Daily Devotion 21 October 2025

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy. James 5:10

READING: Romans 8: 31-39

Every life has those times when we are completely caught off guard by a crisis, whether of pain or illness, of job loss, of a broken relationship, or the outcome of a bad decision. We desperately, instinctively, try to fix it, trying this and that. And hopelessly, we look to God for help.

We beg and plead with God to restore us, to heal us, to take our problem away. But the more we pray, the more the realisation arrives that we don’t need just to be healed, we need Him – to depend on Him.

Our prayer changes from “Lord, do what I want” to “Lord, Your will be done”. We do not, in fact, want to go back to where we were before trouble hit. We want to grow, to be conquerors of life, whether we are healed or not, whether our relationships are restored or not, whether our lives are difficult or not. More than these things we want to be close with God, to know Him better, to yield to His work in our lives. We know that each moment of our lives comes from the loving hand of God, and all things must work together for our good because we belong to Him. The wonderful mystery of our Christian faith is that when we surrender our souls and our wills to Him in the face of trouble, He makes us more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).

James urges us to face suffering with patience, and perseverance (James 5:10-11), and reminds us that God is full of compassion and mercy, and that we should depend on Him to bring about good things.

Paul, writing in Romans 8, gives us that wonderful words in verses 38 and 39, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. Trusting in God’s compassion and mercy, we stand firm, with Jesus as our companion in the good and the bad times.

Prayer

Lord God, I know that Your grace is sufficient for me in all things. Teach me, Lord, to seek Your face in the midst of every moment. Use every challenge to develop my character to grow more like Jesus, my Lord and Saviour. Amen