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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We're ALL sinners in need of a Savior. We're all saints whose Savior forgives ALL our sin. We're all the same in relation to Christ crucified for the sin of the world.
What a person quickly realizes when sin, death, and Satan attack in concrete reality is how inadequate and ill-equipped they are to fight them off.
God’s will is not sparkly, flashy, exciting, extraordinary plans for your life—at least not in the Old Adam’s eyes. So, what is the will of God?
The easiest way for us to contend with our sin is to become an agent of sin. We slice and cut others to pieces for all the world to see.
One moment, we pray for our rescue from sin and death. The next moment, we beg our Father to do unto others what we hope he will never do to us.
Our brokenness cuts deeper than just the times when we recognize it needs to be fixed.
The Son of Eve disarmed Satan’s hold on humanity, not with an earthquake, atomic bomb, or brilliant essay, but with his dead body and final words, “It is finished.”
When we ask ourselves, "My God, how did I get so lost," he answers, "I am the God who comes to seek and save the lost in the power of my resurrection.
The devil knows our name and labels us by our sin. The devil breathes out death as he names us for what we are, sinners.
So long as we entrust death to Jesus, new life is ours. He has lunch ready and he is waiting for us in the power of his resurrection.
We expect the world to shoot its wounded. But not even the world expects Christians to shoot their wounded.
The danger of denying the truth of our common human fallenness and brokenness by original sin is that the denial of this doctrine may also lead us to the denial of Christ as our Savior.