Nothing good happens when you get ahead of God and take matters into your own hands.
To confess Christ crucified and risen as the only hope in a world that has lost its mind to wickedness and rage.
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. 191-192.

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You will not be disappointed in this Champion of the Incarnation.
There is no meaning, life is all vanity, if one is not in relationship with God. Keep life simple: trust in God and enjoy the life He has given.
What Jesus promises is better than justice. Jesus promises grace.
We set our minds on things above, but our feet are firmly planted in the stuff of earth, our hands open to the treasure which is our neighbor.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
God is in control, but God is also in relationship with His children and asks us to pray, to lament, and to ask Him to change His mind as we participate as the Bride with our Bridegroom.
This is not just a pericope about hereditary sin and actual sins, nor is it providing a pattern for prayer. It is fundamentally about God our gracious Father and His promise to hear us, answer us, and provide for us.
What pressures or dangers are these particular people, in this particular place, facing right now which keep them from being “rooted and built up” in Christ? What is keeping them from “abounding in thanksgiving”?
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
We can see this as a foreshadowing of how the LORD always comes to His people—the people do not come to Him. So, it is God who sent His Son to us, His Promised One, up close and personal.
But it is not always helpful to create tidy categories of good and bad and to say, “Stop being ‘a Martha’ and do a better job of being ‘a Mary.’” That is a dangerous sermon to preach. In doing so, we can fall into the very thing we see Martha doing.
What might be a unique challenge of this text is how our preaching of it might itself resonate with its mystery. It goes to a broader question: How can we retain a sense of the “mysterious” in our preaching of mysterious texts?