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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We all look forward to Lent’s conclusion and the celebration of Resurrection Sunday. This is the Sunday of victory and joy as the Church enters into the reality that Christ has defeated death and hell, declared victory over such enemies and set history on its final course of consummation.
Only a god could be wise. We are seekers, lovers of divine wisdom, but it is forever beyond our grasp due to human limitation.
“Putting hope in the cross of Christ means putting hope outside of anything – mentally, physically or even spiritually – you do.”
We are all sojourners in a perilous cosmos, what is sometimes conceptualized as the theology of the pilgrim.
We are forgiven for Christ’s sake. Losers set free to trust in God’s promises.
Satan cannot stand the Gospel, and so he goes to work to undermine and render God’s Word an impotent and absurd message.
There’s something very attractive about both the cross-ladder and the cross-crutches. In fact, there’s something about both of them that the woodworker within us finds eminently more appealing than the simple cross of Jesus.
I spend a lot of time talking to people in coffee shops. Some share my Christian faith, some are exploring and questioning faith and others have left the church, having had a crisis of faith.
During my recent trip to visit my daughter and her family, my son-in-law got me hooked on Leah Remini’s A&E show, Scientology and the Aftermath.
Ultimately, however, we find in the Heidelberg Disputation the root and core of Luther’s theology, which he would build and expound upon throughout his life.
As long as we hold tight to a life that was never ours to possess in the first place, so long as we refuse to lay down our life so others can live, Jesus can't do a thing for us.
This coming Sunday churches around the world will celebrate the big, splashy day of Pentecost. As well they should.