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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I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
While the world is full of horizons and endpoints, for Christians, there is always tomorrow, and there are people in that tomorrow waiting for us as we wait for them.
We ache in eager anticipation as we see Christ in action and as we take in the snapshots of his life, death, and resurrection.
That is the task of preaching in these last weeks of the Church Year, to enable the people given to our care, to praise God from the perspective of the end when our Lord will return in glory bringing us into His Kingdom of glory.
The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
Whatever else may be said about the Last Day it consists of these two inseparable things: Christ’s coming and His kingdom people being gathered to Him.
Increasingly, to forgive is seen as winking at evil, as shrugging one’s moral shoulders, and as being complicit.
We did not say “Goodbye” to our son on the day of his burial. We said, “Luke, we’ll see you soon.”
As is often the case in Scripture, creation is about a renewed, restored, and redeemed relationship with the Creator.
What the gospel promises is not escape from our humanity, but resurrection from the dead.
Salutary funeral preaching seeks to set the life of the baptized believer who has died within the life of Christ incarnate, crucified, risen, and reigning.
I want the beginning of my funeral to be focused on Jesus, as well as the middle, the end, and every point in between.