BIBLE READING: Joel 2:23–27, 32 — NKJV
23 Be glad then, you children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God; for He has given you the former rain faithfully, and He will cause the rain to come down for you — the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.
24 The threshing floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall overflow with new wine and oil.
25 ‘So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust, My great army which I sent among you.
26 You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wondrously with you; and My people shall never be put to shame.
27 Then you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel: I am the Lord your God and there is no other. My people shall never be put to shame.’
32 ‘And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be deliverance, as the Lord has said, among the remnant whom the Lord calls.’
Exhortation
Welcome to the Mercy Speaking Devotional — your daily encounter with the God who not only saves but restores. Today is Sunday, June 6, 2026, and we are on Day 6 of this season of devotional journey together. Sunday is a day of worship, of gathering, of remembrance, a day set apart for us to realign our hearts with heaven’s rhythm. And today, God has a specific word for every person who has watched something precious being eaten away: time, opportunity, health, relationships, calling and has quietly wondered: can any of this ever be recovered?
The answer, from the mouth of God Himself in today’s passage, is an unqualified yes.
Let me tell you about a woman named Ngozi Obi.
Ngozi grew up in Enugu, the daughter of a secondary school principal who had great hopes for her. She was brilliant — the kind of student teachers remembered long after she left their classrooms. She gained admission to study Medicine at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1998. But a combination of family financial crisis, a turbulent relationship that consumed her emotional energy, and two failed academic sessions left her without a degree at twenty-six. She eventually completed a lower qualification, married, and moved to Lagos where she worked administrative jobs that felt, in her own words, ‘like wearing a coat that belongs to someone else.’
By 2010, she was forty years old, had three children, a husband who worked long hours, and a growing, gnawing conviction that she had missed her purpose. She would later describe that decade between her university failure and her fortieth birthday as ‘the locust years, years she felt had been eaten by choices, circumstances, and a sense of divine abandonment she was almost too ashamed to admit.
In 2011, her church in Lagos ran a weeklong revival. The preacher, an elderly pastor from Ibadan, preached from Joel 2:25 on the fifth night: ‘So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.’ Ngozi said she sat in the back row and wept silently through the entire message. Not for grief. For recognition. She said it felt as though God had written that verse specifically for the decade she had just lived through.
She went forward for prayer that night. She did not receive a miraculous degree or a reversal of time. What she received was something more foundational: a renewed clarity of purpose. She began studying again — this time a degree in Public Health, which she completed in 2014 at the age of forty-four. By 2017 she had founded a community health initiative in her local government area in Lagos, training market women and artisans in basic healthcare. By 2022 her organisation had trained over three thousand people and was formally partnered with the Lagos State Ministry of Health. In 2025, she was awarded a national recognition for grassroots healthcare innovation.
Ngozi did not get back the exact years she had lost. But what God restored to her was richer, wider, and more impactful than what she would have built had nothing been lost at all. That is the nature of divine restoration. It does not simply return what was taken — it redeems the taking itself.
Joel 2:25 is one of the most extraordinary verses in all of Scripture. God is speaking to a people who have watched locusts — four distinct kinds described in the Hebrew: the gazer, the yelek, the hasil, and the arbeh — systematically devour everything they had planted and cultivated. This was not a single catastrophe. It was a sustained, layered, progressive consumption of their livelihood. And God’s response is not simply to feel sorry for them. He issues a divine decree of restoration: I will give back what was eaten.
Notice the weight of that personal pronoun. ‘I will restore.’ Not: circumstances may improve. Not: you may recover some of it eventually. God Himself takes ownership of the restoration. The same God who permitted the locusts — for reasons He does not fully explain in this passage — now personally undertakes the recovery. This is the God who works all things together for good to those who love Him (Romans 8:28). Even the locust years are not wasted in His economy. They are raw material for a testimony.
But restoration in Joel is not passive. It flows from a return to God. Earlier in the chapter — Joel 2:12–13 — God calls His people to ‘return to Me with all your heart.’ The restoration of verse 25 is the fruit of the turning of verse 12. This is a critical principle: purpose is not restored to people who are spiritually stationary. It is restored to those who turn, who seek, who return to the One who holds their purpose in His hands in the first place.
It is also significant that today is Sunday. In the biblical rhythm, Sunday is the day of resurrection — the day Jesus walked out of a tomb and overturned every verdict that death had tried to make permanent. Every Sunday is a weekly declaration that nothing God has purposed for your life is permanently buried. The resurrection of Christ is not only a past historical event. It is an ongoing announcement: restoration is possible, purpose is recoverable, and endings that look final are often only God’s way of preparing a greater beginning.
Perhaps you are reading this today feeling like Ngozi in 2010 — aware of years that have been eaten, sensing a gap between who you were made to be and where you currently are. Perhaps you have almost stopped believing that the gap can close. Let God’s word to you be what it was to His people through Joel: Be glad. Rejoice. He will restore. And when He does, verse 26 promises, you shall eat in plenty and be satisfied — and you shall never be put to shame.
Your purpose was not cancelled when the locusts came. It was preserved by the God who called you — and He is ready, on this Sunday, to begin the restoration.
Food for Thought
Reflect on this: Ngozi did not get back the identical years she had lost — she received something better: a purpose larger than what she had originally planned. Divine restoration rarely looks like a simple reversal of loss. It tends to look like a transformation of loss into something more fruitful than the original. Are there ‘locust years’ in your own story that you have been grieving as permanent losses? What would it mean to stop mourning what was eaten and to start positioning yourself for what God intends to grow in its place? And practically — what one step of return, of seeking, of turning back to God could you take today that would open your hands to receive what He is ready to restore?
Prayer Points
1. Father, I stand on the promise of Joel 2:25 today. Every year that the locust has eaten — every season of loss, delay, failure, missed opportunity, and stolen potential — I declare that You are able and willing to restore it all. I receive Your restoration not just as a future hope but as a present reality that begins today, in Jesus’ mighty name.
2. Lord, I return to You today with my whole heart. Like Your people in Joel, I turn from every distraction, every spiritual drift, every season in which I have sought purpose outside of Your presence. I declare that You alone are the source and sustainer of my purpose. Restore what was lost as I return to You.
3. God of restoration, I release every year I have spent grieving what was taken from me. I refuse to remain in mourning over the locust years. I declare that in Your hands, my losses become seeds and my setbacks become the soil for a harvest greater than what I originally imagined. Let the threshing floors of my life overflow with the abundance of Your restoration.
4. Holy Spirit, clarify my purpose. Where confusion, discouragement, and delay have blurred the vision You placed in me, restore it now with fresh clarity and renewed fire. Let me see again what You called me to do, and let me have the courage and the grace to step back into it — regardless of how much time has passed.
5. Lord, let my restoration become a testimony that silences shame and ignites faith in others. As Ngozi’s recovered purpose touched thousands of lives in Lagos, let what You restore in me ripple far beyond my own story, glorifying Your name and drawing others into the reality of a God who wastes nothing and abandons no one. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
