Psalm 116:5 Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; Yes, our God is merciful.
Exodus 33:19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
Isaiah 54:7-8 For a mere moment I have forsaken you, But with great mercies I will gather you. 8 With a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment; But with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you,” Says the LORD, your Redeemer.
The mercy of God is not a distant concept—it’s His very nature. From Genesis to Revelation, God reveals Himself as righteous, just, and profoundly compassionate. His mercy is not a reaction; it’s a reflection of His divine character.
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, what was revealed? Goodness, grace, and mercy—not thunderbolts or judgment, but compassion flowing from the very heart of the Almighty.
The Hebrew word for compassion, rakhamim (רַחֲמִים), comes from the root rechem (רֶחֶם), meaning womb. This is no coincidence. Just as the womb protects, nurtures, and gives life, so God’s compassion embraces us in our weakness, shelters us in our wandering, and breathes hope into our despair.
Even in seasons of correction, God’s heart never grows cold. His discipline may be real, but it is always measured and momentary. What feels like abandonment is often just a pause in His visible presence, not in His love.
As Isaiah reminds us: “For a mere moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In a little wrath I hid My face, but with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you.” (Isaiah 54:7–8)
His mercy endures far beyond His anger, and His kindness knows no end. Though He may allow distance for a season, His compassion never stops pursuing us—it always makes a way back to His embrace. Where sin has scattered, His mercy gathers. Where wrath is momentary, His love is everlasting. Even when we forget Him, He remembers us—faithfully, tenderly, completely.
The greatest revelation of God’s compassion came through Yeshua (Jesus), the Messiah. He was compassion in flesh, reaching, touching, healing, restoring. He touched the leper, sat with the sinner, wept with the grieving, and restored the broken. He even healed on Shabbat, declaring by His actions that human need outweighed religious customs.
Yeshua never asked, “Are you worthy?” Instead, He asked, “What do you want Me to do for you?” (Matthew 20:32)
This is divine compassion: it was not merit-based, but need-driven. Yeshua didn’t just feel sympathy—He acted, often with a touch, always with love.
If we are made in the image of God, then compassion must flow from us, too. We are not called to passive emotion but to active mercy; we are called to do the same to dispense true justice and practice lovingkindness and compassion. (Zechariah 7:9)
True compassion steps in, speaks up, and stretches out its hands. It’s not afraid to get messy. It’s not reserved for the “deserving.” It reflects God’s heart to a world that’s forgotten what love looks like.
So let the womb of God’s heart—His deep, life-giving compassion—be formed in you. Just as a mother carries and nurtures life within her, allow God’s Spirit to cultivate in you a heart that is ready to hold the hurting, heal the broken, and help the weary. Compassion isn’t complete until it moves beyond emotion and becomes action. Don’t settle for merely feeling sorry—become a vessel of mercy. Step in. Speak up. Reach out. Let your life be a living expression of God’s compassion to a world desperate for His touch.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]Recently, I’ve been impressed by the Lord to address the anxieties many are feeling about the future– how to be strong in the face of the intense opposition we’ll be facing as believers. One of the founders of the modern state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion once said, “Courage is a special kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. From this knowledge comes an inner strength that inspires us to push on in the face of great difficulty. What can seem impossible is often possible with courage.”
For a season, I worked in Washington, D.C., for one of America’s largest Christian political organizations. Sometimes I saw how politics could get ugly and, more often than not, how it changed people — not for the better…but usually for the worse!
Have you ever felt uneasy, unsettled or unstable? Or maybe a better question is — who hasn’t? How do we overcome these feelings?
Is that a trend or something? I don’t know what it is but I’ve heard that phrase said quite a bit. We were even walking down the Wal-Mart isle to pick up a few things and my wife showed me a T-shirt with “I have issues” written across the front! I guess the world is coming to the sad reality that we really do have some issues.
It never ceases to amaze me, the way the devil uses our offenses and our “offendedness” to divide and conquer marriages, relationships, churches — even entire nations!
There’s an old adage, “Have the heart of a lion!” Hearing it, we think, “courage”. This recalls a quote I once heard; “Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened”. I doubt there’s a single hero story in which the fearless leader fails to inspire the righteous determination of his army or people. The voice of the captain resounds through the ranks evoking the fierce cry of every warrior ready to face death or worse, for the cause. Courage truly is contagious.
The Hebrew word for “face” is “panim”, (the Hebrew letters, peh-nun-yud-mem), literally “faces”, a plural word. Normally, when we think about God, we focus only upon one of His “faces” at a time. God is “love” – or He is “holy”– or He is “just”— or He’s a God of “wrath”. Yet, of course, ALL these “faces” are His at once; and so the word “panim” accurately reflects the truth of God’s multifaceted being. As we get to know Him better we begin to appreciate the complexity of His nature and the fact that our focus on one “face” is a very limited view, since there’s so much more going on in His amazing “Personality”.