Every generation faces its defining battles. In this message, Scott Brown shows that the battle of our time is not fought on distant fields, but in the quiet, everyday spaces of life—our minds, families, identities, and relationships. It is a battle for truth and purpose. Today’s conflicts run deeper than politics or culture, pressing into the core of who we are: our worth and what it means to be men and women created in God’s image.

My opening message here tonight is entitled, The Battle of Our Times. We're really embarking on a very thrilling subject, and I want to begin by explaining why we are doing this conference. That's really the heart of my message and why we need to pay attention to what has happened to us in our culture. And I'm going to spend some time really talking about the dark underbelly of our culture and why it's really critical that we're doing a conference like this. But at the same time, We really are here to celebrate the goodness of God in creation, and particularly the image of God in man.

And that's where the beauty is. In my opening message, I'm not sure there's that much beauty in it, but the rest of the men that will follow me up, you'll see the beauty of it and they will bring it about. We're here really to rejoice in the restoration of fallen humanity through the new birth and really to embrace that restoration process in our lives in the deepest parts of our lives. The Lord has secured his children by his blood and by his power and he pours out his grace to transform them. All of us need transformation.

And that's really what this conference is all about. So open your Bibles to Romans chapter one. Romans chapter one. And find verse 18. This verse that you're turning to, I'm submitting that this is a helpful diagnostic for what has happened all around us and to us, all of us in one way or another.

Romans 1, 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world is invisible, attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Because although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four footed animals and creeping things. Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray.

Lord, we pray that you would teach us your ways, that you would help us to walk out of Egypt, that you would help us to walk out of Egypt, that you would help us to find all of our paths in yours. Lord, that we would place ourselves under the most wonderful authority, your authority. Lord, help us to understand what's happening around us and how we might respond to it. Amen. I'm not going to do a formal exposition of these verses, but every verse in what I just read is implied in everything I'm going to say.

And you'll, I think you'll see it. Every generation has defining battles. The church is always engaged in battles. It doesn't matter when you visit her. In the first century it was the battle over the Judaizers and the Gnostics and the third century it was the battle over Trinitarian matters of Christology and Arianism.

In the 12th and 13th centuries it was the battle with Islam. In the 16th century, it was the battle of over justification and sacraments and church authority, the Pope or scripture. Now I could list many, many more battles, but the battle of our time is against the created order. You're living in a civilization that is in revolt against its maker, which is just described there in Romans chapter one. We are tearing to bits the architectural design for mankind.

We've been jackhammering the foundations for a long time. We've been chainsawing through the load-bearing posts. We've been knocking through the beams of our society that is designed by God actually to hold it up. And what is what is so stunning about this revolt is that it's actually a revolt against reality. It's a revolt against what is actually the most obvious reality in the world, manhood and womanhood.

But to destroy the structure, your best bet is to attack what holds it up and what it stands on. Because a building collapses when its foundation is corrupted and its supports are damaged. And what we're seeing all around us is the destruction of the load-bearing strength of the society. You know, Sink the footers, chainsaw the posts, knock over the columns. Picture in your mind the leaning tower of Pisa was built on unstable subsoil.

Now Paul talks about what happens when you build on bad ground. Think about building, there are many many buildings all over the world that fell When one load-bearing wall was taken down without understanding of what that load-bearing wall was doing, and what we're experiencing now, this isn't a cultural drift. We're watching a civilization wage war against the entire created order that is stated on the very first page of the Bible. We're tearing down the load-bearing walls of human life. And God's creation order is not just about surface appearances.

It's not like wallpaper, it's not like icing on a cake. It's load-bearing architecture. And the supporting columns are being pulled out, and the ceiling is caving in. Let me put it this way. When the glass ceiling was broken for women, it came down and everybody got bloody from the glass.

Not just the women, the children, the husbands, the churches, all were wounded, everyone in his own way. The most dangerous ideology at loose in the world is feminism. Feminism, I think, can be likened by what Samson did when the whole building came down by just pushing out two columns, in our case, the columns of manhood and womanhood. So what is the creation order? I'm going to give you five propositions, five foundational propositions upon which the creation order rests.

