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

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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.

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The Spirit Leads Us to Worship

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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.

The Spirit Who Carries Us

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2 After they set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. 3 Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, “This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 4 ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.” 7 So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words the LORD had commanded him to speak. 8 The people all responded together, “We will do everything the LORD has said.” (Exodus 192-8a NIV)

I have nothing against flying; in fact I'm fast approaching the age where I'd rather fly than drive and that from a man who used to LOVE driving! But I will admit my lack of fondness for flying in small airplanes. I shared how in my freshman year in college during Christmas break a neighbor asked me to accompany and translate for a relative of theirs up from Mexico looking to buy Caterpillar tractors for the government of Mexico. The Caterpillar dealer in Houston kept saying if there was nothing he liked in Houston he could fly us to Amarillo. And he did. And the man didn't like anything anything there either. Some years later I finally agreed to attend a Walk to Emmaus in Kerrville. I was living in Edinburg and there was a group of pastors who were also going and almost last minute I found out we were flying to Kerrville in a six-seater plane! I said, "It's the WALK to Emmaus and the FLIGHT to Egypt!" Or at least one of my Bibles had it subtitled that way! But one of the lay directors needed flying hours for his license and this would give him a couple of hours. The spiritual side of the retreat started early. At takeoff. And on the updrafts over the hills in the Hill Country. I drove home.

The passage for today has a section on flying or something like flying when God sends His Holy Spirit to carry us. This is an awesome experience!

Opening: The Mountain and What Happened Before It

They are camped at the foot of a mountain in the middle of a desert. Behind them is Egypt — ten plagues, a parted sea, the army of Pharaoh swallowed by the waters they had just walked through dry-shod. Ahead of them is a covenant they have not yet heard and a land they cannot yet see. They are in the wilderness between what God has done and what God has promised, which is, as it happens, exactly where most of us spend a significant portion of our lives.

And it is here, at Sinai, in the desert, that God speaks one of the most beautiful and consequential invitations in all of Scripture. He does not open with commands. He does not begin with law. He begins with a memory and a metaphor: “You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”

Before the covenant comes the carrying. Before the call comes the grace. And woven through all of it — in ways the Israelites did not yet have the language to fully articulate — is the presence of the Spirit who has been the agent of God’s carrying from the very beginning of creation.

Eagles’ Wings: The Spirit Who Carries

The image God chooses to describe what he has done for Israel is not an army metaphor or a legal one. It is a natural one, drawn from the most graceful and powerful of birds. “I carried you on eagles’ wings.”

Ancient observers of eagles noted something remarkable about how they tended their young: the parent eagle would fly beneath the fledgling as it learned to fly, ready to catch it on outstretched wings if it faltered. Whether or not this is precise ornithology, the image God reaches for is one of active, attentive, underneath-you carrying — a power that holds from below and bears up from beneath, a presence that does not lead from a safe distance but positions itself under the weight of the one it is carrying.

In the New Testament and throughout the Psalms, this is the characteristic work of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who intercedes for us with groans too deep for words when we do not know how to pray. He is the helper — the one called alongside — who bears up the believer under the weight of what they cannot carry alone. He hovered over the waters of creation, the same word used for a bird hovering over its nest, attentive and ready. He brooded over the formless void and brought forth life.

The carrying God describes at Sinai — the rescue from Egypt, the provision in the wilderness, the sustaining of a people through impossible terrain — is the work of a God who is never only watching from a distance. He carries. He bears up. He positions himself beneath the weight. And the agent of that carrying, the presence who makes it personally real in the interior of human experience, is the Spirit he would one day pour out on all flesh at Pentecost.

Every time you have been carried through something you could not have survived on your own, you have experienced what Israel experienced at Sinai — the underneath-you, bearing-up, eagles’-wings presence of the Spirit of God.

