Showing results by author "Chad Bird" in All Categories

Jacob seems to be anything but a model disciple. He's a trickster, liar, and selfishly ambitious man who fathers children with four women and leads a dysfunctional family rife with jealousy and backstabbing. But Jacob is also Israel, the namesake of the Old Testament community of God, chosen and blessed. As such, this sinner-saint, who limps along with the Lord, burdened by weakness and beset by problems, is the mirror image of all of us who follow Jesus.

Reading Reading the Old Testament can seem like exploring an old, mysterious mansion, packed with of all sorts of strange rooms. What does this odd and ancient world have to do with us, who are modern followers of Jesus? As it turns out, everything! Every chapter in the Old Testament, in a variety of ways, tells the story that culminates in Jesus the Messiah. What Christians today call the Old Testament is what Jesus and the earliest believers simply called the Scriptures.

Most of us are regular people who have good days and bad days. Our lives are radically ordinary and unexciting. That means they're the kind of lives God gets excited about. While the world worships beauty and power and wealth, God hides his glory in the simple, the mundane, the foolish, working in unawesome people, things, and places.

In our age when the church can too often seem like a poor copy of the world, Chad Bird challenges us to reclaim the astounding originality of our ancient, backward faith. With compelling examples from the Bible and today, Bird paints an enticing picture of the counterintuitive, countercultural life that God wants for us. He helps listeners delight in all of the ways that Jesus turned the world upside down, allowing us to experience true freedom, not from our weaknesses but in the midst of them.

Journeys that begin in brokenness rarely follow a straight road to healing. There are twists and turns - and setbacks - on the path of repentance. Night Driving tells the story of a pastor and seminary professor whose moral failures destroyed his marriage and career, left his life in ruins, and sent him spiraling into a decade-long struggle against God. Forced to fight the demons of his past in the cab of the semi-truck he drove at night through the Texas oil fields, Chad Bird slowly began to limp toward grace and healing.

Suffering engulfs our lives in an unavoidable darkness, leaving answers and explanations obscured like a sorrowful fog. The gospel of Christ, however, gives us something infinitely more valuable than answers or explanations. Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment is not an attempt to decode or decipher every nook and cranny of sorrow and suffering. It is a journey wherein faith, hope, and love are unexpectedly found along the way, in the midst of darkness. Much to our surprise, that's where God shows up, too.

Brought to you by Jeppson’s Malört: Put some prime quality Chad into your ear, with his weekly Avian Op-Ed about pop news, sports, politics, science, sex, life, death, birth, love, nerds, Star Wars and sometimes it's all about you.