it. Come hear what happened when I cried out.

Mothers know this kind of prayer. It is the 3 a.m. prayer when a child is sick and the fever will not break. It is the prayer in the hospital corridor, or the school parking lot, or the bathroom floor when the marriage is falling apart and the children do not know yet. It is the prayer that has no words left — only the sound of a need too large for language.

And the psalmist says: God heard it. “God has surely listened and has heard my prayer.”

The surely is doing significant work in that sentence. It is not casual. It has the quality of someone who was not always certain in the middle of the waiting, but who can now say — looking back, with the whole story visible — surely. He was there. He heard it. The prayer did not rise into an empty sky. It was received.

And then the psalm ends with what may be the most quietly extraordinary line in the entire passage: “Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me.”

Not rejected my prayer. Not withheld his love. These words are written by someone who, at some point, feared both of those things were happening. Who sat in the silence of an unanswered prayer and wondered if the silence meant rejection. Who carried the weight of a difficult season and wondered if it meant God’s love had reached its limit.

It had not. It does not. It will not.

The love of God is not a resource that runs dry under the pressure of your need. It is not rationed, not exhausted by repeated requests, not conditional on your performance in the hard seasons. The psalmist ends his song here because there is nowhere better to end: the love was not withheld. That is the whole testimony. That is the entire point. Whatever else the fire took, it did not take that.

For Reflection

On a day that can carry so many different weights — gratitude and grief, celebration and longing, joy and the ache of what is absent — Psalm 66 offers us something more honest than a greeting card and more durable than sentiment. It offers us a framework for the whole of the maternal journey, held within the faithfulness of God.

To the mother who is in the fire right now: you are seen. The testing is real, and it is heavy, and God has not left the room. He is the silversmith watching the crucible, working toward something in you that you cannot yet see.

To the mother who has come through: your testimony is a gift. The story of your survival, told honestly and with the fingerprints of God visible on it, is one of the most powerful things you own. Tell it to someone who needs to hear that the fire does not have the final word.

To the woman for whom today is complicated — whose experience of motherhood has included loss, or longing, or a grief that doesn’t have a simple name: the psalmist’s God is large enough for your full story, not just the parts that fit neatly on a card. You are not outside the frame of this psalm. You are in it.

And to everyone in this room, whatever your story: the love of God has not been withheld from you. It was not withheld in the hard seasons. It is not withheld today. The one who preserved your life, who kept your feet from slipping, who walked with you through fire and water — that God is here. And the sound of his praise is worth letting be heard.

PRAYER: Lord, for every mother in this room who has been through fire and water, and for every woman carrying a weight only you can see, we praise you that your love has never been withheld and your ear has never been closed to our crying out. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Before this day is over, tell one person — a mother, a daughter, a friend — the honest story of a season when God brought you through, and let your testimony be the gift you give today.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me. — Psalm 66:20

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

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22 So Paul took his stand in the open space at the Areopagus and laid it out for them. "It is plain to see that you Athenians take your religion seriously. 23 When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, to the god nobody knows. I'm here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you're dealing with. 24 "The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn't live in custom-made shrines 25 or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn't take care of himself. He makes the creatures; the creatures don't make him. 26 Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living 27 so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn't play hide-and-seek with us. He's not remote; he's near. 28 We live and move in him, can't get away from him! One of your poets said it well: 'We're the God-created.' 29 Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn't make a lot of sense to think we could hire a sculptor to chisel a god out of stone for us, does it? 30 "God overlooks it as long as you don't know any better - but that time is past. The unknown is now known, and he's calling for a radical life-change. 31 He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged and everything set right. And he has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead." ( Acts 17:22-31 The Message Bible)

Are you a person who loves to learn new things? Or, the kind that enjoyed learning to a certain point and then decided enough was enough? We are reading the writings of a man who loved to learn and we heard his discourse to a people, like him, who believed they never learned enough. They were people who believed in many gods and reached a point where they, in order to cover all their bases, dedicated a shrine to "The Unknown God," Or as this modern version says, "The god nobody knows." What an opening Paul sees in this shrine.

Paul is standing in the most intellectually prestigious public space in the ancient world — the Areopagus, the hill of Ares in Athens, where philosophers, poets, and civic leaders gathered to debate ideas and adjudicate matters of consequence. The city around him is breathtaking, honeycombed with temples and altars, statues of gods rendered in marble and bronze so polished they gleam in the Mediterranean sun.

Paul is not a tourist. He is, Luke tells us earlier in the chapter, deeply distressed by what he sees — not because it is ugly, but because it is misdirected. All this longing. All this seeking. All this magnificent human reaching toward something beyond the ordinary — and not quite finding it.

And yet, in the middle of all those shrines to gods that Athens knew by name, Paul spots something that stops him cold: an altar with the inscription, To the God Nobody Knows. Somebody in Athens knew that their catalogue of deities was incomplete. Somebody had the intellectual honesty to leave a space, to hedge against the possibility that the divine was bigger than their imagination.

Paul steps into that space. And what he says there is one of the most remarkable pieces of preaching in the entire New Testament — a sermon that begins with a compliment, moves through creation and poetry, and lands, hard, on a fact: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

It is a model for Eastertide witness. And it has something urgent to say to us.

Paul’s opening move is theological and bold. He introduces the God Nobody Knows not as a tribal deity, not as the god of one people or one place, but as the one who made the entire world and everything in it. The Message renders it with characteristic punch: “This Master of sky and land doesn’t live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him.”

This would have landed as a provocation to an Athenian audience steeped in temple culture and the elaborate rituals of feeding, clothing, and appeasing the gods. The gods of Greece needed things from human beings. They were, in a sense, dependent on human devotion to keep them satisfied. Paul announces a God who is in need of nothing — who gives life and breath and everything else to every creature, rather than receiving them.

