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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God created Israel to be the vessel into which he would place both his Law and his Son.
These teachings are the heart of the Reformation…If it is about you, it isn’t about Jesus.
The power and the purpose of the Reformation was to bring the full force of the Law and the Gospel to the ears of sinners.
But where love is necessary we pray for our enemies and bless them in the hope that God will repent and convert them to the Gospel.
Death is never natural. Death is abnormal. Death is not human. Death is the enemy.
We demand that our Creator defend His judgment and justification of sinners in a courtroom where we are judge, prosecuting attorney, and jury.
The Law though it does many things—restrains, exhorts the Christian unto righteousness, punishes—always rightly accuses and condemns sinners of their sin before a righteous, holy, and just God.
There’s something very attractive about both the cross-ladder and the cross-crutches. In fact, there’s something about both of them that the woodworker within us finds eminently more appealing than the simple cross of Jesus.
This is a selection from, "A Path Strewn With Sinners" by Wade Johnston
I spend a lot of time talking to people in coffee shops. Some share my Christian faith, some are exploring and questioning faith and others have left the church, having had a crisis of faith.
This is why a Christian must keep learning to forget himself so long as he lives.
The only churches that live are churches that have died. That still die. And that rise to newness of life in Christ’s life alone.