Living Sacrifice

Hear and view devo: https://bit.ly/4xh72Uk 12:1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:1-8 ESV)

As a child I loved to read comic books. And I also loved the ads! My favorite was the one by Charles Atlas whose body-building course appealed to me. Being a child that enjoyed too much flour and sugar, well, you understand. The ad's price was never shown and I was smart enough even then to know I probably could not afford the course. I later found out that his name was not even Charles Atlas! It was Angelo Siciliano born in Italy in 1892 and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, as a child. As a young man, he was determined to transform himself from what he described as a skinny, weak youth into a muscular and confident adult. He developed a system of exercises that later became known as "Dynamic Tension." The ads featured a skinny boy having sand kicked in his face which motivated Angelo to become Charles Atlas. I was in junior high when I made a good friend who owned the courses and he gave them to me! I really believed that at 14 I was the strongest I had ever been in my life. I still do. But with no telephone books around I can't prove that any longer. Heck, I have trouble opening a Frito's bag!

Paul has spent eleven chapters of Romans building the most comprehensive theological argument in the New Testament — justification, grace, the sovereignty of God, the mystery of Israel, the mercy that swallows everything (Just why this epistle is called The Gospel According to Paul!) — and now, in chapter 12, he arrives at the practical implications, and he starts with the body. Not the soul. Not the spirit. The body. Could we call Paul the "Charles Atlas of the Faith?" He writes, "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." If you were expecting Paul to spiritualize everything he's just said into a series of interior attitudes, he's about to disappoint you in the best possible way. The gospel has an address, and that address is your actual physical life — the one with the schedule and the habits and the Monday morning and the recurring temptations and the things you do when nobody's watching.

A living sacrifice is, when you think about it, a genuinely unusual concept. In the ancient world, the whole point of a sacrifice was that it stopped living. The animals was offered to God to take the burden of sin in the human. The animal didn't get to wander off the altar. But Paul is describing something different — a sacrifice that stays on the altar not because it can't get off, but because it chooses to remain there. Which means the challenge isn't getting on the altar once; it's staying on it when everything in you wants to climb back down and run the show yourself. Every morning is essentially a new opportunity to either present your body again as a living sacrifice or slide quietly off the altar before breakfast and resume the management of your own life. Most of us know which one tends to win before the coffee is ready. Be honest!

Then Paul says the line that has probably been quoted more times than almost any other in Romans: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Conformed is a passive word — it describes something that happens to you when you stop paying attention, when you simply absorb the shape of whatever surrounds you long enough. Water takes the shape of its container. Christians who stop actively resisting conformity will take the shape of the culture around them — not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, almost imperceptibly, the way a river slowly changes the landscape. The transformation Paul calls for is the active alternative — the daily, Spirit-enabled renewal of the mind that changes not just what you do but how you think, what you value, what you notice, what you desire.

And here is where the gifts come in, and Paul's tone shifts to something almost playful in its matter-of-factness. He says we are all one body in Christ, each of us members of one another — and then he just starts listing gifts. In Ephesus, on our tour of the Holy Land, we saw an ancient museum from Paul's time, that featured different model of the parts of the body; hands, feet, head, etc. And it is believed that as Paul toured it, he got the inspiration for this belief. Prophecy. Ministry. Teaching. Exhortation. Giving. Leading. Compassion. He lists them without ranking them, without suggesting that some are more important or more spiritual than others, without building any kind of hierarchy. The person who gives generously and the person who leads and the person who shows compassion with cheerfulness are all in the same list, treated with the same weight. There is no hint that any of these gifts is the point — the body is the point, and the gifts are what make the body function the way it's supposed to.

This is where the renewed mind becomes visible. When you stop being conformed to the world's way of measuring worth — by status, by visibility, by how many people are watching when you do the thing — and start thinking with a renewed mind, you discover that showing compassion cheerfully and giving generously and teaching faithfully are not lesser gifts being offered on a lesser altar. They are the body doing exactly what the head, who is Christ, designed it to do. The gift you have is not accidental and it is not optional. It was given by the Spirit, for the body, for the moment you are living in.

The Pentecost connection runs right through the middle of this passage. The Spirit poured out in that Upper Room came not to give everyone the same gift but to give each person what was needed for the whole body to function — which is exactly what Paul is describing here. The diversity of gifts is not a design flaw in the church; it is the design. A body that was all eyes or all ears would be, as Paul says elsewhere, a very odd body. What you bring to the community of faith is not redundant. It is necessary. And the renewed mind that the Spirit cultivates is what allows you to offer it without comparing it to someone else's gift, without wishing you were the eye when you're the ear, without sliding off the altar because nobody seems to be noticing what the ear does.

