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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We chase after status, wealth, luxury, glory, honor, youth, beauty, and pleasure. We work ourselves to death. For what?
It's a January day in New York City and the building I work in is just off the water. What this means is that it's cold out and not just cold but cold with a biting wind. As the phrase goes, "you can feel it in your bones."
They may also be fellow sufferers who’ve hit their own bottom with you. Whoever they are, they wear the mask of Jesus the crucified. In them and through them the Lord is at work to love you.
I’m still piecing together fragments. I’ve spent my life collecting scraps of personal stories that will explain my father to me.
The biblical witness is clear: all the so-called gods and lords and idols who are the object of people’s devotion, to whom they offer their sacrifices, to whom they pray, whom they call God and Lord, are sadly nothing but a front for the father of lies.
It’s one of my favorite family pictures. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on a couch are my granddad, my dad, me, and my son. A four-generation snapshot: Lee Roy to Carson to Chad to Luke.
There is truly only one commandment and only one sin. That one commandment is “You shall have no other gods,” and that one sin is idolatry.
He loved me, to be sure, but in a very nondescript, emotionally detached way, which is the way my grandfather loved him.
Nonetheless, if we wish to treat apologetics as a practical endeavor for concrete engagement with people who ask about Christianity, it seems best to start with the questions young people are actually asking.
You may not believe it; you may even scoff at the claim, but here’s the truth: God hears your roar of pain on the other side of your silence. He counts every tear you let escape, or refuse to let go, from the ocean of anguish inside you.
I have found that Gandalf’s words above ring true, not only in Middle-earth, but in our world as well.
I once heard a grad school professor say that America really is a polytheistic nation since so many people believe in so many different gods.