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.

All Articles

Has the modern world taken too strong a dose of the gospel as its inheritance from the Reformation?
This tale of two professors has a common theme, plot, and denouement - the good news of the one true story, Jesus Christ crucified for you.
Paul knew, and so do we: the law doesn’t change hearts or heal the world. More demands won’t do the trick.
God makes all things new. He refashions us from those turned in upon ourselves, turned to idols of our own choice and making, to experience the freedom He gives by pronouncing us His righteous children.
What does being free from sin, which is obviously a good thing, have to do with being free from the Law, which sounds dangerous?
The church does well to remind the world that God is unmasked, indeed, that God has unmasked himself in the person of Jesus.
St John of the Cross' feast day on December 14 commemorates the day of his death in 1591, at the height of the Catholic renewal movement that followed the Reformation.
It wasn’t a perfect image, but it was still there, even in its cartoonish movie magic distortion. It was an element of the Gospel right there in front of me.
Trusting Jesus, worshipping our Christ, and praising him, we have the blessing of God so that we can give thanks with a grateful heart for everything he gives to us today and always.
Where there’s more sin, there’s more grace! Are you comfortable with that? That the greater the sin, the greater the grace? Could it be that easy?
Love continues to gently but endlessly pursue the narrator, despite his persistence in pulling away in the opposite direction.
The following is an adaptation from "Law and Gospel in Action" written by Mark Mattes (1517 Publishing, 2019).