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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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.
The church is the only place God promises to lift us out of ourselves not in order to become more like God but so that we may finally be freed from our obsession with becoming little gods.
We won’t use the right words, but the Holy Spirit is interceding with and for us, as we pray.
Our experience with good fathers – even when they are not our own – can point us to God the Father.
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.
Wilson reminds his reader over and over again that, in his love, God accepts sinners as they are so that we may be delivered from the self-acceptance, self-worship, and self-justification of our selfish definitions of love.
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.