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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God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
God has in fact executed his plans for his people, plans of peace (probably a better translation than welfare), a future, and a hope in Jesus Christ.
God uses the unlikely, the unexpected, and sometimes even the unsavory to deliver us and to crush the heads of his enemies
The grass withered for them too, but they held on to God’s Word. They knew that was eternal, so they lived in it. They lived in his forgiveness.
A seed grows the kingdom of God. A whisper eventually turns the world upside down. A carpenter’s son from nowhere becomes the Savior of everyone. Such is God’s way.
Today, we begin a short series profiling women in the Bible (Who are not named Ruth or Esther). Both the stories of Ruth and Esther are beautiful, gracious, and profound. We love reading and rereading them. However, in an attempt to bring attention to more stories of more women throughout the Scriptures, we choose now to shift our focus. Our first woman, is, the first woman herself: Eve.
Calvary is our mountain of pardon. It is the place which reveals most definitively God’s plan to redeem and reconcile sinners to himself.
What God created, God will grow. We don’t add a few stitches onto his creation.
God will give you more than you can handle. But he doesn’t leave you alone. Not at all.
Through the often abominable and lamentable and occasional commendable season, there is one who remains unmoved by it all.
Christian hope means always hope in God and hope in Christ simultaneously without distinction.
The only one truly blessed of God, who in himself is God’s incarnate makarios, surrounds himself with a multitude of the accursed, the non-makarios.