Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.

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We are invited to entrust everything to the one who accomplished what we could not: living and bleeding and dying and rising again, so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). To put it another way, when it comes to the kingdom of God, there’s no room for DIY’ers. Best leave it to the professionals.
Your God is not artificially intelligent, but the source of all intelligence (including yours).
It appeared everything would work out perfectly when Ivan the Great married Sophia Palaiologos. But when inheritance was discussed the problems arrived.
When the enemies of your faith surround you, don’t look to your own wits and wisdom.
The wicked emperor, Andronikos, thought he could manipulate a human prophecy in order to save his kingdom. If only he understood which blood saves!
The same words of hope and peace that were entrusted to Israel are available to all, to “everyone who believes” (Acts 10:43).
No one is harder to convert than a religious expert.
The heavens are neither geocentric, nor even heliocentric, but Christocentric. It is the cross and the crucified and risen Jesus who has the whole world, and each of us, in his nail scarred hands.
Humanity, despite our best efforts, cannot answer the question as to why God allows evil to occur.
This is an excerpt from the third chapter of By Water and the Word: God’s Gift of Baptism for You by Brian Thomas (1517 Publishing, 2026), pgs 52-60.
To not speak of hell is also to forget or ignore the great benefits of Christ and his saving work.
Christ’s saving work is finished, but his love is not locked away in the past.