Wade Johnston, Life Under the Cross: A Biography of the Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis: MO, 2025.
This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.

All Articles

God has found a way to be God even for the likes of us. He has found a way to save sinners.
You can die now, you can let go, and because that is true, you can begin to live!
Only in Christ has God taken upon himself the worst that could ever happen between God and man: he has allowed himself to be rejected.
A Sermon on Psalm 130:3–6.
Maybe for the first time you can begin to receive creation as a gift, a sheer gift from God’s hands. And who knows what might happen in the power of this grace? All possibilities are open.
There is no justification except by faith alone. The radical forgiveness itself puts the old to death and calls forth the new.
The law does not end sin, does not make new beings, it only makes matters worse.