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 legal record of debt for our sin was canceled because Jesus satisfied the legal demands for us by his life, death, and resurrection.
Walking in the light doesn't entail a spotless moral record but rather an honest appraisal of who we are.
If you are going to lose your life for the gospel’s sake, you must begin by hearing it.
Cranach became the evangelical interpreter for the masses
There is only one antidote to the venom of sin and death: the Savior who becomes the serpent so that every snake-bitten-sinner might live.
To “trust in God in trial” means we fight our battles by kneeling and praying to “the Holy One of Israel,” who works out our deliverance by himself.
We bring nothing with us that contributes to the preaching or the hearing of God’s promise to us.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
At the heart of The Idiot is Dostoevsky's confession of faith and the confession of all Christians.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.
Finding the balance between indifferentism and obsessiveness has never been easy, and it’s especially difficult in our environment.
Sometimes I think we should be more tempted to laugh at the gospel than we are, not in derision but in sheer surprise and awe.