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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Whenever Jesus explains the commandments they get harder to keep, not easier.
Despite what the Pharisees believed and advertised, Jesus was not intent upon deconstructing the fundamental tenets of the Old Testament law. Actually, he proceeds to do just the opposite.
It is necessary for preachers to have both the humility to acknowledge that they must keep watch over their teaching and the means to have their preaching constantly formed and shaped by God’s Word.
Everyone is living as a naked sufferer who’s been duped into believing that the nakedness of suffering has to be covered up.
Here is someone to love; they’re not a Christian. They’re not very clean and don’t seem to care. Love them. Let your life become intertwined with theirs. Let it cost you something.
The one true God has revealed himself as the answer to the longings of every human heart. The search has ended. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Holy, Holy, Holy.
The irony of our idolatry is that many of our idols could and would speak the gospel to us if we would listen.
God bestows faith that it should deal not with ordinary things, but with things no human being can master such as death, sin, the world, and Satan.
The law is good and holy but so often when we are “shoulding” on one another, we actually are just going to end up “burning” each other’s fields.
The world’s history and Jewish history was like a story in search of an ending; and when Jesus rose from the dead the ending was now revealed.
The Apostle Peter’s monumental sermon on Pentecost declares the Kingdom purposes and divine saving work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which culminates in the new world order with Christ in charge.
The whole point of Church is to be in a place that hands over the gifts and promises of Jesus Christ to dirty rotten sinners who are in desperate need of them.