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.

All Articles

Who should we baptize and when? How old does the person have to be? What if we get it wrong? Will something terrible happen to us?
But when God's Word of Law and Gospel are tuned up, when they're properly distinguished, then Jesus' words rain down on us like thunderbolts.
A Christian is justified—saved from sin, death, and hell—by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Sometimes, I wish I was much older. Old enough to realize that my best, most influential, and productive days are behind me so that I could speak completely and openly about my life, my triumphs, and most of all, my struggles.
Last year, a friend I follow tweeted, “Calling yourself a sinner is spitting on all the work that Jesus did to make you a saint.”
He barely wakes to find himself nearly dead; even so, he can’t feel a thing.
Salvation starts in being a sinner and knowing it because that's where God starts salvation, in making "Him to be Sin who knew no sin."
God’s Son is infinitely more than our fragile egos have flattened him out to be.
The question is not can I lose my salvation, but can salvation lose me? No, it can’t.
Can one still find a church that teaches that Christianity, and the Christian life, can be summed up as: "We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone?"
A while back, my wife and I attended the wake and memorial service of a friend from a prior church we attended.
It was Jesus who appeared to Hagar, comforted her, and gave her the promise of future blessings. It was Jesus who came to her when it seemed everything and everyone else had let her down.