A Song for Every Season of Motherhood

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/42kP5qh

View devo: https://bit.ly/3P8VtxJ

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.

Support our ministry by getting a journal for your personal spiritual adventures at this site: https://bit.ly/4evekxy

The Unknown God Made Known!

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/4upN5Jb

View devo: https://bit.ly/4cRZzDJ

CONCAFE JOURNAL FOR YOUR PERSONAL USE FOR NOTES, ETC. AVAILABLE AT https://bit.ly/4evekxy

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.

A Letter of Hope

ConCafe logo by Eradio Valverde, Jr.

View devo: https://bit.ly/4cQyyAr

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/4nhQFTC

13 Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? 14 But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats ; do not be frightened.” 15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, 16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.17 For it is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. 18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. 19 After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits— 20 to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, 21 and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.(1 Peter 3:13-22 NIV)

We have it made here in the USA when it comes to being Christians. We are free to go to whatever church we want or to stay home if we want. We're free to buy a Bible whenever we want and tear pages out of it if we want. And, thank God, no one will knock on our door and arrest us for our beliefs. It is not a crime to be a Christian, and you gotta love the old question; if it were, would there be enough evidence to convict? We are reading a passage written in the dark period of being Christian. Peter lovingly wants those believers who are reading his letter to be safe and sure about their faith.

Peter was writing to communities of believers scattered across Asia Minor — people who were strangers and exiles in their own world, facing social pressure, suspicion, and in some cases outright hostility simply because of their allegiance to a crucified and risen Lord.

This was not abstract theology. These were real people navigating real danger. And yet the letter breathes with a strange, undeniable confidence — not the confidence of people who have been spared suffering, but the confidence of people who know what suffering cannot touch.

We are in the season of Easter. The alleluias are still fresh. But the world we return to on Monday morning is the same one Peter’s readers inhabited — one where faith costs something, where doing good does not always go rewarded, and where the resurrection can feel, on hard days, more like a creed than a lived reality.

This passage speaks precisely into that gap. It tells us what to do with our hope when the world pushes back. And it anchors everything — absolutely everything — in the risen Christ.

Peter opens with a question that sounds almost optimistic: “Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?” But he does not linger there long, because he knows the answer is not always “no one.” He pivots almost immediately: “But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed.”

This is one of the more countercultural claims in the New Testament, and we should sit with it rather than rush past it. Peter is not promising that goodness will protect you from harm. He is promising something far stranger: that harm sustained in the cause of goodness is not a sign of God’s absence. It is, he says, a mark of blessedness.

We hear echoes of the Beatitudes here — Jesus on the mountainside, telling the poor in spirit and the persecuted that the kingdom belongs to them. The world’s ledger and God’s ledger do not always balance the same way. What the world counts as loss, the kingdom sometimes counts as gain.

In Eastertide, this truth takes on even sharper edges. The resurrection is the ultimate proof that God’s arithmetic is different from ours. The cross looked, by every human measure, like the end. It was not. Death, which appeared to have the final word, turned out to be a comma. And if God can do that with crucifixion, then suffering for doing good is not something to be feared — it is something to be endured with open eyes and a quiet heart.

Peter even borrows the words of Isaiah: “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” The risen Christ has dethroned the thing that fear is ultimately about. If death is not the end, then the threats that trade on the fear of death have lost much of their power.

Now comes the verse that has anchored Christian witness for two thousand years: “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

We sometimes call this the great apologetics text — the verse that sends people to seminaries and debate podiums and philosophy classrooms, armed with arguments for the faith. And those endeavors have their place. But notice what Peter actually says. He does not say, “Be ready to prove your faith.” He says, “Be ready to give the reason for the hope that you have.” The question he is imagining is not primarily an intellectual challenge. It is a human one. Someone looks at your life and asks: “How do you keep going? Where does that come from?”

The implication is striking: the lives of these early Christians were so visibly, tangibly different — marked by a quality of hope that did not wilt under pressure — that people around them were asking questions. Their witness was not primarily an argument. It was a life.

And here is the Eastertide connection: what makes that life possible? What is the source of hope that holds steady when circumstances say it should not? It is not optimism, not resilience, not positive thinking. It is something that happened in history, to a specific person, on a specific morning.

