In his sermon, Scott Brown reflects on the significance of father-son retreats, emphasizing the importance of building a culture of honor between fathers and sons for the glory of God. He reminisces about his late father, whose dedication to prayer and encouragement greatly influenced him. Brown discusses the retreat's focus on the 'marks of spiritual death' versus the 'marks of Jesus Christ,' urging fathers and sons to contemplate these concepts and engage in meaningful discussions. The retreat includes short sermons by various speakers, encouraging participants to reflect on biblical teachings, such as those from Isaiah, and to nurture a culture of honor and faith. Brown's father exemplified a life of faith, always attending prayer meetings and encouraging others, ultimately showing the impact of living a life aligned with God's teachings.

You know every year that we did this father-son retreat my dad was here he never he never missed one and He was always he was always in the back row and Of course if you knew him In the last probably five years he would always get in his wheelchair and he'd come up here, he would take in every session and he would just, he just delighted to be here. I really miss him, it's hard to look out and not see my dad sitting there. We buried him or he died on November 4th and we buried him over on that corner of the graveyard. We just put his headstone there. You get a chance to go look at it.

My dad was a good father. The reason we have these Father-Son Retreats is really to build a culture of honor between father and sons. So that fathers and sons, you know, enter into really a pact for the glory of God. That fathers would love their sons and lead their sons, teach their sons, do the things that God has commanded fathers to do and do it diligently. Like Moses commanded fathers to teach your children diligently.

When you sit in the house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down And when you rise up when you have fathers and sons who live that way you get a different kind of culture We live in a culture right now where people say well I don't know I don't want to bring a baby into this world. No that's ridiculous. Christian men should bring as many babies into the world as they can and bring them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord and teach them what is true and right and what is just. And you know my father, my father was a good father. I was so grateful for him.

The last words my dad spoke to me were so stunning. They were so characteristic of his life. I was just getting ready to go to prayer night on Wednesday night and he never missed prayer. He may have missed one prayer night the week before, but I'm not confident he actually did. He always wanted to be at the prayer nights.

He always wanted to be at the men's Bible studies. But I was just getting ready to leave to go to prayer on that Wednesday night. And he was failing. And the last words my father said to me was, son, the Lord knows what he's doing. That's my dad.

That really characterized his whole life. My dad never worried about anything as far as I could tell. He was the happiest man I've ever known. Every day he would encourage everybody in my house. Well, you knew him.

When he talked to you, he would encourage you too. That's what he did. He couldn't help himself. And so anyway, I'm so thankful that my father was with us for 97 years. And it was such a blessing.

Well, here we are. Here we are. We pray that you, fathers and sons, would do what you can to build a culture of honor and a culture of power in the world and when you do that things really change in the world. Now what you've got in front of you is a six page syllabus here. The first page gives a passage of scripture that we're going to concentrate on that I hope defines what we're going to be doing.

Isaiah 1 3, the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not consider. In other words, God owns you. In the next passage on the right, Isaiah 43, I have called you by your name, you are mine. That's verse one. So all of what we do at this retreat here is going to center around that message.

Now I want to tell you about the messages. If you could open up your syllabus here and look at the schedule page. And there are five messages that we're gonna be giving at this gathering. I'm gonna give one tonight, it's gonna be about a 20 minute message. And then Mike Davenport is going to give a 20-minute message.

And then we have three more tomorrow. What we're doing is we're going to give short messages, and we want fathers and sons to break out and talk about them. So we want to leave time for you to be together. When we break out into those times, it's not a time for your kids to go play with other kids or you to talk to other men. It's a time for you to sit down with your sons or son, and talk about what you had just been taught through that preacher.

The preachers here are myself and Mike Davenport and Jamie stout and Robert Bosley and Trent Moody so we're gonna be giving the messages at this retreat. And I want to tell you a little bit about the messages. You'll see which ones, well mine tonight is to be unaffected by God's sovereign rights in your life or in the world. Now we're talking about the marks of Jesus Christ on your life and the marks of the world in your life and we want you to contemplate that and this really came out of a sermon that I we decided to do this out of a sermon that I preached in the book of Revelation a little while ago and we I I spoke about an incident that took place at Anthony at John Snyder's church when a brother by the name of Richard Owen Roberts came to preach there, and he gave 12 marks of spiritual death in that sermon, 12 marks of spiritual death. And we reviewed those as a church, but we've just picked five of them out for this conference here.

These are the marks of spiritual death. These are the marks of the beast. People are very interested in what the mark of the beast is. The mark of the beast is the mark of the world. It's to think like the world.

It's to embrace the ideologies of the world. It's to embrace the lifestyles of the world. Don't expect a 666 to appear on your head. You're known by God. You're known by the marks of God or the marks of the beast in your life.

And so this gathering is to identify the marks of the beast and the marks of Jesus Christ. And so each one of our messages are going to focus on that there. And we want you to just meditate on that and also talk as fathers and sons. What does it look like to have the marks of the world? What does it look like to have the marks of the world?

What does it look like to have the marks of Jesus Christ in your life? So that's really the whole thing that we're doing here at this conference. Now in this very back page, you can see these 12 marks of spiritual death and 12 marks of Jesus Christ and So we listed all 12 of them just for your edification, but we're only going to identify five of them in this gathering.