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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God the Father sent us – his wayward, sinful, and naughty children – his own series of Father Christmas Letters.
Psalm 8 is a trailer for the entire biblical movie, and the entire biblical movie centers on Christ.
Even though All Saints is a day for remembering the dead, it is not a day of mourning.
There is no true life and meaningful community apart from forgiveness.
In the Reformation, as in the tabernacle, God gave skill, artistry, and craftsmanship to put his Word in images so that through art, his Word would be revealed.
Do you confess Christ as God in the flesh, born, died, and raised to new life for you? Any answer of yes will do
Hymns were a means by which people were brought into direct contact with the Gospel that brought justifying faith. Set to music, they could readily memorize it, take it home with them, and rehearse its messages around the hearth and at work.
“There,” the Queen said, “That’s so much better than talking, isn’t it?”
My words are peanuts compared to the porterhouse of God’s Word.
Only by faith in Christ are we truly awake.
Increasingly, to forgive is seen as winking at evil, as shrugging one’s moral shoulders, and as being complicit.
Good, we tend to think, is the absence of evil. But this reversal of the formula can only have disastrous consequences.