The following entries are excerpts from Chad Bird’s new book, Untamed Prayers: 365 Daily Devotions on Christ in the Book of the Psalms (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 311 and 335
Why did the church dedicate a day to St. Michael anyway? Who is he, and what does he do?
The Antichrist offers another continual presence. It is every whisper that tempts us toward autonomy, that tells us to carry it alone, that insists suffering is meaningless.

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We’ve hung on every whisper of hope that this way of life would end and a new one would rise to take its place.
Christian peace is not the absence of problems, but it is the presence of God amid our pain and sorrows.
The well-meaning advice “time heals all wounds” is offensively false when we confront the overwhelming evidence that the constants in our lives are death, taxes, and suffering.
St John of the Cross' feast day on December 14 commemorates the day of his death in 1591, at the height of the Catholic renewal movement that followed the Reformation.
Christ urges us to love our neighbor as He loved us, forgiving all of their sins - giving them the absolving, shirt-pulling, embrace that we would also want.
It wasn’t a perfect image, but it was still there, even in its cartoonish movie magic distortion. It was an element of the Gospel right there in front of me.
He assumed the weakest form to do his greatest work.
This is an excerpt from Martin Luther’s Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535), written by Martin Luther and translated by Haroldo Camacho (1517 Publishing, 2018).
The following is an excerpt from “The Christian Life: Cross or Glory” written by Steven A. Hein (1517 Publishing, 2015).
Love continues to gently but endlessly pursue the narrator, despite his persistence in pulling away in the opposite direction.
The following is an adaptation from "Law and Gospel in Action" written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).
“Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions on Insights from Old Testament Hebrew” by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2020) is now available for purchase.