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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We are caught up in a battle between two kings and two kingdoms. And, whether we like it or not, we are ruled by one king or the other.
I visited a senior man at his home the other day. I'll refer to him as “Jim.”
We try believing in more abstract concepts: justice, happiness, and self-improvement, only to find that we can never truly grasp which standards should be accepted and which should be rejected.
When we Christians shoehorn Creedal Christianity into any of these ideological positions we obscure the Gospel mingling it with the Law and strip the Good News of its catholicity.
All other wonderful teachings of Holy Scripture from creation to Christ’s coming again are absolutely worthless without being understood in light of Jesus, death, and resurrection for sinners.
Our meditation listens to the King of Kings when He says; it is finished.
I have a confession: I don’t believe the Bible is true because it says it’s true.
No matter how loving we are, we don’t get bonus points with the Almighty for imitating Jesus. We love each other because we recognize that “this is one for whom Jesus died.
It can be argued that this scene sets a pattern for Christian activity on the first day of the week from that time until the present.
When guilt becomes our totem, it dictates our idea of right and wrong and enslaves us to the fear of what happens when we open our eyes tomorrow morning.
Much like Jacob wrestling with God in the desert, we find our intellectual hips continuously put out of joint as we engage the culture around us.
And your life, weary and broken as it is, is hidden by God in Christ—tucked away in God’s enduring and eternally given Word, in Jesus.