Father, what a joy it is to be before you today. It's our honor, our privilege, and we really do get to do this. We pray for our listeners today that they'll be encouraged, they'll be lifted up, perhaps inspired, Lord. That's our heart, to put some lift under their wings. We bless them even as we do this and have this conversation, Lord. And we ask Holy Spirit, you would literally guide this conversation today. and give us solutions and answers, or at least even greater questions.
So, we honor you in everything we do in Saturday, in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. It's Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. We get to do this. This is episode number 35. You know you're a real podcaster when you're doing a podcast on your vacation. I'm in brother. I am all in with what we're doing. That is when you are a true podcaster. You watch before you know it. OK, we're going to the beach. Honey, I got to bring my rig because I got to do a podcast. I will be bringing my rig. Are
you bringing it? Oh, you guys are going to the beach, right? I put it all together. Yeah, I've got my microphone, my cords. I've got my mini, what do you call it? The pod mobile? Yeah, pod mobile. I've got that all in one bag. That'll fit either in my suitcase or right in there. You got the little stand for the mic? I do, yeah. Those are perfect for a trip. Yeah, it's a little bitty one. How's the vacation been, brother? Must be so weird. As a pastor to not be at your
church and the machine keeps on running. It's good odd though. It's odd or different, but it's good different. I stay busy because I love what I do and I love interacting and engaging with people, so I continue to do that online easily. I'm reading some great guys on Substack right now. I've been encouraging and just studying. Annette and I started a study called Rooted. Which is, I didn't name our series after, it just happens to be called Rooted. And it's a
fantastic 10 -week discipleship journey. So we're sort of screening it to see if this is something we want to implement for our church. Sounds like work, but it's what we love to do is get in the Word and study and read. And so far it's been fantastic. People have no idea what the life of a pastor is or pastors because you're pastors together. They think it's like, Oh man, what a gig that is. You show up on Sunday. Okay, you got to do two messages. But the work that goes
on in between is really... Well, we tend to look happy most of the time. We're with people. Well, there's that. It's the world we're in. And truly we are. We love what we do. I've been doing this 43 years now, 42, 43 years. And I'm just as excited about what I do today as I was the day I started. It shows, brother. It's joyful. It really does. One of my long -term thinking philosophies, if you would, has been play the long game. Play
the long game. Finish strong. We used to say in golf, it's not how you drive, it's how you arrive. Because sometimes you can whack one out in the weeds and then you have a couple of good shots and you're back in the game. So you don't ever just panic over a bad drive. You just try to, okay, all right, it's not how you drive, it's how you arrive. It's the same in life. My attitude is I want to finish strong. I want to
run through the tape. I want to be in a sprint over the finish line, not crawling or coming up short. So many guys that I went to school with because I did my undergrad in theology and then I did my graduate work in ministry as well and what's called Christian education and so I did a lot of years of school around church. I mean my whole bachelor's and master's degree and there's quite honestly very few of those
guys still in the game. It's a tough game. It's such a false equivalency, but it is a bit like being a podcaster. Apparently, I am one now. They're very similar. It's like people give up. It's very hard to... So when you're on vacation, and actually, Pastor Brian, he's also, I believe, on vacation. Yeah, they did their second week. Right. So you have an interesting task of filling... the pulpit with somebody. Correct. Because church doesn't stop. That's right. So what is the process
for fillings? I mean, how does that even work? It's relational. These are guys, people I know, people I trust. I don't just call anybody out of the blue and go, hey, you know, and we plan this out for months in advance. So we had Krish Dunham this last weekend, but that's been planned for months when we hosted Reagan. you know, in the pulpit. We'd plan that months ahead. So we do that way out front. So we know who's going to, Tommy is going to be with us. One of these
weeks. Tommy Hayes. We love Tommy. He compresses a thousand pounds of TNT into 30 minutes and we get out early and you're like, what just happened? And he smiles the whole time. I mean, he's so excited to do it. I love this one. So these are men I know. These are people I walk with and have had, you know, relationship with. I rarely will put somebody in my pulpit that I don't know. Rare. Victor Marx was one of those. Another great example. I didn't know Victor personally, but
I knew people around him personally. I liked what I'd heard. I'd been listening to some podcasts with him and read his book. By the time he got here, I felt like I knew him. We ended up hitting it off like brothers from another mother kind of thing. That's a rare thing. We'll be hosting Todd out of Nashville. His last name skates me off the top of my head, so I don't know him that well, but I know about him and I've known around
