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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One of my jobs in high school was helping local ranchers work cattle. We’d vaccinate, cut off horns, castrate, mark their ears, and brand them.
Martin Luther knew something about economics. Well, God’s economics anyway.
Americans love the vicarious sense of pride they get from the odds-defying underdog myth.
Your eternal salvation isn’t dependent on performance or effort. Well, not your performance anyway...
Did the Apostle Paul just say that “he fills up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ?" That seems a little at odds with Jesus’ statement, "It is finished."
In our democratic society we love to talk about freedom. But anybody out there ever tried to be perfect? Ah, shucks. Turns out we’re not as free as we thought.
Jesus is the heart of the Gospel, and the Gospel is Good News. But it is always Good News that comes to us best on the lips of another.
Jesus’ coming and death and resurrection guarantee us the victory over the lies, the desire to be pitied, and the appeal of stuff.
Luther’s theology lets the believer in Christ dwell under the cerulean sky of God’s unchanging grace.
There’s no watch on the Lord’s wrist. No iPhone in the back pocket of his blue jeans. He did create time; it was his idea. But for him “the right time” is never our time. From our perspective, he’s either way too early or—more usually—way too late.
We tell our children if they work hard and play by the rules, they’ll succeed in life. Jerks, cheaters, and thieves won’t. They’ll end up in the gutter. Or jail. Or worse.
The biblical response to suffering, to recognizing that things are not as they ought to be, is lament.