But here is the part that should slow us down in Eastertide: Paul does not describe this God as remote or indifferent. Quite the opposite. He says God arranged the world — the spread of nations, the contours of history, the very texture of human experience — “so we could seek and find him.”

And then these words, which The Message renders with particular grace: “He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. He’s not remote; he’s near. We live and move in him, can’t get away from him.”

Paul is quoting the Greek poet Aratus here — a pagan poet, writing centuries before Christ — who intuited something true about the nature of the divine: that we are embedded in God the way fish are embedded in water, the way lungs are embedded in air. The capacity to seek God is not foreign to human nature. It is written into it. We are, as Paul puts it by way of another Greek poet, the God-created.

This has profound implications for how we move through the world during Easter and beyond. Every person we encounter — however far they seem from faith, however buried under skepticism or distraction or hurt — is someone for whom the seeking has already begun, whether they know it or not. The longing is already there. Paul’s sermon is a reminder that we are never introducing a stranger to a stranger. We are introducing people to the one in whom they already live and move and have their being.

Paul could have stopped there. He could have left his Athenian audience with a beautiful, philosophically palatable vision of a transcendent and near God, and many of them would have nodded along. Stoics and Epicureans both had room for something like that in their systems. It was agreeable, even sophisticated.

But Paul does not stop there. He makes a move that is neither philosophically convenient nor socially comfortable. He says: “But now God has drawn back the curtain and shown us who he is.”

The phrase is arresting. After all the epochs of human reaching and seeking, after all the shrines and philosophies and altars to unknown gods — God has acted. Not to give us a better idea, or a more refined theology, or a more elegant argument for divine existence. God has acted in history, specifically and concretely, in a way that changes everything.

And the act is this: the Resurrection of Jesus, raised from the dead.

The Message puts it starkly and beautifully: this event “signals a new beginning, a new order of things.” It is not merely a miracle in the category of unusual events. It is a hinge. Before it, the world is one thing. After it, the world is another. The resurrection is not a footnote to the story of God’s engagement with humanity — it is the turning point on which all of history pivots.

Paul does not offer the resurrection as one item in a list of evidences. He offers it as the evidence — the thing God has done that makes the identity of the God Nobody Knows no longer a mystery. You want to know what this God is like? Look at the man raised from the dead on the third day. Look at the one who went into the tomb and came out the other side. That is your answer. That is who you are dealing with.

For those of us in Eastertide — still living in the light of that first Sunday morning — this is the irreducible core of our faith. We do not offer people a philosophy or a lifestyle or a community, though all those things matter. We offer them a fact and invite them to reckon with what it means. The God who raised Jesus is alive. The curtain is pulled back. The God Nobody Knows has a name and a face and an empty tomb.

Paul ends his sermon with a call that The Message renders with urgency and clarity: “Everyone is called to a radical life-change.”

Other translations use the word repentance. But The Message captures something important in the texture of the Greek word metanoia — it is not merely feeling sorry, not merely a private emotional transaction. It is a reorientation of the entire person. It is what happens when you have been living as though the universe is a closed system — as though the last word belongs to death, to power, to the forces that crush and consume — and you encounter the news that the universe is not a closed system after all. That death has been broken open from the inside. That the last word belongs to the one who raised Jesus.

When that news lands in a human life, it changes things. Not all at once, and not without struggle. But it changes the fundamental orientation of a person — the direction they are facing, the thing they are building their life on, the story they believe they are living inside.

Paul calls this God “the God-who-raises-the-dead.” It is a hyphenated title in The Message, and it functions almost like a name — a name that tells you everything you need to know about who you are dealing with. Not the God-who-is-vaguely-benevolent. Not the God-who-rewards-the-virtuous. The God-who-raises-the-dead.

That title matters enormously when we are in the valleys of our own experience — when a relationship feels irretrievably broken, when a dream has died, when grief has settled in and will not move, when the church feels exhausted and the culture feels hostile and the resurrection feels like something that happened a long time ago to someone else.

Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus says: the God who raised Jesus is the same God in whom you live and move and have your being. He is not remote. He is near. And the thing he is best known for — the thing that drew back the curtain on his identity once and for all — is raising the dead.

That is not past tense. That is present tense. That is who he is.

For Reflection

Paul at the Areopagus gives us a portrait of Eastertide witness that is worth sitting with.

He did not begin by condemning his audience. He began by paying attention — by walking around the city, noticing what people were reaching for, finding the altar where the longing was most honest. He started where they were, not where he wished they were. And then he pointed them from their own longing toward the God who had already answered it.

That is a model worth imitating. The people around us — the ones who have no church, no creed, no framework for faith — are not godless in the deepest sense. They are seekers, often without knowing it. They have built their altars too: to meaning, to connection, to something that will hold when everything else gives way. The question is not whether they are reaching. The question is whether we are paying close enough attention to see it — and whether we are ready to say, gently and clearly, let me tell you about the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Paul’s sermon did not persuade everyone. Luke tells us that some sneered when he mentioned the resurrection. Others said, politely, “We’ll hear more about this later.” And some believed. That is still the pattern. The resurrection is not a message that lands the same way in every heart. But it is the message. And Eastertide is the season to remember that we carry it — not as a burden, but as the best news the world has ever been offered.

PRAYER: God-who-raises-the-dead, open our eyes to the altars of longing around us, and give us the grace and courage to point every seeking heart toward the risen Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Pay attention to the altar of longing in one person’s life — the question they keep returning to, the ache they can’t quite name — and pray for the moment to say, simply: let me tell you about the God who doesn’t hide.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! We have seen the Lord! Now go and make Him visible to others!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.