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.
Even when the bitter places sink down deep into our bones, the Restorer never relinquishes his grip on you.
To Live Well is therefore not a general advice book, but a message suffused with the gospel.

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May we, as preachers, rise and proclaim that Jesus Christ is sufficient for all our spiritual hunger.
Christ’s saving work is finished, but his love is not locked away in the past.
The resurrection means your ultimate problem is no longer ahead of you. The grave is not waiting for you. It is behind you.
The Church’s unity is not uniformity in every matter of her well-being. It is faithfulness in what constitutes her being.
For many years, I held piety as my god.
When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.
We believe in a Savior who raises the dead: this is why the church is the one place on earth that can speak plainly about abortion without collapsing into despair.
Fulfillment can sound awkward as a title or name, but it is one of the most prominent proclamations concerning Christ found in the New Testament.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
The crisis is not merely that people are leaving. The crisis is that we have relinquished what is uniquely Lutheran and deeply needed.
Merry Christmas, Christ has spoken, and his verdict stands.
“The well that washes what it shows” captures the essence of Linebaugh’s project, which aims to give the paradigmatic law-gospel hermeneutic a colloquial and visual language.