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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Our regrets and anxiety, self-abuse and addictions, violence and endless lists are signs that we don’t have an answer to the question: "Why am I here right now, alive, existing?"
It seems too good to be true, and yet it is the truest of all truths. This is our God. This God sees and chooses to trample our sins under his feet.
When we look to Jesus nailed up on that cross, that's God's final goodbye to our sin-blasted survival methods. No more unanswered questions. No more long goodbyes.
Jesus is a heroic warrior that not even hell can defeat.
Regardless of what our eyes, senses, and circumstances tell us, we belong to Christ, and He is with us.
Jesus Christ has finished his work of delivering you from the consequences of your sins and the brokenness of this fallen world.
God isn't satisfied when we turn our backs on Him. No, he takes the initiative and goes after us. In fact, he obsesses over us.
We confuse our success and failures with God’s judgment of us.
We are so free as Christians that we don't even have to compare ourselves to other Christians.
It is a strange irony, but in a world drunk on violence, it is only on the cross of violence that there is hope for peace in our world.
Did the suffering stop? No. It actually got worse. The commands of what exercise to do next sped up and intensified for both of us. The Guide was allowing himself to be smoked with me.
God is always better than your imaginings. God is greater than your thoughts about God!