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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Like Jacob, sinners approach the Heavenly Father wearing the clothes of their older brother, Jesus.
Lutherans have a unique heritage that makes teaching predestination doubly difficult.
What we do much less of, even in Christian circles, is recognize just how pervasive sin is, such that it has thoroughly corrupted us.
God chose Russell Brand, chose to defy his fast-escaping life and drink up all his swift-running sin in the River Thames.
Five promises were seemingly all those apostles, staring into the sky, had to go on. Five promises that were more than enough.
Elsewhere makes promises that can’t be kept, but God’s promises are secure, reliable, and certain.
It's easy to have courage when things go well.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
Regardless of background or beliefs, every American I talk to seems on edge, as if the sky were about to fall. But the sky is not falling.
He declared you what you might not always feel you are, but what you were from the moment he knew you, before you were you, when he foreknew you.
Regularly reading and hearing God’s Word helps us to keep a song in our hearts.
What if the dissonance in this calendrical coincidence can be harmonized into a deeper melody?