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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As our first parents had a bond with the animals, as Noah had animals with him in the reboot of creation after the flood, so after this old creation comes to an end, we will enjoy a new creation that includes animals.
Stop and be enveloped by the unending grace of Christ and his beautiful teachings that touch every corner of life.
Every day, in everything we do and experience, we are busy hearing, seeing, and telling stories.
I had been taught and believed in a God who is love, but as I walked outside that night I did not see him. I saw the stars and I felt their indifference.
Rather than validate our selfish, self-serving choices, he justifies us by giving us new life and baptizing us into his death and resurrection.
The real problem with the way we talk about Baptism in particular, and the sacraments at all, is that we are simply afraid of letting God’s Word get us.
The following is an excerpt adapted from, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” written by John Warwick Montgomery (1517 Publishing, 2016).
The communion service is a sermon in and of itself. The communion sermon is that which most expressly tells us of the sinless One who stands in the sinner’s stead.
When the church has gone astray, it has been the responsible (not slavish) approach to history that has helped correct the course.
I’d like to offer a short reflection on the theme of “worldliness” as it appears in his later work and how that’s connected to an item of his Lutheran heritage: the theology of the cross.
We’re messed up people with messed up bodies. All of us. Even Miss America gets hemorrhoids. The Fall mocks us in our own skin. We’re all walking sermons.
The 'church' is neither your mega-complex nor is it you alone with your own private devotions.