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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As the church year ends, we are not give a vision of Jesus on His throne, ruling over a new creation. Instead, we see Jesus ruling from the cross. His grace comes in the midst of suffering and pain.
That is the task of preaching in these last weeks of the Church Year, to enable the people given to our care, to praise God from the perspective of the end when our Lord will return in glory bringing us into His Kingdom of glory.
The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
Preachers and church workers must also hear the gospel preached to them.
The mind-blowing part of this entire story, though, isn’t that only one leper came back to “give thanks,” but that the Lord Jesus healed all ten knowing full well that only one would come back.
You’re not new because of what you do. You’re new and so you do new things, even in spite of yourself, because of your sinful nature.
Our God is a living God and he listens to our cries for help.
Weak faith in a strong Christ is still saving faith.
The Gospel outpaces all would-be and eventually fleeting identity-makers and brings in the truth of a renewed-in-Christ humanity.
When God does not give you a life free from suffering, He calls you to look for Him in the midst of suffering. There you find Him doing His work, giving you words to speak and promises to hold onto.
Only by faith can we believe the mystery that salvation in all it various forms comes through Jesus, the Son of Righteousness.
Peterson would have us see each sermon embedded in the community of the faithful. No sermon stands alone because its context is not merely the liturgy, much less an online livestream, but the life together of God’s people.