In this life, the Christian will always be dealing with sin. This side of heaven, there’s no sinless perfection. God’s good and holy law is a tool that reminds us of this reality. It is a searchlight that shows us who we really are, as we deal with remaining sin that still wars within us. This rightly frustrates the believer, as we battle wrong impulses that persist. Yet we need not despair—though we’re commanded to keep God’s law, those who are in Christ are not condemned by it, for He has paid for all our sins. The law and the gospel thus work together to encourage believers to rest in Christ’s work for them.

What does it mean to make Christ the center of your marriage? Husbands and wives cannot write their own lines. They have a role to play. Marriage was designed by God to paint a picture of Christ’s love for the church, and the respect of the church for her Savior. A husband’s role is to be like Christ, and a wife’s role is to be like an adoring church who loves her husband. So when you get up in the morning, what kind of picture are you painting when you roll over in bed and see your spouse? When you have breakfast together? When you contact one another throughout the day? Let it be a glorious and beautiful picture of Christ and His church!

How should Christian’s engage with God’s law? The truth is, the believer’s relationship to the law of God will have massive consequences in your life. It will either make you a legalist, or it will make you one of the blessed of the earth. For the Christian, the condemning nature of the law has ceased. But the commanding power of the law continues, and the Bible makes it clear that the believer is always happiest when he is under its consultation. Why? God’s law is a rule of life that teaches you how to live, and when believers keep His law, He promises great blessing.

Every word in the Bible is the word of Christ. This includes the 613 Old Testament laws and the 1050 laws and commands found in the New Testament. But how are we as Christians to interpret them? It starts by understanding God’s four central purposes for the law: (1) To disclose His character and righteousness; (2) To reveal and convict us of sin; (3) To constrain evil in the personal and civil realm; and (4) To give us a rule of life. To this Scott Brown adds nine key questions to ask, including: Is it a moral, ceremonial, or civil law, and how is it fulfilled in Jesus Christ?

How can Christians be “dead to the law” if the law is “holy, just and good” (Rom. 7:4, 12)? Scott Brown answers this thorny question, putting Romans 7 in proper context. The Apostle Paul uses the metaphor of a woman whose husband dies, who then is free to remarry, being no longer bound by the law of her first husband. Being married to Christ is akin to this. When He regenerates us, we are married to Him and dead to the condemnation of the law, our old husband, which once condemned us. Now our “Maker is [our] husband” (Isa. 54:5), who helps us to freely keep His good law rather than be crushed by it due to our sin.

The Bible says that everyone’s a slave—either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness. The question is: Whose slave are you? In this podcast Scott Brown explains that, without Christ, we are slaves to sin, and the wages of this sin is death. Yet, with Christ, we get a gift we don’t deserve—a grace that delivers us from the condemnation of sin and enables us to present our members as slaves to righteousness instead. Having been set free from a bad taskmaster, we are willing slaves to Christ whom we freely obey.

God has given our tongues as a good gift—not for death, but for life. Yet it’s easy for all of us to fall prey to bad speech habits that hurt others. In this podcast, Scott Brown gives harmful patterns of communication to avoid, such as name-calling and giving the cold shoulder, followed by good behaviors to sweeten conversations such as carefully listening, monitoring your tone, asking questions, and more. His charge—be on a mission to bless others when you speak!

The tongue is a good gift from God—but it also can be a destructive troublemaker. In this podcast, Scott Brown discusses how the tongue can poison and devour, but also how it can be tamed to encourage others through singing, hearty counsel, thoughtful admonishment, and more. Not only can our tongue be used to bring praise to God, but it can give “beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful words of life” to our friends, family, and others in need.