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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God has a strange delivery system, the foolish preaching of the cross and foolish preachers for Christ’s sake delivering it.
Jesus offers to the anxious soul the one thing it ironically wants: certainty of the good.
God loves you no matter what. Loves you no matter how many times you have screwed up. Loves you to death, he does.
If sin is only a matter of “doing,” then “undoing” and/or “redoing” would serve as the equivalent savior necessary to find redemption.
Jesus lives to intercede. So we needn’t bring him our feigned righteousness or our faux rehabilitation.
If we want to see evidence of our Father’s answer to the fifth petition, we need only to look at the cross and the empty tomb.
It’s not the disciples’ faith that invented the resurrection but the resurrection that gave birth to the disciples’ faith.
Apathy, melancholy, and disillusionment plague the footsteps of the up-and-coming generations more than ever, especially in the realm of religion, and it’s worth asking, “Why?”
The Bible is a book for the desperate. That is its target audience. Recognizing our desperation readies us to hear the consolation that only God’s Word can offer.
"A Lutheran Toolkit" is available for purchase today from 1517 Publishing
So, what do we pray? What do we say? In times of fear, in times of chaos, in unprecedented times, we pray and say the words that have been written on our hearts.
Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking God's love is like the love we experience in human relationships. But human love is a derivative of God's love. It is lesser.