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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When God makes promises, he is incapable of not keeping them.
Only by faith in Christ are we truly awake.
The LORD God declares He Himself will shepherd His sheep. He will seek them out. He will rescue them. He will save. He will gather them in. In other words, the Good Shepherd will take care of His own sheep.
The smallest amount of Holy Spirit-created faith defeats every antichrist belief we hold.
These words direct the people of God how to live in their identity as God’s children. We would say, this is the reality of our baptismal identity!
Don't lose hope. Don't avoid church on Sunday morning.
All of this is interesting and useful in preparing a sermon, however, there are no explicit words of Gospel in this text. How does one preach without shoe-horning the Gospel into the message, perhaps in an inappropriate or confusing manner?
As is often the case in Scripture, creation is about a renewed, restored, and redeemed relationship with the Creator.
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.
The real presence of the LORD does not pop-up unannounced when Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper—it has been a theme from the days in the Garden of Eden when He walked and talked with His people.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.