him. When I was in Nashville 12 years ago, I knew him then, but it wasn't like best friends, but I knew who he worked for and who he worked with. Big surprise, we've got the Caleb Global coming to do a weekend seminar. Big surprise is Papa Don Finto is coming. Coming himself? He's coming. He wanted to. He said, I want to come. I'm going to be there. I'm mad. We're going to be out of the country. I'm just sad we're not going to be there for that one. He literally
is one of my heroes in the faith. I mean, he discipled Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant. I mean, all these people that we love and know on the Godcaster, he's been one of the spiritual advisors over most of those artists. In one way or another, they know Papa Don. So, Chris Dunham, Dean of... He's at the Patriot Academy, his actual title is Dean of Patriot Academy… Scholars? Scholars? I think so, yeah. I mean, that's what they call
their students, scholars. And he's preached before, and he is one of my favorite apologetics guys. Is that the term? Apologetic guy. Yeah, he does apologetics. He's an apologist. Which is always confusing for new Christians. Like, why are you apologizing, man? What are you apologizing for? There's nothing to be sorry about on here. And he came, he did some things, and by the way, he's so much one of my favorite guys. I wish I could get him on Rogan. I'm afraid that Rogan
might not be able to keep up with him. It would work. And I'm going to suggest it. Wow. Absolutely. He is, and he's funny, and he has a great story. And he spoke, and it's a two -part series, he spoke on Sunday, and it's about Islam. And what he was doing, as I've listened to both services, is he was kind of waking everybody up in service one, and then this coming Sunday, he's going to dive deep. This hit me so hard because I have been, I have literally been talking about this
for 20 years. Two things really. One, growing up in the Netherlands when I moved there when I was seven, it's really odd what people accuse me of because really it's Isaac and Ishmael that I've grown up with. On one hand, I had kids that I played with whose grandmothers had numbers tattooed on their arm from concentration camps and I learned a lot. A lot, a lot right. More than most Americans would ever learn just by
the fact that so much happened there. But also growing up, I played with a lot of Muslim kids. But we didn't know them as Muslims. In the 70s, they were Indonesians because that was a Dutch colony. So the Indonesians had a citizenship, actually, right to be in the Netherlands. In the 80s, we got a new group of Muslims, but we
didn't call them Muslims. We called them Turks because there was a guest worker program and it was specifically open to Turkish people to come with their families and work because the country was being constructed and we just didn't have enough labor. And then later what happened is the liberal world government of Europe as the European Union start to drop borders and create one form of money and all kinds of interesting. They tried to become the United States of Europe,
really, which was not a great idea. They shipped in Moroccans. Never said Muslims, they just shipped in Moroccans. And they didn't ship them in with jobs. No, here's a house that you get and a Dutch person doesn't get. Here's money that you get. And when the houses were... It sounds like the last administration here. We're going to get to that, bingo. And when the houses ran out, there's a huge shortage of houses, they started
something called asylum seeker centers. And these are like not a detention center, but a camp where they would put them in and give them money, but no job. And they were on the outskirts of the country, kind of in the rural areas until they ran out of that. and now they're in everybody's backyard. And so now, at this point, we've got prayer calls five days a week everywhere. We've got the whole—they call it the street picture,
Stratbelt. The street picture has changed from originally people in wooden shoes to kind of modern, modern Western people to burkas, literal burkas. The part that is unique to me is I went back to the Netherlands in 99 and I saw, whoa, what just happened here? And there were two guys that I knew and met and interacted with who were saying, we have to stop the Islamification of the Netherlands. And that doesn't mean we need to stop people from being Muslims, but the Islamification,
which is a political issue. One is a guy named Pim Fortin. And he was a professor of economics and history and openly gay, larger -than -life guy. And he's like, I'm running for political office. He won posthumously. And I say posthumously because the establishment hated him so much that he was assassinated two weeks before the election right outside the radio station where I worked, killed not by a Muslim. by a radical leftist member of the animal party or something like
that. And his party won the election. Of course, that fell apart because their leader was gone. But I remember distinctly seeing the whole country from Amsterdam to The Hague, his funeral procession went, this is like 40 miles. The whole highway was filled with people, slow claps, and you never heard anything about Islamification again. The message was, don't say anything, we're going to kill you, except for one guy. Theo van Gogh, direct descendant of the painter. I knew him
because he was in television. He was a columnist. He wrote. He was a huge leftist until he met Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You've probably heard of her. She was a politician in the Netherlands. She's from Somalia. And she said, hey, what's going on here in Holland is no good. And the female genital mutilation, that was one of her big... one of her big talking points, but they teamed up together and made a movie. He was also a filmmaker.
