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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I don’t think the people of Jerusalem designed to reject God. They didn’t wake up one day and decide that, instead of listening to God, they would make it their mission to kill him. They were deceived. Blinded. Deluded by sin and its author. As a result, they were unable and unwilling to hear the Word of the Lord.
“Each of us shares in this sin; the sin of self-justification and disbelief in God’s promises.”
Our sin marked Christ. Jesus was marked with the scars of nails and a spear for us. His hands, feet, and side are marked with scars displaying the cost of our redemption.
All this disciplined living is to be done in freedom.
Our church doesn’t talk a lot about giving up things for Lent. Lent seasons means we have Sunday night services as well, where we bring in speakers who talk about a different theme each year.
The post-Reformation observance of Lent is both commemorative and penitential
Our wants and desires are wholly driven by selfishness, just like Peter, James, John, and all the disciples
The word of faith means the word that declares us righteous and gives us Christ’s own righteousness as a gift. At the start of the Passion Season, these texts call us deny ourselves and our pride that comes by our obedience to the Law, and to cast all of our sins, failures, and weaknesses onto Christ, to trust Him alone for our salvation.
There are two ways to think about what’s happening when someone is tempted. The first is to imagine temptation as enticement toward something bad and wrong. This is probably the more common of the two. But there’s another way of thinking about it. Temptation could also be seen as encouragement away from something good and right.
The Father uses this last festival of Epiphany, the Transfiguration, to announce one more time to us just who Jesus is: His beloved Son, the Chosen One
The danger was not necessarily inside the city. Nor was it from an obvious source. Outside the walls of Thyatira, lay a small shrine of white stone.
God is used to working with colorful figures. One of the most colorful in the Bible is Balaam. Hailing from Mesopotamia, Balaam was what we might call a shaman or a soothsayer.