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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No longer do we read about Jesus promising to satisfy and raise and abide in His people. Instead, we encounter a Jesus who goes on the attack.
Baptism is always valid because no unrighteousness or faithlessness on our part could ify God’s faithfulness.
Jesus, the Son of God from all eternity, the agent of creation, the Savior of all people, promises to abide IN His people.
The reason the mind is endlessly troubled about God predestining everything is the vague generalization. Generalizations are cold as ice, without the warm Christ.
Jesus promises more than a disembodied “spiritual” existence after death. He has promised to raise our perishable, mortal bodies to immortality.
Here is the foundational cure for the evils of racism in human society, faith in Christ as definitive for racial identification.
We are not saved by the success of our refining process. We are saved precisely because our impurities, no matter what the percentage, ruin the whole thing.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.
In His grace, Jesus promises that all who come to Him in faith will live abundantly and eternally.
When the One who created the world comes to you, there is reason for courage and never reason to fear.
God’s love is axiomatic; it just is. It’s a truism without a logical explanation.
But Jesus didn’t see it that way. He saw his arrest not as the kingdom’s program being thwarted but as it being “fulfilled.”