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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Both Hus and Luther arrived at the same conclusion: neither councils nor the pope had final authority in the church. Headship in the church belongs solely to Christ.
Apart from God's word, we will judge the right to be wrong and evil people as good.
The well-known Sunday School story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is far from a simple account of three brave and faithful Israelites. It’s a mini-story with a mega-story tucked inside it—a story that links it (backward) to Exodus and (forward) to the Gospels.
God created humanity in his image and then inhabited that image. Not just for 33 years, but for eternity thereafter.
Christ presents to us such liberty, so that we as Christians according to our faith may tolerate no other master, but only hold that we are baptized and called unto Christ, and through him have become justified and sanctified.
A change during a time of crisis is nothing new; it's an experience we can see throughout history.
In our attempts to conform the Gospel of Jesus Christ to material, therapeutic, and mystical standards of religion and spirituality we've arrested, inhibited, distorted, and handicapped God's Word and gifts of salvation.
Lack of effort isn’t the sworn enemy of fruit-bearing. Self-sufficiency is.
By basing our assurance on the promises of God, which we not only hope for in the future but live in now, the Christian can finally rest in the comfort that they are both saved and not responsible for their own salvation.
There is often no way forward for us without the prophetic lament, because such laments force out our honesty and resentment at the God who does not treat us as we expect to be treated.
God not only unites us to himself by the death and resurrection of his Son; he unites us, the church, together and to himself under Christ as his children.
We must not submit ourselves to false gods and godless men. Instead, we may hold fast to Christ, because He’s holding fast to us.