And he got killed on his bike going shopping in Amsterdam by a radicalized Islamist with an AK -47, which you can't even get guns anywhere in Holland. And just to accentuate the point, stuck a knife in his chest with a note on it of who would be next. Wow. And so I knew these people. And so I've seen firsthand what happens if you let the political Islamification take over your country. And I think, yeah, there's something going on with the construction. We'll
just pretend we're not hearing it. OK. And so Krish was talking about this. And we've talked on the show a lot about what people are getting really spun up and fearful of. And so I really
wanted to sharpen iron with him today. because he was coming at it from such a knowledgeable background of the Quran and And and you're really Indian culture as well a lot of people don't know that the most Muslims in the world live it Here's here's the order of countries Indonesia India Pakistan Bangladesh It's a long time before you hit Iraq Iran and Somalia and all those others But he's right. He's right that we cannot let this is that that? Is that outside? Yeah, it
is okay. We'll just we'll just ignore. We're
under construction. We have been for sorry about that We're gonna five years stop talking about it people won't hear it in a minute And he's so right about what he was saying he did two services I attended the first when I heard the second one like oh, man You're really you're really firing on all single cylinders, but I needed to talk to him and sharpen some ire about what I call bazookas I Said we have these bazookas that we create online And the problem with the
bazooka online is anybody can fire it. So you may build something you want to fire. For example, if you say, we're funding our own demise with $4 billion given to Muslim nonprofits, which is, I think, a number that has been created. It's got legs somewhere. It got a lot of legs. It grew. It grew. What happens is if you fire this, so the bazooka is meant to say, we got
to stop funding Muslim nonprofits. But what happens is you fire that bazooka, and the first thing my wife, Tina, said is, we got to get Abbott out. I'm like, hold on, let's slow down for a second. And why not, right? It makes sense that you say, wait a minute, if Abbott is doing this, then we've got to get another governor. So you have to be very careful. The other thing is how many mosques are in the Dallas Metro, Fort Worth
area. There's a number that's out there 245 in the last five years and there's a map that pops up on Facebook and all this stuff happens and Krish actually got to be true. It's got to be true It's actually only one has been built in the last two years. One has been expanded There are a few other small ones, but most of these mosques were built in 79 in the 80s The most recent big one was built in 2018 and I agree that we should not have this epic center or the
Meadow as it's called. It is now, yeah. But when you fire bazookas, what good American Christian people do is they go put up signs and hammer pieces of pork to it. This is not the way we're going to stop this. No, you stop that by getting on the zoning committee, by being on your city council, by being... part of the school board. This is how we do it, which has been such a driver of Bridge Church. And look what we got. We got our Mayor Briley. So I really wanted to talk
to him about the bazookas. And man, it was so wonderful because he said, yeah, you know, you're right. I agree. I got to temper that a little bit because I'm just firing off stuff. And what happens is the message gets lost. And so it was so wonderful. to sit here, because man, this guy is knowledgeable. He is beyond, beyond sharp.