Peter also tells us how to give this answer: with gentleness and respect. The tone of our witness is not incidental to its content. A faith that has been reshaped by a crucified and risen Lord ought to look different — more patient, less combative, less anxious about winning. We speak from a position of security, not threat. We do not need to be aggressive, because the truth we carry does not depend on our performance of it.

Peter now reaches the theological heart of the passage: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.”

This is one of the most compressed and powerful statements of the gospel in all of Scripture. Let us unfold it slowly.

“Christ also suffered.” The word also is doing significant work here. Peter has just been talking about the suffering his readers are enduring, and he says: Christ suffered too. Your suffering is not a place where Christ is absent. It is a place where Christ has already been.

“Once for sins.” The word once in Greek is hapax — once, and once only, with permanent effect. The sacrifice of Christ is not repeated. It does not need to be. Its scope is complete. This is why the early church spoke so insistently about the once-for-all nature of the atonement: it is finished. The ledger is closed on the debt side.

“The righteous for the unrighteous.” This is the great exchange at the center of the gospel. The one who owed nothing paid the debt of those who owed everything. And the purpose? “To bring you to God.” Not merely to rescue us from consequences, but to restore us to relationship. The goal of the cross is not simply a cleared conscience — it is a face-to-face, unobstructed, permanent access to the Father.

Then come eight words that contain all of Easter: “He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.” The cross was real. The tomb was real. And the resurrection was real. The same body that was put to death was made alive — not resuscitated, not spiritualized away, but raised. This is the foundation on which everything Peter says rests. If Christ is not raised, the suffering of these scattered believers is pointless. If Christ is raised, then their suffering is held within the orbit of a victory that cannot be undone.

Peter then moves into territory that has puzzled readers for centuries — the proclamation to imprisoned spirits, the days of Noah, the ark, and baptism. A full treatment of these verses belongs in a longer study, and scholars have debated their precise meaning since the earliest centuries of the church. But let us notice what Peter seems most interested in, because that is where the devotional weight falls.

Whatever the precise nature of Christ’s proclamation to the imprisoned spirits, the point Peter is driving toward is this: the victory of Christ is cosmic in scope. It reaches beyond the visible world, beyond the boundaries of our immediate experience, into dimensions we cannot fully see. The risen Christ is not merely a personal Savior in a private sense — he is Lord over every authority and power, every principality and dominion.

The reference to Noah reinforces this sweep. In the days of the flood, a tiny remnant — eight people — were carried through the waters of judgment into new life on the other side. Peter sees in this a picture of baptism. Not the washing of the body, he is careful to clarify, but “the pledge of a clear conscience toward God.” Baptism is the moment when a person stakes their life on the resurrection — when they go under the water as one thing and come up as another, not because the water has power in itself, but because it is done in the name of the one who went into death and came out the other side.

And then the passage ends with one of the most triumphant images in all of Scripture: “Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand — with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.”

This is where the risen Christ is right now. Not distant, not dormant, not waiting for history to catch up to him. He is reigning. The one who suffered is the one who rules. The one who was put to death in the body is the one at whose name every knee will bow. And it is this Christ — reigning, living, present — whom we are called to revere in our hearts as Lord.

For Reflection

There is a thread running through every verse of this passage: the resurrection changes what suffering means.

For Peter’s readers, suffering was not theoretical. It was the texture of daily life — the cold shoulder at the marketplace, the suspicion of neighbors, the possibility of something worse. Peter does not minimize any of it. He does not tell them to pretend it is not happening. He tells them something far more powerful: he tells them who is on the throne.

For us, the pressure may take different shapes. The cost of following Jesus in our context may be social rather than legal, relational rather than physical. But the core question is the same: when it costs something to live as a follower of Christ, does your hope hold?

Peter says it can. Not because we are strong enough, but because the one in whom we hope has already walked through the worst that the world can do — and walked out the other side. Our suffering is not a place where Christ is absent. It is a place where Christ has already been. And the one who was there in the darkness of the tomb is the same one who is now seated at the right hand of the Father, every power subject to him, interceding for us.

That is Eastertide hope. Not optimism. A Person.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus Christ, You suffered once for sins — the righteous for the unrighteous — to bring us to God. We thank you that suffering was not the end of your story, and so it need not be the end of ours. Revive in us this Eastertide the hope that your resurrection makes possible — not a wishful hoping, but a grounded, unshakeable confidence in the one who is seated at the Father’s right hand. Teach us to hold that hope openly, to speak it gently, and to live it boldly in the ordinary days that follow this holy season. To you be glory and dominion, now and forever. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Think of one person in your life who might look at you and wonder where your hope comes from. Pray for one natural opportunity to tell them — not with an argument, but with a story. The story of why, in spite of everything, you still believe.

