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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God’s people get the warm feast of victory, while God’s meal is prepared cold.
Sometimes the old story is the one we need to hear again and again.
Lent isn't simply a season. It's the Christian life in microcosm.
Apart from the confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God who suffered and died for the forgiveness of sins and rose again to justify the ungodly, there is no Christian faith.
The great lie of addiction is that suffering must be fled, must be numbed, must be drowned out by any means necessary.
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.
Despite the mathematical incongruity, the church confesses that Christ is one hundred percent human and one hundred percent divine.
Christians don’t need a bucket list. We’ve got the whole bucket: the Word fulfilled, life fulfilled, and life in full.
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.
Jesus, the true Bridegroom, erases that mistake by his own compassionate, saving act. Isn’t this also a picture of the gospel?
Wisdom lurks in the outer places. Rich gratitude sprouts from the impoverished and forgotten.
Peace is ours, even when what seems like the end draws near, because we know who Christ is and we know what Christ has done, and we know that who he is and what he’s done is all for us.