Yoked to Christ

View and Hear devo: https://bit.ly/44B7Si6

16 “To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: 17 “‘We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ 19 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.” 25 At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. 26 Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do. 27 “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. 28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 NIV)

Happy Monday to you, Friend! At one church where I served, I served alongside three wonderful and creative preachers. We did a sermon series once called Yoked to Christ, and one of the pastor designed a logo for the series that featured a beautiful sunny side up egg. A play on words, an egg yolk to compare to the yoke of the oxen which spoke of the connectedness of that we can have if we connect to Jesus. It did not create the number of gripes that our series called "The Real F-Word." Okay, folks, like I told the little old ladies, "Get your heads out of the gutter, the real F word is Forgiveness!"

Jesus opens this passage with a complaint that sounds almost weary: "To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to others" He goes on to describe a crowd that simply cannot be satisfied — John the Baptist came fasting and severe, and they said he had a demon; Jesus came eating and drinking with sinners, and they called him a glutton and a drunkard. Whatever approach God took, this generation found a reason to dismiss it. There's something painfully familiar in that. People can talk themselves out of receiving almost anything, if they've already decided not to receive it. One of the saddest and most frustrating moments as a district superintendent was trying to give away almost a half million dollars from the conference to a small church. The church sat, or so it thought, in the very area of a new bridge that was coming to the city. This church owned eight acres in another part of the city and they could have used the money to begin construction of a new church building that would have reached a part of that city that did not yet have many churches in that area; but the church received the news of free money with much suspicion. They wanted a church conference to discuss this. And the night of that conference people I had never before seen in the church were there and they were the most vocal. "I smell a rat," said one stranger, "the conference wants us to vacate this property so they can receive the money we will be paid as the bridge come right through here!" Not true. And they overwhelmingly voted no. The bridge went another way and a church that had just reloated and needed more room already in the early days of their new buidling. Almost $500,000 free came to them and they used it. The skeptical church still sits in an old, slowly decaying building, thanks to their talking themselves out of receiving almost anything.

And then, in the middle of this frustration, Jesus does something remarkable. He prays out loud, right there in front of everyone: "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children". This isn't bitterness. It's worship. The very people who should have understood — the religious experts, the credentialed, the ones who prided themselves on discernment — missed it. And the ones who received it were the unimpressive, the overlooked, the ones with nothing to prove. Jesus isn't surprised by this. He's thanking His Father for it, because it reveals something true about how the kingdom actually works: it comes by revelation, not by credentials.

This is exactly the pattern Pentecost would later confirm on a massive scale. When the Spirit was poured out in Jerusalem, it didn't fall on the religious elite first. It fell on fishermen, on women, on the ordinary and overlooked, on "your sons and daughters," on "old men" and "young men," as Peter would quote from Joel — anyone, regardless of standing, who would receive what only the Spirit could reveal. The wise and learned of Jesus's generation needed credentials to take Him seriously. The Spirit doesn't ask for credentials. He reveals the Father to whoever will receive Him with the openness of a child — which is exactly what Jesus is praising God for in this passage, decades before Pentecost made it the normal experience of the whole church.

And then comes one of the most tender invitations in all of Scripture: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light". A yoke was the wooden frame that bound two oxen together to share a load. Jesus isn't offering to remove all burdens from your life — He's offering to walk beside you under the weight, taking the harder share of it Himself. That's not a metaphor that ages out after the resurrection. The Spirit Jesus sent at Pentecost is the ongoing fulfillment of this very promise — Christ's continued presence, yoked to us, carrying what we cannot carry alone, teaching us as we go.

This passage holds together two things we don't usually put in the same breath: the disappointment of being misunderstood and dismissed, and the deep rest available to anyone humble enough to receive it. The same Spirit who revealed the Father to little children instead of the wise and learned is still doing exactly that today — meeting the weary and burdened, not the impressive, with rest that doesn't depend on having it all figured out.

PRAYER: Loving Lord, give us the humility of little children, and yoke us to Yourself so that we carry nothing alone today. Regardless of the challenge or obstacles, You are with us, and we will be more than overcomers. This we know and pray because of Jesus, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one burden you've been carrying by yourself, and consciously hand it over to Christ today, asking His Spirit to share the weight with you as His yoke promises.

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

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

How Long, God?

