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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God is the God of failures, for He became one for you. There is no failure of ours that is bigger than Jesus’ cross, no sin of ours that can overshadow the cross.
Without the “simul” distinction, theology lapses into moralism.
Many Christians are worried—perhaps legitimately—that the state is a short step away from turning the Law of God into hate speech and silencing the legal preaching of God’s Word.
As I was reading Romans 7 today, I was reminded of a pivotal scene in one of my favorite movies, As Good As it Gets.
Nicodemus, like us, does not really have phantoms and dragons in his head. He has just one demon, one virus, one malady: he lives in fear.
If we get past Sunday School moralizing what do we discover in the Old Testament?
Some lie and tell us that to sin is to be ourselves. But it is not. Sin is not natural to humanity.
The little psychologist within us is often hard at work to pinpoint the origin of life’s problems.
God’s Law is a death sentence for us sinners. There is no winning beneath the Law of God.
The Gospel predominates when hearers receive the saving gifts of Christ as God’s final word to them.
What did Christians do, both when they encountered a Rome in its glory, as when Christ was born, and in it decline, as when Constantine tried to pull stuff back together?
There is just something about the idea of not being ‘under Law’ that sets off all kinds of alarms in the minds of many Christians.