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 long as the church teaches the gospel, it will suffer persecution.
It isn’t that God struggles to believe our repeated cries of “wolf.” Rather, we struggle to believe God when he repeatedly comes to us with forgiveness and mercy on his lips.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.
The Church is where God has instituted the office of the preacher of the gospel. And if you are let-down, the gospel is what you need to hear.
Blessed are we, for we are filled by the cornucopia of Christ’s righteousness.
God’s love is axiomatic; it just is. It’s a truism without a logical explanation.
The giver of life, the source of joy, stands weeping together with the human family as they grieve under the curse of sin.
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.
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 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.