A Kingdom of Priests: The Spirit’s Pentecost Purpose

God’s destination for Israel in this passage is not merely rescue. He brought them out of Egypt in order to bring them to himself — and the purpose of that bringing is breathtaking: “you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

A kingdom of priests. In Israel’s religious structure, priests were the intermediaries — the ones who stood between God and the people, who had access to the presence of God on behalf of those who could not approach directly. To call the entire nation a kingdom of priests was to describe a community whose corporate vocation was to be the place where God and humanity met — to embody, among the nations of the earth, the reality of a God who is present and accessible and in relationship with his people.

Peter picks up exactly this language in his first letter when he writes to the church: “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.” He is quoting Sinai. He is saying that what God promised to Israel at the foot of the mountain has now, through Christ and by the Spirit, been extended to a community gathered from every nation under heaven.

And it is the Spirit who makes this possible. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit who constitutes the church as a priestly community — who gives every believer direct access to the Father through the Son, who distributes gifts for the building up of the whole body, who makes the gathered people of God a place where the presence of God is real and available to the world around them. The kingdom of priests God envisioned at Sinai is not a national institution. It is a Spirit-formed, Spirit-sustained community of people who carry the presence of God into every corner of the world they inhabit.

This is what we are. Not by our own holiness or our own effort, but by the carrying of the one who bore us on eagles’ wings to himself.

For Reflection

The people’s response to Moses is simple and complete: “We will do everything the Lord has said.” It is a response made at the foot of a mountain, in a desert, between what God has done and what God has not yet fully revealed. They are saying yes before they know the full cost of yes.

That is always the shape of genuine covenant response. It is not a yes given after all the terms are clear and the risks have been calculated and the outcome has been guaranteed. It is a yes given on the basis of what God has already done — the carrying that has already happened, the eagles’ wings already experienced — and the confidence that the God who carried this far will carry further still.

The Spirit who hovered over the waters, who carried Israel through the wilderness, who was poured out in wind and fire at Pentecost, who has been poured into the hearts of every believer by God’s love — that Spirit is the one who makes it possible to say yes to the covenant invitation. He carries what we cannot carry. He intercedes when we do not know what to pray. He constitutes us as the kingdom of priests we could never be on our own.

We are standing at our own Sinai — in the desert between what God has already done in our lives and what he has not yet fully shown us. And the invitation is the same as it was to Israel: remember how you have been carried. Look at what the eagles’ wings have already done. And say yes to the one who brought you to himself.

PRAYER: Lord God, who carried Israel on eagles' wings and carries us still by your Spirit through every wilderness between your promises and their fulfillment, make us the kingdom of priests you envisioned at Sinai — a people so filled with your presence that the world finds in us a place where you can be known. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, recall one specific season in your life when God carried you on eagles’ wings through something you could not have survived alone — and share that testimony with at least one person as your act of priestly witness.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! "I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to me."

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

"Heaven Came Down & Glory Filled My Soul!"

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1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. 9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. 11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5:1-11 NRS)

"It wasn't anything I did, for He knows the life I led. It was because of the wrong choices and hateful decisions I made that I ended up right next to Him, and I truly deserved it! It was a miracle I could even hear Him speak for the crowd was so loud in their jeers and mocking, and it didn't help that our partner there joined in and he with a request that if He wanted, He could get us off that cross; I felt at that moment that though I truly deserved to die I also believed He did not and I also believed He was the Messiah, so I got out the words that said, 'Jesus, remember me, when You come into Your kingdom.' And here I am, in the Kingdom. I don't know a thing about church doctrine or creeds or confessions; all I know is that I said for Him to remember me, and He did."

This, dear friends, is justification by faith which brings us peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ as the Apostle Paul wrote in that first verse. He was another one who understood that our salvation comes through faith alone; not works. And here we will discover more of what Jesus shared with Paul about this reality.