Stay on the altar. Keep showing up with the gift you've been given. The body needs what you carry more than you probably know. That will mean praying for those you don't even know; sharing with the needy when you used to say no way and "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!" Give because it was given to you.

PRAYER: Lord, renew our minds by Your Spirit so that we offer our bodies and our gifts as living sacrifices — cheerfully, faithfully, and free from the conformity that would make us something less than You designed us to be. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! And make it the same for those around you! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify the specific gift Paul would put on his list that best describes how God has wired you, and find one concrete way to use it in the body of Christ this week — without comparing it to anyone else's.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me, as all should matter to you.

Let's win the world for Jesus!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

Hear and View this devo: https://bit.ly/4xNvRY8

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” 14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. (Matthew 16:13-20 NIV)

Friend, can you visit a doctor's office or make a telephone call asking for help or stay at a hotel without getting a text or email with a survey attached? Try calling the federal Medicare help line and guess what? "You've been selected to participate in a short survey about our service! Press 1 for the worst service you've ever had in the world to 5 which is the greatest service the world has ever seen." Okay, I stretch it a bit, but you get what I am saying. Today's passage has a question that some may say is a survey question that Jesus asks about Himself.

Jesus asks the disciples a question that sounds almost like He's conducting a public opinion survey, which is a little amusing when you think about it — the Son of God, checking His approval ratings. "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" The disciples, apparently having kept up with the local gossip, have a ready answer: some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah or one of the prophets. The crowd, in other words, has Jesus in the category of "significant religious figure, possibly with a connection to someone who came before." High praise by any ordinary standard. Not even close to sufficient.

And then Jesus pivots. The survey is over. He's not actually interested in the crowd's opinion — He's interested in theirs. "But what about you? Who do you say I am?" That little word "you" lands differently than the first question. The first question was about what's out there, what people are saying, what the general consensus is. This question is personal. Intimate. It's the difference between asking someone what the critics think of a movie and asking them what they thought of it. Jesus is not asking for a theological position paper. He's asking for a personal declaration.

Peter, being Peter, doesn't hesitate. While the others are presumably still formulating their responses, weighing their words, making sure they get this right, Peter is already talking. "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." It's complete. It's correct. And it comes with an immediacy that tells you something about Peter — he's not always right, but he's rarely slow. This happens to be one of his finest moments, and Jesus receives it as exactly what it is: not the conclusion of a careful theological argument but a revelation. "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven." Nobody told Peter to say that. Nobody taught him to arrive at that conclusion through a series of logical steps. The Father opened something in him, and what came out was the truth.

And then Jesus says something that has shaped the church's understanding of itself for two thousand years: "On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it." There has been a great deal of debate over the centuries about exactly what the rock is — is it Peter personally, is it the confession Peter just made, is it Christ Himself as the foundation? Theologians have been cheerfully arguing about this since approximately the second century, and we will not resolve it here this morning. What is less debated, and what matters enormously for how we live, is what Jesus says the church will be able to do once it is built: not even the gates of Hades will overcome it.

Now, gates are defensive structures. Gates don't go anywhere — they stand and hold a position. Which means that the image Jesus is painting is not the church huddled behind its own gates hoping the enemy doesn't break through. It's the church advancing, moving forward, pressing against the gates of death and darkness and finding that those gates — however solid they appear — cannot hold against the authority that Jesus is about to hand to His people. "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Keys open things. Keys give access. Keys are given to people who are trusted with the household.

The church Jesus describes here is not a museum for people who have already figured everything out. It is a movement of people who have said — with Peter, with whatever degree of confidence and whatever remaining uncertainty we each carry — You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. That declaration is the foundation. Not a perfect life. Not a spotless record. Not a performance that earned the keys. A confession. And on that confession, the Spirit who was poured out at Pentecost came to inhabit and empower a community that would carry those keys into every place where the gates of darkness were still holding.

The gates are still standing in a lot of places. The darkness is still real in a lot of lives. But the church — the community of people who have answered the personal question with Peter's personal answer — has been given the keys. Not to keep them polished and hanging on the wall, but to use them. To open things. To loose what has been bound. To press against gates that look solid and discover that the one who promised has not overstated the case.

PRAYER: Lord, give us the courage of Peter's confession and the boldness to use the keys You have placed in our hands for the sake of a world where so many gates still need opening. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Answer Jesus's personal question for yourself today — not the crowd's answer, not the theologian's answer, but yours — and let that declaration be the foundation from which you press against one closed gate in your world this week.

