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.

All Articles

Thanksgiving is a day set aside for tragi-comic sinners to come together and give thanks for the deliciousness of God's grace in the good news of Jesus Christ.
We long for the Great Thanksgiving that hasn’t happened yet.
Any day of thanksgiving is a confessional day—a day of expressing a short creed that sums up our entire existence: God gives, we receive. Thanksgiving as a day of confession becomes very obvious when we look at it from a Hebrew perspective.
To pray that God’s name is hallowed among us is to pray for the continual proclamation of the gospel in truth and purity that we would hear the word about Christ crucified for sinners.
The following is an excerpt from “A Year of Grace Volume 2” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2019).
We’re messed up people with messed up bodies. All of us. Even Miss America gets hemorrhoids. The Fall mocks us in our own skin. We’re all walking sermons.
God’s gifts are received, and the faithful heart offers gratias, and thanks are given in return.
Consider the word, “salvation.” It comes from the same root word as salvage.
It’s strange that we’ll stuff our mouths today with a bird whose life preaches against us. For consider the turkeys, which neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.