This is an excerpt from the introduction of Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life by Christopher Richmann (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We can bring our troubles, griefs, sorrows, and sins to Jesus, who meets us smack dab in the middle of our messy mob.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.

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Maybe, just maybe, our goal for 2023 should not be to live more but to die more.
In Memory of My Friend, James Arne Nestingen
Because we could never intuitively figure it out, God reveals Christ to us.
The Lord’s Gospel will attract all the nations to His holy mountain, and people from the ends of the earth will sojourn to the city to bear witness to God’s great work of salvation.
The question remains, how do we get connected to this Isaianic Servant? How do we get into a relationship with Him so our perspectives and lives might be changed? We want to see God rightly, so where do we look?
To trust in the Lord, the Messiah, the Deliverer, is our salvation and our only hope. Yet he does not trust us to have this “trust” on our own or of our own will.
Who would ever want all these screamers and haters? It turns out that Christ does.
For with God we look not for the order of nature, but rest our faith in the power of him who works.
For Christians, Advent is the time when the Church patiently prepares for the coming of the Great King, Jesus the Christ.
The Church stands firm on the word of promise that Christ will one day return to change what we know by faith into sight.
We live again, not so that we will now pay our debt, but to proclaim that we live because our debt was paid!
That is the task of preaching in these last weeks of the Church Year, to enable the people given to our care, to praise God from the perspective of the end when our Lord will return in glory bringing us into His Kingdom of glory.