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.

All Articles

The glimpse of this final vision of healing has healed us before, it heals us here and now, and it will heal us again.
Just as the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, so we, through the working of the Holy Spirit, recognize our Lord in the Word and Sacraments.
I trust that because of the gospel, God will continue to mend what I, in my sin, continue to break.
There is someone outside of I, someone outside of you, that our faith and hope is in.
Jesus does not put us on trial and make us pay for our own sin, but he, himself, is put on trial in our place.
Now, in the New Testament, the number for the Church remains twelve as Jesus calls twelve Apostles to be trained by Him to carry out the ministry following His ascension.
So, we pray. Not just in times of need, but we pray at all times. Because this is part of what it means to be saved.
We worry about the fact our days are as grass – so we try to scratch out a place for ourselves, to make a permanent, lasting place, to climb to higher places and succeed, more often than not, only to hurt each other in the process.
There were no discussions, no committee meetings, no master planning, he and his group simply went to Macedonia.
What you are doing for your hearers is sparking their imagination to live in, to dwell in, the images you are conjuring in their mind’s eye.
Jesus opens for us a way to walk through suffering and to sing our song of salvation as we talk to our heavenly Father.
Both Paul and Martin Luther were Olympic champions when it came to ladder climbing.