Hear/View devo: https://bit.ly/4bbekjx

1-2 Long enough, God— you’ve ignored me long enough. I’ve looked at the back of your head long enough. Long enough I’ve carried this ton of trouble, lived with a stomach full of pain. Long enough my arrogant enemies have looked down their noses at me.

3-4 Take a good look at me, God, my God; I want to look life in the eye, So no enemy can get the best of me or laugh when I fall on my face.

5-6 I’ve thrown myself headlong into your arms— I’m celebrating your rescue. I’m singing at the top of my lungs, I’m so full of answered prayers. (Psalm 13, The Message Bible)

Psalm 13 opens with four questions in a row, and The Message doesn't soften a single one of them: "Long enough, God — you've ignored me long enough. I've looked at the back of your head long enough. Long enough I've carried this ache in my heart, long enough endured this anguish in my heart. Long enough my arrogant enemies have looked down at me" (Psalm 13:1–2, MSG). There's no theological throat-clearing here, no careful qualifying of his complaint. David just says it. He feels forgotten. He feels like God has turned His back and walked away, and the waiting has gone on so long it's become its own kind of suffering. If you've ever sat with a prayer that seemed to bounce off the ceiling, or watched the silence stretch into weeks or months, this psalm already knows your address.

What's striking is that David doesn't talk himself out of the complaint before he brings it. He doesn't perform faith he doesn't feel. He says, essentially, I've had enough of this — and he says it directly to God, not about God to someone else. That's an important distinction. The complaint itself is an act of relationship. He's not walking away from God in his despair; he's walking straight toward Him with it, demanding an answer the way you only demand answers from someone you still believe is listening.

And then, in the space of just a few lines, something shifts. The Message renders it like this: "But I trust in your love. I'm dancing my salvation. I'm singing to God Most High. He has poured richest love on me" (Psalm 13:5–6, paraphrased from the full text). The turn doesn't come because his circumstances changed. Nothing in the psalm tells us the enemies backed off or the silence broke. The turn comes because David reaches for what he knows to be true about God's character even while the evidence in front of him hasn't caught up yet. That's not denial. That's the deepest kind of faith — choosing to trust the steadfast love of God when the present moment offers no proof of it.

This is exactly where Pentecost meets us. David didn't have the indwelling Spirit the way we do now; he had to reach for hope across a distance, almost willing himself toward trust by sheer force of memory and conviction. But after the Spirit was poured out, that reaching became something else entirely — an actual presence inside us, helping us when we don't even have words for what we're asking. Paul says the Spirit groans within us in our weakness, when we don't know how to pray as we ought. The same God David accused of ignoring him is the God who, through the Spirit, now takes up residence in exactly the kind of heart that's praying Psalm 13 — the discouraged, the waiting, the worn down. Pentecost doesn't erase the long enough; it means we're never groaning through it alone.

This psalm gives permission for something the church doesn't always make room for: honest lament that ends in real trust, not because the pain disappeared, but because the character of God is more durable than the darkness of the moment. You're allowed to ask God how long. You're allowed to feel forgotten. And you're invited, in the same breath, to remember that His Spirit is already groaning alongside you toward the answer you can't yet see.

PRAYER: Lord, when our waiting feels like forgetting, remind us that Your Spirit groans within us and Your love has not moved. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Voice your own honest "how long, God" today, and then deliberately follow it with one true thing you know about His steadfast love, trusting the Spirit to carry the rest.

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

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

God Himself Will Provide

Hear and View devo: https://bit.ly/4uRWusO

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied.

2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

8 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.

9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram[a] caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.” (Genesis 22:1-14 NIV)

Those who have had children know the frantic reaction most parents have when their newborn child has a fever. I speak from experience! It was the most helpless feeling in the world to check our baby's temperature and see it was 99.1 degrees. And of course, it was after hours and there was a call center that would take messages which they would relay to the pediatrician and when he finally called after fifteen minutes, he of experience knew how to talk us crazy nervous parents down to reality. "The baby is fine and some Tylenol will bring the fever down." And we were young! Imagine a man, who had been promised a son but who watied years and then had his wife suggest a surrogate son through their servant girl, and when finally God sent him Isaac, he's 100 years old. Now add the age that Isaac is at the time of this story, and the Bible does not give an exact age but add that to 100 and you get the age of Father Abraham. Now again, Christian tradition places Isaac in his teens to his 30s, but some traditions place him 25-37 years old. And the debate becomes why? Why in the first place? Why at that age?

