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.

All Articles

Dear hearers of the word of God, you are finished. You cannot be the same now. All that is ended, over.
If the season of Lent is a journey, Holy Week is the destination.
If we just say to God, “We don’t get it, please explain,” he will. He will send us a preacher to point us to his words for more clarification.
The needs of the people remain the same, but now the people are you and me. We still sin, and that sin causes so many challenges in our lives.
We can’t predict the harvest. We can only sow.
To believe God is love and thus loves you is a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit.
His love for you is so deep that in his mercy, while you were yet a sinner, God sent his only begotten Son to die for you.
“So loved,” then isn’t about how much but instead simply how.
Love is pointing to Jesus who said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Even as he was dying, the heart of God poured itself out for the sake of sinners.
I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling.
As the writer to the Hebrews affirms, what makes the Christian gospel so much better is that we are no longer dealing with “types and shadows."