Chad Bird

The artwork on the front cover is a painted sermon titled, "An Allegory of the Old and New Testaments" by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8 - 1543). The central theme, encouraged by the Reformation, is the contrast between the unforgiving Word of the Law (LEX) on the left, and the forgiving Word of the Gospel of Grace (GRATIA) at the right. Man (HOMO)'s failure to trust God led to sin (PECCATUM) and death (MORS) as testified by the Law received by Moses. However, the mystery of justification (MYSTERIUM IUSTIFICATIONIS) in the Old Covenant is revealed in the New Covenant through the gospel of our justification (IUSTIFICATIO NOSTRA) proclaiming our victory (VICTORIA NOSTRA) through Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection for salvation to everyone who believes. Man sits between the prophet Isaiah and John the Baptist, who point the way forward to Christ "the Lamb of God" (AGNUS DEI) who takes away the sin of the world. I often behave as if I were trying to validate my existence. Deep down, I know that something is wrong. The world is broken, and so am I. How can I be fixed? My attempts at self-justification projects did not alleviate my anxieties. But God surprised me by grace when I realized He had provided the solution to my problem in His two words: the law that condemns me for my sin and the gospel that justifies me through Christ's righteousness. When I am reminded of those two words, law and gospel, I realize that I am the problem, and the solution lies outside of me, in Jesus Christ. This good news seems too good to be true This book provides a theological and historical exposition of God's righteous law and sublime gospel for sinners and saints dealing with their sins and being set free by the Word of Christ. Arturo Perez is a member of the board of directors at Knox Theological Seminary, where he obtained his master's degree in biblical and theological studies. He authored S ntesis del Nuevo Testamento and S ntesis del Antiguo Testamento (Xulon Press) and has contributed articles to The Gospel Coalition and other Christian websites. He is a consultant for Spanish translations at Ligonier Ministries. Arturo is the producer of the radio podcast "Contexto B blico," broadcasted weekly by Radio Eternidad. His works can be found in his blog: lex-evangelium.com Arturo has served as an elder at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, and he continues preaching and teaching in South Florida, especially at Riverside Church, where he serves as one of the pastors on the teaching team. Arturo's undergraduate degree is in Industrial Engineering, and he has worked many years for IBM and Microsoft in his professional career.

Muchas veces me comporto como si estuviera tratando de validar mi existencia. En el fondo, s que algo anda mal. El mundo est roto, y yo tambi n. C mo puedo ser arreglado? Mis intentos a trav s de proyectos de autojustificaci n no alivian mis ansiedades. Pero Dios me sorprendi por gracia cuando me di cuenta de que l hab a provisto la soluci n a mi problema en Sus dos palabras: la ley que me condena por mi pecado y el evangelio que me justifica a trav s de la justicia de Cristo. Cuando recuerdo esas dos palabras, ley y evangelio, me doy cuenta de que el problema soy yo, y la soluci n est fuera de m , en Jesucristo. Esta buena noticia parece demasiado buena para ser verdad Este libro proporciona una exposici n teol gica e hist rica de la justa ley de Dios y el sublime evangelio para pecadores y santos que tratan con sus pecados y son liberados por la Palabra de Cristo. Arturo Perez es miembro de la junta directiva del Seminario Teol gico Knox, donde obtuvo su grado de maestr a en estudios b blicos y teol gicos. Es autor de S ntesis del Nuevo Testamento y S ntesis del Antiguo Testamento (Xulon Press) y ha contribuido con art culos en Coalici n para el Evangelio y otros sitios web cristianos. Sirve como consultor de traducciones al espa ol en Ministerios Ligonier. Arturo es el productor del podcast radial "Contexto B blico" que se transmite semanalmente por Radio Eternidad. Sus obras se pueden encontrar en su blog: lex-evangelium.com Arturo ha servido como anciano en la Iglesia Presbiteriana Coral Ridge en Fort Lauderdale, y contin a predicando y ense ando en el sur de Florida, especialmente en la Iglesia Riverside, donde sirve como uno de los pastores en el equipo de ense anza. Arturo es graduado de Ingenier a Industrial, y ha trabajado muchos a os para IBM y Microsoft en su carrera profesional.