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.

You Will Not Be Alone

Image from Eradio Valverde

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/3OXuNA8

View devo: https://bit.ly/4w8Uyhq

15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. 18 "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them." (John 14:15-21 NRSV)

In my career of the second half of my life I seek to make sure people are ready to leave this life by making sure those who stay behind do not have to suffer. Yes, it's called life insurance. I love and still try to sell people on eternal life insurance; that is the kind found in accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, but that's a more personal decision. Life insurance ensures that the financial burdens of one's absence not leave pressure on one's spouse and surviving offspring. The first policy I sold was to a friend whose dad had bought a policy of $50,000 back when that would have covered a lot. We're talking the 1960s. Had the father died in the 60s the family would have been fine. In the 1960s my parents bought their home for $11,000. New cars were on average worth about $3,000. But the dad did not die until 2021 and the $50,000 did not cover much.

Here we see Jesus making plans for His departure and what He knew to be important and needed once he was not there with the Disciples. His love made sure to let them know they were not to be orphans. Jesus knew their hearts and minds and their abilities and He knew they needed a lot.

It is the night before the crucifixion. The disciples are gathered around a table that still smells of bread and wine. Their teacher has just told them he is going away — and that where he is going, they cannot yet follow. The air in that upper room is thick with confusion, grief, and the kind of dread that settles into your chest when you sense that something irreplaceable is about to be taken from you.

They are afraid of becoming orphans.

And into that fear, Jesus speaks these words — not as a theological lecture, but as a promise. A promise so staggering that we are still unfolding it two thousand years later, here in the bright, alleluia-filled days of Eastertide.

We are not orphaned. We never were. And this passage tells us exactly why.

I. Love Is Not Sentiment — It Is Kept Commandments (v. 15)

Jesus opens with a word that might catch us off guard: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."

In our culture, love is very often measured by feeling — the warmth in the chest, the tears at a wedding, the nostalgia of a childhood hymn. But Jesus consistently refuses to let love remain in the realm of emotion alone. Love, for Jesus, has a shape. It has hands and feet. It shows up in how we treat the stranger, the poor, the difficult neighbor.

This is not a transaction. He is not saying, "If you want to earn my favor, you must perform." He is saying something more intimate than that — almost biological. A vine produces fruit because it is a vine. It cannot help it. In the same way, a person who truly loves Jesus will naturally, organically, begin to be shaped by his teachings. The commandments are not a cage; they are the form that love takes when it walks through the world.

In Eastertide, we celebrate a risen Lord who is not merely a memory. He is alive. And because he is alive, his call on our lives is alive too. The resurrection does not retire his teachings — it ratifies them. The one who said "love your enemies" and "serve the least of these" is the same one who broke the power of death. His words carry the weight of eternity.

So we begin here: Easter is not just a Sunday. It is an invitation to a way of life, a life shaped by the commandments of the one we love.

II. Another Advocate — The Gift We Cannot See (vv. 16–17)

Then Jesus makes a breathtaking promise: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever."

The word translated "Advocate" is the Greek parakletos — literally, "one called alongside." It is the word for a defense attorney who stands beside the accused, for a counselor who remains close in the storm, for a comforter who does not leave when the night grows long. It has also been translated Comforter, Helper, Counselor, Intercessor.

Notice that Jesus calls this figure "another Advocate" — which implies that Jesus himself has been the first one. He has been walking alongside them for three years, answering their questions, calming their fears, steering them back when they wandered. And now, he promises that this same ministry of presence will continue — not through a distant memory, but through one who will be in you.

The Spirit does not operate at arm's length. The world, Jesus says, cannot receive the Spirit because it looks only at the surface of things. But for those who belong to Christ, the Spirit takes up residence — not as a houseguest who might leave, but as an inhabitant, a presence woven into the fabric of the believer's inner life.

This is the Eastertide miracle that we often underestimate: the risen Christ is not merely risen — he is present. Through the Spirit, the distance between heaven and the human heart collapses. You are not praying toward a remote deity. You are breathing in the presence of one who has made your very life his home.

