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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How can we best talk about the Gospel with an Old Testament accent? Chad Bird provides us with a helpful "map" that highlights Egypt, the Red Sea, and Jerusalem. These three places represent the ways in which God graciously redeems, delivers, and sanctifies us. This brief essay was delivered at the 1517 Regional Conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 17, 2021.
What kind of shepherd does God provide? The answer, of course, starts and ends with Christ.
The biblical shepherd leads his sheep. He provides for their needs. He protects them from enemies, and he does not leave his sheep unattended.
Resurrection life is not something cast into the future. The future is now.
He continues to gather other sheep in, and He does it through the selfless serving and the gracious speaking of His people.
Jesus rejects what we believe is most necessary and instead points us to his pain, suffering, death, and self-sacrifice.
Jesus’s touch of this leper is the touchstone of the gospel itself. It’s a living parable of his entire ministry.
After more than a year of facing our collective mortality as a species, the promise of a physical resurrection is welcome news.
Preachers are called to consider how the resurrection reverberates in the present but also the future.
The Light of the LORD, Jesus Christ, has risen upon us and set us apart as the chosen people of God.
Jesus is proclaiming the good news that he has come to put an end to laboring to be loved by God.
The cross is not some mystic metaphor for the change we must undergo before our self-realization, but the earth-shattering event that changed the course of eternity.