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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No matter how great our thirst is, God's abundance not only meets it but quenches it. When we are poor and in need, the Lord is always there to give us grace and mercy without end.
Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes to bum you out. He wrote it to set you free.
This is an excerpt from “The Freedom of the Christian” written by Martin Luther and translated and edited by Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing, 2020).
Maybe for the first time you can begin to receive creation as a gift, a sheer gift from God’s hands. And who knows what might happen in the power of this grace? All possibilities are open.
"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).
The wisdom of God became man, lived, died, and was raised for the justification of sinners, great and small.
The scope of catechesis from the Reformation was broad and included not only instruction at church but in the home and in schools.
This is an excerpt from “Crucifying Religion” written by Donavon Riley (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Jesus isn’t any ordinary leader. In spite of all the ways the leaders of our world may let us down, you can trust Jesus to always lead you well.
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.
Predestination is a promising teaching as Paul teaches it in Romans 8. It’s promising when Christ and his work for us are held firmly in hand.