III. "I Will Not Leave You Orphaned" (v. 18)

These may be the most tender words in this entire passage: "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you."

The word for "orphaned" in Greek is orphanous — from which we get our English word. It carries with it all the vulnerability, isolation, and grief of a child who has no one to turn to. Jesus sees the fear in their eyes and calls it by its name. He knows they are terrified of being left alone in a hostile world.

And he says: that will not happen.

For many of us, if we are honest, orphanhood is a feeling we know — not necessarily because of the loss of parents, but because of the particular loneliness of the spiritual life. There are seasons when God feels remote. When prayer feels like leaving messages that no one retrieves. When the silence of suffering makes us wonder if anyone is there at all.

Jesus speaks directly into those seasons. His promise is not "you will always feel my presence." His promise is far more durable than feeling: "I am coming to you." The resurrection itself is the proof. He came. Death could not hold him, grief could not silence him, and the fear of the upper room could not contain him. He came — through locked doors, in the breaking of bread, on a beach at dawn.

And Eastertide is the season when the church re-learns this truth: we serve a God who comes. We are not orphaned. We are found.

IV. The Trinitarian Life We Are Invited Into (vv. 19–21)

The passage closes with a vision so luminous it can be easy to rush past it: "On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you."

This is not merely a description of doctrine. This is an invitation. Jesus is pulling back the curtain on the inner life of God — Father, Son, and Spirit in a perpetual exchange of love — and telling his disciples that they are not spectators to this divine communion. They are participants in it.

You in me, and I in you.

This mutual indwelling — what the early church called perichoresis, a kind of divine dance — is the very life into which every believer is drawn. The same love that flows between the Father and the Son now flows toward us and, remarkably, through us. We do not love God from the outside. We are loved from the inside.

And the evidence of this love? "They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

Notice the cascade: love kept in action → the Father's love → Jesus's love → self-revelation. The risen Christ continues to make himself known. He is not a figure locked in the past. He is a living Lord who reveals himself still — in Scripture, in sacrament, in the face of the neighbor, in the still small voice of the Spirit in the interior of the soul.

This is Eastertide: not the fading of Easter Sunday's excitement, but the unfolding of all that resurrection means. The empty tomb is not the end of the story. It is the door through which we are invited to walk — into the very life of God.

For Reflection

The Easter season lasts fifty days for a reason. One Sunday is not enough to absorb what resurrection means. The early church understood that we need time to let the truth of Christ's victory settle down into our bones, our habits, our daily choices.

This passage from John 14 gives us three Eastertide gifts to carry into the days ahead:

First, we have a Companion. The Holy Spirit is not a force or an atmosphere — the Spirit is a Person, a Paraclete, one who walks alongside you in every moment of this day. You are not navigating life alone.

Second, we have a Promise. Christ said he would not leave us orphaned, and he has kept that word. Whatever season of dryness or doubt you may be walking through, the promise holds. He is coming to you.

Third, we have an Invitation. The life Jesus describes — you in me, and I in you — is available right now, not as a reward for spiritual achievement, but as the gift of a God who has already made his home in you.

PRAYER: Loving Lord, We confess that we have sometimes lived as orphans — anxious, alone, as though the grave had won. Forgive us. Fill us afresh with your Spirit, the Advocate you promised, that we might know — not just believe, but know — that you are in the Father, and we are in you, and you in us. Let this Easter season be more than a memory of an empty tomb. Let it be the beginning of a life fully alive in you. We pray this in your name, and by your Spirit, to the glory of the Father. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Choose one of Jesus's commandments to keep with fresh intentionality this week — whether it is loving an enemy, serving someone in need, or simply forgiving a debt of the heart. Let your love take a shape the world can see.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God, and you matter to me! Alleluia. Christ is risen and we are not alone!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

You Are Known

Image from Eradio Valverde, Jr.

View devo: https://bit.ly/4t8oasS

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/49iemoK

“You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.” Psalm 139:1–2 (NIV)

Dear Friend, This is a preview of what could be a second devotional source. Please pray that it be anointed by the Lord for those who might need such a word. Also, please lift up in prayer a 16 yr old young lady from La Joya, Texas battling terminal cancer. Aunesty Garcia has been battling cancer for some years now; went through remission and the cancer has returned with a vengance; latest was a huge mass found in her brain last night. Aunesty is the granddaughter of a preacher; she has tremendous faith, but needs our prayers. Please pray that God's will be done in her body and life.

