The greatest obstacle to friendship in middle age isn't that nobody wants friends. It's that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. But here's the good news: Christ has already gone first for you. And because He has, you are free to go first for someone else.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.
What does it take to draw near to God? It takes a perfect priest, a finished work, and a broken body to open the way. In short, it takes everything, which is exactly what Christ has given for you.

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We can’t remove our crosses or the reality of our deaths. Only Jesus can.
People everywhere, every day, feel God’s wrath—and not as merely an afterlife threat but as a present reality.
Christians can pursue projects of justice free of the burden of being the justifier of the world; that office belongs to Christ and Christ alone.
When Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881, he left behind novels that refuse to flatter the reader or simplify the human condition.
The Bible isn’t a set of moral examples or religious insights. It’s the record of God’s saving work, fulfilled in Christ, delivered now through words spoken and heard.
This is the third in a series meant to let the Christian tradition speak for itself, the way it has carried Christians through long winters, confusion, and joy for centuries.
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.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
The Passover wasn’t just Israel’s story; it’s ours.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.
The crisis is not merely that people are leaving. The crisis is that we have relinquished what is uniquely Lutheran and deeply needed.