First, God is the creator of all things. This means that God is the designer of everything that he is and his design is an orderly design. Second, God is infinitely wise and all-knowing. Proverbs 3.19 says, "'By wisdom the Lord founded the earth.'" Third, There is no imperfection in God. Deuteronomy 32, four says, he is the rock, his work is perfect.

All his ways are justice. He's a God of truth and without injustice. Righteous and upright is he. Fourth, God reveals himself in his word. The Lord Jesus Christ himself said, it is the Spirit who gives life.

The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life. Fifth and finally, there is orderliness to humanity Because it was God, the infinitely wise God, powerful God made male and female in his own image. This is the Imago Dei in Genesis 1.26. Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

And the meaning of this is vast. It touches really every part of your life because it's God who creates distinctive beauty. This is actually is the heart of manhood and womanhood, a distinctive beauty. And you find this flow in the creation narrative. Could somebody get me some water?

I think I might need it. In the creation narrative, we are faced with a number of distinctive binaries. You have the heavens and the earth. You have light and darkness. You have evening and morning.

You have the firmament and you have the waters, you have the dry land and you have the seas and you have the Sun and you have the moon. But at the crescendo of the creation narrative is the creation of man and woman, two distinct creatures. And this distinction forms the wisdom of God for almost everything that happens in the world, because everything that happens in the world comes from a man and a woman. And this distinction is being desecrated in our times. This is a war zone over anthropology.

It's a satanic anarchy against anthropology and masculinity and femininity. Here's one of the great tragedies of all of this. When you mess with the creation order, you are putting a wrecking ball to human happiness and thriving from the littlest child all the way to the oldest person. And that's one reason why so many millions in our country, the richest country in the world, are on antidepressants. The problem is, you can't wage war against reality and win.

You will dash yourself upon the rocks of the reality. And you will actually do what Paul spoke in Romans 1. In your body, you will experience the wrath of God. I recently wrote a catechism on the family. I'm going to read briefly just the first few questions.

Question one, who created man and woman? God. Question two, how did God create man and woman? Answer, God formed Adam first as a man and ruler from the dust of the ground and Eve second as woman and helper from Adam's rib, creating both in his own image. Question three.

Are men and women created equal? Answer. Men and women are both created equal in God's image and are equally valuable in His sight. Question four, are men and women created different? Answer, God created men and women in His own image, yet different, making them distinctly male and female by nature and giving them unique roles, men and women created in God's image.

Question five, What are the differences between men and women? Men and women are fundamentally different in their creation order roles, being made for separate and distinct duties under God's authority. Question 6. What is man? A man is a fixed biologically male person, uniquely created by God in his image, originally very good, but sinful by the fall, created to rule, as married to be the covenant head of his wife and family, leading them with grace and mercy and wisdom and love in a godly dominion mission, and as a husband called to be a living symbol of Christ's love for the church.

Question seven, what is a woman? A woman is a fixed biologically female person, uniquely created from the man by God in his image. Originally very good, but sinful by the fall, as married, designed to be man's suitable and submissive helper, to conceive, bear, and nurture children, to be a man's co-regent in having dominion over the earth and called to be the living symbol of Christ's church? Those are the first seven questions in the catechism. Back to the battle.

Our culture is bringing the building down and it's dancing on the rubble and they're calling it progress. And the battle of our time is whether God has the right to define his world or whether rebellious man should seize authority for himself. And our age is at war with creation itself, seeking to desecrate the image of God in man. That's why the 20th century was a bad time for manhood and womanhood. In the 1960s, it seemed like the demons were unleashed, but not how you think.

It was unleashed through the angels of light, the progressives. It was a witch's brew of apostates of the sexual revolution. It included feminists and musicians and philosophers and playwrights and legislators and bloggers and screenwriters, all angels of light masquerading under a cloak of decency and progressivism. I'd like to identify these one by one. Let's take feminism.

