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.

Your Purchase of one of our products supports our ministry! https://concafe.printify.me/products

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/

The New Life in the Spirit

Hear and View devo: https://bit.ly/4eP4bub

1 What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For whoever has died is freed from sin. 8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:1-11 NRSV)

Dear Friend, May the grace and peace of the Lord Jesus be with you and yours. Please use this devotional time to pray for those who have asked prayers of us, i.e., your church bulletin's prayer list, etc. Also, from First Methodist Gonzales, we have this prayer request: Please pray for Bill Goins, father of Sandra Atkinson's daughter-in-law. He is dealing with serious health issues and needs prayers for healing.

As a child, the concept of sin took a hard minute for it to take root in my mind. I better understood it when someone taught it as "missing the mark," and demonstrated on a target. God expects us, I was told, to hit the mark and not to miss it. Sin is serious business and this is precisely what Paul is addressing in this passage.

Opening: The Question That Sounds Outrageous

Paul opens this passage with a question so extreme that he immediately answers it with his most emphatic Greek phrase: by no means — mē genoito — which carries the force of “Absolutely not! The very idea is unthinkable!”

The question was: should we keep sinning so that grace can keep doing its gracious work? It sounds absurd. But Paul is taking seriously a misunderstanding that was already circulating in the early church — the idea that since grace covers sin, more sin simply provides more occasion for grace to display itself. If forgiveness is free, why not keep drawing on it?

Paul’s answer is not primarily a moral argument. It is a theological one. And it is rooted in the same water and Spirit that stand at the heart of Pentecost. You cannot keep living in sin, Paul says, because you have already died. The person who used to live there is gone. And the one who has been raised in their place is alive to something entirely different.

Buried and Raised: What Baptism Actually Means

Paul’s argument turns on baptism — not as a ritual to be explained but as a reality to be inhabited. “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”

This is a staggering claim. Baptism is not, in Paul’s understanding, primarily a public declaration of personal decision. It is a participation in an event — in the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When a person goes under the water, something real happens. They are, as Paul puts it, buried with him. And when they come up, they are raised with him — raised to walk in newness of life.

The water of baptism and the fire of Pentecost belong together. Jesus himself, when he described what was coming, spoke of being baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire. John the Baptist announced it: “I baptize you with water, but he who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” The water buries. The Spirit raises. Both are required for the newness of life Paul describes.

At Pentecost, when Peter finished preaching and the crowd asked what to do, his answer was immediate: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Water and Spirit. Death and resurrection. Burial and new life. The Pentecost pattern is exactly the Romans 6 pattern — going down into one kind of existence and coming up into another.

Three thousand people went into the water that day. Three thousand people came up into the newness of life Paul is describing here. The Spirit who descended in wind and fire at Pentecost is the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead — and he is the one who makes the resurrection of Romans 6 not a theological category but a lived reality.

The Old Self Crucified, the New Self Freed

Paul then introduces language that is both more personal and more demanding: “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”

The old self. This is not Paul’s way of saying that we used to be bad people who became good people. He is describing something more structural than a moral improvement. The old self is the self that was defined by, oriented toward, and enslaved to the power of sin — the self that lived as though death were the final word and the body’s appetites were its own masters. That self, Paul says, has been crucified. Put to death. Nailed to the cross with Christ.

And here is the liberating consequence: “For whoever has died is freed from sin.” Death, in the ordinary world, is the one thing that releases a person from all legal obligation. A law can only bind the living. If you have truly died — if the old self has genuinely been put to death with Christ — then sin’s claim on you is broken. Not weakened. Broken.

The Pentecost connection here is direct and powerful. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit of the resurrection — the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead. Paul writes elsewhere that if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. The freedom from sin that Paul describes in Romans 6 is not a freedom you manufacture by trying harder. It is a freedom the Spirit enacts in the person who has been raised with Christ and now has the Spirit of the resurrection living in them.

The old self is dead. The Spirit is alive in you. That is the arithmetic of the new life.

