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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This is the feast, the banquet to end all banquets. The LORD God is the maker and provider of this great feast which takes place for the resurrected faithful in the courts of Heaven.
Your forgiveness means you are in God’s favor, and no matter what tomorrow brings, God’s face is shining upon you, and he is gracious to you. Whether you live or you die, you belong to the Lord.
From the womb to the tomb, from the cradle to the grave, Jesus’ name defines and describes who he is and what he is all about.
Fred Rogers did not teach children how to live through a pandemic, but he had many profound things to say about loving our neighbors and finding our identity in that calling.
Christian peace is not the absence of problems, but it is the presence of God amid our pain and sorrows.
The way through loneliness will lie in the blessing of solitude and the care of God.
The well-meaning advice “time heals all wounds” is offensively false when we confront the overwhelming evidence that the constants in our lives are death, taxes, and suffering.
The proclamation of Christ's coming is for all people, at all times.
To a world enslaved to time (because it has no future), the Church's disregard for clocks and calendars is ridiculous.
The resurrection of Jesus was the moment when the one true God appointed the Man through whom the whole cosmos would be brought back into its proper order. A man got us into this mess; the Man would get it out again.
Although theirs is an impressive show of faith, the display of God’s faithfulness to them is far greater. After all, faith is only as strong as the object in which it is placed.
God's justice is marked and measured by sacrificial love, not power as the world defines it.