There is a particular loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone. You can feel it in a crowded room, at a busy table, in the middle of a conversation that skims the surface of things without ever touching what is real. It is the loneliness of being unseen — of moving through your days with the quiet, unspoken fear that if people really knew you, truly knew you, they might not stay.

Psalm 139 is written for that loneliness. It is one of the most intimate pieces of writing in all of Scripture, and it opens with a word that stops the reader in her tracks: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.” Not “You have observed me.” Not “You are aware of my general situation.” You have searched me. The Hebrew word is chaqar — the word used for a miner digging deep into the earth to find what is buried there, or for a judge who examines a case with thorough, unhurried care. God has done this with you. He has gone all the way down.

And what did He find when He went that deep? He found everything. “You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways” (vv. 2–3). The sitting and the rising — the rhythms of the ordinary day. The thoughts from afar — the ones half-formed before they reach words, the ones you barely know you are thinking. The going out and the lying down — the movement between your public self and the private one who finally gets quiet at night and reckons honestly with the day.

God knows all of it. Not in a surveillance way — not the cold, cataloguing gaze of someone looking for evidence against you. In an intimate way. The way a mother knows the sound of her child’s breathing in the next room. The way someone who has loved you for decades can tell from the set of your shoulders that something is wrong before you have said a word. God knows you the way the people who love you most only partially manage to. And He is not alarmed by what He finds.

Before You Had a Name

The psalm takes us further than just the present moment. In verses 13 and 14, David reaches back before birth: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” The word translated “inmost being” is the Hebrew word for the kidney — which in the ancient world was understood to be the seat of the deepest self, the place where the most private emotions and truest longings lived. God did not form the outside of you and then encounter the inside of you later. He created the inside first. He knew your inmost being before He knew your face.

The image of knitting is worth staying with. A knitter does not rush. She works stitch by stitch, row by row, with patience and intention. She knows the work in progress in a way no one else does — she knows what it will be before it is finished, she has chosen the colors, she has planned the pattern. And God, the psalm tells us, did this with you. Before you were born. Before you could do anything to earn His attention or justify His investment. He was already at work, already intimately acquainted with the person you were becoming.

That means the knowing came before the earning. He did not know you because you proved yourself worthy of being known. He knew you into existence. The knowledge is prior to the performance. And that changes everything about what it means to be in relationship with Him — because you cannot impress someone who was already there at the beginning, and you cannot surprise someone who already knows every thought before it reaches words.

What It Costs to Be Truly Known

There is a reason we hide from being known. Being truly known is the most vulnerable thing in the world, because it means the other person has real information about you — real grounds for rejection. As long as you present only the best version of yourself, any love that comes back is conditional on the version you have presented. But to be fully known and still fully loved — that is the thing we most long for and most fear.

David, of all people, knew what it was to have things about him that he would rather God had not seen. He was an adulterer and a murderer, a man whose private failures stood in stark contrast to his public reputation as a man after God’s own heart. And yet this is the psalm he wrote. The man who had every reason to hide from divine scrutiny instead leaned into it — because he had learned that being known by God is not the same as being judged by God. The God who searches and knows is also the God who leads, who guides, who holds.

Verse 10 is quietly extraordinary: “even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” The hand that searches is the same hand that holds. The knowledge is not prosecutorial — it is relational. God knows you completely so that He can love you completely. There is no part of you that He has not seen, and there is no part of you that lies outside the reach of His care.

Living from Being Known

Here is what changes when you truly receive this: you stop needing to perform for God. Not because holiness stops mattering, but because you realize that the relationship is not built on your performance in the first place. You are already fully known. The searching has already happened. And the verdict is not condemnation — it is love. A love that chose you before you had done anything, that knit you together before you were born, that attends to your sitting and your rising and your half-formed midnight thoughts.

David ends the psalm with an invitation — not a boast, but a surrender: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (vv. 23–24). He is not afraid of being known, because he has come to trust the one who is doing the knowing. That trust is available to you today.

You do not have to curate yourself for God. You do not have to present the best version of yourself in prayer or pretend that the anxious thoughts are not there. He already knows. He has always known. And He has not looked away. The God who searched you and found everything is the same God who holds you fast — and He is not letting go.

