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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I grew up playing baseball – mostly “street” baseball, with a bunch of friends. It was one of my passions in life.
When bishops err we must not follow...We must obey God before man.
The celebration of He who came in humility, who would upend the Kingdoms of this world, was eclipsed by men grasping at the power of each other’s supposed kingdoms.
Is a god fully understandable and explainable according to the finite logic and world we inhabit, is that a god one can trust and truly believe?
The more that we hear the law, the more we recognize others as those who, like us, are torn and tattered by the wounds of sin and brokenness.
God has forgiven you. That is an objective fact. You can reject it, but it is nevertheless true.
What postmoderns see in modernism is a misuse of power through the control of dominant narratives.
We try believing in more abstract concepts: justice, happiness, and self-improvement, only to find that we can never truly grasp which standards should be accepted and which should be rejected.
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.
When we Christians shoehorn Creedal Christianity into any of these ideological positions we obscure the Gospel mingling it with the Law and strip the Good News of its catholicity.
Press further on the historicity of the Bible, and we start to get fidgety.
In order to shore up wavering faith commitments, both for the disciples and for us today, Jesus used His actions during a day’s worth of ministry to evidence the hard truth about His Messianic identity.