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

Understanding the doctrine of the hypostatic union can help us understand what God is up to in the Incarnation.
It is in the midst of a world marked by empty and deceptive hopes that have broken hearts and lives that we are sent to deliver the promise of a future that has as its last chapter the resurrection of the body to eternal life with the Lamb who was slain but is alive forevermore.
Where Erasmus saw fear and collapse, Luther saw the never-ending comfort of Christ and his gospel.
When we hear freedom, we have to ask about its opposite, bondage.
The devil knows our name and labels us by our sin. The devil breathes out death as he names us for what we are, sinners.
Are people so different today? Is justification really irrelevant now? Is the preacher’s only point of contact with the life-giving Gospel a by-product of Microsoft’s word processor? I do not think so.
Theology is not to simply adopt the positions and presuppositions of philosophy, nor should it reject philosophy.
The kingdom of Christ is realized where nothing but comfort and the forgiveness of sins reign not only in words to proclaim it, which is also necessary; but also in deed.
The articles were used to catechize churches in Lutheran doctrine through a series of pastoral visitations.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner as deeply as he sticks there himself.
Every day, in everything we do and experience, we are busy hearing, seeing, and telling stories.
[Luther's] Catechism is at home in the evangelical pulpit, guiding and shaping what the preacher says so faith might be created and love given direction.