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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When we cry to the Lord in our trouble, he will send us a preacher with words that deliver us from destruction.
Hope is found precisely while we’re dead.
The one who embodies the dove, that is, the Holy Spirit will be mounted upon the staff of Calvary.
Being the baptized just may be the last, great resistance.
FLAME uses Scripture and church history to argue that baptism is a gospel gift, not our work.
God has a plan for this world that he put into place from eternity, a plan that is carried out in Jesus Christ and promises unimaginably great blessings for believers.
Jesus does not put us on trial and make us pay for our own sin, but he, himself, is put on trial in our place.
What the gospel promises is not escape from our humanity, but resurrection from the dead.
To give us God’s name, the name that is above every name, Christ gave us the exact words to say at baptism: the name of the triune God who is three persons, one God: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
Free-range Christ is fearful Christ because he is present, speaking, and I just crucified him.
Scott Hall may not have been a theologian or a preacher but for me, at that moment he might as well have been.
Who we are buried with matters. But there is no need to go out and find a dead prophet so you can join him six feet under.