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 in general” is of little use to all of us suffering the ravages of sin, the fear of death, and satanic prosecution.
Look the judge in the eye and pin your sin on Jesus, the divine judge’s son. Jesus knows you can’t do it, so he trades places with you and pits himself against God’s righteous demands.
The Israelites had taken the Covenantal promise and the language of separation and interpreted them to mean the message of salvation and restoration was meant for only them. But this is counter to the reality of the Scriptures.
We won’t use the right words, but the Holy Spirit is interceding with and for us, as we pray.
A Sermon on Psalm 130:3–6.
Jesus meets us in our life of lies, in our falsehoods, in the untruth of our being, and in the company, we create to cover up our nakedness.
This book is for people who want to get serious about the church. It’s for pastors who are sick and tired of surfing the latest wave or jumping from one program to the other.
The tragedy of the incidental Christ I was raised with is that he was really no Savior at all.
While the insights in each chapter are uniquely personal to the individual writers, the overarching theme is one of the sufficiency of Christ.
When we — sinful, reprehensible we — become the enforcers of justice, we never bring about true justice. We either go too far or not far enough.
Jesus came from the heights of heaven above to the depths of earth below to rescue and redeem his long-lost love.
The church’s reformation is not about fragmentation, but a way forward to unity around that which is central to the church, around Christ and him crucified.