In the sermon titled 'Flying over the Battle Field,' Scott Brown outlines the structure and purpose of a Father-Son retreat focused on discussing worldviews. The sessions include short talks followed by discussions aimed at addressing cultural issues through a biblical lens. Brown emphasizes the impact of culture on thought processes and stresses the importance of understanding and using Scripture to navigate these influences. He highlights key doctrinal truths such as the sovereignty of God, the divinity and atonement of Jesus Christ, and the doctrine of sin as foundational answers to societal challenges. Various worldviews like secularism, socialism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, the LGBTQ movement, racism, poverty, and technology are examined in contrast to Christian teachings. The ultimate goal is to equip participants to preach the gospel with clarity and to understand the times they live in.

Thank you, Mike. May all those things be true of our time as we're gathered here together. I'd like to just give a couple of thoughts about how we're going to be engaging this time. As you can see from the schedule, I'd like you to go open up and look at that schedule. And you'll see that we're doing things maybe in an unusual way.

We have short messages that are scheduled for this 20 minutes. We're asking men to come and speak for 20 minutes and then to give fathers and sons time to discuss what they heard. We've done this before, we found it to be very helpful. The father-son discussion we really want to preserve time for. Now I'd like to ask just so you can see who the men are who are speaking.

If you men who are speaking could you just stand so people can see who you are? So these we have 11 men who are going to speak. I'm going to give a brief introduction and then I'm going to give a final summary. But throughout, thank you so much. These men are going to speak for 20 minutes.

If they don't, we have laser blasters to take care of that. But it's critical that we really preserve the time for discussion with fathers and sons. So look forward, look forward to that. As you can see from the format here, almost everything we have to say is about worldview, how you think about particular things that are particularly happening in our times. Great movements washing over our culture.

I know that we, the elders of our church, have felt like we haven't maybe communicated as clearly about really particular issues to our people. And we think it's important that we do that. This is part of that. But what we think and how we think is always shaped by something. And one of the great challenges of living in a wicked and in a perverse generation is why we think what we think and how we're affected by the great movements of our culture.

We're all born into this culture and we have taken on the thinking processes of our culture, whether we recognize it or not. And it has a profound impact on our lives personally and our families and our churches. I think it was Francis Schaefer who said that the church is usually only about seven years behind the world in the way that it thinks and the way that it acts, and that may be true, but particularly of churches that really have not embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ and have not seen how critical it is that all of church and family life and every part of life is to be regulated by Scripture alone. But what we'll be finding here in this time is that the answers to these questions, they are found in the authority of Scripture and in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. All of them are answered there.

And we'll find that They're answered really by the great and wonderful doctrinal truths that are in the Word of God, the sovereignty of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of justification. The answers to these problems are all there in these various treasures that God has given to us to help us to think rightly about everything. Now, if you're looking at your program, You'll see there's a sequence here. First of all, Jason Dome is going to speak about secularism. He's going to lead off tonight.

The reason he's leading off is because this matter of secularism lies really at the heart of all the other worldview issues that we're going to be dealing with. Paul White tonight is gonna come and speak about socialism. Paul Carrington is gonna speak about Roman Catholicism. That's tonight. Now, after the first session with Jason Dome, we're gonna be serving a really, really great chocolate cake and coffee.

And then we're going to come back and have the final two sessions. And then tomorrow morning, Rodney Wilson and James Lundquist are going to lead off with a discussion about Islam. Michael Beasley and Anthony Mathenia, after that, are going to deal with the LGBTQ movement. And then Carlton McLeod is going to come and speak to us about racism. And then Mike Davenport is going to come and speak to us about technology.

And so you'll see how all these things tie together. But I think that it's really important that we have an opportunity to discuss these things with our sons. And this is something that we want to encourage you to prioritize. I know at a Father-Son retreat, it's really easy for the boys just to run around and play and the dads talk to each other, but We'd really like you to resist that during the sessions that we're going to be engaged in. It was George Barna who told us that 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview, and that probably is true.

Now I'm going to give you a brief flyover of all these areas that we're going to be dealing with. I'm just going to give just a few statements about them, and then we'll bring Jason up to begin to deal with this very first one of secularism. So let's talk about secularism. Secularism says that we are alone, God is not there. The physical world is all there is.

