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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It’s been my experience that All Saints’ Day, celebrated on November 1st and observed on the first Sunday following, gets overshadowed by the celebration of Reformation Day.
Gospel questions don’t get a Law answer. Religious questions beg for Law answers.
I have been very busy lately, trying to understand things.
Love is the sum of the law. Love God with all your heart, spirit, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. That means that if love can't be done when it needs to be done then get rid of the law, because it's not lawful.
Perhaps if we indulged our Christian freedom around them, they would come to see that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
We are saved by grace, and strictly speaking, not by an offer.
God’s grace is extended to the incorrigible alcoholic as well as to us, the more sophisticated sinners and drunks.
This a part of our series on Luther's, Heidelberg Disputation
Only because He is an outsider can he afford the costly fee insiders could never afford no matter how hard they work.
I told him that God does not have two types of sheep. God does not have a fold of black, and another white. God only has a fold made up entirely of black sheep because He knows the truth about us.
For on the other side of the death of forgiveness is the resurrection of joy. An easter in which we emerge from the tomb in the arms of the man whose scars glow with mercy.
Whatever loss you’ve undergone, whatever grief resides in the hollow of your heart, however much it seems like God has abandoned you, God sees that void as the place he wants to fill with new life and mercy.