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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What greater friend could we have than Jesus?
No good will come to the cause of the Gospel by followers of Jesus being regarded as crazy dissidents who will not cooperate with the most basic social mechanisms.
Our Lord's love for us is so great that He not only sent His Son to redeem us from sin, death, and hell, but He sends His holy angels to protect us no matter which direction our lives go.
In both Psalms, we hear the Messiah becoming sin for us, and thus he pleads on our behalf before the Father
God doesn’t give us second chances. No one earns another shot at forgiveness. We cannot earn forgiveness, it’s too costly.
What does it take to be a Christian? Christ.
Prayer dares to call the impossible into reality. It trusts the One who can do all things to do impossible things. It rests its hope on God’s power and not man’s agency.
We’ve become experts at making deals with God.
A truly Christian work is it that we descend and get mixed up in the mire of the sinner, taking his sin upon ourselves and floundering out of it with him, not acting otherwise than as if his sin were our own.
Even as children of God, we have down days. That’s just a fact of being sinful and living in an evil world.
This is an excerpt adapted from “Let the Bird Fly” written by Wade Johnston (1517 Publishing, 2019).
God does not take us out of a world of evils of various kinds, but He does stand beside us and accompany us, as a shepherd accompanies his sheep, through valleys of shadows of all kinds.