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

Let's win the world for Jesus by our love,

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Irrevocable

Hear and View devo: https://bit.ly/4qh8J1J

11:1 I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. 2 God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel: 29 for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. 30 Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, 31 so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. 32 For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all. (Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 NIV)

Welcome to ConCafe (again) Friend! I pray this finds you well and enjoying this day! May the Lord show you the path you should take in all situations is my prayer for you. I spoke with Rev. Onweiler's daughter this morning and he is weaker today than yesterday but holding on. May we continue to pray for Harold and Roma and family. Prayers for Mr. Clay Pace's Kairos friend "Tim Acklin who is in the hospital where they are trying to find the source of his internal bleeding." May it be soon and complete. Pray for one another! Pray for our world and the need for peace in each heart especially those who lead.

I am convinced that the more I request to be unsubscribed from spam mail the moment I type in my email address so they know who's requesting it, they must enter it into 500 more spam email servers! God have mercy on us! I know these spammer feel no sense of rejection for they must know of their sins! In the early days of ConCafe I had the option on that alerted me to the people who unsubscribed from ConCafe, and being only human I feel pain in knowing that not only was I not reaching them they no longer wanted to be bothered with my emails. But we come a passage that addresses the question about God rejecting His people.

Paul opens this passage with a question that sounds almost defensive, and knowing Paul, that's probably intentional: "Did God reject His people?" You can almost hear the sharp intake of breath from his Jewish readers. This is the question that everything he's said in the previous chapters seems to be building toward, the uncomfortable logical conclusion that some of his readers were quietly drawing: if Israel largely missed Jesus, if the covenant people stumbled over their own Messiah, does that mean God gave up on them? Does it mean the promises are cancelled, the relationship terminated, the whole covenant history of Abraham and Moses and David filed away under "didn't work out"?

Paul answers with the Greek equivalent of absolutely not, no way, perish the thought — and then, with what you have to imagine is at least a small smile, offers himself as exhibit A. "I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin." In other words: you want proof that God hasn't rejected Israel? You're reading a letter from the proof. The man who once held the coats of the people stoning Stephen and then spent years dragging Christians to prison is now the primary theologian of the movement he tried to destroy. If God's mercy can find Saul of Tarsus on a road to Damascus and turn him into Paul the Apostle, the argument that God has given up on anybody becomes considerably harder to sustain.

And then Paul moves to something that should slow every one of us down long enough to actually think about it: "for God's gifts and His call are irrevocable." Irrevocable. That's not a soft word. It means it cannot be called back, cannot be undone, cannot be revised in light of subsequent behavior. What God gives, He gives. What God calls, He calls. Not on a trial basis. Not subject to renewal pending performance review. The gifts and the call of God don't have an expiration date printed on the bottom, and they don't come with a return policy that God activates when we disappoint Him. This is, when you sit with it, one of the most stabilizing sentences in all of Scripture — not because it means behavior doesn't matter, but because it means the foundation of our relationship with God is not our grip on Him but His grip on us, and His grip doesn't slip.

What follows is one of the most gloriously counterintuitive statements in the whole letter: "For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that He may have mercy on all." Read that again slowly, because it sounds almost backwards. God allowed the disobedience — in Israel, in the Gentiles, in all of us — not as a punishment but as the setup for the mercy. The whole human story of going our own way, of missing the mark, of the stubborn self-direction that characterizes every person who has ever lived — all of it was allowed within the sovereign purposes of a God who intended, from before any of it started, to meet it with mercy. Not because He approves of disobedience. Not because sin doesn't matter. But because the mercy He wanted to show was always bigger than the problem it was answering, and the problem needed to be fully acknowledged before the mercy could be fully displayed.

This is, honestly, a little humbling if you think about it too hard. We would have preferred a story in which we were never disobedient and God was simply pleased with us. But that's not the story. The story is that we were all, in our various ways, bound over to our own stubbornness, and the mercy that met us there is the mercy that now defines us — not our disobedience but the grace that answered it. Paul is saying that the very thing that looks like the problem — the human capacity for going wrong — turned out to be the occasion for the most magnificent display of mercy in the history of the universe. The cross was not plan B. It was always the point.

This connects directly to Joseph's story that our series has been following. The brothers who sold Joseph intended disobedience. The Egyptians who imprisoned him were instruments of injustice. And God took all of it — every act of human wrongness in that long chain of events — and bent it toward mercy, toward the moment when Joseph could say to the very brothers who had betrayed him: you intended this for harm, but God intended it for good. The mercy was always larger than the wrong. It just needed the whole story to play out before you could see it clearly.

And that is where we live — in the middle of the story, where the disobedience is still very visible and the mercy is sometimes harder to see. But the promise of this passage is that the mercy is not losing. The gifts are irrevocable. The call stands. And the God who took human disobedience and turned it into the occasion for the cross is the God who is still taking our mess and working it toward something only He could have designed.

