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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Through water, blood, and word, the Spirit never stops pointing us to Christ, and even more, giving us Christ.
Both now and forever, the bruised and crucified Lord nailed to a cross is our assurance of deliverance.
Paul calls them the fruits of the Spirit after all
When we cry to the Lord in our trouble, he will send us a preacher with words that deliver us from destruction.
The one who embodies the dove, that is, the Holy Spirit will be mounted upon the staff of Calvary.
Only by faith in Christ are we truly awake.
Increasingly, to forgive is seen as winking at evil, as shrugging one’s moral shoulders, and as being complicit.
Being the baptized just may be the last, great resistance.
We did not say “Goodbye” to our son on the day of his burial. We said, “Luke, we’ll see you soon.”
As is often the case in Scripture, creation is about a renewed, restored, and redeemed relationship with the Creator.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.