The following entries are excerpts from Chad Bird’s upcoming book, Untamed Prayers: 365 Daily Devotions on Christ in the Book of the Psalms (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 32, 52.
Bitterness took root when he began approaching the Word merely as a burden he was called to carry rather than a balm that his soul needed, too.
The “mystery of faith” entails the article of faith: Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and, finally, his Parousia.

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This was one of the most haunting and soul tormenting verses in the Bible for me when I was growing up.
Getting ready for church is an exhausting exercise for a lot of people. By getting ready, I don't mean making wardrobe decisions.
But in that quest for thou shalts and thou shalt nots, you’ll miss what really matters. You’ll trample the cross while racing for the tablets of stone. From the tale of Achan's theft, you’ll rob yourself of Jesus.
In the tiny Texas town where I grew up, sleeping in on Sunday morning was as inconceivable as rooting for someone besides the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday afternoon.
Good people like fist-pounding on the pulpit about the bad things that bad people do in this bad world of ours. It makes them feel better about themselves.
Why am I not surprised when people have a need to feel, touch or sense God in some tangible way? Part of it probably has to do with my church experience consisting of denominations that place a fairly strong emphasis on some form of tangible, experiential expression of God.
I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing. Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight.
Ultimately, the lie we have believed is that God is like we are. He is not. Thank God that he is not. He is the Lord who reverses all our expectations.
I once saw a man holding a sign that read: Divorce is an abomination. Repent! That’s it. Nothing else.
Nonetheless, if we wish to treat apologetics as a practical endeavor for concrete engagement with people who ask about Christianity, it seems best to start with the questions young people are actually asking.
In Christ, we become part of the group of eight on the ark. The eight does not increase to nine or ten but swells to contain us all. God recreates us in this saving flood of baptism. We enter the new creation in Christ.
One of my podcast addictions is Criminal. Their tagline is “Criminal is a podcast about crime. Stories of people who've done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.”