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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Treating preaching as a battle with the Devil keeps a preacher on the offense and prevents him from being caught off guard.
Theologians of glory searched for God everywhere except the Cross of Christ.
Luther recognized that in the penitential psalms, God gives us the words to cry out to Him in our distress, lament our sins, and confess trust in the promise of His righteousness in which alone is our sure and certain hope.
God is mercy. He was mercy then. He’s mercy now. God showed them His glory, if only a reflection, in the face of Moses.
It is precisely from the cross that the glory of God shines most brightly into our lives, as dark and sinister as Golgotha appears from a sinful distance. Cross trumps crisis.
Because Jesus has set us free, we enjoy a freedom of movement in His world, under His grace, that loosens our tongues to sing His praise.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.
Our only claim to fame is that we have been claimed by a God who is consistently drawn to losers!
Christ has received the mark of law that we might be marked with the gospel, with the sign of his holy cross on our heads and hearts as redeemed children of God.
Moses was sent to keep the house in order, but this Child is sent to bring the house home, and you are part of that house, the household of God.
Getting ready for Christ’s coming is a practice in humility.
The Word of Yahweh is not a trifling thing that can be visited only when it’s convenient. It’s a book of life, for all of life, that imparts life to those who believe in it and the God of it.