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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Lord, today we remember...
St. Paul extends to us the call to arms. In particular, there is one weapon which is effective against so elusive an enemy. The weapon is prayer.
The one who embodies the dove, that is, the Holy Spirit will be mounted upon the staff of Calvary.
Only by faith in Christ are we truly awake.
Increasingly, to forgive is seen as winking at evil, as shrugging one’s moral shoulders, and as being complicit.
A group of unassuming apostles was given a graphic illustration of how the Lord would use them to turn the world right-side-up through the upside-down logic of grace.
Being the baptized just may be the last, great resistance.
Good, we tend to think, is the absence of evil. But this reversal of the formula can only have disastrous consequences.
There is only one antidote to the venom of sin and death: the Savior who becomes the serpent so that every snake-bitten-sinner might live.
God is consistently rooting us in reality—both what is seen and unseen—because that is where he is.
Our comfort in this seemingly endless age of crisis after crisis is the inexhaustible hope of Jesus’s reversal.
Our challenge today is to inspire trust and curiosity so this generation will openly ask the question, who speaks the words of truth?