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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Professor John T. Pless has organized an incredible Advent series on the Apostles' Creed for you! Included here are texts, themes, and an order of service for your midweek Advent services.
God invites us to have intimate conversations in a world filled with mockery and hate. To trust Jesus reigns whenever and wherever He extends a word of promise to the displaced and the disfavored, welcoming them home.
Understanding the doctrine of the hypostatic union can help us understand what God is up to in the Incarnation.
How do I know the expectations of every Marine even though I am not able to cite specific orders from Marine Corps handbooks? The Rifleman’s Creed tells me.
It is in the midst of a world marked by empty and deceptive hopes that have broken hearts and lives that we are sent to deliver the promise of a future that has as its last chapter the resurrection of the body to eternal life with the Lamb who was slain but is alive forevermore.
Jesus offer us this vision of violence not so we might be drawn into it but so we might be drawn through it to come closer to Him.
Where Erasmus saw fear and collapse, Luther saw the never-ending comfort of Christ and his gospel.
If the resurrection were just a repetition of this world, then it would be ridiculous, indeed. But the resurrection is different. It is a world without death.
When we hear freedom, we have to ask about its opposite, bondage.
The devil knows our name and labels us by our sin. The devil breathes out death as he names us for what we are, sinners.
On All Saints Day, the beatitudes remind us how God in Christ claims people, frail, humble, poor, mourning, and makes them His own.
When it comes to confessing the truth of the Christian faith, Christians are given the words. We don’t have to formulate them ourselves.