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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The Christian sees himself or herself as one just as guilty as the rest of the world. But we see ourselves not just as what’s wrong with the world, but in the One by whom the world has been redeemed.
Jesus cuts right to the chase when it comes to the evil one. He calls the devil “a liar and the father of lies,”
Then, Jesus our Groom, with His nail-scarred hands takes our hands and walks out with us from that ultimate courtroom, and into eternity – His eternity – and a never-ending wedding feast.
We’re living in the end times. We have been since Pentecost. The earliest Christians believed it, and what’s more, that is what the apostles teach us in Scripture.
Jesus opened our ears and mouth when He baptizes us. Jesus put His fingers into our ears, speaks to us, and washes our sins away.
Hurricane Florence, or any natural disaster, can serve as a painful reminder of our own mortality, the futility of human ingenuity and strength.
My biggest criticism of Peterson’s mantra is that it seems to be exclusively a message of Law in a world in desperate need of grace.
There was a TV show back in the ‘90s called “Dinosaurs” that I used to sneak into the living room at night to watch.
We all do it. It comes naturally to every human being. Since the Fall, every man and woman, every child, everyone imagines he can use experience and knowledge to figure out God.
True preaching arises when the Holy Spirit steeps the proclaimer in its own cycle of judgment and mercy.
Jesus says that none of our goodness is good enough to pass muster. Likewise, none of our badness is bad enough to propel us outside Jesus’ death for sin.
Last week we talked about what happens when the Triune God shows up, and how we practice this every week in Sunday worship with the Trinitarian invocation, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”