The great creation order apostates, the gravediggers, the wolves in the sheepfold, Helen Gurley Brown, Gloria Steinem, Hugh Hefner. They fired up their bulldozers and they grabbed their jackhammers to undo everything that God had designed. I heard someone say recently, feminism made women the enemy of children and men. That is so true. There of course were four waves of feminism.

Each wave got bigger. I won't dissect each one of them, but each wave of feminism built on the destructions of the first waves. And the tidal waves just gained strength and size. Now, I'm familiar with waves. I grew up in the ocean in Southern California.

And waves, they come in sets. And every once in a while, there's a gigantic cleanup set that cleans off everybody in the water. And this is what's happened to our culture. The first wave in the 19th and 20th century was focused on overthrowing men's authority in voting, women's suffrage, throwing off the chains of the head of the household. And the second wave in the 1960s through the 80s, you had abortion, sexual autonomy, workplace equality, the pill which actually separated biology from procreation.

The whole world fell under its spell. The whole world fell under the spell of what happened right here in the United States of America. Francis Schaeffer, when I was a young man, he made a film. You know what he called it? The End of the Human Race.

He was right. The third wave, the 1990s to the 2000s, radical individualism, diversity, intersectionality. And then the fourth wave, 2010 to the present, the Me Too movement, homosexuality, LGBTQIA plus, plus transgenderism. After 2015, when Obergefell went down, It's like the LGBT movement went into hyperspace and it quickly transformed itself into the biggest wave, the biggest insane wave we've ever seen, transgenderism. And then you have the musicians.

It was the rock and roll musicians of the 1960s that destroyed American culture. It was a constant spew of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Now I happened to be there when it launched and between 1965 and 1971, if you were there, if you were a little bit younger than me or a little bit older, you missed the flip. But during those years, American culture flipped. And who flipped it?

It was the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, and the Who, and Aerosmith, and the Cream, all these groups. These were the ones that flipped the culture. They were the ones that normalized autonomy in the culture. I had a front row seat of that. Then you had the philosophers, Of course, Marxism had taken root earlier on the educators, the psychologists, psychiatrists.

I was a history major in college and almost all my professors were Marxists. And they were promoting doctrines of demons. But then you get to the legislators, the legislators. There was so much legislation that shaped our culture. They were blowing up the road.

They were erasing the old paths that led to life. They pulled, they pulled the needle of the compass off a true north into a confusing morass. One of The worst elements of legislation was the legalization of abortion in 1973. It expanded autonomy of men and women. It altered attitudes toward pregnancy and the desirability of having children.

And it changed the responsibility of men who no longer needed to take responsibility of the women that were conceived as a result of their activity. And it weakened biblical expectations over fatherhood and motherhood and marriage, it totally reframed marriage. And you saw from then on declining marriage rates, declining birth rates, skyrocketing divorce rates, fatherless children. David Blankenhauer wrote a book called Fatherless America to describe it. Isaiah 10, 1, woe to them that decree unrighteous decrees and that right grievousness which they have prescribed.

In 1969 Ronald Reagan the governor of California at that time signed in the first no fault divorce law almost every state in the Union followed quickly. You had the Equal Pay Act of 1963. It drew millions of women into the workforce that had never been there before, abolishing the family wage principle. The family wage principle was that you should pay the head of the household a wage so that the mother could be a mother at home. It neutralized the single breadwinner and wives began to achieve economic independence.

And now you had dual income families, child care skyrocketed and marriage became less necessary. And then you had another wave, maybe you recognized it, maybe you didn't recognize it. The raising of daughters shifted from motherhood to career formation. And the home became a despised institution and a despised vocation. And then you had affirmative action.

It accelerated female entry into male dominated professions. It blurred the vocational distinctions. The federal government was threatening everybody if you would not hire women. And it ended up barring many men from corporate leadership. Many of you have experienced that.

Then you have Title IX, really saying there's no difference between men and boys. It advanced the premise that boys and girls should be functionally interchangeable in education and athletics. This was a repudiation of the creation order and it required by law for a girl to do everything a boy does. Look what happened to the Boy Scouts. Then you have the military academies.