Opening: The Verse at the Center of Everything

Romans 5 is one of those passages where Paul builds an argument the way a master builder lays a foundation — course by course, each layer resting on the one beneath it, until the structure rises to a height that takes your breath away. And at the very center of this passage, holding up everything on either side of it, is a single verse that connects Pentecost to the deepest experience of the Christian life.

“Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Poured into our hearts. The same word — the same outpouring — that describes the Spirit at Pentecost. The rushing wind and the tongues of flame were not a private event for the upper room. They were the visible, dramatic announcement of something that was about to happen personally and intimately in every believer who would ever call on the name of the Lord. The love of God, poured out like water, poured out like fire, into the interior of a human life.

This is where Pentecost lives. Not only in church history. In your heart.

Peace, Access, and the Ground We Stand On

Paul opens with the result of justification by faith: peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Not the peace of resolved circumstances or calmed emotions, but the peace of a relationship restored — the hostility between a holy God and a sinful humanity ended, the enmity gone, the distance collapsed.

And then he adds something that should stop us: “through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” Access. The word carries the sense of being introduced into the presence of royalty — brought before someone before whom you could not simply walk in uninvited, granted an audience you could not have arranged for yourself. Through Christ, we have been brought into the very presence of God and given a place to stand there. Not as visitors. Not on probation. In grace.

This is the ground beneath every Christian’s feet. Not our performance. Not our consistency. Not our feelings about our own spiritual health on any given morning. Grace. We stand in grace, which means that what holds us there is not our grip on God but his grip on us — the same grip that held through the cross, through the resurrection, through Pentecost, and through every difficult season his people have ever walked through.

From this ground — peace with God, access through Christ, standing in grace — Paul builds his argument toward the hardest part: what we do with suffering.

The Long Road Through Suffering to Hope

Paul’s claim that we boast in our sufferings is one of the most challenging sentences in the New Testament. Not endure our sufferings. Not accept them stoically. Boast in them.

He is not celebrating pain for its own sake. He is tracing a chain of transformation that runs through suffering rather than around it: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. The chain is not automatic or painless. It requires something from us at every link — the decision to endure rather than collapse, the willingness to let difficulty do its forming work rather than fighting it off or numbing it out, the patience to wait for the hope that lies at the end of the chain.

But here is what makes the chain hold. Here is the Pentecost center of the whole passage: “and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

The hope does not fail — not because we are strong enough to hold onto it, but because the love that is its foundation has been poured into us by the Spirit. The Spirit is not a distant resource we can access in emergencies. He has been poured into our hearts. He is an interior presence, a permanent indwelling, the love of God made personal and immediate and real in the deepest part of who we are.

When Paul says God’s love has been poured into our hearts, the verb is in the perfect tense in Greek — which means it describes an action completed in the past with effects that continue into the present. At Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out. At your conversion, the Spirit was poured in. And the pouring has never stopped. The love of God is not being rationed. It is not running out. It has been poured, and it abides, and it is the reason that the hope at the end of the suffering chain does not collapse under the weight of what we have been carrying.

While We Were Still Sinners

Paul then offers the proof of the love he has just described, and it is a proof that goes all the way to the bone.

“But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

Not when we had cleaned ourselves up. Not when we had demonstrated sufficient remorse or spiritual readiness. While we were still sinners. While we were, as Paul says just a few verses earlier, weak and ungodly — not merely imperfect but actively contrary to the purposes of God. The timing of the cross is the measure of the love behind it.

We would understand a love that waited for the beloved to become more loveable. We would understand a love that required some minimum threshold of worthiness before it gave itself away. What we cannot fully comprehend — what Paul himself seems to reach for without quite being able to hold — is a love that moves toward the enemy, the sinner, the ungodly, and gives itself away before there is any reason to do so except the love itself.

This is the love that has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit. Not a smaller version of it. Not a diluted form for daily use. The same love that sent the Son to the cross has been poured — lavishly, without reservation, into the interior of your life by the Holy Spirit given to you.