There are real dangers. Muslim Brotherhood, which was started in the 50s by British intelligence, funny enough, because they hated Egyptian President Nasser because he was taking over the Suez Canal. This is all history, which were not taught in America ever, but they have been. truly the funding, the basis of all terrorism, all Islamic terrorism around the world. You might remember President Obama came into office. You remember the first thing he did in his first term? No, not offhand.
He went to Egypt on an apology tour and apologized to the Muslim Brotherhood for being racist. I'm paraphrasing a lot there. That was the first thing he did. So one other bazooka that we fire is, hey man, they are procreating like rabbits. Everyone of them has got four wives. That means they're going to have four kids at 16 before you know it. So this is factually didn't happen in Holland, didn't happen in the UK, didn't happen in Sweden. Yes, no doubt. It looked like 2 .6
kids from what I read. It's 2 .6 versus 1 .5. And that is a problem. Even 1 .5 will be dead in a hundred years. Nobody left. We need to make more babies for sure. But immigration and the biggest pop in the Dallas -Fort Worth metro area of Muslim immigrants by about a hundred thousand extra ones was during the 2000 -2024 Biden administration. This is what Minneapolis is. Minneapolis is filled with Somalians. Somalians came in because there was a temporary protected status because of the
state of their country. When you hear President Trump saying, go back to your country, it's horrible. The only business they got there is killing people. That's why they were brought in. They're brought into a particular area. to work for particular companies who need cheap labor. But then you, in essence, let them overrun an area. Same thing happened with Haitians. Remember we had there eating the dogs? Those Haitians were brought there for the factories. So this is a political
issue that we need to solve spiritually. There you go. Thank you. And that is really what was on my heart. And Krish completely agrees. I gotta tell you, I was a little anxious about saying to him, hey man, I think you need to tone some things down because I'm out there on a different battlefield than you are and I'm seeing what the result is. And if what we're saying is making people hammer pieces of pork to signs outside of a mosque, we're not really winning the war.
That's not how we're gonna do it. There's a lady, Don't take it from Adam, please. There's a lady, Susan Kokinda. She's part of Promethean Action. I think I've played a clip of hers before on our show. She lives right outside of Dearborn, Michigan. And she's a little older than we are. She's, I think, 68, 69. I remember that clip. Have you seen this clip? No, I don't know. I remember one you played. Oh, on our show? Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. This is a new one.
I don't know this one. OK. And she's been with the Lyndon LaRouche organization when it still existed. I think she actually had a falling out with them. But she has been a political strategist and in the game since the 70s, so longer than I've been doing it. And she and her partner, Barbara, I forget her name, and when I say partner, business partner. Yeah, I know you got to qualify that these days. They do three 15 minute reports
every single week on YouTube. So I can't really call it a podcast, but and she says something the other day, which mirrored exactly what I feel is happening. Remember Dearborn. So if you talk about Dearborn, it's lost the Muslim. Dearborn, by the way, has been a big attractor for Arab Americans since the 70s. I mean, this is You know, we have places where Indians live. We have places where Chinese live. We have places where Hasidic Jews live. I mean, this is America. You
know, look at Fredericksburg. What are we? You know, how many black people do we have here? We're just not attracting many of them. Luckily, we're seeing more and more. You know, we are we are diversifying a bit in freight. So listen to what she has to say about Dearborn, Michigan. Clearly, people look at what is happening in Europe from the standpoint of the complete open
borders. and flooding these societies with Muslim immigrants, many of whom are being deliberately deployed to carry out a cultural warfare against the civilizations of these European nations. That is a world economic forum globalist deployment. You see a certain reflection of that here in Minnesota with the Somali population. and the way that it has essentially been weaponized. In other words, certain layers who are being weaponized by the global elite. But that is not
a Muslim question. That is the global elite using this to try and destroy cultures, to create terrorist capabilities, something that we've documented. So people have that legitimate concern, and it's especially acute when you look at the European countries. And it would have been especially acute if we hadn't got Donald Trump back in and
we've now closed our borders to that. Then there is the question of God fearing people from Muslim countries who want to emigrate to the United States and have emigrated to the United States because they want a better life. And they are not trying to change our culture. And I'm living like seven miles away from Dearborn. Newsflash people, there is no Sharia law in Dearborn, okay? This is one of the rabbit holes that everybody wants to be driven down. Now, are there problems
in Dearborn? Yeah, it's because you have a layer of the Muslim and Arab American population, which is bat shit crazy liberals. And that's their problem. And then you have many other people, many of whom voted for Donald Trump and in fact delivered the victory for Trump in Michigan because of the vote. from the Muslim community in Wayne County here was one of the absolutely critical
margins for President Trump winning. I can't speak for what is going on in other states, but given the fact that we have the largest Muslim Arab -American population in the Western hemisphere, about six miles away from me, you know, the majority of people in Dearborn are not trying to Islamify the United States. They are part of our society and our culture, and they practice their religion. shoulder to shoulder with Jews and Christians.
