Thank you for joining us today for this episode of The Sword and the Trowel.

Today, Pastor Tom and I talk about the Epstein files, immigration, evangelical elites,

and some of the other cultural issues that the church is faced with in our day.

I hope it's a helpful conversation for you. Take a listen.

Welcome to The Sword and the Trowl. The Sword and the Trial is a podcast of founders' ministries,

and founders exist for the recovery of the gospel and the reformation of local churches. I'm

Graham Gundin. I'm Tom Askell. And today's episode is brought to you by Lake Yale Baptist

Conference Center and also the Miller's Grove Soap Company. Today what we want to talk about

is, well, a lot of things. I'm calling this a bit

of a cultural a la carte. There's a lot going on in culture and society right now. And so we kind of

want to address a few of those things because, again, what we want to do is we want to help Christians

and especially pastors think through the issues that are taking place in our day. So recently, the Trump administration

has released, what was it, something like 15 million pages of files from the Epstein case.

And that has caused no small amount of upheaval in social media and in our society at large. So have you

finished reading through them yet? Yeah, I haven't started. And I don't know that I want to start

and what I've heard about them. Part of the difficulty is a pastor in thinking through this.

And I had a conversation, one of our church members recently, who is a former investigator. And so, you know, his

juices have flown trying to think through this and the implications of it is I don't know who to

trust. I don't know what's real, what's not, you know, with the videos and even the emails and such. But

there are some sources that I've come to rely upon for news that as they will say

things or, you know, make references to cultural issues or political issues, I'll at least give them

the benefit of the doubt, you know, and thinking about it.

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