Let's start with the first verse that says that God tested Abraham. And to be honest, it is the sort of test we'll see later at the hands and whim of Satan when old man Job goes through his ordeal; but this is God! God Himself initiates this. And the test could not be more severe — take your son, your only son, the one you love, and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you. This is not a baby's fever; this is the ultimate test! Now, we read this knowing how the story ends, which can make us soften it, rush past the horror of it. But Abraham didn't know how it would end. He rose early the next morning, split the wood, took the fire, and walked for three days with a knife in his hand and his son walking beside him, not knowing whether he would walk back down that mountain alone. How many of us could be doing that? I see no hands raised!

What's almost unbearable is the dialogue along the way. Isaac asks the question that must have lodged like a blade in Abraham's chest: "The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" And Abraham answers with words that are either the bravest or the most agonized in all of Scripture: "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son" (At any age, kids would catch on to what's going on?) He doesn't know how that will be true. He says it anyway. That's faith stripped down to its barest form — not certainty about outcomes, but trust in the character of the one who made the promise, even when every visible fact points the other way.

And then, at the last possible moment, with the knife raised, the angel of the Lord calls out and stops him. A ram appears, caught in a thicket. Abraham names that place Yahweh Yireh — the Lord will provide. The substitute appears exactly where Abraham needed it, exactly when he needed it, not a moment before. This is the pattern Scripture never abandons: God provides what we cannot provide for ourselves, and He provides it through substitution, through something given in the place of what was rightly required.

This ancient mountain in Moriah points forward to another hill, where another Father did not spare His own beloved Son, and where this time there was no angel calling out to stop the blade. Abraham's hand was stayed; the Father's was not. The ram in the thicket was a foretaste of the Lamb who would actually bear what we deserved, once and for all, so that the provision Abraham trusted for by faith became, in Christ, an accomplished fact for the whole world. And it's here that Pentecost enters the story, because the same Spirit who later raised that Lamb from the dead is the Spirit poured out on everyone who places their trust in Him — not leaving us to walk our own mountains alone, but living in us, interceding for us, groaning within us when the way ahead is unclear and the outcome is hidden. Abraham walked three days not knowing the ending. We walk forward carrying the Spirit of the One who already knows it, because the resurrection has already happened and the provision has already been made.

What this story asks of us isn't blind sacrifice for its own sake — it's the kind of trust that keeps walking toward the mountain because it believes the character of God more than it believes the darkness of the moment. Abraham held nothing back, and on the other side of that withholding, he received everything back, multiplied beyond what he could have imagined. The Spirit in us is the proof that we are not asked to provide what only God can provide. We are only asked to walk, to trust, and to let Him be Yahweh Yireh in the place where we cannot see the way through.

PRAYER: Loving God of life and love, increase our faith so that our trust can increase as well. Give us Abraham's kind of trust, the kind that keeps walking even before the way is clear, because we carry Your Spirit and trust Your provision. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Name the mountain you're currently walking toward without knowing the outcome, and tell God today that you trust Him to be Yahweh Yireh in that exact place.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember: The Lord will provide!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr/

The Down Payment of Freedom

View and Hear devo: https://bit.ly/4g2i8Hd

12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, so that you obey their desires. 13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments[a] of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments[b] of righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that you who were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become enslaved to righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms because of your limitations.[c] For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and lawlessness, leading to even more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification. 20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 So what fruit did you then gain from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the fruit you have leads to sanctification, and the end is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:12-23 NRS)

Dear Friend, may the grace and peace of the Lord Jesus be with you on this glorious day! May the Lord shine His love brightly on your day and whatever challenges you may be having. God is with you! As we pray today, please lift up Mr. Bill Reaves as he has been having some cardiac challenges. Bill underwent a heart cath yesterday and will await his next cardiologist's appointment to see what next steps are best for him. Please pray God bring healing and for Ann, Bill's wife, for her peace during this time as well..

One of the cutest memories Nellie and I have is when our two oldest daughters came in after a Vacation Bible School day and started joyfully singing, "I'm in the Lord's Army," really belting out, "Yes, Sir!" We still chuckle these many years later of that precious scene. I did not serve in the military, nor was I able to win the lottery associated with conscripted service, missing my number by 13. Yet, growing up in the mid-50s, the movies and tv shows about WWII motivated us to daily go out and fight the Nazis and Japanese; my favorite show was the Rat Patrol, jeeps with a single machine gun in the back and the cool Australian style hat with the one fold on the side. Yes, sir!

