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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Scott Hall may not have been a theologian or a preacher but for me, at that moment he might as well have been.
The world we inhabit is wrong in so many ways, and a holistic approach to this “wrongness” traces its cause both to sin itself and to the effects of sin.
At its heart, this is what Deacon King Kong is all about: the paradox of Jesus carving his victory out of the last thing we expect, not our triumphs but our defeats.
Viewing the Word as a unified theological narrative prevents us from treating the Scriptures like a cage match between competing theological systems, with prophets duking it out with apostles, and psalmists with evangelists, all supposedly fighting for their voice to be heard.
We don’t have to worry about deserving, earning, or reciprocating his gifts. Our Lord doesn’t give us what we deserve. We are given what he deserves, what Jesus has won for us.
It is in your lows where Christ has hidden his highest high, eternal life itself.
While the insights in each chapter are uniquely personal to the individual writers, the overarching theme is one of the sufficiency of Christ.
Wilson reminds his reader over and over again that, in his love, God accepts sinners as they are so that we may be delivered from the self-acceptance, self-worship, and self-justification of our selfish definitions of love.
As the body positivity movement has gained traction, we must also be aware of some of its pitfalls
That a celestial phenomenon should be appropriated worldwide for iconic value or to illustrate a mythological legend makes perfect sense. One cannot copyright the rainbow.
The world’s history and Jewish history was like a story in search of an ending; and when Jesus rose from the dead the ending was now revealed.
Sin, death, and Satan may have had more than a puncher's chance to beat us, but when God stepped into the ring, they should have admitted defeat and thrown in the towel.