Consider Yourselves Dead to Sin and Alive to God

The passage reaches its practical summit in the final verse: “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

The word consider — logizomai in Greek — is a deliberate, active reckoning. It is the word used for an accountant setting down a figure in a ledger, for a navigator calculating a position, for a person making a considered and settled judgment. Paul is not asking us to pretend. He is asking us to reckon with what is actually true.

The death happened. The resurrection happened. The Spirit has been given. The old self has been crucified. These are not aspirations — they are accomplished facts. And the call to consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God is the call to bring our daily thinking and daily choosing into alignment with what is already true about us.

This is where Pentecost becomes practical. The disciples in the upper room had already been forgiven. They had already seen the risen Christ. But they were huddled behind locked doors, still living from the posture of the old fear, still reckoning themselves as people to whom the worst had happened rather than people through whom the Spirit was about to move the world. And then the Spirit came — and they reckoned it. They counted the cost and found that the new life was larger than the old fear. They unlocked the doors and walked out into the daylight.

To consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God is to do what the disciples did on Pentecost morning: to step out of the locked room of the old way of reckoning yourself, and into the open air of what the Spirit has made you. Not perfect. Not arrived. But genuinely raised, genuinely freed, genuinely inhabited by the Spirit of the one who conquered death.

Walk in newness of life. That is not a command to achieve something. It is an invitation to inhabit what is already true.

For Reflection

Romans 6 and the Pentecost story are telling the same story from two different angles. Romans 6 gives us the theology: you have died with Christ, you have been raised with him, sin no longer has dominion, you are alive to God. The Pentecost narrative gives us the lived experience: disciples who believed all of this in theory, who had heard the promises and received the forgiveness, and who still needed the Spirit to come before they could actually live from it.

We are those disciples. We know the theology. We have heard the promises. We have been baptized into Christ’s death and raised with him into newness of life. And yet the locked room is a familiar address. The old reckoning — the one that says I am still defined by what I used to be, still bound by what once enslaved me, still the person sin knew before the cross — pulls with a gravity that is hard to resist.

The Spirit is the answer. Not as an additional experience to be pursued, but as the one who is already dwelling in you, already bearing witness that the old self is dead and the new life is real. The call of this passage is simply to reckon with what the Spirit has already done — to consider it, to align your daily thinking with it, to walk out of the locked room and into the daylight of what is already true.

Dead to sin. Alive to God. The Spirit says it is so. The question is whether we will reckon it.

PRAYER: Spirit of the resurrection, who raised Jesus from the dead and descended at Pentecost to raise us with him, help us to reckon ourselves truly dead to sin and truly alive to God today — and to walk out of every locked room into the newness of life you have already made real in us. In Christ Jesus we pray, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one locked room in your life — one place where you are still reckoning yourself by the old self rather than the new — and this week make the deliberate, Pentecost-empowered choice to step out of it, counting yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

CORRECTED POST! Be Not Afraid!

CORRECT LINK HERE: (SORRY ABOUT THAT!) Hear and View devo:https://bit.ly/3Se4y9J

24 “The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25 It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household! 26 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. 32 “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven. 34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn “ ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— 36 a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’ 37 “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:24-39 NIV)

Dear Friend, Happy Monday! Make the most of it as we begin this week filled with God's Holy Spirit. May we pray for one another and as we pray may we pray for the family of Sherry Peyton, wife of The Rev. Steven Peyton, who dies this week. Steven and Sherry were members of my church FUMC of San Marcos as they were leaving for Asbury Seminary. Rev. Peyton has served many churches in the UMC and now GMC. May God's comfort and peace be with all who loved Sherry.

I have shared how difficult it was for me to mature into ministry and calling former pastors and mentors of mine by their first name. For many years they were Reverend, Pastor, Brother, and other titles, never Juan, Francisco, Guillermo, or Pancho! I had held closely to my heart the first verse of this passage, "The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters."