There's no one who can tell you what to do or what to feel or how to think. And love is what you say it is there are no answers except for the ones that your heart adopts suffering is meaningless life has no purpose and the exclusion of a religion in every area of life is really the result of it. And by the way, this is the religion of Hollywood, it's the religion of Detroit, and it's the religion of Nashville. In contrast, Christianity says God is there, He's a creator, He is love. Suffering has meaning, life has meaning.

Politics and science and emotions, they can be interpreted and they can be dealt with in a particular way. And then socialism or Marxism, Paul White, is gonna come and speak to us about that. Socialism tells us that our problems can be traced to exploitation of the rich, that you don't have your fair share. The rich are evil, and so we must confiscate their wealth. And You cannot find love or satisfaction because the capitalists have rigged the system against you and you'll only have peace if there's revolution and redistribution.

And then when capitalism is finally destroyed, we'll all belong to one another, which actually is the basis of the free sex and the immoral culture that always arises in a Marxist state. Societies and institutions must be overthrown. That's Marxism. Christianity says that God is the provider. He gives the ability to make rich.

The Bible teaches that rich people should give to those who have need according to their ability and that the church should do the same and Then we move to Roman Catholicism Roman the Roman Church adds to the gospel Exalting traditions over thus saith the Lord They They have added many mediators when the Bible said there's only one mediator between God and man. That's what Christianity says, there's only one mediator between God and man and that scripture is sufficient. And then when we move to Islam, Islam teaches a different gospel by distorting every part of the Bible while even actually appealing to almost every part of the Bible. It rejects original sin, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and therefore it preaches a completely different gospel. It's a gospel of salvation, maybe, by obedience, and really the brutality of forced conversions in jihad.

And there really is no way for anyone to know his status before God. Christianity teaches that man cannot be justified by obedience to the law. It teaches original sin and the divinity of Jesus and the substitutionary atonement for sin and justification by faith alone, which is our only assurance for salvation. And then as we move to the LGBTQ movement, this movement presents the idea that gender is plastic and that you have a sexual orientation identity that's not discoverable by Determined by biology but rather by attraction and it rejects the idea that sin causes a person to desire Immorally the opposite sex or the same sex And Christianity says there's actually no such thing as a gay person in that sense. It teaches that man is created male and female in the image of God and that these gender distinctions bear witness to God the father who sends his son Jesus Christ to save sinners, and that marriage between a man and a woman, a male and a female, forms the structure of a picture of the gospel where the husband is the head of the wife as Christ also is the head of the church.

And then when we get to racism, we realize that the dictionary says that racism is a belief that all members of each race possess characteristics and abilities specific to that race, especially so to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another or races. It's the perspective that creates a spirit of prejudice and discrimination and antagonism based on the color of one's skin and some idea that one color is superior to another. And yet Christianity says that there are no races except two. There are only sheep and goats. That's the only two races that exist, and that all mankind is what Luke described in the book of Acts as one blood and there is no superior race and that there are there are there are negligible differences and race actually does not define any of them.

And then Rob Tart is going to come and speak about poverty. And you know the the the Marxist propositions about about about poverty state state that the welfare the welfare state suggests that poor people should be given money without working and that people are poor because of forces out of their control. And if you give them enough money, they'll be able to pull out of the cycle of poverty. Christianity says that whoever does not work, neither let him eat. And that the church is obligated to discipline those who live in a disorderly life.

And that the one who does not provide for his own is worse than an unbeliever. Christianity actually is a solution to property and one of the one of the great illustrations of this is the Protestant Reformation which saved Europe from poverty. Then we turn finally to technology. Technology always presents new challenges. Technology in the forms that we engage them now, our delivery systems for all of these worldviews.

While technology can add much to life, with the additions can come subtractions, and you have to recognize what those are. And technology has the potential to pollute the soul, and to distract a life from faithfulness By doing what one ought to do and that technology Can disrupt the most important things in life While Christianity says redeem the time I will set no unclean thing before my eyes. So that's just a brief flyover. These are the areas that we're gonna be dealing with. And I pray that God will use our times to help us to understand the times that we live in and to assist us in the communication of the gospel.

That really is our greatest desire, that we would have a framework of sound doctrine to deal with these various worldviews that are washing over our world today and that we would be better equipped than ever to preach the gospel with clarity, with accuracy, and with the power of the Word of God and the Word of God alone. So that's really our objective. So with that I'd like to invite Jason Dome to come up here and and he will he'll begin with this first session on secularism.