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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Bonhoeffer was in the unenviable position of trying to break a spell. The spell was the Nazi crisis, where the totalitarian state threatened the church, and yet to many, seemed to be saving the culture and nation from mortal dangers.
Our anxiety about the future is a consequence of our old self’s attempts to achieve freedom for himself apart from Christ Jesus.
Trusting in Christ’s promise of new life and deliverance pours the ability to abandon fixing our eyes only inwardly and lets us see ourselves as others see us.
When God cancels you, it is an occasion for all of the canceled who are in heaven and earth to rejoice in that one more is added to our number.
Has the modern world taken too strong a dose of the gospel as its inheritance from the Reformation?
Want to do yourself, your family, your friends, and the world a good deed? Hold on loosely to your politics. Don’t drop it. Don’t toss it aside. Don’t privatize it. But, above all, don’t hold on to your politics as if your life, your soul, and your salvation depend on it.
Paul knew, and so do we: the law doesn’t change hearts or heal the world. More demands won’t do the trick.
God makes all things new. He refashions us from those turned in upon ourselves, turned to idols of our own choice and making, to experience the freedom He gives by pronouncing us His righteous children.
What does being free from sin, which is obviously a good thing, have to do with being free from the Law, which sounds dangerous?
The church does well to remind the world that God is unmasked, indeed, that God has unmasked himself in the person of Jesus.
St John of the Cross' feast day on December 14 commemorates the day of his death in 1591, at the height of the Catholic renewal movement that followed the Reformation.
It wasn’t a perfect image, but it was still there, even in its cartoonish movie magic distortion. It was an element of the Gospel right there in front of me.