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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The only place to begin a discussion of human/creaturely identity is with our relationship to the God whose breath filled dust, brought us to life, sustains us and gives us a hopeful future.
While we wait in tribulation for our white robes (or pants) to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, we confess to one another our seen and unseen stains.
The Lord knew how it felt to be a rejected stone.
How can we be sure that we are getting a “solid spiritual diet” and not a “milky” one?
The drama of Scripture is about God renaming us by bringing us into his image-bearing family once again. And it would take “a name above all names” to accomplish it.
Dear hearers of the word of God, you are finished. You cannot be the same now. All that is ended, over.
I hate to break it to you, but "are" is not an action verb. "Are" is a being verb.
I can guarantee you that when Paul was overtaken by the Spirit and inspired to write these words, he did not have in mind your local school's boys' basketball tournament.
The sign of the cross, according to the earliest centuries of Christians, is “the sign of the Lord,” and every baptized Christian was “marked” with it.
Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
The more awareness we have that we are weak and low and frail and incapable of doing this thing called life, the more perfectly we are positioned to meet the God of grace.
All our sin and shame is answered for in the death and resurrection of our Lord.