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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Good works do not give us a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Rather, good works result from righteousness given by the good work of the Righteous One on the cross.
The church does well to remind the world that God is unmasked, indeed, that God has unmasked himself in the person of Jesus.
Any good work we perform among you; any doctrine we write upon your heart – that is God’s own work.
Fred Rogers did not teach children how to live through a pandemic, but he had many profound things to say about loving our neighbors and finding our identity in that calling.
As we close out an old year, Saint Silvester can remind us God is the Lord of history and He has used and is using even people whose lives sink largely or totally into obscurity to keep the confession of our faith in Jesus Christ alive.
Luther’s Christmas sermons remind us that unless Christ is proclaimed FOR YOU, He is not preached.
St John of the Cross' feast day on December 14 commemorates the day of his death in 1591, at the height of the Catholic renewal movement that followed the Reformation.
It wasn’t a perfect image, but it was still there, even in its cartoonish movie magic distortion. It was an element of the Gospel right there in front of me.
Trusting Jesus, worshipping our Christ, and praising him, we have the blessing of God so that we can give thanks with a grateful heart for everything he gives to us today and always.
Where there’s more sin, there’s more grace! Are you comfortable with that? That the greater the sin, the greater the grace? Could it be that easy?
Life will not go as planned nor as we would hope, but "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."
Love continues to gently but endlessly pursue the narrator, despite his persistence in pulling away in the opposite direction.