Opening: The Hard Words Before the Fire Came

This is not the gentlest passage in Matthew. Jesus is not speaking in the soft register of the Beatitudes or the tender invitation of “come to me, all you who are weary.” He is briefing his disciples for the road ahead, and the briefing is honest to the point of being unsettling. Families will be divided. There will be opposition. The teacher was called Beelzebul, and the servant should expect no better than the master.

And yet — threaded through every hard word in this passage — is a command that appears three times in the span of a few verses, like a drumbeat underneath the difficulty:

Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.

The repetition is not accidental. Jesus knows that fear is the primary weapon the world uses against those who follow him. And he is spending considerable effort, in the middle of a passage about the cost of discipleship, dismantling it.

On Pentecost Sunday we celebrated the arrival of the Spirit who makes the courage Jesus is describing not merely a moral achievement but a gift. These words from Matthew 10 are the commission. The upper room is where the power came to live it out. They belong together.

What Is Whispered, Proclaim from the Rooftops

Jesus tells his disciples something striking: “What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.”

The private becomes public. The intimate becomes declared. The whisper becomes a shout. Jesus is describing a movement from concealment to proclamation — from the closed room of formation to the open air of witness.

This is precisely the movement of Pentecost. For fifty days, the disciples had been gathered privately — in the upper room, in prayer, in the company of those who already believed. They had been in the dark, receiving what Jesus had told them, waiting for what he had promised. And then the Spirit came in wind and fire, and they spilled out of the upper room into the streets of Jerusalem, and the whisper became a proclamation in every language under heaven.

Peter, who had denied Jesus three times in a whisper by a charcoal fire, stood up in front of a crowd of thousands and proclaimed the resurrection with a clarity and a courage that was unmistakably not his own. Something had changed. The same message that had been held in private for fifty days was now being spoken from the rooftops — exactly as Jesus had commanded.

This is the pattern of Spirit-empowered witness. What the Spirit has formed in us in the private places — in prayer, in Scripture, in the honest conversation with God about who he is and what he has done — is not meant to stay there. It is meant to be spoken. In daylight. Out loud. Wherever the people who need to hear it are gathered.

The Spirit at Pentecost did not give the disciples a new message. He gave them the courage to say the one they already had.

Not One Sparrow Falls Without the Father

In the middle of this demanding passage, Jesus places one of the most tender images in all the Gospels. He is talking about persecution and opposition and the cost of allegiance to him — and he stops to talk about sparrows.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

The sparrow was the cheapest item in the market. Two for a penny. And yet Jesus says the Father notices when one of them falls. Not in a distant, record-keeping way — but in the immediate, attentive, nothing-escapes-him way of a God whose care extends to the most overlooked and unremarkable creatures in his world.

And then the escalation that should stop us cold: the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Not counted once and filed away. Numbered — actively, continuously, personally known. The God who notices the sparrow has a number for every strand of hair on your head. You are not a case study in divine management. You are known with a specificity that no human relationship can fully match.

This is the foundation of the courage Jesus is asking for. He is not calling his disciples to a bravado that ignores the danger. He is calling them to a boldness that rests on the character of the God who is watching. The same Father who knows the sparrows knows you. And if he holds the sparrows in his care, then the cost of following Jesus — however real and however high — is not falling outside the Father’s notice.

The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit who makes this truth personally real. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children — and that if we are children, we are heirs. The sparrow-knowing, hair-numbering Father is our Father. And the Spirit is the one who makes that not merely a doctrine we hold but a reality we live inside.

Acknowledge Me — and the Life You Find by Losing

The passage closes with two of the most paradoxical statements Jesus ever made, and they belong together.

First: “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.” The word acknowledge here is the word for public confession — the open, named, unashamed declaration of allegiance. Jesus is not asking for a private faith that stays carefully out of sight. He is asking for the kind of faith that can be named, that has a face, that will say “I belong to him” in spaces where it costs something to say it.

