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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The well-known Sunday School story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is far from a simple account of three brave and faithful Israelites. It’s a mini-story with a mega-story tucked inside it—a story that links it (backward) to Exodus and (forward) to the Gospels.
God created humanity in his image and then inhabited that image. Not just for 33 years, but for eternity thereafter.
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.
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.
Lack of effort isn’t the sworn enemy of fruit-bearing. Self-sufficiency is.
There is often no way forward for us without the prophetic lament, because such laments force out our honesty and resentment at the God who does not treat us as we expect to be treated.
God not only unites us to himself by the death and resurrection of his Son; he unites us, the church, together and to himself under Christ as his children.
We must not submit ourselves to false gods and godless men. Instead, we may hold fast to Christ, because He’s holding fast to us.
Our sadness is never inconvenient or unimportant to Jesus.
The disciplines of history and archaeology have assisted in demonstrating the integrity and accuracy of the Bible.
Love is to be the interpreter of law. Where there is no love, these things are meaningless, and law begins to do harm.
He would not go back on his word, for his word is the word of the Father and the Spirit, and they all say “come.”