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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To “trust in God in trial” means we fight our battles by kneeling and praying to “the Holy One of Israel,” who works out our deliverance by himself.
The real presence of the LORD does not pop-up unannounced when Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper—it has been a theme from the days in the Garden of Eden when He walked and talked with His people.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.
We want to control things and we desire to partner with God in all manner of things, but of course, the LORD is in control. He takes care of things and He does not need our help in these matters.
There is no meaning, life is all vanity, if one is not in relationship with God. Keep life simple: trust in God and enjoy the life He has given.
With Christ as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the future is secure already. It’s solid right now, even when the cords seem to be fraying.
God is in control, but God is also in relationship with His children and asks us to pray, to lament, and to ask Him to change His mind as we participate as the Bride with our Bridegroom.
We can see this as a foreshadowing of how the LORD always comes to His people—the people do not come to Him. So, it is God who sent His Son to us, His Promised One, up close and personal.
Through Martin Luther, God would unleash a far greater storm than the one which overwhelmed Luther on July 2, 1505.
[Because] of the relationship of presence the LORD has with His people, His holiness ‘gets on them,’ and, as a result, this is what their life now looks like because the holy LORD is their God.
Following Jesus, we gimp our way down the dark and slippery paths of life. As we do, we discover, ironically, that the longer we follow him, the weaker we become, and the more we lean on our Lord.