October 23, 2025 Devo

This past Sunday in my message, I shared the verse from Isaiah 45:15, “Truly, O God of Israel, our Savior, you work in mysterious ways.” And God really does, doesn’t He? In the passage in Isaiah, the prophet is referring to God using the Persian king Cyrus as God’s instrument to free the Israelites and return them to Jerusalem. Who would’ve ever thought that’s how God would do it?
But that’s why He’s God and we’re not. In our story about the man born blind, we see God working in mysterious ways again. When you think of how and why God heals, how do you imagine it? We would usually think of it happening to someone who is filled with faith. We know that God is moved by our faith, so faith has to be present, doesn’t it? Not always. Or how about prayer? We know that God not only hears our prayers, but that He is MOVED when we passionately and continually pray. But prayer wasn’t a part of this blind man’s story either.
This blind man not only didn’t have faith in Jesus; He didn’t even KNOW who Jesus was! When asked, he didn’t call Jesus the Messiah, or the Christ, or the Son of God. He took a guess by the fact that Jesus healed him and called Him a prophet. Let this sink in. The blind man didn’t have faith in Jesus, nor did he even ASK Jesus to heal him. Jesus, out of His great grace and compassion, healed the man despite who he was, not because of it.
Sit with this thought for a while today. You don’t have to earn the grace of God. You don’t have to be special to have the attention of God. You don’t have to have faith or be a person of prayer for God to see your need, know your pain, and care about your predicament. Yes, God loves it when you have faith in Him. Yes, He’s touched by your prayers and moved when you call upon Him with a passionate heart. But sometimes God doesn’t work because of you. Out of His grace and compassion, He works in spite of you. That’s God’s Word for you today.