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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The first course is always humble pie because, at the table, there are just two seats: from humiliation to exaltation.
At times, evangelical Christianity can be a paradox. For as much as Protestants have spurned Roman Catholicism, they’re much more Catholic than they’d ever like to admit.
God is the God of failures, for He became one for you. There is no failure of ours that is bigger than Jesus’ cross, no sin of ours that can overshadow the cross.
Nicodemus, like us, does not really have phantoms and dragons in his head. He has just one demon, one virus, one malady: he lives in fear.
Mordor’s bleak existence and the successful salvific mission of Frodo and Samwise is what makes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings such a psychologically enjoyable epic.
The miracle of Pentecost is not obvious; it is the miracle of faith created through the preaching of the word of the cross.
If we get past Sunday School moralizing what do we discover in the Old Testament?
An introduction to Bo Giertz's, Romans: A Devotional Commentary
How should we read Paul, ya’ll? Why reading the Bible like a Southerner makes sense of confusing passages.
I’ve always been more at home in the Old Testament than in the New Testament.
Jesus is the great Houdini of the grave for us. And through His death, He gives us the Great Escape from death that leads to the great joy of the Resurrection.
God is for us in His foolish, scarred Word and Wisdom. Nothing is against us, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.