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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Thank God for heroes: they inspire us to be better, to help others, to live and work for the good of our race. And thank God for villains, too: they incarnate our shadow side, our nocturnal soul, the dragon within us that must incessantly have its throat slit on the altar of repentance.
It is only when individuals are bound together in community that they become fully human.
What postmoderns see in modernism is a misuse of power through the control of dominant narratives.
For all its stewing, regret ironically does not truly focus on the past. Often it is more concerned with the present and the future and how they would be if only we had done something differently.
Gospel questions don’t get a Law answer. Religious questions beg for Law answers.
I have been very busy lately, trying to understand things.
They say girls in our society should have nothing to worry about. They should have the opportunity for education and choices far beyond generations before.
Love is the sum of the law. Love God with all your heart, spirit, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. That means that if love can't be done when it needs to be done then get rid of the law, because it's not lawful.
Perhaps if we indulged our Christian freedom around them, they would come to see that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
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.
Only because He is an outsider can he afford the costly fee insiders could never afford no matter how hard they work.
The following is adapted from Called to Defend written by Valerie Locklair (1517 Publishing, 2017).