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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His resurrection reveals that Jonah, and all of us, even the evilest people, are salvageable, even from suicide, in Jesus' death and resurrection.
It would do us well to expand what we mean when we say catechesis and consequently broaden the reach of theological education into daily life.
Your faith is not dependent on whether or not you suffer well. Your faith is dependent on the fact that Christ did.
The gospel is the good news that in Christ we have been given the very righteousness of Christ himself. This means that everything God commands of us is given to us in Christ as a gift.
Pelagius maintained an orthodox appearance while rejecting original sin and the distinction between law and gospel.
God has placed preachers of His Word in the frontlines of His combat against Satan and all his minions that is fought out on the battlefields of the individual lives of believers.
We confuse salvation and vocation in our quest to determine who is in control of our salvation.
One moment, we pray for our rescue from sin and death. The next moment, we beg our Father to do unto others what we hope he will never do to us.
Above all, pastors must aim their preaching at the people God has placed in the care of the pastor rather than airing pious ideas that did not speak to their situations.
Indeed, the law said, “You shall love the Lord your God,” but the law cannot give me such love, nor can it take my hand to grasp on to Christ.
What then does this sequence of stories teach us? It teaches us a pertinent lesson about the Christian life.
When we talk about bettering ourselves, we need to realize that a theology of the cross does not militate against this endeavor but that it places it squarely in the horizontal realm.