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 way to salvation does not consist in works invented by men, but that which leads to God is believing and trusting in Him.
Our Lord is not only the King of creation but the King of creativity.
The entrance of children into the world reminds our world of the hope of redemption in Genesis 3:15.
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.
Preaching is the first line of defense and catechetical offensive against these corrosive falsehoods.
Man and woman together are complete. Apart, they are incomplete. The two correspond and form “one flesh” when combined in sexual relationships and as helpmates.
Except for the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon’s Loci communes of 1521 were the most important of his writings.
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.