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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Christ is not an idea. He isn’t a concept. He isn’t a religious notion or sentiment. He isn’t a product. He is the Savior, flesh and blood.
This is an excerpt from “All Charges Dropped! Devotional Narratives from Earthly Courtrooms to the Throne of Grace,” written by Haroldo Camacho (1517 Publishing, 2022).
My words are peanuts compared to the porterhouse of God’s Word.
Being the baptized just may be the last, great resistance.
The legal record of debt for our sin was canceled because Jesus satisfied the legal demands for us by his life, death, and resurrection.
God’s goodness spoke a promise of peace and mercy to the bewildered, a promise that rings out to this day.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
In the place of God, Marx sets the material, autonomous, self-creating man.
Moses is no Jesus but he, like us, is saved by Him. The law cannot enter the promised land, and yet the true and greater promised land is occupied by nothing but lawbreakers.
How do we preach a text of exhortation while keeping the sermon Gospel-centered?
There’s no possibility of understanding the grace of Romans 6 and the glory of Romans 8 unless you identify with the excruciating struggle of Romans 7.