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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Sometimes the old story is the one we need to hear again and again.
The great lie of addiction is that suffering must be fled, must be numbed, must be drowned out by any means necessary.
To be happy is to be the object of God’s love in Christ and to love God and others with the love of Christ.
You cannot sever the saint from the sinner. Christians remain both simultaneously.
God is a judge, but unlike you, God is just!
The addict’s condition speaks a hard truth: that we are all beggars before God, every one of us bent toward the grave.
The wrong god means love remains frail, fickle, or a fiction. The right God means love is the most reliable thing in all the world.
Wisdom lurks in the outer places. Rich gratitude sprouts from the impoverished and forgotten.
The gospel is best understood in terms of those two most important words: for you.
It is impossible to live our lives in a way that would convince God of our value because he already knows our value. He is the one who gave it to us.
The love of God is creative, always giving, always reviving.
This is the basic argument of To Gaze upon God: that we who now see as if behind a veil will one day enjoy the unveiled splendor of God himself, who will dwell with us forever.