Daily Devotional For July 22, 2025
The nations were angry, and your wrath has come, and the time to judge the dead and to reward your servants the prophets, and the saints and those who fear your name, both the small and the great, and to destroy those who are destroying the earth. Rev 11:18.
Those who face grief or hardship anywhere in the world can appreciate the message of the seventh trumpet. The world belongs to God and He will take full charge of it at the appropriate time (Rev 11:15). When He does, He will right all the wrongs of history, shattering all opposition to His rule (11:18). This text reminds us that when the Day of Judgment comes God will be no respecter of persons. He will reward both small and great (11:18) just as He will punish both great and small (6:15).
The black church tradition of North America was molded by the hardships of the past. Those who were oppressed in everyday life looked forward to church, where janitors could be deacons and street sweepers could be preachers. The black church tradition follows the New Testament pattern where slaves often rose to the office of bishop. There are no limits when God is on your side.
Rosa Parks was tired after a hard day as a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama. She had to run a youth meeting later that night. Still she didn’t jump right on the first bus that came by that Thursday evening. The bus stop was crowded, so she headed to a drugstore to shop for an electric heating pad, thinking she could get a seat on the way home if she waited a bit.
When she finally deposited her ten cent fare on the Cleveland Avenue bus, she found a seat in the first row of the “colored” section in the back. But after a few stops, the driver ordered her to get up so a white passenger could sit down. Parks refused, and the police were called to take her to jail. Two hours after the arrest she was released on $100 bail. By midnight a plan had been hatched for a citywide bus boycott. A young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of that boycott.
The boycott lasted 381 days, until the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was illegal. The success of the boycott ignited the modern civil rights movement. “When I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day or bus in particular,” Parks said later, “I just wanted to be free, like everybody else.1
“Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We don’t need to wait until the kingdom comes to treat other people the way heaven does.
Lord, open my eyes to the injustice You see in my world and my community. Help me to be an agent of change today.
1 Based on Anita Hamilton, “A Bus Rider’s Defiance,” Time, March 31, 2003, A32.