This is exactly what the disciples could not do before Pentecost. They hid. They locked the doors. They kept the faith inside rooms. And then the Spirit came, and they acknowledged Jesus in the streets of Jerusalem in front of the very people who had crucified him. The acknowledgment that Jesus calls for in Matthew 10 is the acknowledgment that Pentecost made possible.

Second: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” This is the great Pentecost paradox made concrete. The disciples in the upper room had given up everything — their fishing boats, their tax tables, their social standing, their safety. They had lost their lives in every way that the world measures life. And on Pentecost morning, they found something no amount of security or self-protection could have given them: the fullness of the Spirit, the presence of the risen Christ, and the joy of a life poured out in the service of something larger than themselves.

The life found by losing is the Pentecost life. It is the life that comes to the person who stops clinging to the version of themselves that fear has built — the careful, self-protecting, say-nothing version — and opens their hands to receive what the Spirit wants to give and do and say through them.

Do not be afraid. The Father knows you. The Spirit has come. And the life you find by losing the one fear has been managing is worth everything you give up to receive it.

For Reflection

Matthew 10 is a passage for exactly the kind of world we live in — one where the cost of naming Jesus is real, where the pressure to keep the faith private is persistent, and where the natural human response to opposition is to stay quiet and stay safe.

Jesus does not pretend the pressure isn’t real. He names it, describes it, and tells his disciples plainly that following him will divide rooms and cost relationships and bring them before authorities who have no interest in what they have to say. He does not offer exemption from any of it.

What he offers instead is three things. The reminder that nothing is hidden that will not be made known — that the truth they are carrying does not need their protection, only their proclamation. The assurance that the God who numbers their hairs is watching everything that happens to them. And the paradox that the only way to find the life worth living is to stop managing the one fear has been running for them.

The Spirit at Pentecost is the power that makes all three of those things not merely true but livable. He is the courage the disciples did not have in themselves. He is the one who takes the whisper of private faith and makes it a word spoken in daylight. He is still doing exactly that — in every person who opens their hands, gives up the carefully protected life, and says: speak through me.

CLOSING PRAYER: Spirit of God, fill us with the Pentecost courage to proclaim from the rooftops what you have whispered in our hearts, trusting that the Father who numbers our hairs is watching everything and that the life we find by losing our fear is worth everything we surrender to receive it. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, acknowledge Jesus out loud to one person in a space where it costs something to do so — not with a rehearsed argument but with the honest, unashamed, Spirit-given words of someone who has found a life worth losing everything else to keep.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. "So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."

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/

Be Not Afraid for God Blesses Us

CORRECT LINK HERE: (SORRY ABOUT THAT!) Hear and View devo:

24 “The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25 It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household! 26 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. 32 “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven. 34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn “ ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— 36 a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’ 37 “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:24-39 NIV)

Dear Friend, Happy Monday! Make the most of it as we begin this week filled with God's Holy Spirit. May we pray for one another and as we pray may we pray for the family of Sherry Peyton, wife of The Rev. Steven Peyton, who dies this week. Steven and Sherry were members of my church FUMC of San Marcos as they were leaving for Asbury Seminary. Rev. Peyton has served many churches in the UMC and now GMC. May God's comfort and peace be with all who loved Sherry.

I have shared how difficult it was for me to mature into ministry and calling former pastors and mentors of mine by their first name. For many years they were Reverend, Pastor, Brother, and other titles, never Juan, Francisco, Guillermo, or Pancho! I had held closely to my heart the first verse of this passage, "The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters."

Opening: The Hard Words Before the Fire Came

This is not the gentlest passage in Matthew. Jesus is not speaking in the soft register of the Beatitudes or the tender invitation of “come to me, all you who are weary.” He is briefing his disciples for the road ahead, and the briefing is honest to the point of being unsettling. Families will be divided. There will be opposition. The teacher was called Beelzebul, and the servant should expect no better than the master.

And yet — threaded through every hard word in this passage — is a command that appears three times in the span of a few verses, like a drumbeat underneath the difficulty:

Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.

