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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Jesus opens for us a way to walk through suffering and to sing our song of salvation as we talk to our heavenly Father.
When Luther was in the pulpit, he was teaching, and when he was in the lecture hall at the podium, he was preaching. Linebaugh’s outstanding book will help contemporary pastors to do the same.
God’s gifts, in turn, conform our minds to the mind of Christ, and catechize our imagination in the image of God’s Son.
Both Paul and Martin Luther were Olympic champions when it came to ladder climbing.
God excludes our boasting out of his abundant mercy.
I wanted the devotions of this book to be a source of strength for everyone who has waited all night to see the sun come up again.
Make no mistake, sinners are in fact being pursued by a most hideous beast called sin, death, and the devil, unleashed and striking continuously.
In the Old Testament all the world is narrowed down to the people of Israel, which is eventually narrowed down to One—Jesus! Jesus is Israel reduced to one in order that all the world might be saved through Him.
What we have in our reading is a picture of how God deals with a lack of understanding.
This voice of Jesus is the same voice which now beckons us to see anew how God in Christ is at work anywhere and everywhere.
If preaching can be a greater joy for myself and my people, who after all have to put up with us preachers, that is a win in my book. And I think preaching by heart can help to accomplish this.
Nothing stands against you. Only Christ stands now, and he is for you, more for you than you could ever know, for you like nothing else that has ever loved you.