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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What God created, God will grow. We don’t add a few stitches onto his creation.
The new life Christ opened for us in His justifying resurrection, the new life into which we were baptized is a life of faith.
For sinners who cannot seem to get out of their own way, Dane brings to bear the gospel of Christ’s heart, which aerates one’s spiritual lungs with undiluted grace.
Baptism is always valid because no unrighteousness or faithlessness on our part could ify God’s faithfulness.
The title “peacemakers” is not ours except as we tell and retell his peacemaking story.
The Old Testament is a long, strange book that’s not easy for modern readers to understand. What is understandable, therefore, is that people can get lost and confused when studying it. Here are three common misconceptions about it.
It isn’t that God struggles to believe our repeated cries of “wolf.” Rather, we struggle to believe God when he repeatedly comes to us with forgiveness and mercy on his lips.
The Psalms aren’t the clandestine successes of a faithful soul, but are the journaled hopes of a desperate soul — of one teetering on the edge of oblivion.
We are not saved by the success of our refining process. We are saved precisely because our impurities, no matter what the percentage, ruin the whole thing.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.
Ascertaining the what and how of the Church greatly factor into the very purpose of the Church, that is, they essentially answer the question why the Church?
Jesus did not need a single act of mercy to get him started on the road to mercy, his essence was by nature merciful.