The repetition is not accidental. Jesus knows that fear is the primary weapon the world uses against those who follow him. And he is spending considerable effort, in the middle of a passage about the cost of discipleship, dismantling it.

On Pentecost Sunday we celebrated the arrival of the Spirit who makes the courage Jesus is describing not merely a moral achievement but a gift. These words from Matthew 10 are the commission. The upper room is where the power came to live it out. They belong together.

What Is Whispered, Proclaim from the Rooftops

Jesus tells his disciples something striking: “What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.”

The private becomes public. The intimate becomes declared. The whisper becomes a shout. Jesus is describing a movement from concealment to proclamation — from the closed room of formation to the open air of witness.

This is precisely the movement of Pentecost. For fifty days, the disciples had been gathered privately — in the upper room, in prayer, in the company of those who already believed. They had been in the dark, receiving what Jesus had told them, waiting for what he had promised. And then the Spirit came in wind and fire, and they spilled out of the upper room into the streets of Jerusalem, and the whisper became a proclamation in every language under heaven.

Peter, who had denied Jesus three times in a whisper by a charcoal fire, stood up in front of a crowd of thousands and proclaimed the resurrection with a clarity and a courage that was unmistakably not his own. Something had changed. The same message that had been held in private for fifty days was now being spoken from the rooftops — exactly as Jesus had commanded.

This is the pattern of Spirit-empowered witness. What the Spirit has formed in us in the private places — in prayer, in Scripture, in the honest conversation with God about who he is and what he has done — is not meant to stay there. It is meant to be spoken. In daylight. Out loud. Wherever the people who need to hear it are gathered.

The Spirit at Pentecost did not give the disciples a new message. He gave them the courage to say the one they already had.

Not One Sparrow Falls Without the Father

In the middle of this demanding passage, Jesus places one of the most tender images in all the Gospels. He is talking about persecution and opposition and the cost of allegiance to him — and he stops to talk about sparrows.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

The sparrow was the cheapest item in the market. Two for a penny. And yet Jesus says the Father notices when one of them falls. Not in a distant, record-keeping way — but in the immediate, attentive, nothing-escapes-him way of a God whose care extends to the most overlooked and unremarkable creatures in his world.

And then the escalation that should stop us cold: the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Not counted once and filed away. Numbered — actively, continuously, personally known. The God who notices the sparrow has a number for every strand of hair on your head. You are not a case study in divine management. You are known with a specificity that no human relationship can fully match.

This is the foundation of the courage Jesus is asking for. He is not calling his disciples to a bravado that ignores the danger. He is calling them to a boldness that rests on the character of the God who is watching. The same Father who knows the sparrows knows you. And if he holds the sparrows in his care, then the cost of following Jesus — however real and however high — is not falling outside the Father’s notice.

The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit who makes this truth personally real. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children — and that if we are children, we are heirs. The sparrow-knowing, hair-numbering Father is our Father. And the Spirit is the one who makes that not merely a doctrine we hold but a reality we live inside.

Acknowledge Me — and the Life You Find by Losing

The passage closes with two of the most paradoxical statements Jesus ever made, and they belong together.

First: “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.” The word acknowledge here is the word for public confession — the open, named, unashamed declaration of allegiance. Jesus is not asking for a private faith that stays carefully out of sight. He is asking for the kind of faith that can be named, that has a face, that will say “I belong to him” in spaces where it costs something to say it.

This is exactly what the disciples could not do before Pentecost. They hid. They locked the doors. They kept the faith inside rooms. And then the Spirit came, and they acknowledged Jesus in the streets of Jerusalem in front of the very people who had crucified him. The acknowledgment that Jesus calls for in Matthew 10 is the acknowledgment that Pentecost made possible.

Second: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” This is the great Pentecost paradox made concrete. The disciples in the upper room had given up everything — their fishing boats, their tax tables, their social standing, their safety. They had lost their lives in every way that the world measures life. And on Pentecost morning, they found something no amount of security or self-protection could have given them: the fullness of the Spirit, the presence of the risen Christ, and the joy of a life poured out in the service of something larger than themselves.