This is a psi war operation. It's taking a legitimate danger that the global elites themselves are deploying these populations and especially radicalized and criminal populations for their purposes. And then trying to do one of these broad brush, everywhere you have a mosque, you have Sharia law. Again, I've got news for you. It's not true. So this is what we're really up against, a psi war, psi op. And I love how she describes what's
happening in Dearborn. I got a lot of people telling me in Dearborn like, well, yeah, it's been this way forever. But yes, Muslim Brotherhood Council on American -Islamic Relations and its intent is to divide and conquer. Divide and conquer the population and then you can take them over.
Right back to Sal Alinsky's. rules for radicals exactly spot on and the more we get all spun up and mad and post stuff online the more we're playing right into their hands bingo right into their hands and bingo was his name and and that's what i love about where Chris is taking this and man i i mean I think he has like a two or three day seminar. We should probably think about having him do that here at the church. Well, this would be a good feeder into that. Yeah,
we need a lot more knowledge about it. We do. Because it's true. Quran and Islam, it's not compatible with our Western values. But that doesn't mean that every brown person is out here to kill us. Exactly. And that's also not who we are as Americans and not who we are as Christians and believers. Thank you for saying that because let's start with Christians and then we can talk about Americans. But I did some research. I did a little deep dive. I've been really... Why does
that not surprise me, my brother? Well, I... I posed the question, and of course I used AI for this. I've got Logos, and then I've got a sermon AI, which is another Bible study program that's all internal unless you tell it to go external. It's a robot. It works. It's a robot. Actually, it's good though. I asked the question, what are the top... Actually, I'm going to look it up. What are the top... biblical virtues that
are the most forgotten or overlooked. And I felt like I was prompted to do this because a young man who's a church planter reached out to me and said, you know, value your experience and your story and listen to some of your sermons. And he said, what would you tell a young new pastor starting out, someone starting in ministry, what's the one thing? I'm like, one thing? No, sorry. Can't do that. And so he got me thinking and I was going to see if I had this locked in
on here. Here it is. By the way, there's nothing I love more in a podcast than silence. I really mean that. It's a beautiful thing. Dead air. You never have dead air anymore. Everyone has to fill it up all the time. Boy, no kidding.
