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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God’s love is axiomatic; it just is. It’s a truism without a logical explanation.
Jesus did not come because we had our act together. He came because we couldn’t get our act together.
The giver of life, the source of joy, stands weeping together with the human family as they grieve under the curse of sin.
We can not give our Heavenly Father anything that will make him love us more or less. He gives and we receive.
The Christian sermon is Gospel preaching. We only preach the Gospel. Only the Gospel is the sermon, notwithstanding necessary admonishments of law and requisite exhortations toward sanctification.
Take away the communal aspect, take away the communal gathering around Christ’s body and blood, and the Christian will begin to suffer a malnutrition of faith.
The reformers were compelled to confess the true faith and challenge corrupt practices—this is what the Augsburg Confession is about.
Our certainty is of Christ, that mighty hero who overcame the Law, sin, death, and all evils.
The story of Juneteenth is one of living between proclamation and emancipation, and the story of the Christian faith is one of living in that same tension.
The world doesn’t need dads who are more stressed than they already are. It needs fathers who care for their families, not in heroic ways, but in common, everyday ways.
The only one truly blessed of God, who in himself is God’s incarnate makarios, surrounds himself with a multitude of the accursed, the non-makarios.
It is not her sacrifices that define Jane's faith, but her belief in the one who sacrificed for her.