The life found by losing is the Pentecost life. It is the life that comes to the person who stops clinging to the version of themselves that fear has built — the careful, self-protecting, say-nothing version — and opens their hands to receive what the Spirit wants to give and do and say through them.

Do not be afraid. The Father knows you. The Spirit has come. And the life you find by losing the one fear has been managing is worth everything you give up to receive it.

For Reflection

Matthew 10 is a passage for exactly the kind of world we live in — one where the cost of naming Jesus is real, where the pressure to keep the faith private is persistent, and where the natural human response to opposition is to stay quiet and stay safe.

Jesus does not pretend the pressure isn’t real. He names it, describes it, and tells his disciples plainly that following him will divide rooms and cost relationships and bring them before authorities who have no interest in what they have to say. He does not offer exemption from any of it.

What he offers instead is three things. The reminder that nothing is hidden that will not be made known — that the truth they are carrying does not need their protection, only their proclamation. The assurance that the God who numbers their hairs is watching everything that happens to them. And the paradox that the only way to find the life worth living is to stop managing the one fear has been running for them.

The Spirit at Pentecost is the power that makes all three of those things not merely true but livable. He is the courage the disciples did not have in themselves. He is the one who takes the whisper of private faith and makes it a word spoken in daylight. He is still doing exactly that — in every person who opens their hands, gives up the carefully protected life, and says: speak through me.

CLOSING PRAYER: Spirit of God, fill us with the Pentecost courage to proclaim from the rooftops what you have whispered in our hearts, trusting that the Father who numbers our hairs is watching everything and that the life we find by losing our fear is worth everything we surrender to receive it. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, acknowledge Jesus out loud to one person in a space where it costs something to do so — not with a rehearsed argument but with the honest, unashamed, Spirit-given words of someone who has found a life worth losing everything else to keep.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. "So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."

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 Spirit Leads Us to Worship

View and Hear: https://bit.ly/3Se4y9J

1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. 2 Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing. 3 Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name. 5 For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. (Psalm 100 NRS)

Opening: Five Verses That Fill a Cathedral

Psalm 100 is one of the shortest psalms in the Psalter. Five verses. Seventeen lines. You can read it aloud in under thirty seconds. And yet it has been filling cathedrals and village chapels and kitchen tables and hospital rooms with praise for three thousand years, because it contains, in the most compact form imaginable, everything a human being needs to know about why to worship, who to worship, and what worship actually is.

It opens with a command so wide it staggers the imagination: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” Not the faithful. Not the already-convinced. All the earth. Every creature, every culture, every language, every person who draws breath under the sky that God made — summoned to the same joyful noise. The psalm’s vision of worship is as wide as creation itself.

And woven through every line of this small, enormous psalm is the presence and the work of the Holy Spirit — the one who initiates genuine praise, who makes the knowledge of God personal and real, who constitutes us as the people of God, and who sustains the steadfast love that gives us reason to keep singing.

The Spirit Who Moves Us to Worship

The psalm opens with imperatives — make, worship, come, know, enter, give thanks, bless. Six commands in five verses, all of them directed toward the same act: the conscious, deliberate, whole-self turning of a human being toward God in praise.

But here is what every honest worshiper knows: the commands are easy to read and genuinely difficult to obey on our own. There are mornings when the joyful noise does not feel natural. Seasons when the gladness has gone quiet. Days when entering the gates with thanksgiving feels more like entering under protest. The psalmist commands us to worship, but the command alone cannot produce the worship. Something else is required.

That something else is the Holy Spirit. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the Spirit himself intercedes for us when we do not know how to pray. In Ephesians 5, he instructs believers to be filled with the Spirit, and the immediate result he describes is speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making music in your hearts to the Lord. The Spirit is the one who moves worship from command to reality — who takes the imperative of the psalm and makes it the actual experience of the worshiper.

