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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Although human reason pretends to understand a great deal about work and word of God. The glory of it is too bright, the longer he beholds it the blinder he becomes.
His word is what strengthens and changes our hearts. The Lord God will bring us victory.
Faith Alone is a translation of Bo Giertz’s second novel, which was originally titled Tron Allena.
We trust God's Word because Jesus never fails us. He is our daily comfort when struggles and afflictions find us.
“Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.”
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.
The power of God's Word is nothing like human power. People exercise power through force and violence. God's Word manifests His power through humility, service, and self-sacrifice.
Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.
Apart from God's word, we will judge the right to be wrong and evil people as good.
Christ presents to us such liberty, so that we as Christians according to our faith may tolerate no other master, but only hold that we are baptized and called unto Christ, and through him have become justified and sanctified.
A change during a time of crisis is nothing new; it's an experience we can see throughout history.
In our attempts to conform the Gospel of Jesus Christ to material, therapeutic, and mystical standards of religion and spirituality we've arrested, inhibited, distorted, and handicapped God's Word and gifts of salvation.