PRAYER: Loving Lord, thank You that Your gifts are irrevocable and Your mercy is always larger than our disobedience — hold us in that mercy today and let it make us people of generous grace toward others. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one person in your life you've mentally written off as beyond God's reach, and let the irrevocable mercy of this passage change how you pray for them this week.

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

Love your neighbor as yourself!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Please support this ministry with your prayers and gifts: paypal.me/eradiovalverde

When Crumbs Are Enough

Hear and view devo: https://bit.ly/45ck7lI

10 Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: 11 it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” 12 Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” 13 He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14 Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” 15 But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” 16 Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? 17 Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer? 18 But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19 For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. 20 These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” 21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment. (Matthew 15:10-28 NRSV).

Dear Friend, happy Monday! Here's praying you have been blessed and you have been busy blessing others! Rejoice in the Lord and be glad! May the fears and worries about today melt in the presence and power of God's word as we examine the passage for this coming Sunday! Open your ears, hearts, eyes, and spirit to receive all the Lord may be sharing with you! As we pray please be in prayer for the family of Mrs. Beatriz Espericueta of Edinburg, Texas, who died on Friday. She was an amazing woman. She was a blessed mother not only to her twelve children, and get this, she birthed six boys, then six girls! But she blessed many who were not biologically related to her. Nellie and i were blessed by many of her kids in our ministry, especially in my campus ministry days there in Edinburg. I pray for the comfort of the Lord to be with that family and who all loved and were blessed by Mrs. Espericueta.

Most of us have some traces or influences of the Jewish faith and culture in our lives. If you've not yet done a DNA history of your life, I urge you to do so! You may get some surprises! And you might even get some family out of it! Okay, that's a story for another time. But in my wife's case, her mother had a unique, very Jewish practice that would fall under kosher practices. She had special pots and pans set aside for different cooking purposes and cross use of such were not allowed. This was taught by her Mom and her Mom before her and may Moms down the line back to España where the Jewish influence was very real and present in that family. There were purposes for those laws as we find them in the Old Testament as well as for the dietary safeties they provided. Today's passage addresses this some. May it bring a blessing to us.

There's a moment in this passage that always makes me smile a little, even though it comes wrapped in some pretty heavy stuff. Jesus has just finished dismantling the Pharisees' entire system of ritual cleanliness — the hand-washing rules, the food laws they'd turned into identity markers — and he says something wonderfully blunt to the crowd: it's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, it's what comes out of your heart. Evil thoughts, murder, adultery, theft, false testimony, slander — that's the real contamination. Meanwhile, eating a sandwich with unwashed hands? Not exactly a spiritual crisis.

The disciples, bless them, come to Jesus afterward a little nervous. "Do you know the Pharisees were offended?" And Jesus basically shrugs — every plant not planted by his Father will be pulled up, so let them be, they're blind guides leading the blind, and you know how that ends: everybody in a ditch together. Peter asks him to explain the parable, and Jesus gently points out that even his own disciples are still slow to get it. Whatever goes into the stomach passes on through and ends up, well, exactly where you'd expect. But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and that's what makes a person unclean.

It's a sharp teaching. Jesus is essentially saying: stop performing purity and start examining what's actually going on inside you.

And then — right on the heels of that — Jesus leaves and heads toward Tyre and Sidon, Gentile territory, about as far outside the boundaries of "acceptable" as you could get in that world. And a Canaanite woman comes to him, shouting, "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly."

Jesus doesn't answer her. Not a word.

Read that again, because it's easy to rush past. The Son of God, who just finished saying purity isn't about external categories, seems to go quiet in front of a woman who — by every external category available — didn't belong. She was a Canaanite. A woman. Shouting in public. Three strikes in that culture, and Jesus says nothing.

The disciples, ever the diplomats, urge him to send her away because she keeps yelling after them. Jesus tells her he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. She keeps coming. She kneels before him. "Lord, help me." And then Jesus says something that lands hard on modern ears: "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs."

I'll admit, the first time I really sat with this, I wanted to explain it away fast. But let's not rush past the discomfort — let's actually watch what happens next, because this woman does something remarkable. She doesn't argue theology. She doesn't defend her dignity. She takes his own metaphor and turns it into an act of faith: "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."

She's essentially saying: fine, call me a dog if you want — just let me have what falls from the feast. I don't need a seat at the table. I just need the crumbs, because I know even the crumbs from you are enough to heal my daughter.

And Jesus' response is one of the great "mic drop" moments of the Gospels: "Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted." Her daughter is healed at that very hour.