Paul opens this stretch of Romans 6 with a command that sounds almost military: "Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies" (Romans 6:12, NRSV). The word dominion is deliberate. Sin, in Paul's mind, isn't just a list of bad choices — it's a kingdom, a rule, a regime that demands allegiance. And the whole argument of this passage rests on a claim he's just made a few verses earlier: that claim has already been broken. You have died with Christ and been raised with Him. The old regime lost its grip the moment you went under the water and came back up. So when Paul says don't let sin reign, he isn't asking you to dethrone a king who's still in power. He's telling you to stop living as though a deposed ruler still holds the keys.

This is where the language of the passage turns vivid. "No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness" (Romans 6:13). Instruments — the Greek word can also mean weapons. Your hands, your voice, your time, your attention: all of it can be handed over to one master or the other. Paul's logic is startlingly physical. The same body that once served sin's purposes can be handed over, piece by piece, to serve God's purposes instead. Nothing about you is too ordinary or too compromised to be repurposed.

And here's where Pentecost quietly undergirds everything Paul is saying. He writes, "you are not under law but under grace" (Romans 6:14) — but grace isn't merely a legal pardon hovering somewhere above you. Grace arrived with a Person. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the down payment and the daily reality of the very freedom Paul describes here. It's one thing to be told you're no longer enslaved to sin; it's another thing to have the actual power to live that out. That power is the Holy Spirit, given to ordinary, weak, often-failing people so that obedience isn't a performance under pressure but the natural overflow of a new master living inside you. Paul will say it plainly two chapters later: the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of sin and death. Romans 6 describes the freedom; Pentecost is where that freedom takes up residence in flesh and blood — the very flesh and blood Christ Himself once wore, and which His Spirit now inhabits in us.

Paul ends with the verse that has anchored more deathbed conversations and quiet personal turning points than almost any other in the New Testament: "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). Wages — what you've earned, what you're owed, the cold arithmetic of a life spent serving the wrong master. Gift — what no one earns, what arrives entirely apart from merit, carried on nothing but the open hand of God, the same hand that was pierced for us and now holds out life instead. The whole passage moves from dominion to gift, from slavery to sonship, from the body as a weapon for wickedness to the body as an instrument tuned by the Spirit for righteousness. That movement isn't theoretical. It's the same movement the Spirit has been making in human lives since the rushing wind first filled that room in Jerusalem, sent by the One who promised He would not leave us as orphans.

PRAYER: Holy Spirit, take what Christ has already won and make it real in our bodies today, so that we live as people who actually believe we have changed masters. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one specific way today you can hand over a part of your body or your time to God as an instrument of righteousness, rather than letting it default back to its old master.

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

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

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The Cup of Water

View and Hear devo: https://bit.ly/4xJ2GpR

“Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.” (Matthew 10:40-42 NIV)

Happy Monday, dear Friend! May the blessings of the Lord Jesus be with you all! A belated Happy Father's Day to the dads out there! Keep Jesus' promises alive in the way you love your children, whether they be biological or not!

My wife tells the story of a day she and her mom and brothers and sister took a very long walk from their town of La Joya, Texas, to Garciasville, Texas, to see her dad. It was his birthday and he took the family car to work there. It's a journey of 15.4 miles on a very warm September day. They took off without taking water or food and about halfway there a blind woman along the route heard them and called them over. It was as if she knew they were thristy and offered them all a cool drink of water. She had prepared boiled potatoes for her lunch and shared those with my future family. It was a blessing from God!

There's something almost startling about how small the acts are that Jesus elevates in these closing verses of his commissioning speech. "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person's reward. And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward" (Matthew 10:40–42, NIV). A cup of water. That's the whole transaction. No sermon, no miracle, no theological insight — just water, offered to someone thirsty, because of who they represent. The woman's gift to my mother-in-law, my future wife and brothers and sisters was a sermon that still blesses to this day. God provides! And sometimes God uses us to bless!

Jesus has just spent an entire chapter sending the twelve out with authority to heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom, warning them they'll be like sheep among wolves, telling them not to fear those who can only kill the body. It's a heavy, high-stakes commissioning. And then He ends it here, with something almost tender by comparison — a promise that the people who receive the ones He sends are, in some mysterious way, receiving Him. And receiving Him means receiving the Father who sent Him. The chain runs all the way back: cup of water, disciple, Christ, the Father Himself. Nothing in that chain is too small to matter, because nothing in it is disconnected from the rest.