On Pentecost Sunday, that is the truth we are celebrating. Not an event in history, though it began in history. A present, personal, interior reality — the love of God, poured out and abiding, the hope that does not disappoint, the peace in which we stand.

For Reflection

Romans 5 gives us three things to carry from this Pentecost Sunday into the week ahead.

The ground to stand on: peace with God, access through Christ, grace as the floor beneath our feet — not performance, not consistency, not feelings. If you wake tomorrow with no sense of God’s presence, the ground has not moved. You are still standing in grace.

The chain to trust: suffering is not outside the purposes of God. The Spirit who has been poured into your heart is at work in the hard places, producing endurance and character and a hope that will not collapse. You do not have to manufacture your way through the suffering chain. You have to stay in it, trusting the one who walks through it with you.

The love to receive: God proved what his love is made of while you were still a sinner. Nothing you have done since, and nothing you will do, changes the quality of that love or diminishes the fullness of the Spirit poured into your heart. Receive it. Live from it. Let it be the answer you give when the world asks why your hope still holds.

PRAYER: Spirit of God, poured out at Pentecost and poured into our hearts, make the love of God so real and so present in us that our hope holds firm through every suffering, and we boast in nothing but the grace in which we stand. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one place in your life where hope has been fading under the weight of suffering or disappointment, and this week deliberately receive the love of God poured into your heart by the Spirit — returning to it in prayer each day as the ground that does not shift.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God, and you matter to me! Hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured out into our hearts!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

From Compassion to Commission

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Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd… “Freely you have received; freely give. Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts — no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep. Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their house until you leave. As you enter the home, give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet… “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you… The one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 9:35–10:8–23 NIV)

Happy Monday, dear Friend! I pray you all had a relaxing and renewing of your lives during this weekend. Nellie and I were blessed in taking our two oldest grandkids to Fredericksburg to tour for the first time, the National Museum of the War in the Pacific, which was very interesting, and which I really encourage you to see. It's quite the museum with plenty of exhibits. One part made me sad, for it was a photo of Hitler Youth, the Nazi group formed for teenagers in Germany in support of Adolf Hitler to join and fight. It made me sad for I remembered my Church History professor, Dr. Klaus Penzel, who was in that group and deployed to fight in France where he was captured and put in a camp. It was at that camp where he met Jesus and became a believer and later felt led to get educated in the history of this movement that he now loved. He was a super smart individual and I admired him and his love for the Lord Jesus. It took me a couple of weeks while sitting in his lectures to realize that when he said, "Christian face," he was talking about the Christian faith. Boy was I perplexed! I had to confess I looked around at my classmates to see which ones truly looked like Christians, all the while trying to remember what I looked like! This will all part of my getting ready, being prepared to go forth and do what the Lord had called me to do. It was fun. It was not fun. It was challenging and it was sometimes truly difficult. Many were the days of those 48 years that I had to share with Nellie and others, "They don't pay me enough!" But the days when I would gleefully say, "I can't believe they pay me to do this!" were more.

Opening: The Briefing Before the Road

In any mission, there is a moment when the one who sends gathers those being sent and tells them exactly what they are walking into. No glossing over the risks. No false promises of smooth roads and friendly crowds. Just the honest, clarifying truth about the territory — and the equipment they will carry into it.

That is what Jesus is doing in these verses. The compassion of chapter nine has already moved him. The twelve have already been named and commissioned. The authority has already been given. And now, before they set one foot on the road, Jesus briefs them on what the journey will actually look like.

It is one of the most honest mission briefings in all of Scripture. And precisely because of its honesty, it is also one of the most reassuring.

Travel Light: The Theology of Empty Hands

The first instructions Jesus gives are about what not to take. No gold or silver. No copper. No bag, no extra shirt, no sandals beyond what they are wearing, no staff. The list is striking in its thoroughness — Jesus seems determined to send them out with as little as possible between them and their dependence on God.

