This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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How can he say it? How can he say that Christ is after all the entire meaning of life for him, and that death is no real worry?
Only the resurrection of Jesus guarantees and facilitates divine presence and love to us as divine life for us.
We live for the most part, on the strength of our moral fiber, under the law, by our zeal for God and all that which tickles our proud fancy.
Tim wanted everyone to know to the deepest part of their being that they were justified by Christ alone.
If the season of Lent is a journey, Holy Week is the destination.
What we discover in O’Connor’s stories and Martin Luther’s theology is that God’s grace is elusive because the human heart is resistant to it.
This is the message of Lent. We are not called to sacrifice for Jesus in order to earn our salvation. Rather, we are called to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.
Fullness, truth, reality – all this God gives us as his gift in Christ.
While they speak on various aspects of the preaching task, these essays share a unity in their authors’ commitment to the fact that the preaching of Jesus Christ is not simply motivational, informational, or inspirational; it is the delivery of God’s promise into the ears of those who if left to themselves are deaf to the Creator’s voice.
It is terribly easy to set up our theology as a buffer against the real coming of the Lord and its consequences.
While the world is full of horizons and endpoints, for Christians, there is always tomorrow, and there are people in that tomorrow waiting for us as we wait for them.
For Christians, Advent is the time when the Church patiently prepares for the coming of the Great King, Jesus the Christ.