The women at the tomb were surprised by Easter. Amazed and filled with wonder at Jesus' Easter eucatastrophe. And so are we.
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.

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Because peace is a gift and not a product, you can’t work your way into it. However—you can receive it by grace.
Viewing the Bible as literature is an essential and natural way of engaging the text. But there are also ways in which this practice can get lost.
The gospel fires up within us the gratitude, joy, and love to pull off what the law never could get us to do.
Character development? Change? Saying that it’s behind you? Yeah right. You’re just saying that because you want your nice polished image back. You haven’t changed. We know. We’ve got the receipts.
Cyprian actually rejected the accusation that he believed in rebaptism because he considered only the baptism within the church to be a valid or true baptism.
The fact that baptism specifically unites me to Christ in his death means that I share in his sufferings in my identity, not in my activity.
We’ve become experts at making deals with God.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.
This is an excerpt adapted from “Let the Bird Fly” written by Wade Johnston (1517 Publishing, 2019).
Sometimes I think I've gone through the whole forgiveness process, but forgiveness for me often feels like I'm weeding my garden. I forgive and another offense pops up.
There is no justification except by faith alone. The radical forgiveness itself puts the old to death and calls forth the new.
I rededicated my life as many times as I could when the guilt was unbearable. I would read my Bible more and pray more, yet I still struggled. I knew deep down, I was breaking God’s heart with my failure at being his child.