Muchas veces me comporto como si estuviera tratando de validar mi existencia. En el fondo, s que algo anda mal. El mundo est roto, y yo tambi n. C mo puedo ser arreglado? Mis intentos a trav s de proyectos de autojustificaci n no alivian mis ansiedades. Pero Dios me sorprendi por gracia cuando me di cuenta de que l hab a provisto la soluci n a mi problema en Sus dos palabras: la ley que me condena por mi pecado y el evangelio que me justifica a trav s de la justicia de Cristo. Cuando recuerdo esas dos palabras, ley y evangelio, me doy cuenta de que el problema soy yo, y la soluci n est fuera de m , en Jesucristo. Esta buena noticia parece demasiado buena para ser verdad Este libro proporciona una exposici n teol gica e hist rica de la justa ley de Dios y el sublime evangelio para pecadores y santos que tratan con sus pecados y son liberados por la Palabra de Cristo. Arturo Perez es miembro de la junta directiva del Seminario Teol gico Knox, donde obtuvo su grado de maestr a en estudios b blicos y teol gicos. Es autor de S ntesis del Nuevo Testamento y S ntesis del Antiguo Testamento (Xulon Press) y ha contribuido con art culos en Coalici n para el Evangelio y otros sitios web cristianos. Sirve como consultor de traducciones al espa ol en Ministerios Ligonier. Arturo es el productor del podcast radial "Contexto B blico" que se transmite semanalmente por Radio Eternidad. Sus obras se pueden encontrar en su blog: lex-evangelium.com Arturo ha servido como anciano en la Iglesia Presbiteriana Coral Ridge en Fort Lauderdale, y contin a predicando y ense ando en el sur de Florida, especialmente en la Iglesia Riverside, donde sirve como uno de los pastores en el equipo de ense anza. Arturo es graduado de Ingenier a Industrial, y ha trabajado muchos a os para IBM y Microsoft en su carrera profesional.

The God of heaven and earth is no tightfisted, miserly deity who leaves us starving for mercy and begging for crumbs of grace. He is lavish. He gives and gives, then just when we think he can't possibly have more for us, he heaps on still more. He formed all creation for us, his sons and daughters. He fills us with forgiveness and life in his Son, Jesus, who is love in the flesh. All we are and all we have is from him. What's more, using us as his hands and feet, the Spirit cares for those around us, even as they care for us. United by faith to our Father and by love to our neighbor, we live in the freedom that comes from Jesus, whose cup of salvation overflows into our lives.

The day after Halloween, everything around us—ads, store displays, music, and the like—put us on notice: Christmas is coming. With the announcement of Christmas's imminent arrival comes work, work, and more work. We mutter under our breath for lazily storing the Christmas lights in a tangle; we wring our hands over finding good gifts and planning the perfect Christmas meal; every major checklist item includes dozens of decisions and subtasks, each with their own obstacles and pressures to complete. The biggest checklist item: completing all your work with Christmas cheer. In this pressuring cooker of Christmas preparations, The Sinner/Saint Devotional: Advent and Christmas walks you through these church seasons, shifting your focus from work and checklists and putting it on the work Jesus did and does for you. Each devotion includes an opening Scripture passage, a devotional thought, a closing prayer, and a suggested Scripture reading for further reflection. They present you with the Gospel of Advent and Christmas: how Christ has come for us and will come for us again. You will be reminded repeatedly that these seasons are not mere past events to remember, but comfort for today. Comfort from the God who keeps his promises and sent his Son for the forgiveness of our sins.

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. In his life we see our lives, our struggles, our failures, and most especially the God who loves us and chooses us as his own. As we explore his bio, from his wrangling in the womb with Esau to his death as an old man in Egypt, we will learn more about ourselves and the God who is with us and for us in Jesus the Messiah.

Reading the Old Testament can seem like exploring an old, mysterious mansion, packed with of all sorts of strange rooms. The creation room, vast and sublime. The exodus room, with hardhearted pharaohs and dried-up seas. The war room, with bloody swords and crumbling walls. The tabernacle room, with smoking altars and dark inner sanctums. 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. That was their Bible. From its pages, they taught about the Messiah’s divine nature, his priestly work, his ministry of salvation. The Christ Key will reintroduce readers to these old books as ever-fresh, ever-new testimonies of Jesus. By the end, you will see even Leviticus as a book of grace and mercy, and you will hear in the Psalms the resounding voice of Christ.