When the joyful noise rises genuinely from a human throat, when gladness is real and not performed, when thanksgiving is more than habit — the Spirit is at work. He is the one who opens the interior of a person to the reality of God in a way that produces the response the psalm commands. Genuine praise is not a human achievement. It is a Spirit-enabled gift.

Know That the Lord Is God: The Spirit Who Makes It Personal

The center of the psalm is a simple, declarative sentence that carries the weight of a lifetime: “Know that the Lord is God.”

The word know here is not merely intellectual acknowledgment. It is the same word used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures for the deepest kind of relational knowing — the knowing of a covenant partner, a friend, a beloved. It is not enough to know about God. The psalm calls us to know him — to have the kind of interior, personal, undeniable knowledge that changes the one who holds it.

This is precisely the work the Holy Spirit is sent to do. Jesus told his disciples that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will take what is mine and make it known to you. The Spirit is the one who takes the revelation of God — the Scripture, the gospel, the person of Jesus Christ — and makes it land in a human heart as personal knowledge rather than mere information.

The difference between knowing about God and knowing God is the Spirit. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, who carried Israel on eagles’ wings, who was poured out in wind and fire at Pentecost, who has been poured into our hearts by God’s love — that Spirit is the one who makes the center of Psalm 100 a living reality rather than a creedal statement. He is the one who turns “the Lord is God” from a proposition into an encounter.

His Steadfast Love Endures Forever: The Spirit Who Sustains the Song

The psalm ends with a three-part declaration that is its own Trinitarian echo: “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”

Goodness. Steadfast love. Faithfulness. The Hebrew word for steadfast love is hesed — the covenant love that does not give up, the love that absorbs betrayal and keeps coming, the love that has been the ground of Israel’s worship from the beginning of their story with God. And faithfulness — the reliability of God across every generation, the consistency of a character that does not shift with circumstances or moods.

These are the reasons the joyful noise never runs out of material. The steadfast love that endures forever is not a static archive of past kindnesses. It is a present, active, ongoing outpouring — and the Spirit is its agent of delivery. Paul writes that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. The hesed of God reaches the human heart through the Spirit. The faithfulness that extends to all generations is made real and personal in each generation by the Spirit who inhabits each new community of praise.

This means that the song of Psalm 100 is not a song that belongs only to those who first sang it at the temple gates in Jerusalem. It belongs to every generation in which the Spirit has been poured out — which is every generation from Pentecost onward. We sing it not merely as a tradition inherited from the past but as a present experience of the love that the Spirit is even now making real in our hearts.

The joyful noise is possible today because the steadfast love is real today. And the Spirit who makes it real has not diminished in his capacity, his presence, or his eagerness to lead the people of God into the praise they were made for.

For Reflection

Psalm 100 is five verses long and a lifetime deep. It tells us that worship is not a performance we put on for God but a reality the Spirit enables in us. It tells us that knowing God is not an intellectual exercise but a relational encounter made possible by the Spirit who takes what belongs to Christ and makes it known to us. And it tells us that the reason the song never ends is that the steadfast love that fuels it never ends — poured into each new generation by the same Spirit who poured it into the first.

We are the sheep of his pasture. We did not get here by our own navigation. We were made by him, carried by him, known by him, and loved by him with a love that will outlast every generation. The Spirit who makes all of that personally real in the interior of our lives is the Spirit inviting us, right now, to enter his gates with thanksgiving.

Make the joyful noise. Not because the circumstances call for it. Because the Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, and the Spirit who poured that love into your heart is still there — still hovering, still carrying, still making the knowledge of God come alive.

PRAYER: Holy Spirit, you who hovered over creation and were poured out at Pentecost, renew in us the genuine praise that only you can produce — making the truth of this psalm land not as words we know but as a reality we are living inside, so that the joyful noise we make is yours, Spirit-born and steadfast-love-fueled, to the glory of the Father. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Before this day ends, pause for one deliberate moment of Spirit-invited praise — speak or sing or write one specific reason the Lord has been good to you — and let that single joyful noise be the beginning of a habit the Spirit is forming in you.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! His steadfast love endures forever!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.