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.

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The testimony of the Word assures us that God isn’t waiting for us at the top of the stairs, with arms folded and brows furrowed.
We need redemption, and we receive it in our church community through God’s Word.
Paradoxes hold everything together, not just in Inception’s plot, but in your life and mine.
The Fourth in the fire is Jesus.
News of Kilmer's death hit me like a freight train because his Doc Holliday stirred something in me about friendship—both the earthly kind and the divine.
Devoid of the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection, sufferers are left to frantically run the halls of self-salvation, turning this way and that but never getting anywhere.
You cannot sever the saint from the sinner. Christians remain both simultaneously.
Huff did not stop there, though. Towards the end of the interview, he asked Rogan, "What do you think of Jesus?"
While Christmas may or may not have pagan roots, it will certainly have a pagan future if Christians lose sight of what it is all about.
In Scripture, laments are raw expressions of grief, but they always point to hope. What if our culture’s obsession with holiday lights is an unconscious way of crying out, “We need good news, and we need it now”?
We love hearing about Jesus, but we also love hearing about how much effort we need to exert to truly pull off this whole “Christian life” thing.
What does professional wrestling and preaching have in common?