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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Sometimes the old story is the one we need to hear again and again.
The great lie of addiction is that suffering must be fled, must be numbed, must be drowned out by any means necessary.
Repentance is not limited to a season.
To be happy is to be the object of God’s love in Christ and to love God and others with the love of Christ.
The wrong god means love remains frail, fickle, or a fiction. The right God means love is the most reliable thing in all the world.
Wisdom lurks in the outer places. Rich gratitude sprouts from the impoverished and forgotten.
The “Chalking of the Door” is a way to celebrate and literally mark the occasion of the Epiphany and God’s blessing of our lives and home.
It is impossible to live our lives in a way that would convince God of our value because he already knows our value. He is the one who gave it to us.
The Great King comes for us.
The love of God is creative, always giving, always reviving.
This is the basic argument of To Gaze upon God: that we who now see as if behind a veil will one day enjoy the unveiled splendor of God himself, who will dwell with us forever.
More certain than death or taxes and more certain than “anything else in all creation” is the fact that God loves you.