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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Because Jesus sacrificed Himself for us sinners, God calls us to open the door of our junk rooms and receive His forgiveness.
The love God showed for us in the death of his Son continues in us because we remain his children as long as we are incorporated in the body of Jesus through faith.
The Lord who stood before her seemed reckless in His love. Her sin didn't deter Him. Rather, it was the reason He came.
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
This is an excerpt from “Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions Based on Insights from Old Testament Hebrew” written by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2020). Used with permission.
The kind of love we crave, that we will go to any lengths to find, is already present for us here and now. The Lord's love for us reaches into our hearts and soul.
David is unable to find an example to accurately compare the purity that flows from God washing a sinner. The winter snow is the best example David can come up with, but it still falls short.
As long as our illusions of control over storms and germs persist to govern our thinking, we will never be able to take the saving work of Christ as seriously we ought.
Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes to bum you out. He wrote it to set you free.
"Whom shall we fear?" We fear no one. We're not afraid of anything. Instead, we wait for the Lord with good courage. He will strengthen our hearts, as the psalmist writes (Ps 27:1).
Christians have the rare faculty, above all other people on earth, of knowing where to place their care, while others vex and torture themselves and at length must despair.
From the junkyard of my past, I assembled the scrap metal of self-preservation, self-righteousness, and unalloyed selfishness, to weld together a hollow divinity. In its core, I stuffed myself: a god without divinity, offering forgiveness with conditions, to sinners without love.