This is where Pentecost quietly stands behind the passage. Before the Spirit was poured out, the disciples were the ones being sent, the ones depending on the kindness of strangers along dusty roads. But after Pentecost, the same Spirit that filled that upper room took up residence in ordinary believers everywhere — which means the logic of this passage never stopped applying. Every act of welcome, every cup of water given to someone in Christ's name, is still received by Christ Himself, because His Spirit is what makes the disciple a disciple in the first place. Pentecost is what makes "whoever welcomes you welcomes me" durable across every century since — not just true of the original twelve, but true of every Spirit-filled life that carries his name into someone else's day.

There's a deep mercy in how low Jesus sets the bar for reward and how high He sets the value of small things. You don't need a platform. You don't need eloquence or theological precision. You need a cup of water and a willing hand. The Spirit who came at Pentecost is still moving through exactly those gestures — still meeting thirsty people through ordinary acts of hospitality, still receiving, in the receiving of one of His own, a welcome offered to Himself.

Think of your interactions with people. Are you the same on Monday as you were on Sunday in church? (And we hope that you were nice and welcoming?). Your witness could be a blessing!

PRAYER: Lord, let us see your Spirit moving in the small and ordinary kindnesses we're given to offer today. Let us be made as Your witnesses and servants who bless the world in loving ways! This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Offer one tangible act of welcome — a cup of water, a kind word, an open door — to someone today, trusting that the Spirit receives it as if given to Christ himself.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. You can be a living cup of water for the Lord!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Suffering and Shame: The Spirit Who Answers

Hear and View devo: https://bit.ly/4fXABEZ

7 It is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that shame has covered my face. 8 I have become a stranger to my kindred, an alien to my mother's children. 9 It is zeal for your house that has consumed me; the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me. 10 When I humbled my soul with fasting, they insulted me for doing so. 11 When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them. 12 I am the subject of gossip for those who sit in the gate, and the drunkards make songs about me. 13 But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me. With your faithful help 14 rescue me from sinking in the mire; let me be delivered from my enemies and from the deep waters. 15 Do not let the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up, or the Pit close its mouth over me. 16 Answer me, O Lord, for your steadfast love is good; according to your abundant mercy, turn to me. 17 Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress—make haste to answer me. 18 Draw near to me, redeem me, set me free because of my enemies. (Psalm 69:7-18 NRSV).

Opening: A Psalm the New Testament Cannot Leave Alone

Psalm 69 is one of the most quoted psalms in the New Testament. The early church returned to it again and again — not because it was comfortable, but because it was recognizable. They heard in it the voice of Jesus. They heard in verse 9 the words the disciples remembered after Jesus drove the money changers from the temple: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” They heard in verse 21 the detail of the vinegar offered at the cross. They heard, in the suffering of the psalm’s speaker, the shape of a life given entirely to God and reproached by the world for it.

This is a Pentecost psalm because Pentecost is the answer to everything this psalm is crying for. The psalmist prays for rescue, for steadfast love, for God’s face to turn toward him and not hide, for deliverance from the deep waters and the mire. And the Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the arrival of the very presence the psalmist is crying toward — God’s face turned toward his people, his steadfast love made personally and permanently available, his answer to the prayer of the one who has borne reproach for his sake.

Let us sit with this psalm and hear what it says to everyone who has ever suffered for the sake of faithfulness — and what Pentecost says in response.

Zeal That Consumes: The Cost of Faithfulness

The psalmist begins with a declaration that sets the entire passage in its proper frame: “It is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that shame has covered my face.”

This is not the suffering of someone who has done wrong and is paying for it. This is the suffering of someone whose faithfulness to God has made them a target. The insults that fall on him are the insults meant for God. The shame he carries is the overflow of a zeal for God’s house that has burned so hot it has made him a stranger to his own family and a byword among his neighbors.

The New Testament writers heard Jesus in these words — and rightly so. Jesus, whose zeal for his Father’s house drove him to overturn the temple tables, whose faithfulness to the mission made him a stranger to his own brothers, whose devotion to God brought him to a cross where the insults of those who hated God fell on him — Jesus is the fullest embodiment of this psalm. He bore reproach for our sake, as the psalmist bore it for God’s.

