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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By basing our assurance on the promises of God, which we not only hope for in the future but live in now, the Christian can finally rest in the comfort that they are both saved and not responsible for their own salvation.
In Christ, God promises to forgive sin and bring about new life: Life after being canceled.
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
If you do not know who your God is, you will not know what your idols are.
That is the good news that ifies all hand wringing and wipes away every tear from every eye.
In our attempts to flee from our fears and escape death, we will become imprisoned by them.
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.
We cannot control the resistance of people to God’s Word, but we can trust in God’s power and promise to work through His Word.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
The message is clear and assuring—the Word of God does what it says it will do!
The number 666 in Revelation has been interpreted in a myriad of ways. To whom does it apply? Is it a reference to a particular man or humanity in general? In this article, Chad Bird describes how 666 is related to God's math of mercy in the Messiah.