He doesn’t consume us, even though that is what we deserve. Instead, Jesus comes down to us and consumes all our sin by taking it on himself.
This article is the first part of a two-part series. The second part will take a look at when pastors abuse their congregations.
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

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Our Lord has told us not to make these fine distinctions in grades of sin.
The accusations of the voices we hear on a daily basis are deafening. There is no shortage of voices that will remind us of our failures.
We get the exact opposite of what we deserve.
I walk in the local mall for exercise several times a week. I purposely avoid weekends and hours when the mall is likely to be crowded because, while I am not a racewalker, I do like to keep up a steady pace as opposed to stopping, starting and inching and this is difficult to achieve even when there are few people around.
A confessing church is a church more worried about souls than appearances, family lines, or institutional bottom-lines.
In Christ we are already dead to sin and the eternal consequences of sin. “There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus,” writes Paul (Romans 8:1).
I’ve seen many Christians attempt to wear the world’s hatred as a badge of honor. They count it a huge win if they can get some atheist to rip them up on Twitter or in the comments on Facebook, blogs, or on YouTube.
The only recourse we have is to die before we die. To give up on a fake-life. To acknowledge that this stupid, selfish game we’re playing with our immortality projects has zero success.
The world doesn’t need dads who are more stressed than they already are. It needs fathers who care for their families, not in heroic ways, but in common, everyday ways.
Have you ever heard of Spanx? Although they’ve only been around since 2010, their predecessors have been around for centuries.
People have often tended, quite wrongly, to view me as saintly. I attribute that undeserved reputation to the fact I have always had a very strong sense of the kind of person I should be.
The common knock against “grace people” (or to put it another way, “Christians”) is that preaching too much grace will encourage licentious living.