But the psalm’s application does not stop with Jesus. It extends to everyone who has ever paid a price for faithfulness. The person who has lost a friendship because they would not compromise what they believed. The family member who has become an oddity at the table because of what they practice on Sunday morning. The one whose zeal for the right thing has made them the subject of gossip rather than admiration.

Pentecost speaks directly into this experience. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost was poured out on people who were about to bear reproach at a scale none of them had yet imagined — who would stand in the streets and be mocked, who would be dragged before councils, who would lose their reputations, their livelihoods, and in many cases their lives for the sake of the name they were proclaiming. The Spirit came not to exempt them from the reproach but to sustain them through it. To make the zeal that consumes not a burden they could not carry but a fire they could not put out.

At an Acceptable Time: The Prayer That Waits

The pivot of the passage is one of the most honest and theologically precise phrases in the entire psalm: “But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me.”

At an acceptable time. The psalmist is not demanding an immediate answer. He is not giving God a deadline. He is placing his prayer within the framework of God’s own purposes and timing — acknowledging that the answer, when it comes, will come in the abundance of God’s steadfast love, at the moment God has determined is right.

This kind of praying is desperately hard. It requires trusting that God’s sense of the acceptable time is better than ours. It requires holding the urgency of the need — the mire is real, the deep water is real, the flood is pressing — alongside the confidence that the one being prayed to has not forgotten and is not indifferent and will answer when the time is right.

The disciples in the upper room were living inside exactly this kind of prayer. Jesus had told them to wait — to stay in Jerusalem until the promise came. They did not know when. They did not know exactly what. They only knew that the acceptable time was coming, and that the one who had promised was faithful. And on the morning of Pentecost, after ten days of waiting, the acceptable time arrived in wind and fire and the sound of many languages. The prayer of the upper room was answered in the abundance of God’s steadfast love, at the moment God had determined was right.

The steadfast love the psalmist cries toward is the same hesed — the same covenant faithfulness, the same love that does not give up, the same love that Paul says has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit at Pentecost is the answer to the psalmist’s prayer. He is God’s steadfast love made personal and present and interior in every believer who has ever cried out from the mire.

Do Not Hide Your Face: The Presence That Comes

The cry that runs through the second half of this passage is one of the oldest and most persistent prayers in the history of God’s people: “Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress — make haste to answer me.”

The hidden face of God. There is no more desolate experience in the spiritual life than the sense that God has turned away, that prayer is rising into silence, that the one who has been cried toward is not answering. The psalmist is in exactly that place. The mire is deep. The enemies are many. The shame is public. And God seems to be looking the other way.

The request is simply: turn toward me. Draw near. Let me see your face.

This is the prayer that Pentecost answers most directly and most personally. When Jesus promised the Spirit, he said: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.” The coming of the Spirit is the coming of the face that the psalmist is crying for. The Spirit does not maintain a polite distance. He draws near. He takes up residence. He is the presence of God made interior and permanent in the life of the believer — not a face glimpsed occasionally through the mire, but a presence that inhabits the person who receives him.

And when the Spirit comes, he does not come to those who have everything together. He comes to the ones in distress. He comes to the ones who have borne reproach. He comes to the ones crying out from the mire who have not yet seen the hand that is reaching for them. The acceptable time for the Spirit is always the moment when human resources have run out and the prayer has nothing left but “answer me.”

That is when the Spirit comes. That is when the face turns. That is what Pentecost announced to the world, and what the Spirit is still announcing, in every life where the prayer “do not hide your face” is being prayed with the last of what a person has.

For Reflection

Psalm 69 is not the psalm for the triumphant moment. It is the psalm for the long middle — the season when zeal has brought reproach, when the prayer has been prayed and the answer has not yet come, when the face of God feels hidden and the mire is real and the flood is pressing.

Most of us know this psalm from the inside, even if we have never read it. We know what it is to bear something for the sake of faithfulness. We know what it is to pray at an acceptable time that has not yet arrived. We know what it is to cry “do not hide your face” into what feels like silence.

What Pentecost says to all of that is not a dismissal of the difficulty. The disciples who received the Spirit had walked through the worst of it — betrayal, crucifixion, the shattering of everything they thought they understood about how God works. They knew the mire. They knew the deep water. They knew the hidden face.

