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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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.
God’s goodness spoke a promise of peace and mercy to the bewildered, a promise that rings out to this day.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
On Saturday, July 16, Luke Gabriel Bird died in a hiking accident in Chile. He was a midshipman in the United States Naval Academy. He is our son. Here are some reflections on his life, his faith, and his Lord.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.
Cyril’s fervor for pure explication of the gospel was present throughout his career.
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.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
With Christ as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the future is secure already. It’s solid right now, even when the cords seem to be fraying.
History is the painful realization that we aren’t the ones who can save the world but, rather, we’re the ones who get saved.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
Christian mercy should not seek its own. It must be round, and open its eyes and look at all alike, friend and foe, as our heavenly Father does.