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 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.
Jesus didn’t enter the water because he was sinful; he entered the water because John was sinful, as are we all.
God Meets is the rare cancer book (and as above, I use that term advisedly) that addresses both the judgment God places on human creatures in the Garden (death) and the hard road anyone walks toward that end (100% of us).
David shows us what happens to a man when his resurrection begins.
The resurrection means your ultimate problem is no longer ahead of you. The grave is not waiting for you. It is behind you.
Job needs a savior, and he knows it. And in Jesus, he gets one.
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.
A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
While we often talk about our growth, our progress, and what we are doing for the kingdom of God, the reality is that any goodness in a Christian does not originate in us.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ crucified, and the cross of the Christian life were not of peripheral importance, but foundational.
We can’t remove our crosses or the reality of our deaths. Only Jesus can.
People everywhere, every day, feel God’s wrath—and not as merely an afterlife threat but as a present reality.