And then the Spirit came. Not to erase the memory of the hard season, but to make the presence of God so personally and permanently real that the mire lost its power to define them. The zeal that had consumed them became the fire they carried into the streets. The reproach they had borne became the credential of their witness. The prayer for the acceptable time was answered in the abundance of steadfast love.

It will be answered for you too. The Spirit who came at Pentecost is the Spirit who draws near to the one in distress. Hold the prayer. The acceptable time is coming.

CLOSING PRAYER: God of steadfast love, pour out your Spirit on everyone here who is praying from the mire today — turning your face toward us, drawing near in our distress, and making the zeal that has cost us something into the Pentecost fire that sustains us all the way through. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, name your mire to God by name, pray the psalm's own words — "At an acceptable time, in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me" — and rest in the Pentecost promise that the Spirit who does not hide his face is closer to you right now than the mire that surrounds you.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God, and you matter to me! God's love towards us is steadfast, show the same to others!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

PRAYERFULLY consider supporting this ministry by visiting our store and making a purchase. Check out two t-shirts that promote our Christian faith! https://concafe.printify.me/

The God Who Opens Eyes

Hear/View devo:https://bit.ly/4uZNVMZ

8 The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast. 9 But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, 10 and she said to Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” 11 The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. 12 But God said to him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. 13 I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring.” 14 Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the Desert of Beersheba. 15 When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. 16 Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there, she began to sob. 17 God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. 18 Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.” 19 Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. 20 God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. 21 While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt. (Genesis 21:8-21 NIV)

There's a certain new style of story found on social media such as FaceBook, TikTok, Instagram, and others. These stories are called A.I. stories. They follow a certain plot and theme, and most are about dysfunctional families. And boy would this story fit right into that category. With one exception. This story was not generated from Artificial Intelligence. This is a God story. A story about the Father of the Faith, Abraham.

Opening: The Ones Who Weren’t Supposed to Be There

Hagar does not belong in this story, if you follow the logic of the people around her. She is an Egyptian slave woman, a secondary figure in someone else’s covenant narrative. The promise came to Abraham. The covenant was confirmed through Sarah. The child of the promise has now been born, and there is no longer any obvious place for Hagar and her son in the household. Sarah sees to that with a brutal efficiency: get rid of them. There was some impatience on the part of Sarah, who thought that maybe God wanted Abraham to have a son not through her, but someone else, like Hagar, her slave girl. Now that Sarah had her promised child, she is bothered that the "other woman" and her child, are still around. She orders Abraham to send away Hagar and her son, Ishmael.

And so, with a skin of water and some food, Hagar is sent into the desert with her boy. The water runs out. The child is dying. She puts him under a bush and walks away — not because she does not love him, but because she loves him too much to watch what is coming. She sits down a bowshot away and she weeps.

This is one of the rawest scenes of human despair in all of Scripture. And it is precisely here — in the wilderness, with an empty water skin and a dying child and a mother who has given up — that God does something that connects this ancient story directly to the promise of Pentecost.

He opens her eyes.

God Hears the Ones Nobody Else Is Listening For

Before God opens Hagar’s eyes, he does something else. He hears. The angel of God calls to her from heaven and says: “What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there.”

God heard the boy. Not the famous patriarch. Not the covenant heir. The boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the son of the slave woman, the one who had just been expelled from the household of promise. In the middle of the desert, under a bush, voiceless and dying — God heard him.

This is one of the most important Pentecost truths in the entire Old Testament. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost was poured out on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free. Not on the religiously credentialed. Not on the covenant insiders only. All flesh. The Pentecost vision is precisely the vision that Hagar’s story prefigures: a God whose hearing is not limited to the people in the room of promise, whose attention reaches into the desert, whose Spirit goes where the institutionally approved are not looking.

Paul makes this explicit when he quotes the story of Hagar in Galatians 4. He uses the two sons — Ishmael, born of the slave woman, and Isaac, born of the free woman — as a picture of two ways of approaching God: the way of law and human arrangement, and the way of promise and Spirit. The Pentecost outpouring is the fulfillment of the promise — and it overflows every boundary that the law-and-arrangement approach would have drawn around it.

God heard the boy in the desert. He hears the ones the rest of us are not listening for. And the Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit of that same hearing — moving into the deserts we have not thought to look in, finding the ones under the bushes, calling out to them from heaven.

Then God Opened Her Eyes

The most luminous line in the passage is also the most understated: “Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.”

