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 love of God in Jesus is our confidence when the world seems to teeter on the brink of self-destruction.
The accusations of the voices we hear on a daily basis are deafening. There is no shortage of voices that will remind us of our failures.
Not afraid, Jesus decided to take a different mode of transportation across the rough waters—his feet.
We get the exact opposite of what we deserve.
The conversation between four year-old Jackson and his mom in the car after dropping off his siblings at school was all-too-typical.
I walk in the local mall for exercise several times a week. I purposely avoid weekends and hours when the mall is likely to be crowded because, while I am not a racewalker, I do like to keep up a steady pace as opposed to stopping, starting and inching and this is difficult to achieve even when there are few people around.
We were created by our heavenly Father to receive all things from Him as free gift.
A confessing church is a church more worried about souls than appearances, family lines, or institutional bottom-lines.
Just when we think we had it all under control, Christ breaks into the midst of our futile efforts to save ourselves.
Ultimately, however, we find in the Heidelberg Disputation the root and core of Luther’s theology, which he would build and expound upon throughout his life.
What do we do when Christians are more focused on their doing for God than God's doing for them?
“My Old Man” is the story of a single father, a grossly flawed character, told through the eyes of his son who can’t help but love him.