The Christian faith is about more than inner piety; it must openly manifest itself in the real-life battle lines of our earthly walk. In this podcast, hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by guest Carlton McLeod, discuss the Christian’s call to battle. Our engagement must be built on God’s Word and then put into practice. Fathers must reject passivity and take charge of their families. Women must embrace their femininity, not fall prey to feminism. Parents must diligently shape their children’s education, not send them to Pharoah’s schools. Young people must not seek their identity through escapist media and entertainment, but earnestly walk in the ways of God. Our call before God is this—we must not be merely hearers of the word, but doers also (James 1:22). 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today, we've got Carlton McLeod with us, and we're going to talk about objections that particularly young people have and that pastors need to address in their preaching. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Jason, we're here to talk about battle and really a call to battle. You know, I loved Carlton McLeod's title of his conference coming up called Call to Battle.

We should talk to somebody who has a military background. Do you know anybody like that? We should talk to him, Absolutely. Carlton, welcome. Hey guys, how you doing?

Good to see you again. We're doing great. We want to talk about the battle lines and hey, but so give us a little thumbnail on this conference that's coming up. When is it and what's up? Sure.

It's October 17th and 18th here in Chesapeake, Virginia, right at our church. It's Friday night and into Saturday through the day. It's free. We're going to feed you as well as give you 10 sessions on bringing everything back to the Bible in the home and church. And it's called A Call to Battle.

Order in his house and order in our house. And you can find all the details on our website, acalltobattle.org. And basically we're just ripping off church and family life. That's all we're doing. There you go.

Jason, Jason. Rip away, rip away, my friend. Jason, it's free food. We should go up there. I know, we'll be there.

Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. We're just going to call folks back to the Bible, show them the sufficiency of scripture in the home and church, and just exhort every soul that walks through the door. So, you know, I think you can kind of sort out churches along two different lines. I'm going to call it pietism or dominionism. Pietism just rests on our personal faith, our individualistic response to God, and it's very personal.

But there's a very different kind of church, And that is the kind of church that is desiring to take dominion over every area of life. Those churches are involved in a battle, okay? And they're self-consciously engaging in particular battle lines. And so we want to talk about some of those battle lines. And these are the ones that we're interested in.

These are the ones that we're, well, we've been focused on these for a long time. And these, these battles, you know, they're fought in the family and they're fought in the church and they actually have tangible manifestations in the world. On the one hand, there are the things that we believe, and there are on the other hand the things that we do. And this is the doctrine of sanctification. You want to understand justification, but you don't want to be stuck on justification because there's the real work to do in sanctification.

In fact, you know, the letters of Paul are all structured like this. Ephesians, Romans, you have the doctrine of justification at the front end. And then how do you live it out? How do you wage war? And, you know, if you look at Ephesians, I mean, you're waging war with the world, the flesh, and the devil, and you're waging war in your family, you're waging war in the workplace.

This is called not pietism, this is dominionism that actually works out. Carl, I was just looking through the schedule and the names of the sessions that will be there and there's a text for every session. I think it's the first session is titled, Built on the Word, and the text is Matthew 7, 24-27. Just let me read this. This is what Jesus says in Matthew 7, 24 through 27.

Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them, he will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house and it fell and great was its fall." Normally that text gets preached to build your life on Christ and I really have no objection to that, but what the text actually says is the one who hears these sayings of mine, hears the word of God, and does them is building on the rock. If you don't do those sayings, if you don't build on obedience to the word of God, you're building on sand.

In terms of battle lines and waging a war against all the flood of things that comes against us, what a great place to start, built on the Word. Amen. Amen. And our goal is to explain to everybody that comes in that The Bible is a sword. It is the sword of the spirit.

It is the word of God. And we use it to form ourselves, to wage war with the flesh, but also the world and the devil, as Scott mentioned earlier. And I love that text. I think that's one of my sessions I'll be preaching that text. But I love that text because it reminds me of me so much.

You know, the word in Greek there for foolish is where we get the word moron. And I've been such a moron at times in my life where I've chosen my path over the way that are pleasant and all the paths that are peace that come from our Lord. And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna, and this is not easy all the time as you guys know, because sometimes our lives are so contrary and they're built on sand, they're so off the Word of God. And so when the Word of God comes, it shakes and grabs us.

But this is the only way we can build a solid house. This is the only way we can weather the wind and the rains and the storms, as the Lord said. Yeah, I mean, This is the battle line of the sufficiency of Scripture. What is sufficient? How are you gonna live?

Are you gonna just live out of the hat of your experience or what other people are doing? Not in the kingdom of God. I mean, you live out of the Word of God. Scripture informs every question. It speaks to everything about our lives, what we think and what we do.

But I think that's probably the heart of the battle right there, is for the sufficiency of Scripture, because culture is so pernicious and it's so powerful to overtake us. We end up looking weird because we believe scripture is efficient, not culture. Amen. Amen. Well, we're called to be peculiar anyway, And that's who we are, pilgrims in this land and procure your people at that.