We're going for the phone. I have it here. The reason I wanted to look this up is because I've been struggling with a lot of the bravado I see in the Christian world, whether it's pastors showing themselves at the gym pumping iron, I'm all about temple care, mind, body, spirit, but we don't need to see you flex to this bravado, proud, loud, railing against... said, a rage against the machine, they're raging against Islam, they're raging against Mormons, they're raging
against whoever they are, not them. And I'm going, this is not the Jesus way. And it's been really just on my heart. And so I did a little query this morning on... I got to find out which one I used. I've got... Here it is. And it's called underrated. biblical virtues, and here's the top five that are underappreciated in our culture, underrated. Humility is number one. This comes back to your daily grind from today. Yeah, I
can see where that got informed. And I was thinking, because I had written down off the top of my head before I even looked this up, when that young man asked me the question, he didn't ask me in real time, so I get to formulate my answer a little bit. And I grabbed my little pad here and I wrote down, Humility, the greatest and least appreciated virtue. I wrote that down in real time after I was thinking about his question. I wrote down some other things, but humility
is number one. Number two is meekness. Number three, patience. Number four, contentment. Number five, forgiveness. Think about how Christ has tried to teach us to respond to our enemies. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who persecute you. If they compel you to go one mile, go two. I mean, we have so jacked this around, and it's really been bothering me lately because I have a lot of dear friends that are beating a lot of drums right now. And listen, I'm all
about speaking up. our constitution has given us the right and privilege to push back. And so I think we should do that, but I think we should do it always. And Chris actually read this scripture respectfully, respectfully with respect, with honor, not this torches and pitchforks mentality, hair on fire as you use it, my new
favorite term, hair on fire. And so as I was reading, thinking about addressing the issues that are at hand, it's like, how do we address this as not just a Bible -believing Christian, but how do we believe it as one who says, I am intentionally conforming in my life to Christ? What would Jesus do? This is interesting because as Chris and I were talking this morning, we
had this meeting. He says, why is it, he posed the question, why is it that and I think some of this is true and some of it is rehashed social media images, that Muslims can stop traffic around Times Square, you can't even drive near Times Square, but Times Square to do prayer five times a day, but we're afraid to go out and sing carols and stop traffic because we're praising our God, our Jesus. And part of his message is, We're not even showing our brand let alone. Do we even
know what it is? I would say if that's true, and I'm saying if because I know a lot of a lot of believers who are bold with their faith I Think we can make these broad sweeping generalizations Where one size fits all you know I hear it all the time well pastors just aren't speaking up about culture, and I'm going What am I, chopped liver over here? I've done it for the last number of years and will continue. We just got our mayor elected and we will get more involved and connected.
And there'll be some appointments coming with that election from our church. So, no, we're in the game. But when I hear these broad generalizations, it really, I have to take a step back and go, okay, let me think through what they're trying to say. Not what they just said. What's the message behind what they just said? Because there's more
to it. You got to see it in 3D. And so I'm concerned about my brothers, my sisters, getting on social media, raging against the machine, whatever the machine of the day is, because it's not always the same. It changes. And my ask for believers is to is to understand the sky is not falling. Jesus, unlike Elvis, it says Elvis has left the building. Jesus has not left the building. And we as Christians need to get our faith back on
track. If we're jumping on our phones in the morning and our screens and we're getting our news before we're getting in the scripture, We are already off -center. We're already fighting an unfair fight. And so, my appeal, my cry, my exhortation, my ask is, could we get back to the scripture and get grounded in God's Word before we get versed in all these other fields? I'm okay with going outside my house. I'm okay with stepping into another ballpark and playing
the game. You know what I mean? Somebody say, well, this is our ball field. No, no, it's all of ours. It's the grounds level. But I want to make sure that I am prayed up, that I'm worded up, that I've been walking with Jesus, not just from a distance, but up close, so that when I do speak into culture or into a situation, I'm doing it mindfully, not mindlessly. Scripture says we have the mind of Christ. We need to tap into that and then respond accordingly, not react,
but respond. And what I'm seeing from a lot of my brothers and sisters, especially on social media and platforms, podcasting, is reaction, reaction, reaction, reaction. And then they go back and either clean up the mess or they don't, which is even worse, to come back and say, I
miss that. I was wrong. Swing and a miss. I told you a story one time, a couple came to me in church after a Wednesday night, it was about six years ago, and I'd been talking about, I was thinking dispensationalism, but I was saying cessationalism. Two very different things. But I didn't realize it. And so I just got the terms mixed up and they came to me very kind of upset, not mad, but just, you know, that's not right. We're dispensationalists. You're talking about,
and I said, what do you mean? And when we talked about it, and they brought me an article, and I sat down, I read it, and I went, oh my gosh, I totally flipped that. And I got up the next Wednesday night, and I apologized and repented to the church. and said, and I did it with a smile. I messed up. I made a mistake. I know, shock and awe, everybody. Human. But I'm a human, and I made a mistake, and I want to apologize for that. I want to clarify, so I kind of went
back into it and retaught it accurately. And it was an honest mistake. It wasn't a big deal. But I remember after that service, people coming to me and thanking me for, they said, I've never heard a pastor say he was sorry for something he said in a pulpit. Really? And I'm like, what? Well, get ready because there'll be more. You speak several hundred thousand words every month. You're going to have some misses. Oh, wait until
you get going as a podcaster, brother. Oh, I'm just quite dribbling my chances to stick my foot in my mouth. But you know what? We got to be willing to go, you know what? I was wrong. I missed that. I didn't have the right information. Why can't we just... Be good people and good Christians and back up and say I'm so sorry.