Reading the Old Testament can seem like exploring an old, mysterious mansion, packed with of all sorts of strange rooms. The creation room, vast and sublime. The exodus room, with hardhearted pharaohs and dried-up seas. The war room, with bloody swords and crumbling walls. The tabernacle room, with smoking altars and dark inner sanctums. 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. That was their Bible. From its pages, they taught about the Messiah's divine nature, his priestly work, his ministry of salvation. The Christ Key will reintroduce readers to these old books as ever-fresh, ever-new testimonies of Jesus. By the end, you will see even Leviticus as a book of grace and mercy, and you will hear in the Psalms the resounding voice of Christ.

Reading the Old Testament can seem like exploring an old, mysterious mansion, packed with of all sorts of strange rooms. The creation room, vast and sublime. The exodus room, with hardhearted pharaohs and dried-up seas. The war room, with bloody swords and crumbling walls. The tabernacle room, with smoking altars and dark inner sanctums. 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. That was their Bible. From its pages, they taught about the Messiah’s divine nature, his priestly work, his ministry of salvation. The Christ Key will reintroduce readers to these old books as ever-fresh, ever-new testimonies of Jesus. By the end, you will see even Leviticus as a book of grace and mercy, and you will hear in the Psalms the resounding voice of Christ.

Unveiling Mercy will do just that—unveil how the mercy of God in the Messiah is spoken of from the very opening Hebrew word of the Bible, all the way to the closing chapter of Malachi. By the end of the year, you will have entered the Old Testament through 365 new doorways, looked with fresh eyes at old verses, and traced a web of connections all over the Scriptures that you've never spotted before. You'll begin to see what one person meant when he described Hebrew words as “hyphens between heaven and earth.” Reading the Bible in translation can be like “kissing the bride through the veil.” Each of these 365 devotions is crafted so as to lift that veil ever so slightly, to touch skin to skin, as it were, with the original language. You do not need to know anything about Hebrew to profit from these meditations. They are not written to teach you the language of Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah, but to give you a taste of their insights, to expose you to their eloquence, to laugh with them at their winking wordplays, to un-English their idioms, and—most importantly—to trace their trajectories all the way into the preaching of the Messiah and the writings of his evangelists and apostles.

Unveiling Mercy will do just that--unveil how the mercy of God in the Messiah is spoken of from the very opening Hebrew word of the Bible, all the way to the closing chapter of Malachi. By the end of the year, you will have entered the Old Testament through 365 new doorways, looked with fresh eyes at old verses, and traced a web of connections all over the Scriptures that you've never spotted before. You'll begin to see what one person meant when he described Hebrew words as "hyphens between heaven and earth." Reading the Bible in translation can be like "kissing the bride through the veil." Each of these 365 devotions is crafted so as to lift that veil ever so slightly, to touch skin to skin, as it were, with the original language. You do not need to know anything about Hebrew to profit from these meditations. They are not written to teach you the language of Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah, but to give you a taste of their insights, to expose you to their eloquence, to laugh with them at their winking wordplays, to un-English their idioms, and--most importantly--to trace their trajectories all the way into the preaching of the Messiah and the writings of his evangelists and apostles.

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. Where the world stresses the importance of success, Bird invites readers to embrace nine specific failures in the areas of our personal lives, our relationships, and the church. Why? Because what human wisdom deems indispensable is so often an impediment to our spiritual growth, and what it deems insignificant is so often essential to it. 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 readers 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.

Parables are some of the most familiar stories in the Bible, yet their interpretations and applications are anything but uniform. Scandalous Stories is a "sort" of commentary on these familiar stories that are steeped in God's offensive grace and loving mercy for sinners and saints alike.

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 day of celebrity worship and online posturing, this is a refreshing, even transformative way of understanding God and our place in his creation. It urges us to treasure a life of simplicity, to love those whom the world passes by, to work for God's glory rather than our own. And it demonstrates that God has always been the Lord of the cross--a Savior who hides his grace in unattractive, inglorious places. Your God Is Too Glorious reminds readers that while a quiet life may look unimpressive to the world, it's the regular, everyday people that God tends to use to do his most important work.

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. Drawing on his expertise as an Old Testament scholar, Bird weaves together his own story, the biblical story, and the stories of fellow prodigals as he peels back the layers of denial, anger, addiction, and grief to help readers come face-to-face both with their own identities and with the God who alone can heal them.