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 resurrection of Jesus was the moment when the one true God appointed the Man through whom the whole cosmos would be brought back into its proper order. A man got us into this mess; the Man would get it out again.
Faithful preachers should remain steadfast in the biblical categories and terminology and preach the reality of death.
God's city is beautiful because God has constructed it to offer eternal safety to all weary sinners.
From mountain to mountain, from meal to meal the LORD God points us to His banquet, already prepared; the marriage feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom which shall have no end!
Everyone dreads what might happen if political control is captured by the enemy. Paranoia is the characteristic feature of this kind of under-realized eschatology.
This is an excerpt from “God’s Devil” written by John Warwick Montgomery (1517 Publishing, 2020).
The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
That is why we dance on graves. That is why we smile in the midst of sorrowful tears. That is why we retell old stories and share humorous memories.
If the world could have been saved by bookkeeping, it would have been saved by Moses, not Jesus. The law was just fine.
The biggest point Luther makes about the descent is not that Jesus triumphed over hell idle and unaffected, but that Jesus defeated hell by suffering hell away.
In our liquid world, strung out on the meth of evil, full of poor souls fighting to stay afloat, where are you, O God? Don't you care that we are perishing?