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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Because Jesus has set us free, we enjoy a freedom of movement in His world, under His grace, that loosens our tongues to sing His praise.
The world we inhabit is wrong in so many ways, and a holistic approach to this “wrongness” traces its cause both to sin itself and to the effects of sin.
Aquinas would craft a systematic theology that did with the matter of faith what Aristotle had done with the natural world.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.
Grace remits sin, and peace quiets the conscience. Sin and conscience torment us, but Christ has overcome these fiends now and forever.
Our only claim to fame is that we have been claimed by a God who is consistently drawn to losers!
Christ is present in the pure preaching of the gospel. And if Christ is present, then we have entered into the domain of the sacraments.
Christ has received the mark of law that we might be marked with the gospel, with the sign of his holy cross on our heads and hearts as redeemed children of God.
Moses was sent to keep the house in order, but this Child is sent to bring the house home, and you are part of that house, the household of God.
Getting ready for Christ’s coming is a practice in humility.
Is it possible to celebrate Thanksgiving every time we come together as God’s people as well?
The Word of Yahweh is not a trifling thing that can be visited only when it’s convenient. It’s a book of life, for all of life, that imparts life to those who believe in it and the God of it.