A Moment to Pause

Is there a part of yourself that you have been keeping hidden — even from God? What would it feel like to bring that specific thing into the open today, trusting that the God who already knows it is holding you, not prosecuting you?

A Brief Prayer

Lord, You have searched me and You know me — all the way down, all the way back. You were there before I had words or memories or a face the world could recognize. You know the thoughts I haven’t spoken and the fears I haven’t named, and You have not turned away from any of it. Today I choose to stop hiding from You. I bring You the unsorted places, the anxious thoughts, the parts of me I am least proud of — and I trust that the hand that searched me is the same hand that holds me. Lead me in the way everlasting. I am grateful to be known by You. In Your strong name I pray, Amen.

Your Word for Today

Known.

When the day feels uncertain, return to this: I am fully known and fully held.

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

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Keep Your Eyes on Jesus

Image from Eradio Valverde

View devo: https://bit.ly/4t8f5Af

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/4dannme

55 But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 56 “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” 57 At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, 58 dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. 59 While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” 60 Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:55-60 NIV)

Dear Friend, I thank you for your prayers and for sharing your thoughts on my question about the name change of this ministry. I shared with some of you that I will keep the name ConCafé for this devotional and I may start Heavenly Hope as a website or some other sort of publication. "The joy of the Lord is my strength" is a verse that describes my joy in sharing these devotionals with you and some of you share the same verse in your responses to me. May the Lord bless you and keep you. Quick update: Rev, Whyte, the pastor from Canada, is now in Canada thanks to an air ambulance that flew him and his wife home this Tuesday morning; thanks be to God!

This passage introduces us to two important men in God's plan for the salvation; one was the first person to die for his faith. The second was there because he approved of this death. The first's death would later impact the second's future. The martyr was Stephen, a man chosen to be a Deacon, a servant to people on the Lord's behalf, who paid the ultimate price for his faith. Like Jesus, he was hated for his relatioship with God and falsely accused of wrong things.

We are in the great fifty days of Easter — the season when the Church lives in the light of the empty tomb, singing alleluias and feasting on the reality of resurrection. It may seem surprising, then, to pause at the stoning of Stephen. Death feels out of place in a season of life.

But look more carefully. Stephen's death is not a contradiction of Easter. It is Easter applied — the resurrection power of Jesus made visible in a human life surrendered completely to God. This is what Eastertide is for: not merely to celebrate that Jesus rose, but to ask what his rising changes about how we live, how we suffer, and yes, how we love our enemies.

Luke tells us Stephen was "full of the Holy Spirit." That phrase is doing enormous work. Stephen was not a bishop or an apostle — he was a deacon, appointed to serve tables. Yet in his moment of greatest crisis, he was not empty, not grasping, not afraid. He was full.

And what did that fullness produce? He looked up. In the middle of a crowd that had turned to a mob, in the moment his life was about to be taken, Stephen's gaze went upward. He saw the glory of God. He saw Jesus — not seated, as Psalm 110 describes him in rest, but standing. Standing, as if to receive his servant home. Standing, as if to bear witness on Stephen's behalf before the courts of heaven.

Stephen's declaration — "I see heaven open" — was not a private vision he kept to himself. He spoke it aloud, to people who were already furious with him. This was not recklessness. This was witness. The Greek root of our word martyr simply means witness. Stephen bore witness with his words and, moments later, with his blood.

Notice what his testimony provoked. The crowd covered their ears. They could not bear to hear it. This is a telling detail: the truth of the risen Christ is not always received; sometimes it is violently refused. The resurrection does not guarantee our comfort or our safety. It guarantees that what we speak and suffer for is real, is permanent, and is watched over by One who stands on our behalf.

Luke, the careful historian, makes one other detail explicit: a young man named Saul was there, watching the coats of the executioners. That detail will matter enormously later. God was writing a story that no one in the crowd could yet read.

When the stones begin to fly, Stephen prays two prayers. The first: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." The second: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them."

You have heard these words before. From the cross, Jesus said, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." From the cross, Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Stephen is not imitating a dead hero. He is being conformed, by the Holy Spirit, to a living Lord. The resurrection meant that Jesus' pattern of dying — trusting, forgiving — could now be reproduced in others. Easter is the engine of that reproduction.

