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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This is a companion article to “Johann Spangenberg on Dying Well”
It is your privilege—we may even say “right”—to call upon this Father and to call him Father.
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
Moltmann is gone now, but his theology will continue to provoke and provide.
We know we are made for something great. We humans were created in God’s image and restored through Christ in his perfect image.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these early Lutheran hymns – and their physical availability in hymnals – in the piety of common people living in Lutheran towns and territories.
The Battle of Frankenhausen stands as a warning for what can happen when we abandon the Word God has given us and chase after some vision of our own imaginations.
The lack of history surrounding Psalm 130 allows it to endure as universally appealing even for our seasons of hopelessness and despair when we’re in “the depths.”
Jonah’s biggest blunder was a failure to understand that God’s grace is always undeserved and always falls on those who are unworthy of it.
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.
Zwingli the Pastor provides an excellent introduction to the Swiss reformer’s life and work, focusing on Zwingli’s philosophy of church reform, biographical details, and mode of exegesis.
This is the sound of freedom. The Eternal One died so that we who are dying might live eternally with him.