Here's what I think is happening underneath the surface of this whole passage, from the hand-washing debate straight through to this remarkable woman. Jesus just spent an entire conversation teaching that what defiles or purifies a person has nothing to do with external categories — what you eat, what group you were born into, which side of the boundary line you stand on. And then a Gentile woman shows up who has every external mark of "outsider," and by the internal marks — humility, tenacity, faith that doesn't quit even when it seems ignored — she turns out to be the truest insider in the whole story. She sees who Jesus is more clearly than the religious professionals did a few verses earlier.

Some scholars think Jesus' initial silence and the "dogs" comment were even testing or drawing out the disciples' assumptions as much as hers — letting everyone watch what real faith looks like when it doesn't get the immediate yes. Whatever the mechanics, the outcome is the same: the crumbs from Jesus' table turn out to be more than enough. That's not a small thing to say about him. A king with such abundance that his leftovers heal.

Maybe you're in a season where you feel like you're only getting crumbs. Underqualified, outside the circle, praying and not hearing much back. This woman's story isn't a lesson in groveling — it's a lesson in tenacious, undignified, wonderfully persistent faith that trusts even a crumb from Jesus is more substantial than a feast anywhere else.

PRAYER: Living Lord, give us the humble, relentless faith of the Canaanite woman, who trusted that even the crumbs from your table were enough to heal what we cannot fix ourselves, in Jesus' strong name we pray, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord. OUR CALL TO ACTION: Bring your unresolved, maybe-too-small, maybe-too-bold request to Jesus today, and don't stop asking just because the first answer feels like silence.

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

Let's share love today like never before to the unloved and unwanted and especially the unseen!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

What is God Preparing for You?

Hear and view devo: https://bit.ly/4fT8LId

1 O give thanks to the Lord; call on his name; make known his deeds among the peoples. 2 Sing to him, sing praises to him; tell of all his wonderful works. 3 Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. 4 Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his presence continually. 5 Remember the wonderful works he has done, his miracles and the judgments he has uttered, 6 O offspring of his servant Abraham, children of Jacob, his chosen ones. 6 When he summoned famine against the land and cut off every supply of bread, 17 he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who had been sold as a slave.18 His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron;19 until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord kept testing him. 20 The king sent and released him; the ruler of the peoples set him free. 21 He made him lord of his house and ruler of all his possessions, 22 to instruct his officials at his pleasure and to teach his elders wisdom. 45 that they might keep his statutes and observe his laws. Praise the Lord! (Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b NRSV)

Dear Friend; it's Thursday! I pray it's a terrific and tremendous Thursday in all that you plan to do for the Lord including the unplanned, the unexpected, and the unusual! God's Adventure is just like that! You open yourself to God, offer yourself, and away we go - doing, blessing, and helping to change the world for the better! And honestly the world needs our attention and affection!

Our youngest grandchild, little Ari James, has the sweetest voice right now. He's learned to say in response to kindness, such as slliced strawberries, popsicles, Hersey's kisses and the like, "Thank you!" To hear them from a two-year old in his sweet voice melts both grandma and grandpa. He doesn't realize it yet, nor perhaps some of you, there is power in giving thanks, especially to the Giver of All Things. Hint; I mean God! An article I read yesterday said that always giving thanks even before anything happens changes the outcome! God knows the day ahead for us and if we start in prayer, giving thanks for what is to come, it may be blessing after blessing. And even if not all things are blessings, your mindset and attitude changes and you better receive whatever it is that is coming. For example, I went to what I believed was a followup to my left cataract surgery and I'm told as I sign in that the surgeon wanted to check on my right cataract. And as all the prelims were done and the doctor walks in she says that my cataract was "Medically ready" to be removed. I heard, "The insurance company will pay for this procedure!" But she also said that it had to be done within three months and I might even consider having the left macular puckering removed as well. Gulp. But having given thanks this morning, these news didn't hit as hard. I know I have a supportive and loving wife to walk with me and help me heal, and a loving and powerful God to guide the surgeon in whatever surgeries I agree to. And I know even now many of your are praying for this old man! That Check Engine light sometimes burns bright!

King David knew how to give thanks for he knew the One receiving the thanks was always at work in his life and God is faithful. This psalm addresses the thanks and calling on God through prayer for our days. On social media I saw a story about a man who dreamed him going to a major hospital, third floor and even saw the room number he was to enter. And he heard the word go. He woke up the next morning and told his wife about the dream and the wife asked what he was going to do, and the man said I guess I go and see this person for whom I am to pray. And he gets in his truck and drives to the hospital he thinks he saw in his dream and there it was. It had three floors, so he knows he's in the right place and gets on the elevator and goes to the room where he saw the number he had seen in his dream. He sees the door is open and a man lying in bed. He knocks and the man gruffly asks, "Who sent you?" The man said I dreamed last night that I was to come into this room, so I guess God sent me!" The man starts to weep and says, "I've been praying for God to send me someone because I doubted in God, and I basically prayed, 'God if you're real, send me someone to pray for me.' And God is real!" Both men are now crying and celebrating faith. I tell you because I know faith is an adventure!

