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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Hebrews proclaims you absolutely need a priest and you have one. This priest is Jesus!
Christ has taken our failures and defeats and exchanges that yoke for his own.
Even if not a turning point, 1518 is a point of no return for Luther.
The Son of God is still God the Son in the Incarnation.
Our Lord is not only the King of creation but the King of creativity.
The entrance of children into the world reminds our world of the hope of redemption in Genesis 3:15.
God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
God has in fact executed his plans for his people, plans of peace (probably a better translation than welfare), a future, and a hope in Jesus Christ.
The goal of language in the mouth of a Christian isn’t to hold power for ourselves but to give it.
Preaching is the first line of defense and catechetical offensive against these corrosive falsehoods.
Man and woman together are complete. Apart, they are incomplete. The two correspond and form “one flesh” when combined in sexual relationships and as helpmates.
God uses the unlikely, the unexpected, and sometimes even the unsavory to deliver us and to crush the heads of his enemies