This is perhaps the most radical claim of the Christian gospel: that the grace shown on Good Friday was not a one-time event, but the opening of a new way of being human. Stephen inhabits that new humanity fully, completely, even to his last breath. The resurrection did not make Stephen immune to suffering. It made him capable of forgiving in the midst of it. That is the Eastertide transformation: not escape from the hard things, but grace sufficient to meet them with open hands and an upward gaze.

PRAYER: Risen Lord, fix our eyes on you when the world presses in. Make us full of your Spirit — full enough to look up, full enough to speak the truth, full enough to forgive. Let the resurrection that raised you raise the quality of our love. In the name of our Lord Jesus we pray, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, choose one person who has wronged you — and pray for them by name, daily, asking God to bless them. Let Stephen's last words become the practice of your ordinary days.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Keep your eyes on Jesus, for He is life and that in abundance.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

You Might Just Be a Living Stone!

Image from biblia.com

View devo: https://bit.ly/4eecSiN

Hear devo: https://bit.ly/4t0pVrM

2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” 7 Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and, “A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for. 9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2:2-10 NIV)

Leave it to American marketing to have convinced millions to buy a non-breathing pet. I'm referring to the phenomenal craze which was The Pet Rock. It was 1975 and an advertising manager by the name of Gary Dahl who was in a casual conversation about how real pets require care and that a rock, if it were to become a pet, would require no care at all. Mr. Dahl took the idea and ran with it, selling 1 million rocks in four months. The timing was right, the rocks were cheap and from Mexico, they shipped in a cardboard carrying box that looked like a pet carrier with air holes, and it came with a humorous instruction manual entitled, "The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock." Selling for around $4 it was very affordable and made for a great gift.

Leave it to the Bible to come up with some solid (yes pun intended) plays on words like saying a stone could be living, and The Living Stone was the Lord Jesus Himself; and those who came to Him would become, like Him, living stones as well. Once and now. Before and after. The way things were, and the way things are. Peter is writing to scattered, displaced believers who have every reason to feel small, forgotten, and inconsequential. And he reaches for the most radical reorientation available to him: he tells them who they are. Not who the world says they are. Not who they feel like on their worst days. Who God has declared them to be. And the distance between “once” and “now” in this passage is nothing less than the distance between the cross and the empty tomb.

Eastertide is the season of “now.” The resurrection has happened. The stone has been rolled away. The old things have passed. And Peter’s invitation in this passage is to live from that “now” — fully, joyfully, and with the kind of settled confidence that comes from knowing exactly who you are and whose you are.

Peter opens with one of the loveliest images in his letter: “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation — now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” The image of a newborn is not a picture of weakness. It is a picture of appetite. A newborn knows exactly what it needs and makes no apology for wanting it urgently, persistently, and at inconvenient hours.

But notice the sequence Peter gives us. The craving doesn’t come first. The tasting does. “Now that you have tasted that the Lord is good” — the craving is the result of having already tasted. You don’t crave something you’ve never experienced. You crave something you’ve had a first taste of and can’t quite get enough of. Peter is assuming that the people he’s writing to have already had that moment. The moment when grace became real, when prayer felt like an actual conversation, when the Word opened and something in you said: yes, that is true, I have always known that was true.

You have tasted. The question the Eastertide season puts to us is: are you still craving? Or have we grown so accustomed to the grace of God that it no longer stirs the appetite it once did? One of the subtle dangers of a long faith is that we can gradually move from hunger to habit. We go through the motions of devotion without the desire. We arrive at the Word without anticipation. We come to prayer as an obligation rather than a meal.

Easter is a recalibration of appetite. The risen Christ is not stale. The gospel is not old news. The same grace that first broke through to you is available right now, in the same freshness, with the same power. The Lord is still good. The milk is still pure. And the invitation to come and taste again is extended to every one of us, no matter how long we have been walking this road.

Peter pivots from the image of a newborn to the image of a building, and he places one stone at the center of it all: the living Stone, rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him. The reference is unmistakably to Jesus — and the word “living” is everything. This is not a metaphor for a dead teacher whose memory endures. This is the risen Christ, alive and active, the cornerstone of a structure that cannot fall because He Himself cannot be held by death.

Peter is drawing from Psalm 118, the same psalm quoted when the crowds welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem — “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” The builders of the world assessed this stone and found it unsuitable. Too rough, perhaps. Too inconvenient. Too costly. And they set it aside. But God chose it. God declared it precious. And on the morning of Easter, God demonstrated precisely how wrong the builders’ assessment was.