There's something the psalmist knows that it takes most of us years to learn, and he puts it right at the very start: before you do anything else, before you ask God for a single thing, before you bring your needs and your worries and your requests — give thanks. Seek His face. Tell someone what He has done. Sing to Him. The opening of Psalm 105 is a call to remember before it is a call to anything else, because the psalmist understands that a people who remember what God has done are a people who can face what God is asking them to do next.

And the remembering matters so much here because what follows in the psalm is one of the hardest parts of Joseph's story to sit with — the part that our devotional series has been building toward, the part where the pit gives way to the prison and the years keep adding up without any visible sign of the promise being fulfilled. The psalm puts it plainly and without softening it: God had sent Joseph ahead of them, and when he arrived in Egypt, his feet were hurt with fetters and his neck was put in a collar of iron. A collar of iron. This is not poetic embellishment. This is the reality of what the beloved dreamer endured in the years between the pit and the palace — real chains, real confinement, real suffering that went on long enough to make anyone question whether the dreams were ever anything more than the wishful thinking of a favored child.

And yet the psalmist, looking back from the far side of the whole story, describes every bit of it — the slavery, the false accusation, the prison, the iron collar — as God's doing. Not that God was the author of the evil done to Joseph, but that God was sovereign over the circumstances that resulted from it, threading even the injustice toward a destination that nobody could see from inside the suffering. The word of the Lord tested him, the psalm says. This is the refiner's fire language, the silversmith watching the crucible — not cruelty for its own sake but the forming of something in Joseph that the easy road never could have produced. The capacity to forgive. The wisdom to govern. The character to hold power without being corrupted by it. None of that was forged in Jacob's comfortable tent. All of it was forged in the pit, in the house of Potiphar, in the dungeon where the prisoners were kept.

And then — at the time the king sent and released him, the psalm says — everything changed. Joseph went from the prison to standing before Pharaoh in what must have felt like no time at all, though it had actually been years. He was made lord of Pharaoh's house and ruler over all his possessions, to instruct the princes at his pleasure and to teach the elders wisdom. The one who wore an iron collar around his neck was given a gold chain and a signet ring and the second chariot of Egypt. The one who had been sold for twenty pieces of silver became the man through whom an entire nation and eventually his own family were saved from famine. The dreamer's dreams came true — not on the dreamer's timeline, not in the way the dreamer had imagined, but in a way so far beyond what the dreamer could have designed that the only reasonable response was worship.

This is why the psalm opens the way it does. Give thanks to the Lord, call on His name, make known His deeds among the peoples, sing to Him, sing praises to Him, tell of all His wondrous works. The people who can do that are the people who have remembered that the collar of iron and the seat of power are both in the same story, both held by the same God, both moving toward the same destination. You can't praise with that kind of depth unless you know the whole arc — unless you've seen enough of it to trust that the parts you're currently living in are not the whole of it.

This is where Jesus stands in the story, and He stands there unmistakably. The beloved Son, sent by the Father, sold for silver, stripped and condemned and placed in a tomb as final as any prison — and raised on the third day to a name above every name, a throne above every throne, a reign that will never end. The Joseph story is a rehearsal for the Jesus story, told in advance so that when the real thing happened, the people of God would have the pattern already in their hearts. And the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is the same Spirit who was at work in every prison cell and every moment of waiting and every iron collar that God's people have ever worn on the way to what He was preparing for them.

The psalm ends where it should always end — with praise, with the hallelujah that belongs to a people who have seen enough of God's faithfulness to know that the iron collar is never the last word.

PRAYER: Lord, give us the long memory of this psalm — the kind that praises You in the prison because it trusts that the palace is already in Your plans. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! CALL TO ACTION: Take five minutes today to write down three specific things God has brought you through that once looked like iron collars, and let the remembering become your act of praise.

