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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Preaching is the first line of defense and catechetical offensive against these corrosive falsehoods.
Man and woman together are complete. Apart, they are incomplete. The two correspond and form “one flesh” when combined in sexual relationships and as helpmates.
Angels minister to us, but Jesus becomes one of us and calls us His brothers and sisters, sharing in our flesh and blood.
God’s promise never to separate us from the love of Jesus means that our security, and our confidence, and our forgiveness—even for our part in past divisions—depends entirely on His faithfulness and not ours.
This complaining is a rejection of the LORD and all He has done to rescue them, guide them, and provide for them as He leads them to the Promised Land.
James makes it sound like prayer is actually effective, that God listens, God answers in line with our requests. Does James realize the questions he is raising?
You cannot “be what you want to be” and follow Jesus. Jesus has a higher calling for you, a calling which is more personal.
What is it to perform the Word? Is it to speak about it, to retell it, to illustrate it, to enlighten it? What?
The “Lamenter” does not ask to carry out the vengeance/action himself, rather He trusts the LORD God to take care of business.
It is from this God, the Wisdom from Heaven who came down in our flesh to befriend sinners, you will learn true wisdom.
Jesus takes that which is overlooked and unappreciated and celebrates this child as the place where God is at work.
A famous saying of Augustine (echoing Jesus in Luke 24:44) perhaps puts it best, “The New Testament lies concealed in the Old, the Old lies revealed in the New.”