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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Apart from the confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God who suffered and died for the forgiveness of sins and rose again to justify the ungodly, there is no Christian faith.
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.
Despite the mathematical incongruity, the church confesses that Christ is one hundred percent human and one hundred percent divine.
In grace, God chooses to love his people.
Christians don’t need a bucket list. We’ve got the whole bucket: the Word fulfilled, life fulfilled, and life in full.
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.
There is no one — not now, not ever — who cannot be included in the family of God through the efficacy of Christ’s saving power.
Jesus, the true Bridegroom, erases that mistake by his own compassionate, saving act. Isn’t this also a picture of the gospel?
Wisdom lurks in the outer places. Rich gratitude sprouts from the impoverished and forgotten.
Peace is ours, even when what seems like the end draws near, because we know who Christ is and we know what Christ has done, and we know that who he is and what he’s done is all for us.