Here is the extraordinary thing Peter does next: he tells his readers that they, too, are living stones. “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house.” Not just building blocks — living ones. Not static, inert material, but people who share in the resurrection life of the cornerstone. You are not merely positioned near the living Stone. Something of His life has gotten into you. The same resurrection energy that raised Christ from the dead is at work in those who are built on Him.

And notice the tense: “are being built.” Present continuous. The construction is not finished. God is still placing stones, still shaping and fitting the community together, still doing the work of making something beautiful out of the very people the world has overlooked, dismissed, or declared unsuitable. If you have ever felt like you were the wrong shape for the life you were supposed to have — too broken, too ordinary, too far past your best years to be useful — this image is a word directly to you. The divine Builder is still working. You are not a reject. You are a living stone in the hands of the one who specializes in using what the world casts aside.

And now Peter arrives at the passage’s great crescendo — four declarations of identity stacked one on top of another like the richest gift you have ever been handed. Read them slowly, because each one is meant to land.

A chosen people. Not chosen because of merit or achievement. Not selected because you got your life together or finally became the person you always meant to be. Chosen — which means the choosing happened before you did anything to earn it. You were wanted before you knew to want back. That is the only kind of choosing that is truly grace.

A royal priesthood. In the Old Testament, the priesthood was a narrow, hereditary office — a small group of people with the specific vocation of bringing humanity before God and bringing God’s presence to humanity. Peter says that in Christ, that vocation has been democratized. Every one of you is a priest. Every one of you has direct access to the Father. Every one of you carries the vocation of making God’s presence known in the ordinary spaces of your life. And you carry it royally — not as a burden but as a dignity.

A holy nation. Holy does not primarily mean morally superior. It means set apart for a purpose. You belong to a community that crosses every border of ethnicity, nationality, culture, and class — a nation shaped not by geography or bloodline but by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You are citizens of something that will outlast every earthly empire. That citizenship is your deepest identity.

God’s special possession. The Greek word here — peripoiesis — was used in the ancient world for a treasure kept safely by its owner, something valued above ordinary goods. You are not incidental to God’s story. You are not a bystander or an afterthought. You are the treasure He purchased at the cost of His Son’s life, and He intends to keep you.

Peter gives these four declarations not so we can feel good about ourselves, but so we can do something with them: “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” The purpose of knowing who you are is to point to the One who made you that way. The identity is not the destination — it is the launching pad. We are chosen, royal, holy, and treasured so that we might tell the world something true about the God who calls the rejected, the forgotten, and the once-nobody into the glorious light of belonging.

And then Peter closes with those two quiet, devastating words: once and now. “Once you were not a people — now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy — now you have received mercy.”

The “once” is real. Peter does not pretend it wasn’t. There was a time before. A time of wandering, of being no one in particular, of looking for belonging in places that could not hold you. A time of living outside the mercy that was always, already, waiting to be given. The “once” is not something to be ashamed of — it is part of your story. Without the “once,” you cannot fully appreciate the “now.”

But the “now” is the point. And the “now” is held open by the resurrection. Easter is what keeps the “now” from collapsing back into the “once.” Because Christ is risen, the mercy is not withdrawn. Because the cornerstone is living, the building stands. Because you are built on the one who came back from the dead, nothing — not failure, not weakness, not the accumulated weight of your worst days — can reduce you back to nothing. You are the people of God. You have received mercy. That is not temporary. That is permanent.

So let that be the word you carry out of this room today. Not a to-do list. Not a new spiritual program. Just this: you are not who you used to be. The “once” is behind you. The “now” is the ground beneath your feet. And the risen Christ, the living Stone, is holding the whole thing together.

PRAYER: Living Stone, risen Lord — thank You that the “once” is behind us and the “now” is held open by Your resurrection. Build us into what You have declared us to be: chosen, royal, holy, and Yours. May we live from that identity today. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Write down one of the four identity declarations from this passage — chosen people, royal priesthood, holy nation, or God’s special possession — whichever one your soul most needs to hear right now. Put it somewhere you will see it every day this week. Read it aloud each morning as a statement of who you are, not a wish for who you might become. Let the “now” be louder than the “once.”

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Once you were not a people. Now you are the people of God. Live like it.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.