West Point was the first to fall in the class of 1980. They graduated 62 women. VMI, the Virginia Military Institute, was found in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and now you had women graduating. In 1999, Nancy Mase was the first female graduate of the Citadel down here in South Carolina. Why say all of that?

I hope everyone in this room sees how important legislation is. How important it is for the Church of Jesus Christ to raise their voice when the doctrines of demons are being legislated. The church should have a voice. The church should be in the city council meetings, the church should be voting out the bad guys, and they should be working hard to bring men of God into the legislative process. Let's just be very clear, legislation matters and it really should matter to the church.

And we should not neglect to raise our voices in the public square when the revolutionaries are at the door. And they're still, they are still not only at the door, they've overtaken the building. And then you had the screenwriters in Hollywood and the playwrights in New York. And then you had the fantasy writers. Ian Murray wrote a book called Undercover Revolution several years ago.

And what he says, his thesis is that it was the novelists and the poets and the playwrights and the intellectuals that undermined Britain's historic Christian worldview by creating worlds where God wasn't there in their literature and normalizing skepticism and sexual libertinism and hostility toward traditional morality. Murray contends that fiction and literary culture has maybe even a greater influence than overt political movements. And then the glass ceiling all came tumbling down and everybody got bloody. The feminists, the musicians of the 60s, the legislators, and the filmmakers, and the fiction writers. They were a nuclear tack on the creation order, all in the name of progress.

Progress. Many of you are raising children. Do not underestimate, do not mistake the power of music, of literature, and art, and social media on your children. And they are going after your children when you're not looking. The apostle Peter said, be saved from this perverse generation.

I was struck a couple of weeks ago when I saw that Carl Truman had just written a new book called The Desecration of Man. His thesis is that when man desecrates the image of God, the result is that man is desecrated. We've watched that before, our very eyes. But what God has done is he's implanted a compass within your soul. But as a result of the revolutionaries, that compass can give you inaccurate readings.

There are things that interfere with the magnetic needle. Nearby magnets can pull the needle off of true north. In a compass, metal objects, phones, speakers, power lines, steel structures, they can pull the needle off of true north, and that's exactly what has happened to us. And when the church of Jesus Christ does not hold fast to the Word of God, she loses her way. All these battles are over the sufficiency of Scripture.

One more thing before we move into the scope of the creation order and the very practical elements of it in all of our lives. Why is there so much controversy over manhood and womanhood? I believe it's because a man and a woman were created by God to be a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The two become one flesh, and the husband loves his wife like Christ loved the church. And the wife respects and submits to her husband as a glorious and submissive church.

I think that there's so much confusion and there's so much attack on the family is because the devil hates the gospel. And he knows that when you have a husband and wife linked arm and arm with the gospel of Jesus Christ, their world changes and their church changes, and those changes are designed to change everybody else in their social sphere. I think that's why the devil hates marriage, he hates the gospel. Let's talk in very top-level terms about the scope of the creation order. The creation order flows through all of life.

There's no human experience that is untouched. And I just want to give you three broad categories that cover really all of the human activity in the world. And you're going to hear these themes rolling through this conference. The men who have come to preach are gonna come and give you the good news, okay? I'm here to give you the bad news.

The three features of the creation order. First, the interplay of husband and wife in marriage. The interplay. This beautiful interplay of husband and wife. Matthew Henry said the marriage relation lies at the very root of the social system of nations.

Should be carefully protected. The Bible declares the creation order of headship and submission in marriage. You think of manhood and womanhood, like the sun and the moon, like the land and the seas. Each has its distinctive glory. Each has its distinctive timing and rhythm.

The woman is the helper, the man is the initiator. He's called Lord, he's called head, he's called master. And the man and the woman, they're like, they're fitted instruments and harmonized the way that God designed it as the two become one flesh. The second distinctive, the distinctive roles in the church. The creation order is designed by God to have a dramatic impact on the Church of Jesus Christ.