And so yeah, our goal is to not apologize for anything that God says, particularly as it relates to the home and church and by the grace of God, help people order their families and order their churches in a God-fearing and God-pleasing way. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the pivotal battle lines is really over fatherhood, fatherhood and motherhood, but particularly, you know, fatherhood is such a powerful influence. You can eliminate almost every social problem if you have a father in the home. There are all these studies that have been done.

If your mother takes you to church, there's a very low percentage that you will come back to church. If your father takes you to church, everybody's going to go. God has invested a particular influence in fathers. And so the breakdown of fatherhood is such a massively important thing. So we've spent, you know, years trying to rebuild, you know, the doctrine of practice of fatherhood in our churches.

You've heard the modern phrase is it takes two to tango. And I think we probably want to dispute that, meaning homes need robust motherhood, there's no doubt about that, but mothers tend to want to engage robustly in the role that God has given them in a home, when a man will rise up and do what God has given him to do. You know, when a father takes hold of the Bible and says, this is what God is calling me to do in my home. Almost every woman that we've seen is invigorated by that to do what God has called her to do. So often the sins of women in the home are sped along by passivity in manhood.

So one of the things we want to do is to call men not to be passive, but to read their Bibles and whatever God says they ought to be in their home and ought to do in their home, they should be that and do that. Yeah, they ought to be training their children, but a father should particularly, if he has sons, be training his son. Fathers should train their sons to be rulers, to be generals, to take dominion, to actually make tracks in the world, boys trained to work hard. It's very interesting. If you look at two great genocides in the Bible, you had Pharaoh and what was he doing?

What was Herod doing? Killing the boys. The demonic strategy is to kill men and to kill the effectiveness of men. And in our society, the devil wants men sitting in front of their computers and looking into their phones, hanging out, going out for lattes instead of actually taking... Playing games.

Playing games instead of working. Or these days turn them into effeminate men. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's something that happens to a boy when he works with his father. It changes him.

It really does. You know, and you know, my urging of fathers for years has been, look, you take your son to work as much as you possibly can, have him hear the conversations, have him see what kind of life you're living, bring him into a man's world and bring him in early. You know, don't wait till the guy's 18. You need to bring him into a man's world really early on. Fathers are so critical for this thing.

And that's really the vision of Deuteronomy 6, isn't it, Scott? Of when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise, that's actually more than family worship in the morning, as nice as that is, but that's a lifestyle of discipleship in context from a father to a son. Yeah. Another battle line is the whole battle line of education. Over the years, we've just seen this escalation of secularism, the LGBTQ movement, just horrific things happening in our public schools.

About 15 or 20 years ago, you know, well-known Christian leaders began to say, you got to get your kids out of the school system, even more so now, you know, it's way worse than it was. So we're actually, we're engaging in an educational war, which means we brought education into the home as we're just harder in a lot of ways. And it puts, puts quite a bit of load on a wife. So I thought, I think the equation is, the, the person or whoever has the hours as the influence and, parents have, have, have given over the hours and wanted to maintain the influence and that's just not how it works. So in terms of education, we want to maintain the influence and so we have to keep the hours.

Yeah, there seems to be a misconception even today that kind of festers that education is somehow neutral, but the training of the soul is never neutral. And I remember figuring this out myself, and I had to ask myself, do I want someone who doesn't confess the name of Jesus Christ teaching my son or teaching my daughter? Because Scripture has pretty potent things to say about people in that state. A servant really isn't above his master and a student really isn't above his teacher, but will be like his teacher. Just kind of laying out those principles hopefully will help people as well see the truth of this this particular battle I think you know education is one of those great battlegrounds and Christian parents have to figure out how to Make that happen in an effective way so that their children are really taught about how everything works in the world.

This whole, you know, unschooling movement is such a corruption. You know, God has designed Christian parents to teach distinctive things about everything and really to prepare them educationally. So let's talk about feminism, the ongoing battle against feminism. The problem with feminism is it's in all of us. If you went to an American university like I did, you actually, you graduate and you got a lot of feminism in you and you spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of it.

We've been swimming in feminist juices for so long that we have a hard time actually thinking in terms of manhood and womanhood, the creation of a patriarchal society, and actually the deployment of women in the area of their nature. So, yeah, So that even when you just read texts of Scripture, you find yourself recoiling in a certain way from it. And it's not because there's a problem with Scripture, it's because we've imbibed the spirit of the age in ways that we haven't detected when we were imbibing it. Yeah, I mean, you've got a generation even in homeschooling families where you have boys, they've been over-mothered and they've been under-fathered because of this feminist culture. But, you know, feminism actually destroys femininity.

Not only does it destroy the family, not only does it destroy this whole structure of marriage and the way that God has wired the world, it actually kills womanhood. Yeah, it just strips all the beauty out of what God designed to be beautiful. And that's one thing I've always appreciated about you, Scott, in terms of how you communicate the beauty of biblical womanhood, who she is and what she's designed to do. And it's an ongoing fight in churches, in churches around here and in Chesapeake, Virginia. And guys that I know are struggling with this all the time.

