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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Christ has forgiven you, and all of your worship, all of your prayers, all of your offerings are accepted because they are built on the foundation of Christ’s forgiveness.
Into our world of sin, broken hearts, physical ailments, and psychological suffering, our Lord of grace descended.
Jesus promises to work for you, forgiving your sins, but He also promises to work through you, forming you into a witness to the world.
The original sin of Genesis 3 was not gutter-style-sin, but glory-style-sin. It was more of an upward grasp than a downward fall. - Nathan Hoff
There’s a delicious freedom to wrongdoing. It taps a primal desire within us for rebellion. We feel liberated, unshackled by demands to be this way, do this, avoid that. We become masters of our own destiny.
What the law is powerless to do, Jesus accomplishes for us. Jesus delivers what the law demands.
Ash Wednesday confronts us with our true nature, our mortality, and marks us with the only escape from it: the cross of Christ.
But this is not a story of Jesus being taken many places. This is a story of Jesus remaining in one place and deepening in His love of the Spirit and the Father.
The Seed of the woman is he who will crush the head of the evil one and restore man to a right and proper relationship with God.
Though not without his faults, Anselm of Canterbury is unquestionably one of the great theologians of the last millennium.
When Jesus preaches the gospel, he is preaching himself. Jesus’s good news is the good news about himself.
This article is the second installment in an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.