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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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.
What Jesus promises is better than justice. Jesus promises grace.
We set our minds on things above, but our feet are firmly planted in the stuff of earth, our hands open to the treasure which is our neighbor.
The pastor, then, possesses the prerogative of calling the children to himself, in the stead of Christ and after the manner of Christ, to particularly bless them with the Word.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
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.
This is not just a pericope about hereditary sin and actual sins, nor is it providing a pattern for prayer. It is fundamentally about God our gracious Father and His promise to hear us, answer us, and provide for us.
What pressures or dangers are these particular people, in this particular place, facing right now which keep them from being “rooted and built up” in Christ? What is keeping them from “abounding in thanksgiving”?
Preaching the Word made flesh liberates the imagination from this world’s false and crippling vision of reality, and once again brings the imagination into an encounter with the one and only true and living God through Immanuel: “God with us.”
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
Whatever body part you are, the body of Christ is no pod person. Together, we’re a living, breathing, deathless whole.