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 gospel promise is that God in Christ knows exactly what your temptations are and still bids you find protection from them in him.
When Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, Luther wrote him an open letter that has become a classic expression of the "when, how, and what" of prayer. It is as instructive today as when it was first penned it in 1535.
Long ago, the people of Israel began to sing words of encouragement to each other in times of distress. In their songs, the psalms, are three Hebrew words that provide stability for us. They are more than just words—each one encapsulates the way of God with his people. They serve as helpful handholds in times of stress and upheaval. The words are these: רָפָה (be still), קָוָה (wait), and שָׁמַר (watch).
The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.
There has been a blood atonement for sin. Jesus is our propitiation. Jesus has expiated sin. Lent climaxes with this expectation.
This petition is proof that the Christian life is not a practice in perfectionism. Rather, it is a life of dying and rising, lived under the cross of Christ, in the continual forgiveness of our sins.
Jesus does not give as the world gives. With Jesus, everything is guaranteed and has been finished from the start.
The whole world's sin, the crushing horror of death's power, and even hell itself were unleashed on that hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus was executed.
In the vortex of uncertainty and upheaval, what’s the best thing we can do? Seize the ordinary.
Looking at a bronze serpent on a pole cannot remove deadly venom coursing through your veins. But it can if God says it can.
Only God's Word of Gospel can permanently help and heal the addicted.
Can we fully experience the joy of the Festival of the Resurrection if we do not seriously stare boldly into the sad state of our own faithlessness to Him who promises to be faithful even when we are not?