Now, when you read who's supposed to be an elder, everyone recoils. Now, when you read about being a keeper of the home, as Jason said, we've imbibed so badly the kind of the rotten fruit of it all, that we sound like weirdos by even saying it. We get lumped sometimes into these camps. And I'll just tell people, I'm only camp, I'm trying to be in his camp, Jesus, and I just want to do what he said. I can't change the fact that he said, that there's a sphere that women are designed to excel in for the blessings of everybody around them.

So Carl, here's another text from one of the sessions at A Call to Battle, your conference, it's Colossians 3, 16 through 21. Let me read it. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching, and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Wives, submit to your own husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them. Children, obey your parents, for this is well pleasing in the Lord. Fathers do not provoke your children unless they become discouraged." So because there's something in between, you might miss that that begins with the word of Christ dwelling richly and then graduates to marriages, how husband and wife should relate, the parent-child relationship, how they should relate to each other. This has to be built on the word of Christ dwelling richly in us. And we find that things are so much more healthy and we're all, in the end, so much more happy when we just build on what the Bible says.

Amen. You know, looking at women over the years and the churches that I've been a part of, here's my conclusion. The strongest, the stateliest women, the most fearless women, the happiest women, are the women who figured out how to submit to their husbands, because they're not afraid of anything. They realize God is sovereign. They realize God gave them this husband.

And they also understand that they can talk to their husbands and coach their husbands and even correct their husbands. But, you know, the ending of feminism in a, in a woman's heart is the beginning of strength and joy and peace. And I'm just going to call it a stateliness that you don't see, you know, in women today who are frenetically grasping, you know, for authority and things like that. But feminism is a real threat, it's a real enemy to our wives, to our children, and to the families that are in our churches. So let's talk about another category, biblical churches with sound preaching.

Here we're talking about a biblically ordered local church. Churches really are where you're fighting with the Word of God, you're training troops, you're getting the people of God ready for battle, you're equipping the saints, you're outfitting them, you're resourcing them, you're filling them up with the knowledge of God's will, and you bring them all together and you want to be moving like a platoon, like a column, like warriors in battle. That's what we're doing in the local church and we send them out to battle. But, you know, God has created the world such that there are these little communities called local churches where this happens. Yeah, the design of God is that families and local churches would be so interwoven that would be hard to see where one ends and the other begins, not because there's confusion about what the distinctions are, and there are certainly distinctions, but because they're cheering for each other and helping each other so much, families cheering for and helping local churches and local churches cheering for and helping the families in the church that they're just working together and both are stronger as a result of it.

This is really what God has in mind. Amen. Our dear friend Vodi Bakham said when it comes to discipleship, it's a three-legged stool, the home, the church, and the classroom. All of those are battle lines, as we mentioned. The church is so critical in that, in many of the communities that I frequent, biblically qualified elders is an issue.

Once we get past the sufficiency of scripture, now do we have the courage that it takes to actually install men who will preach the whole counsel of God? And so we hope to bring some of that to light here in the conference as well. Yeah. And, you know, to be ordered according to the word, to do the things that God commanded. I think that's what we're very focused on in our churches.

And then let's also talk about the influence of media and entertainment. This is a massive, massive area of threat to the church. You have the tendency to live remotely, to interact with people that you don't know, to not be enmeshed in real eyeball-to-eyeball relationships, to argue with people that you don't know, With people you'll never meet. So you have this whole existence online, but it's not real. It's remote and it's ethereal.

And the danger of this entertainment culture is that we lose personality and we lose the functionality of relationships that God has designed. And in many cases, it displaces the relationships that God meant for us to have in the home. In other words, you can become so consumed by these things and you actually never spend time with your family anymore. Yeah. And the church as well.

I mean, coming out of the COVID era, there are many people who still haven't made it back to church and feel like online church is okay. There's still a large group of folks just like that. Yeah, you are your gaming avatar, right? You're not a real person, you know, and you present yourself in ways that really are not you. These are just massive dangers to the younger generation.

And how do you raise up a generation that's not addicted to their phones and not staring into their phones every three seconds, which is actually what most people are doing. And, you know, and then, but then you have, you know, some of the most dangerous things, pornography and all kinds of things. It's not just the distraction, But it's actually the defilement that's the problem. And the way the algorithms are working, they're going after you, they wanna find you. And they wanna subjugate you and incarcerate you in this pornographic world.

So the dangers are really, really massive. It's really, it's been very interesting. You got whole school districts who aren't letting kids bring phones to school anymore. Secular schools have figured that out, but Christian parents haven't figured it out yet. So The final session at your conference will be entitled, Doers of the Word out of James 1.

So reading our Bibles is good, but reading it without conforming ourselves to what we're reading is not good. And so I'm grateful you're going to gather people and call people to read their Bibles and then conform themselves to it. Carlton, thank you so much for joining us, and I hope you all can join us back again for the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.