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 church is the only place God promises to lift us out of ourselves not in order to become more like God but so that we may finally be freed from our obsession with becoming little gods.
Without the sacraments, God’s grace is simply an artifact behind a glass-case in a museum. We might be able to describe and even admire it, but we never get firsthand access to it.
Grace and mercy are a powerful act of the Almighty God. God alone can grant forgiveness and restoration, salvation from the sorrow of this world.
One could reason that God might, at least, give the church a little worldly power.
God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
God has in fact executed his plans for his people, plans of peace (probably a better translation than welfare), a future, and a hope in Jesus Christ.
God uses the unlikely, the unexpected, and sometimes even the unsavory to deliver us and to crush the heads of his enemies
The upright, in whom the law has exercised its work, when they feel their sickness and weakness, say: God will help me; I trust in him; I build upon him; he is my rock and hope.
The grass withered for them too, but they held on to God’s Word. They knew that was eternal, so they lived in it. They lived in his forgiveness.
A seed grows the kingdom of God. A whisper eventually turns the world upside down. A carpenter’s son from nowhere becomes the Savior of everyone. Such is God’s way.
Today, we begin a short series profiling women in the Bible (Who are not named Ruth or Esther). Both the stories of Ruth and Esther are beautiful, gracious, and profound. We love reading and rereading them. However, in an attempt to bring attention to more stories of more women throughout the Scriptures, we choose now to shift our focus. Our first woman, is, the first woman herself: Eve.
To act according to a “theology of glory” that exalts in money and status at the cost of your brothers and sisters who are hurting or suffering in any way is to act in the opposite way of Christ.