On the teaching in the church, the sociology of the church, 1st Timothy 2 11 says, let a woman learn in silence with all submission, and I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man but to be in silence for Adam was formed first then Eve and Adam was not deceived but the woman being deceived fell into transgression. I don't know why there's so much controversy over teaching authority of men in the church because the Bible is explicitly plain about it. The third area of the creation order is under the category of work and dominion because the creation order assigns responsibility in the home before the fall by the way and the husband and wife are co-regents to rule the household while the man is the head and master of the woman is the helper to subdue the earth, filling the home with the glory and beauty of femininity and children. And the harmony of it is just so wonderful. I remember when Deborah and I got married, she moved into my house.

It was a house. But like when you walked into it, it kind of looked like a warehouse. And by the time she got done with it, it was a beautiful house. But let's be really clear, the United States government and the entertainment industry and the legislators, they have done everything they could do to erase all of these things by making it illegal for men to act like men and women to act like women. And if God so designed things so beautifully, why is everything so out of order?

And it all comes down to sin and its disruption in the created order that Romans chapter 1, 18 and forward talks about. All of the fractures come from sin, and yet Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own people, zealous for good works, Titus 2.14. In other words, You must be born again. There's only one savior. There's only one authority.

There's only way on one way into the kingdom of God, not by works by which you have done, but by the grace of God. He opens your heart. He gives you a desire to walk with him and to be his disciple. He changes what you want, and you want him for the rest of your life. There are moments, we are living in one of those moments where people forget who they are and how they ought to live.

And that's what's happened in family life in America. Looking back in this era, it's glaringly clear that the biblical doctrine of the family and the biblical functionality of the family and biblical order in the church were nearly forgotten by Christians because of the jackhammers and the bulldozers going after manhood and womanhood. So we are here because it's time for a new generation to recover what has been lost and to reclaim the creation order with boldness. A new generation must be taught again what their parents and grandparents missed. The well-being of the world depends on the preservation of the gospel from one generation to another.

And Each generation must begin afresh. I'm so thankful there are so many from the younger generation. The whole demographics of our conference has changed over the last 15 years. Now it's mostly young people. I praise God for that.

God is calling on every generation to be a blessing to the rising generations by doing their duty and their families unswervingly. Psalm 145 verse 4 says, one generation shall praise your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts. But the battles of our time are not fought with weapons on distant fields, but they're fought actually every day in the quiet, unadorned places that nobody sees in your home. It begins in your mind and and in your identity and it works its way out into every part of life. And my prayer is that our time together would be a help to parents and children and church members to give themselves entirely to God to care for the next generation.

And you young people who are not married yet, you are the next generation. You're gonna hear many things about what it means to be married, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. These things are so pivotal. I'm so grateful for the hundreds of single people that are here in this room. And I pray you take every word that you hear to heart and that you would rise up when you get married, and you would bring the glory of God into your home, and that your mission would be to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture in your home.

The greatest threat to Satan is a biblically ordered family and a biblically ordered church. So let's rise to the task. Let's repair the foundations that have been broken. Be fuel in your local church. Shape the future generations, mend what was broken.

And strengthen the things that remain and plant new seeds. Let's make our way out of Egypt. All of us have lived in Egypt. Now, if you grew up in the 1960s, you grew up as a feminist, and feminist blood was running in your body. That's just how it works because you went to these universities and you just picked it up by osmosis.

But it's time to set it aside. Isaiah speaks of what is my greatest prayer for our time. Isaiah 61 verse four. And they shall rebuild the old ruins. They shall raise up the former desolations.

And they shall repair the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations. Let's pray. Lord, I pray you would come and equip the saints, I pray that you would set the devil to flight. I pray that you would do a repair and a healing job in any marriages or families, that there would be repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ, that family members that are at odds with one another that they would make peace and be reconciled, that they would find themselves walking in your ways, that they would set aside the ways of the world and spurn the works of darkness. Oh God, I pray that you would help us all, that you would come and sanctify your church and edify your saints, and Lord, that even here you would save some who do not know you.

Amen.