This is not asceticism for its own sake. It is a theology carried in a traveling posture. When you go with empty hands, you cannot pretend that the provision you receive along the way came from your own preparation. When you arrive at a home with nothing to offer but the message and the peace of Christ, the welcome you receive — or the rejection — tells you immediately where the soil is open and where it is not.

The instruction to find a worthy person in each town and stay there, giving your peace to the household, is a model of what missiologists today call relational mission — going not as a parachuting authority who delivers a message and departs, but as a guest who enters a home, receives hospitality, and lets the relationship itself become the vessel for the gospel. Jesus’ peace, extended to a household, is not merely a greeting. It is a real spiritual reality — something that either rests on the home or returns to the sender, depending on how it is received.

And when a town refuses to receive them — shake the dust off your feet and move on. There is no instruction to argue, to escalate, to stay and wear the resistance down by force. The commission is not to manufacture receptiveness. It is to offer the gospel genuinely and let people choose. The workers’ job is to go and give. The harvest belongs to the Lord of it.

Sheep Among Wolves: The Company That Makes It Possible

Then comes the line that sets the realistic frame for everything else: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.”

Jesus does not say this to frighten them. He says it to prepare them — and to introduce the two qualities that will make the difference between faithful witness and foolish vulnerability: the shrewdness of snakes and the innocence of doves. These two are not in tension. The snake’s shrewdness is the wisdom that reads a situation clearly, that does not rush naively into danger, that navigates the landscape of opposition with intelligence and care. The dove’s innocence is the purity of motive that cannot be compromised, the refusal to meet hostility with its own methods, the integrity that remains intact when everything around it is corrupt.

The church in every generation has needed both. The witness that is only shrewd becomes cynical and calculating. The witness that is only innocent becomes naive and easily crushed. Jesus asks for both at once — clear-eyed about the wolves, unstained by them.

And then the warnings deepen: councils, synagogues, governors, kings. The twelve are being prepared not for a comfortable village tour but for a mission that will, in time, bring them before the highest authorities of their world. This is not a failure scenario. Jesus describes it as witness — “on my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles.” The opposition itself becomes an opportunity. The arrest becomes a platform. The trial becomes a testimony.

But the promise that holds all of it together is the one Jesus saves for last: “when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”

The sheep among wolves are not alone. The Spirit of the Father goes with them into every courtroom, every hostile village, every moment when their own words run out. They are sent with empty hands and a full presence — the presence of the one who sends them, speaking through them, in every situation the road brings.

For Reflection

Jesus ends this section with a word that carries the weight of everything that has come before: “The one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Standing firm is not the same as standing still. It is the ongoing, daily, sometimes costly choice to keep going — to keep offering the gospel in the face of indifference, to keep traveling light when the temptation is to accumulate more security, to keep trusting the Spirit to provide the words when our own words are not enough.

The commission of Matthew 10 is not a first-century document that expired when the twelve returned. Jesus’ instruction to pray for workers and his sending of the twelve are the beginning of a pattern that has never stopped. The harvest is still plentiful. The wolves are still real. The Spirit of the Father is still speaking through ordinary, sent, empty-handed people who go in the name of Jesus.

We are those people. We carry the same commission, the same authority, and the same promise: it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. You do not need to be eloquent. You need to be willing to go — and to trust that the one who sends never sends without accompanying.

Travel light. Extend the peace. Shake off what does not receive it. Stand firm. The Lord of the harvest is with you on the road.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, send us out with empty hands and your full presence, shrewd enough to navigate what we face and innocent enough not to be stained by it, trusting that the Spirit of our Father will speak through us in every moment our own words fall short. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, go to one conversation, one relationship, or one need in your world with empty hands — no agenda to protect, no outcome to control — and trust the Spirit of your Father to provide the words and the welcome that only he can give.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! “It will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” Matthew 10:20 (NIV)

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.