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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To know the cure is not to become immune to sorrow.
What God perceives is not what our eyes see; he is focused on righteousness because his love creates what is righteous.
Seek moments of silence, and use them to listen and ponder.
Christianity doesn’t start with our speculation about God. It starts with God’s self-revelation.
This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.
Was Jesus ambitious or unambitious? We have to say that the answer is…yes.
I find myself returning to the Nicene Creed this Advent season
“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.
The Christian answer to death is not a disembodied app, but a bodily resurrection.
The testimony of the Word assures us that God isn’t waiting for us at the top of the stairs, with arms folded and brows furrowed.
This is the fifth installment in our article series, “An Introduction to the Bondage of the Will,” written to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will.