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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A group of unassuming apostles was given a graphic illustration of how the Lord would use them to turn the world right-side-up through the upside-down logic of grace.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
On Saturday, July 16, Luke Gabriel Bird died in a hiking accident in Chile. He was a midshipman in the United States Naval Academy. He is our son. Here are some reflections on his life, his faith, and his Lord.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.
The glimpse of this final vision of healing has healed us before, it heals us here and now, and it will heal us again.
Now, in the New Testament, the number for the Church remains twelve as Jesus calls twelve Apostles to be trained by Him to carry out the ministry following His ascension.
So, we pray. Not just in times of need, but we pray at all times. Because this is part of what it means to be saved.
Darkness is not your only friend. Jesus loves you, and he will be with you.
There were no discussions, no committee meetings, no master planning, he and his group simply went to Macedonia.
What you are doing for your hearers is sparking their imagination to live in, to dwell in, the images you are conjuring in their mind’s eye.
Jesus opens for us a way to walk through suffering and to sing our song of salvation as we talk to our heavenly Father.
In the Old Testament all the world is narrowed down to the people of Israel, which is eventually narrowed down to One—Jesus! Jesus is Israel reduced to one in order that all the world might be saved through Him.