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

What is it that the 13th session actually has to say about the Eucharist, and how does it compare to what Luther and the reformers confessed about the Lord’s Supper?
Understanding that I am completely free in Christ allows me to read the injunction to “love my neighbor as myself” as a promise instead of a threat.
Luther's signature insight on the sacraments was that God’s word of promise doesn’t just symbolize an absent reality but that it gives and bestows God’s real favor.
This is an excerpt from “The Freedom of the Christian” written by Martin Luther and translated and edited by Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing, 2020).
We don’t deserve Jesus' friendship, but he nonetheless embraces us with it, along with his promise that he will never leave us nor forsake us.
Nothing promotes good preaching quite like actually knowing the Word of Truth and delivering it from a disposition of passionate care, commitment through the long-haul, and life spent together with the people of God.
This is an excerpt from “The Freedom of the Christian” written by Martin Luther and translated and edited by Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing, 2020).
The Church's hymns help us see our own world from another—and perhaps not so different—vantage point that illuminates the impact of the work of Christ and the general providing and protecting activity of our Creator in our lives.
The scope of catechesis from the Reformation was broad and included not only instruction at church but in the home and in schools.
As much as Luther calls Christians to a sober belief in the devil, he also calls them to a firm and steadfast faith in Christ
Christians have the rare faculty, above all other people on earth, of knowing where to place their care, while others vex and torture themselves and at length must despair.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.