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

Set free the prisoners of sin in Jesus' name and love!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The Dreamer in the Pit

Hear and View devo: https://bit.ly/4wMzs8Q

37 Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. 2 This is the account of Jacob’s family line. Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. 3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate robe for him. 4 When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him. 12 Now his brothers had gone to graze their father’s flocks near Shechem, 13 and Israel said to Joseph, “As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them.” “Very well,” he replied. 14 So he said to him, “Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me.” Then he sent him off from the Valley of Hebron. When Joseph arrived at Shechem, 15 a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, “What are you looking for?” 16 He replied, “I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?” 17 “They have moved on from here,” the man answered. “I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan.’” So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. 18 But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him. 19 “Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. 20 “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” 21 When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. 22 “Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the wilderness, but don’t lay a hand on him.” Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. 23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing— 24 and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it. 25 As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt. 26 Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? 27 Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed. 28 So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. (Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 NIV).

I've said it more than once, and you know it to be true; if you're looking for a perfect family in the Bible, there is none. Not even the Holy Family. And more so if you're looking for one in modern life. Humans are humans and some are worse at it than others. And here is a story about another yet imperfect family.

Let's be honest about this story from the start, because it doesn't let us off easy. Joseph's brothers throw him in a pit and then sit down to eat a meal. That detail is almost too raw to read without flinching — the casualness of it, the ordinary hunger that continues right alongside the extraordinary cruelty. They've just stripped their brother of his robe, tossed him into a dry cistern, and listened to him cry out to them, and then they pull out their food and eat. There's something in that detail that tells us everything about how thoroughly they had closed their hearts to him. He had become, in their minds, a problem to be solved rather than a brother to be loved.

And how did they get there? It started with favoritism and a coat and a father who didn't hide it very well. Jacob loved Joseph more than all his other sons — we're told that plainly, without apology — and he made him an ornate robe, the kind that said to everyone watching that this one is different, this one is set apart, this one is going somewhere the rest of you might not go. And then Joseph had the dreams, and made the mistake — whether innocent or not, the text doesn't entirely say — of telling his brothers about them. Dreams in which they bowed down to him. Dreams in which he was elevated and they were beneath him. You can understand why that didn't land well. The brothers couldn't say a kind word to him, Matthew tells us. The hatred had moved in and settled.

So when the opportunity comes — when Joseph walks across the fields to check on them and they see him coming from a distance — the hatred that has been building finds its outlet. They call him "the dreamer" when they see him, which tells you that the dreams are still the wound, still the thing that festers. They plan to kill him. Reuben, the oldest, talks them back from the edge of murder — let's not shed blood, let's just throw him in the pit — and he privately intends to come back and rescue Joseph later. But before Reuben can act on that plan, a caravan of Ishmaelite traders passes by, and Judah has an idea. Why kill him? Why get blood on our hands? Let's sell him. And so for twenty pieces of silver, the dreamer is sold to strangers heading down to Egypt, and the brothers have to live with what they've done.

What strikes me every time I read this is the way the story holds together two things that seem incompatible: genuine human evil and the sovereign purposes of God moving quietly through it. The brothers meant it for harm. They were not instruments of God's plan in any self-aware sense — they were jealous men acting on jealousy, and what they did was genuinely wrong and genuinely damaging and genuinely painful for Joseph in ways we can barely imagine. And yet. The coat that caused so much trouble, the dreams that provoked so much hatred, the pit that seemed like the end of everything — all of it was being threaded, by a God who works in ways we cannot always trace in real time, toward something none of them could see from where they were standing.

Joseph in the pit is one of the clearest Old Testament pictures of Jesus we have. The beloved son, sent by the father to his brothers, rejected and stripped and sold for silver by the very people he was sent to. Thrown into a kind of death, only to emerge on the other side of it as the one through whom salvation would come to the very people who had betrayed him. The parallel is not accidental. God has a long history of working through betrayal and abandonment and the kind of cruelty that makes you wonder where He is — and arriving, on the other side of all of it, with a redemption so large that even the people who caused the suffering end up inside the rescue.

If you're in a pit today — not the dramatic Biblical kind, but the kind that feels just as dark and just as enclosed — this story is speaking directly to you. The pit is not the end of your story any more than it was the end of Joseph's. The coat may have been stripped from you by people who should have loved you better. The dream may feel like mockery now rather than promise. But the God who was with Joseph in the pit, who was working toward Egypt and a throne and a rescue that would save many lives, is the same God who is with you in whatever cistern you're currently sitting in. The caravan hasn't passed by yet. The story is still going.

PRAYER: Loving Lord, remind us when we are in the pit that You are already in Egypt, preparing what we cannot yet see, working through what was meant for harm toward a redemption larger than our current suffering. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Tell God today about the pit you're in, and ask Him specifically to show you one sign that He is already at work ahead of you, turning what was meant for harm toward a purpose only He can see.

