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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When we get wrapped up in tying God down, when we worship and work in a way that seems good to each of us, it’s impossible to recognize God as loving Father and helpful Savior.
Infamy allows us the opportunity to hone one of our favorite skills: to shrink a 343-page life story down to a single paragraph that narrates what happened on one day, at a certain hour, and in a certain location. We can whittle an entire biography down to a single Tweet.
Around Easter my mind often drifts back to all of the annual ‘Revival Services’ I attended when I was growing up. Every year they began the revival with the Easter service.
If everyone would just live by the rules, the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?
If I’m going to join your church, there’s some things I’ll need to know first. I need to know whether you practice a Christianity that’s primarily a to-do list.
Paul describes this faith in most significant words, namely, when we cry Abba! Father! For in the spirit of fear it is not possible to cry, for we can scarcely open our mouth or mumble.
I am the Resurrection,’ says Jesus, not an abstract miracle or idea
With these words, Jesus at the same time acknowledges that earthly government is both divinely sanctioned and, at the same time, not to be conflated with the kingdom of God.
All this disciplined living is to be done in freedom.
The danger was not necessarily inside the city. Nor was it from an obvious source. Outside the walls of Thyatira, lay a small shrine of white stone.
Did the Apostle Paul just say that “he fills up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ?" That seems a little at odds with Jesus’ statement, "It is finished."
The history of the early Reformation in the New World is both a tale of pirates and the battle of catechisms.