I miss that You talked about praying up, you know, and so I and I shared some of this list with you the other day I just have a list of when I when I think of oh, oh, wow Here's the fear. This is all the things that are happening as a new Christian I have such a benefit because these things are so fresh on my heart. This is part of the reason why I took it from a conspiracy
theory to conspiracy therapy. Timothy 1 .7, right off the top, for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. Like that was a big one for me when I was just starting to… So let me define sound mind. Please. It literally means the ability to think well. Perfect. It's that simple. Chronicles 32 .7. This kind of goes back to the actual Muslim fear thing. Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged because the King of
Assyria and the vast army with him. For there is a greater power with us than with him. With him is only the arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles. It's how this country was born, man. We prayed to God and this little ragtag group of guys defeated the British. This is true. Mind -bending, miraculous. Ephesians 6 .12, this is the one that, for me, you know this, this is one of my, I'm still looking to get something
tattooed for this. I don't know how to do it yet. for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, this is the truth, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and principalities, etc. And then one that I'm always, I always have this kind of, when I talk about Eddie Murphy, who doesn't vote, he says, God's got this, not that I'm saying he shouldn't vote, but Daniel 2 .21,
he removes kings and he raises up kings. And, you know, so when I really, When I really just want to pray up, I think of these scriptures. I'm like, what am I worried about? It doesn't mean I don't have to take action. It doesn't mean we don't have things to do. But even when the disciples wanted to replace Judas, they prayed and then they cast lots. The way I read that is, okay, Lord, I'm praying and now I'm going to vote. And you've always said, like, pray over
who you're going to vote for. Don't just vote because of a letter in front of their name or whatever. Vote, pray about it. And this has changed my life so much. I probably would have been spun up out there slinging pork. So let me give another scripture. It's right in line here, and you'll recognize this immediately. 2 Corinthians 10 .3, for though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. I mean, we don't have to take another step. Just do that. Because
that is what we're talking about. You've heard me for the last few years stand and say, we do not have a political problem in America. We have a spiritual problem. And I will continue to beat that drum because it's true. And when I see my brothers and sisters get so spun up that they're no longer tapping into the mind of Christ. They're no longer thinking well in that spirit they've been given. sound mind. They're not operating
in a sound mind. And it's just like kings and rulers, you know, we're told in Romans that we're to submit to them. But it says, because they have your good in mind, it's because they, and they will reward the good and punish the bad. But what that doesn't say, but it is saying, is that if those rulers are wrong, they need to be deposed. And that is a biblical precedent. And God will turn them into a donkey and make them eat grass out on the hillside. Didn't end
well. So that's the thing is at what level, there's always going to be a tension. In fact, when I was writing this young man, I haven't given it to him yet. One of the things is you have to learn to embrace tension because we're talking about tension here. At what point do you stand and fight? Do you stand and stand? Do you, when you push back, when you show up, when you protest, the things that we're allowed to do, peaceful protest, of course, not seeing a lot of those
right now. And I saw Senator Mullen cracking down on that before the Senate hearing. It's pretty interesting. But tension, embrace it. be afraid of it if it goes away. I had a professor, Dr. Wallace Roark, philosophy professor, godly man, called me into his office one day, scared the bejeebies out of me. He was very intimidating because he was so smart. We all kind of revered him, you know, and he said, Mr. Perutt, could you come into my office, please? And I'm like,
oh, what did I do? You know, I'm going down the list. I think I'm okay. And I go in there, I sit down. I mean, I feel, he's behind this big desk and his room looks like an F5 tornado just went through there. That's how you know he's smart. There's books and papers and shelves and it's, it is chaos. It wasn't to him, but it was to me. I sat down. He says, I need to ask you a question, Mr. Pruitt. And I said, okay. He goes, do you have a knot in your stomach? I never
