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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The following is an excerpt from “A Year of Grace Volume 2” written by Bo Giertz and translated by Bror Erickson (1517 Publishing, 2019).
“I forgive you,” must be said and it must be said often in a marriage.
We love those who enable us to see our love for ourselves reflected back at us.
It is in the midst of a world marked by empty and deceptive hopes that have broken hearts and lives that we are sent to deliver the promise of a future that has as its last chapter the resurrection of the body to eternal life with the Lamb who was slain but is alive forevermore.
We were lost. We didn’t know where we were going or which way to turn. We had been driving around in circles for hours with nothing to show for it. And now we weren’t sure how to find our way home - and losing hope by the minute.
A new life in Christ Jesus is our hope. Not only that, Jesus is our access to God.
His kingdom is not one of force and might for our exploitation and his gain, but one of his patience and long-suffering for our benefit.
We would be utterly miserable if we could not find somebody less than ourselves, somebody to look down on, somebody to make us more pleased with ourselves.
It is incumbent upon the faithful preacher, looking to see sinners transformed into the image of Christ, to preach a naked gospel.
When we run deep into the darkness, Jesus runs deeper and deeper after us. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.
We expect the world to shoot its wounded. But not even the world expects Christians to shoot their wounded.
Are people so different today? Is justification really irrelevant now? Is the preacher’s only point of contact with the life-giving Gospel a by-product of Microsoft’s word processor? I do not think so.