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

Let's love each other to the fullest, in fact, to the point people will point at us and wonder what's going on in our hearts!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Beautiful Feet

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

5 Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that “the person who does these things will live by them.” 6 But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim), 9 because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For one believes with the heart, leading to righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, leading to salvation. 11 The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. 13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” 14 But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? 15 And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” (Romans 10:5-15)

Dear Friend; how beautiful are your feet? Did you know the average American spends on average $60 per shoes based on the fact that Americans spend $121 Billion dollars on shoes each year? That's based on the 2.1 billion pairs of shoes sold here in the US! I don't know about you, but that is a large amount of shoes sold! If you're like me you buy a pair of shoes and think you're fine, but next thing you know it's been three years since you bought those shoes and you wonder why the soles are worn out? If you're an active runner your running shoes will wear out in 4 months; 12 months if you're an average runner. Work shoes will last between 1 to 2 years, and Sunday go-to-meeting shoes will last about 4 years, more if you get them re-soled and maintained. The song framed it best; "Never been with a woman long enough for my boots to grow old."*

The Bible is an action book with the word "go" in it enough times for us to know that God wants us moving to get His love and kingdom growing! Paul examines a part of that in this passage.

Paul has a way of taking something that feels impossibly complicated and placing it so close to you that you can almost reach out and touch it. That's exactly what he does in this passage. He's been talking about righteousness — about how it comes, what it costs, who can get it — and he's about to make the most important turn in the argument. Forget the idea that the gospel is something you have to climb to, something far away at the top of a mountain that only the most spiritually athletic can reach. Forget the idea that you have to somehow ascend into heaven to bring Christ down, or descend into the deep to bring Him up from the dead. You don't have to do any of that. The word, Paul says, is near you. It's in your mouth and in your heart.

That's one of the most disarming sentences in all of Scripture. Near you. Not up there somewhere, not behind a veil of religious complexity, not requiring credentials you don't have or a spiritual experience you haven't had yet. The word of faith that Paul is proclaiming is as close to you as the next word you're going to speak, as close as the thought that's forming in your mind right now. God has done the impossible distance-crossing already, in Christ, and what remains is not a long journey but a short confession.

And here it is, as plain and as profound as anything in the New Testament: if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. Two things. A confession and a belief. Not a performance and a record. Not a résumé and a recommendation. A confession — which means saying out loud, in the hearing of others, that Jesus is Lord, that He is the one to whom all allegiance belongs, that every other claim on your life bends the knee to His — and a belief that the resurrection actually happened, that the tomb is actually empty, that the one who died on the Friday actually walked out of the grave on the Sunday. This is the heartbeat of the whole thing, and Paul says it with a simplicity that should make us stop and breathe for a moment.

Because here's what's easy to miss: the order matters. Belief is in the heart, and it leads to righteousness. Confession is with the mouth, and it leads to salvation. The inner conviction and the outward declaration belong together — you can't have a living faith that never takes verbal form, and you can't make an honest confession that isn't rooted in something genuinely believed on the inside. But Paul is saying that both of these things are available to everyone, without exception, without qualification: "For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on Him." The same Lord. Generous to all. Call on Him and see.

Then Paul asks a series of questions that build on each other like steps on a staircase, and each one is worth following all the way down: How will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him of whom they have never heard? How will they hear without someone to proclaim Him? How will anyone proclaim Him unless they are sent? And then the verse that has launched more missionaries and more conversations at kitchen tables and more moments of nervous courage than perhaps any other in the letter: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news." Beautiful feet. Not eloquent lips or impressive theological credentials or a platform with a large following. Beautiful feet — the feet of the person who simply goes, who shows up where the word hasn't yet arrived, who is willing to be the link in the chain between someone's hearing and their believing and their calling and their salvation.

This is where the personal becomes missional, and where the good news stops being something we receive and becomes something we carry. Every person in this room who has ever heard the gospel and believed it is standing in the middle of that chain. Someone had beautiful feet that brought the word to you. And somewhere ahead of you, there is someone who is waiting — perhaps without knowing they're waiting — for the word to arrive on feet that turn out to be yours.

The confession that saves is meant to travel. The belief that produces righteousness is meant to be spoken into the silence of someone else's not-yet-knowing. "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" — everyone, without distinction, without qualification — but the calling requires hearing, and the hearing requires someone willing to go and speak, and the going requires feet willing to be beautiful in the service of news that is genuinely, astonishingly good.

PRAYER: Lord, give us the courage to open our mouths with the confession that saves and the willingness to go with the feet that carry the beautiful news to everyone who hasn't yet heard it. This we pray in Christ Jesus' strong name, amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Think of one person in your life who hasn't yet heard the good news in a way that made it personal to them, and take one step this week toward being the beautiful feet that bring it.

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

Let's surprise someone with love today!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

*Heard It In A Love Song