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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The Bible not only calls us to remember God’s past acts of deliverance; it also invites us to recognize that God in Christ is still in the business of delivering sinners from bondage.
Everything in Scripture is God revealing himself to his people, you and me.
If we believe that ours is truly the greatest story ever told, then we must share that story in creative ways and allow it to change the desires of its hearers.
Below is a compilation of some of our staff and contributor’s recommended reads for this summer (based, of course, on what we are reading). Let us know if you find a book you love!
Caesar boasted: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Christ can rightly say: “I came. I saved. I ascended.”
God's faithfulness is constant and consistent. It knows no season. His love for us doesn't fade with the summer sun.
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.
His successes were not the result of his brilliance, might, and ability as an apostle. They were the result of the all-sufficient grace of God.
The Lord’s Prayer is liturgy and catechism, action and instruction, praxis and theology.
What I desperately needed was not to preach to myself, but to listen to a preacher—not to take myself in hand, but to be taken in the hands of the Almighty.
Praying the Word of God back to God carries didactic import. It teaches us.
Just like for Mordecai and Esther, our lives are also sustained by the hand of God in the ordinary, in events begging to be seen as the work of Christ in our lives.