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.

All Articles

Paul wants us to know the radical identity shift that takes place when you put on Christ. You are free.
We do not typically give much thought to the title at all, missing a chance to create greater anticipation for the preaching of the Word before it has even begun.
The Trinity is a handy shorthand for all that God has done to justify sinners.
Our only hope in life and death is that God loves sinners, who fail and forget constantly, with a love that is just as constant.
After the big, splashy, exciting day of Pentecost in Acts 2, church life faded into the ordinary life of ragtag sinners encountering the God of the cross coming to them in seemingly unawesome ways. What can we learn from this?
These are not exclusive words for Israel, but for all the people of the Lord God’s creation.
As astounding as co-eternity and co-equality with the Father in majesty and glory is, this is not the most significant answer Jesus gave in this Gospel reading, not for us at least.
Our daily remembrance of baptism, our daily dying and rising, is a daily joining to Jesus and His death and resurrection for us.
The celebration of Trinity Sunday–the only church festival specifically dedicated to a doctrine–reminds us of the necessity of confessing that the one God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That on Pentecost God’s Spirit should function through a dozen seeming inebriates should be no surprise when this same God saves through the ignominy of the cross.
At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is poured out and the language of man is united again for the Gospel to be preached to the ends of the earth.
How might your preaching of the work of the Spirit expand your own view of the Spirit’s work, and help your hearers gain an appreciation for the Holy Spirit’s activity in their lives beyond a standalone celebration, one day a year?