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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As we judge and demand payment from one another, we fashion a world not only skeptical of forgiveness, grace, and mercy... but downright opposed to it.
How we feel is so often conditioned upon what we are experiencing. Faith grabs hold of something outside our experience, something objective and true that is not changed by circumstance.
This love story goes on and on, from the beginning of time. Every retelling of this incredible story reveals a little more, exposing our inadequacy, producing more devotion, capturing unspoken emotion, inspiring us to a greater love.
When we are invited to cast all our cares on God's shoulders, he means all of them — every single one of them.
"As we stare down another day, the struggles and joys that it will bring, take a deep breath. In spite of all the failures, floundering, and “that-should-have-been-something’s” flying in our faces, there is peace and redemption in Jesus." Tara Flattley
Christianity is about forgiveness for the sake of Christ. Yet often, we who have been forgiven much are sitting around expecting much from others.
No matter who or what chooses us as their enemy, we've received God's promise that there's nothing to fear. He will be our Light and Salvation. He will be our strength.
We must put away a whitewashed Christianity that says that God simply forgives because He is nice, kind, loving, gentle, etc. That is not how forgiveness works.
Sin will constantly break our hearts, but God's love in Christ Jesus will give us new hearts daily, in the abundance of his forgiving grace. This is love in its purest form, and he has overcome the world.
This petition is proof that the Christian life is not a practice in perfectionism. Rather, it is a life of dying and rising, lived under the cross of Christ, in the continual forgiveness of our sins.
The primary point of Joseph’s life (and every story in Scripture) is to point us to Christ. To tell us something about what God is like and how He interacts with His Creation.
The monsters we fight against and the monsters we become are drowned in the blood of the Lamb. Jesus' death, and the power of his resurrection, restore our humanity.