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.

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Like the younger son, we can return to our Father every time our sinful hearts rebel against him. Like the older brother, we can complain and lament to our Father without fear of being destroyed.
On All Saints Day, the beatitudes remind us how God in Christ claims people, frail, humble, poor, mourning, and makes them His own.
It is incumbent upon the faithful preacher, looking to see sinners transformed into the image of Christ, to preach a naked gospel.
Any conception that contends that Jesus only died for some sinners turns the gospel into an uncertain message for everyone.
Faithful celebration of the Reformation is possible only for those who understand they have nothing. Whose incapability and insufficiency are obvious and owned. Who recognize their dependence on God for all things. In other words, Reformation is for children.
If the gospel is promise that means it is essentially relational. It stands that the nature of any promise is that it's only as good as the one who issues it.
God daily broadsides us with his abundant power and glory as we observe nature around us. And yet, as glorious as this book of nature is, it is not enough.
Jesus is a heroic warrior that not even hell can defeat.
Terror and even hatred of God are the only things with which divine hiddenness can leave us.
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.
I suggest preaching a sermon that directs attention away from the main characters. Instead, highlight for your hearers (and proclaim loudly and clearly) the promise of Jesus in this text.
The law does not end sin, does not make new beings, it only makes matters worse.