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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This article begins an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.
The implications were clear: Jesus’ death destroyed the things that distinguished people as educated or uneducated, rich or poor, free or enslaved, black or white, pious or godless.
His resurrection reveals that Jonah, and all of us, even the evilest people, are salvageable, even from suicide, in Jesus' death and resurrection.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus establishes a whole new standard for what it means to live as one of His people.
This is our frontier religion: God is waiting to shower blessings upon us if only we will unlock those blessings with the right kind of works, and a sufficient quantity of the same.
The easiest way for us to contend with our sin is to become an agent of sin. We slice and cut others to pieces for all the world to see.
The followers of Jesus have a function to perform. When they do not perform it—that is, when they are not being themselves—the world suffers.
Your faith is not dependent on whether or not you suffer well. Your faith is dependent on the fact that Christ did.
We can rejoice in our own need and the gift we receive through baptism given by the same one by whom John desired to be baptized.
It’s a delivery of historical facts that tells us who Jesus is and what he has done for us through his dying on the cross and his rising from the grave.
We live in the strength of our baptism again and again and again, returning to it every day according to God's promise. 
The gospel is the good news that in Christ we have been given the very righteousness of Christ himself. This means that everything God commands of us is given to us in Christ as a gift.