Welcome to the second part in our new series: The Family & Culture: How to bring glory to God within our households in a hostile culture. Last week, we took a deep dive into the joys & duties of a Christian household and it was a good introduction to this topic. We've got some terrific topics coming up in this series. But today we are tackling a really important lesson for all of us today: We need to be brave in faith before the Lord. We need  to lead and love our families with Bravery. We need to teach and train our kids to be brave. And it starts with us. Listen in today: Listen to the Podcast: You can find all the links and notes for this episode below! Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer. We need to learn how to be brave. We need to be brave women. We need to be brave mothers. We need to help inspire our men to be brave. And we need to instill bravery in our children as they grow. We need to be brave, in order to follow God's leading. Especially in an increasingly hostile culture. If we don't cultivate bravery, we may very well bow the knee to false gods and idols. Learning how to be brave in a hostile culture Something that the past 2 years has brought to a lot of our attention is how hostile our culture is against Christians. We've become so use to comfort and ease, that with the world getting a little shaking, we don't know how to respond. We need to become braver. We need to become brave Christians. And THIS is going to heavily affect how we respond now and especially into the future. We've seen this shift in the western world over the past 20 years. Those perhaps in the UK or Australia have been feeling this shift for a decade. And those of us here in the US are finally feeling it now as well. "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through. My treasures are laid up Somewhere beyond the blue. "In reality, for us in the English-speaking West this world has tended to feel very much like home and our treasures have been right before our eyes. But now we are finally facing the fact that this broken, sinful world in which we live is not actually our home - that what the Bible says concerning believers in this world is really true: That we really are aliens and that we really are strangers. The fact of the matter is that it has been true that we are strangers in and to this world. It has just been clouded, obscured by the size and influence and legal protection of the church in most of the Western world. But this world is not actually our home. We're not supposed to be treating this life the way other people treat it, as if this is the be-all and end-all of everything, or as if as Christians we can have a comfortable, respectable, prosperous life here and look forward to even more of those things in eternity. "Secularism pushes back again and again against what the Bible says about sexual ethics, about salvation, about education, about the role and reach of the state, or about matters of public welfare. Public opinion has turned against Christians." - Brave by Faith We've become so comfortable in our world, that we are not ready or willing to make sacrifices. I can't even begin to count how many times those around me (and myself) have uttered the past 2 years "I just can't wait until things get back to normal." But what if God is teaching us some profound truths through all of this. What if he is exposing the true Church, cutting the wheat from the chaff and teaching all of us in the Western world how to stand firm in the Lord once again. But God is Sovereign.  He is in control. He is foreseeing all that is happening and He is working it all out to His Glory (and for our good to those of us in His Church). We freak out at the slightest inconvenience. We fear for the future and what kind of society our kids will inherit. I'm not saying it's wrong to speculate about what's coming and it's certainly not wrong to be proactive in protecti...