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 hope is God's mercy. It's like a well that never dries up. His mercies were there before he created us. They are present for us today.
Even for idolatrous sellouts like you and me, God’s position has not changed. Even though we may have forgotten him, he never forgets us.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.
Grace remits sin, and peace quiets the conscience. Sin and conscience torment us, but Christ has overcome these fiends now and forever.
God's power and works are awesome and cannot be stifled. His grace and mercy will be heard above the growls and howls of those who deny Christ Jesus is God and Savior
Our children are not our own, but even more, our children are born in need. They are sinful, from conception and from birth.
At its heart, this is what Deacon King Kong is all about: the paradox of Jesus carving his victory out of the last thing we expect, not our triumphs but our defeats.
You are not in debt to sin. You don’t owe it anything. There’s no reason for you to serve it.
Meeting the crown prince is one thing; meeting God in the flesh, as the Light of the Gentiles and the Savior of the world is another.
Love turns out to be not simply a thing or action, but a characteristic of God himself.
As Christians, we rest in the finished work of Christ on the cross, and we yearn for our neighbor to be reconciled to God, to know the peace that we are resting in.
What we are asked to believe as we ponder the birth of this child is that in his coming, a new creation has dawned.