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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It's a new year, and you are still the same you: a sinner who is simultaneously perfect in every way because Christ declares it to be so.
Below is the Thinking Fellows Essential Reading List with contributions from each of the Thinking Fellows hosts.
The good news for Jacob is that God humbled himself so that he could lose a wrestling match to a man with a dislocated hip so that he could give him a new name.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
The gospel is for sinners – both the tax collector and Pharisee, both in need of the Great Physician.
The profound significance of Christ’s resurrection comes from the threefold justification it provides: it justifies the sinner, the sinner’s hope, and God himself.
The notion that your goodness is “good enough” to make you right with God is a lie straight from the father of lies himself.
Bathed in the waters of baptism, you are placed in God's path of totality, a path he won for each and every one of us.
Paul knew that, without the resurrection, the Christian life was a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
This article is written by guest contributor, Christopher J. Richmann.
He declared you what you might not always feel you are, but what you were from the moment he knew you, before you were you, when he foreknew you.