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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The Son of God is still God the Son in the Incarnation.
Our Lord is not only the King of creation but the King of creativity.
God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
Grace does not emancipate us from any requirement of obedience. Rather, grace allows Jesus to be obedient on our behalf that the righteous demands of the law can be fulfilled.
God has in fact executed his plans for his people, plans of peace (probably a better translation than welfare), a future, and a hope in Jesus Christ.
The goal of language in the mouth of a Christian isn’t to hold power for ourselves but to give it.
God uses the unlikely, the unexpected, and sometimes even the unsavory to deliver us and to crush the heads of his enemies
God’s word is creative in both the imaginative sense and the constructive sense. It brings things into existence and displays new ideas, images, and concepts we did not previously perceive.
While all Scripture is the self-revelation of God, not all Scripture should be read in the same way.
A famous saying of Augustine (echoing Jesus in Luke 24:44) perhaps puts it best, “The New Testament lies concealed in the Old, the Old lies revealed in the New.”
The grass withered for them too, but they held on to God’s Word. They knew that was eternal, so they lived in it. They lived in his forgiveness.
A seed grows the kingdom of God. A whisper eventually turns the world upside down. A carpenter’s son from nowhere becomes the Savior of everyone. Such is God’s way.