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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Love continues to gently but endlessly pursue the narrator, despite his persistence in pulling away in the opposite direction.
When we genuinely measure ourselves, we will find ourselves dreadfully lacking.
The command to love those nearby is as challenging as it is simple. Jesus took the initiative to come near to us in loving sacrifice.
The Gospel is a precious and comforting word. It comforts and refreshes the sad heart. It wrestles it out of the jaws of death and hell and transports it to the certain hope of eternal life, through faith in Christ.
Imperatives are good for many things. Luther said the Law is good, but precisely because it is good, it has become poison and death to the bad. The Law does not give life but evaluates it, and we encounter day in and day out its negative evaluation of us.
As God in his mercy enacted his plan to redeem his loved ones, he took them step by step. In the process of redeeming every part of us, he sent us prophets like Moses.
The church is of no use to this world if all we do is ape the world’s rhetoric, antics, and actions. We are a unique community with a unique message. Here are four reasons I'm convinced that 2020 is a great year for the church.
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
That unremarkable trip to the zoo on September 28, 1931, was the last in a long line of experiences that brought C.S. Lewis (Jack) back to the faith.
What does it mean that holding to Jesus’ teaching will set us free? Which teaching? What will we be set free from?
Viewing the Bible as literature is an essential and natural way of engaging the text. But there are also ways in which this practice can get lost.
The gospel fires up within us the gratitude, joy, and love to pull off what the law never could get us to do.