The well was already there. It had been there all along. Hagar was not saved by a miraculous creation of water in the desert. She was saved by the opening of her eyes to what was already present but invisible to her in her despair.

This is a Pentecost image of the first order. The Spirit at Pentecost did not bring something entirely foreign into the world. He revealed what had been present all along — the risen Christ, the love of the Father, the power of the resurrection that had already occurred — and opened the eyes of the disciples to see it in its fullness. Before Pentecost, they had seen Jesus with their physical eyes. After Pentecost, they saw him with the Spirit’s eyes — and what had seemed like the end of everything became the beginning of everything.

John’s Gospel describes the Spirit as the one who will guide you into all truth — who will take what belongs to Christ and make it known to you, who will open the interior eyes of the believer to see what is already real. The Spirit is, in this sense, the great eye-opener. He does not manufacture a different reality. He opens us to the reality that God has already created and placed before us.

Hagar was weeping at a bowshot’s distance from the water that would save her son. Many of us are doing the same thing. We are sitting at a bowshot’s distance from the resource God has already placed in our desert, unable to see it because grief or fear or exhaustion has closed our eyes. The cry of this passage — and the cry of Pentecost — is: God, open our eyes.

And the promise of the Spirit, poured out on all flesh, is that he is precisely the one who does.

Lift the Boy Up

The angel’s instruction to Hagar before he opens her eyes is worth sitting with: “Lift the boy up and take him by the hand.”

Before the well is revealed. Before the water is poured. Before the rescue is complete. Hagar is asked to do one thing: stop sitting at a distance from the dying child she loves, go back to him, and take his hand.

This is not a trivial instruction. Going back to where the child is means going back to the thing that is breaking her heart. It means facing the grief she walked away from rather than managing it from a safer distance. It means choosing presence over protection of herself from the pain of the situation.

The Pentecost parallel is direct. The disciples in the upper room were sitting at a distance from the city that had crucified their Lord — behind locked doors, managing their grief from a safer distance. The Spirit came and the instruction was the same: go back into the city. Go back to the people who rejected him. Lift the boy up. Take him by the hand. Go to where the need is, not away from it.

And here is the sequence that the passage establishes, and that Pentecost confirms: the going back comes before the eyes are fully opened. Hagar is told to lift the boy before she sees the well. The disciples are told to go into Jerusalem before they fully understand what is about to happen. Faith is asked to move toward the need before the resource is fully visible. And in the moving, the eyes are opened.

God opened her eyes. She saw the well. She filled the skin. She gave the boy a drink. In that order. First the opening. Then the seeing. Then the filling. Then the giving. That is the Pentecost sequence too — Spirit opens, believer sees, receives, pours out.

For Reflection

Hagar’s story is a Pentecost story because it is a story about a God whose Spirit reaches into the deserts that fall outside the boundaries of official blessing — who hears the ones nobody else is listening for, who opens eyes to what is already present and already sufficient, and who sends his people back toward the need rather than away from it.

The well was already there. The water was already waiting. The God who heard the boy already knew where the rescue was. What Hagar needed was not a different desert. She needed opened eyes.

The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit who opens eyes. He opened the eyes of the disciples to see the risen Christ in his fullness. He opened the eyes of three thousand in Jerusalem to see their need and the one who met it. He has been opening eyes ever since — in deserts and in upper rooms, in the places where the water has run out and the places where the water was always there but invisible until the Spirit came.

Where are you sitting at a bowshot’s distance from something God is asking you to move toward? Where has despair or exhaustion or the accumulated weight of a hard season closed your eyes to a well that may already be there, waiting to be seen? The same angel who called to Hagar from heaven is calling to you: do not be afraid. Lift the boy up. Take him by the hand. And let the Spirit open what grief has closed.

PRAYER: Loving God thank You for allowing us who try to be at a safe distance to finally hear and approach where the need is. Give us the faith to listen, the faith to have our eyes open. Give us the faith to help those who are in need. Fill our hearts with love, our minds with compassion and our bodies with the boldness to reach out to those in need; for this is the way we will win the world for You; in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Be attentive to God's leading, to have our eyes open to the needs aournd us and this help others in loving and genuine ways.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Going forth in service will win the world for Jesus Christ.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

PRAYERFULLY consider supporting this ministry by visiting our store and making a purchase. Check out two t-shirts that promote our Christian faith! https://concafe.printify.me/