would have expected that. I said, yes, I do. He said, be afraid if it ever goes away. Wow. What he was doing was following up on a challenge I issued in a class, one of his philosophy classes, where we were talking about, it came down to, he didn't identify it, but it was the tension that we live in as believers who believe Scripture and stand in the world in which we have to navigate. There will always be tension in that. And he said, be afraid if it goes away. If it goes away,
that's so good. I was like, whoa. Yeah. I walked out, wrote that down. What's your list again? You had five. You can go through that again because I really like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a very good. I love the meekness one because I immediately I think because the meek shall inherit the earth. And there's nothing weak about me. Meek is not weak. Meek is literally power
under control. It's like having a car that's fast, but it doesn't show but it doesn't show it You don't have to you don't have to you've got it, but that doesn't mean you're using you know I'm saying right and meekness is that strength under control. That's what it literally means You know the Greek word for it. I don't know okay top of my head, but I believe because you know man We so we know so little we don't learn
anything anymore, but I love that. I'm gonna have to look that up meek Does not mean weak it does not very good So humility was the first, meekness the second, patience. I love that King James really did it right when they identified the word patience as long -suffering, because patience means to suffer long. Wow. That's what it literally means. The scripture talks about God is patient with us. He's suffering long time. He's suffering long with us. Isn't that beautiful?
Number four is contentment. Break that one down. Oh, contentment simply means being satisfied with what you have. Yes. Not this living with this striving, this consumer mentality. More, more, more, more. More me, me, me. More clicks, more likes. More everything. More followers. More influence. Yes. No, contentment is, and these all work together. You can see how they're like fingers on a hand, right? They all work
together. I think it was Paul who said, You know, I've been, I've had a lot, I've had little, I've always been, and by the way, that's me. I've had millions, I've had nothing, and I'm kind of okay, but I am okay. I am okay. I don't care. I'm good. Okay, so Annette and I, we've said the same thing. We may not have had millions, but we were fine. We've done well, we've not done well. And here's the deal. We never lost our joy through the journey. Amen. That's right.
We never got bitter. We never, started to look at other people and go, well, why do they have something and why don't? Why am I suffering? Well, that's the covetousness, of course. It is. So this idea of contentment, Paul says this, godliness with contentment is great gain. Godliness with contentment is great gain. And that was in that passage you were just quoting, where I've been debased, I've had nothing, I've had it all. Godliness with contentment is great gain.
That's true riches and true wealth. Amen to that. Isn't that beautiful? Because I'll tell you, when I had millions and millions, unhappiest time of my life. I get it, brother. And I'm not the first one to say that. When I saw that little BBC clip of you and saw you in your gold lace clip and then your posturing, I was going... That is all BS, man, dude. Just because I know your heart. Because you know me, yeah. I know deep underneath all that facade. Look at me,
look at me. This kid's trying to go, man, I just want to make a difference somehow, some way. And you're chasing something. The last one was forgiveness. Yes. And then it lists honorable mentions that almost made the list. Purity. Purity. Self -control. Well, that's right up there with patience. The top two for me of the fruit of the Spirit. Yeah. Hospitality, opening your home and life to others. We have some friends that
are very gifted in that area. Do we ever? Oh my God, you know what I'm talking about, Andrea. To the point where I'm like... We got to do something back because we're not doing enough. It does. It does. For sure. But that's a gift. And when they're in their gift, they're full of joy. Yes. You're so right. We always tell Andrea, no, we don't want it. We're not going to come there for Thanksgiving. You've doing so much. She's like, I love to do this. She does. She does.
Thank the Lord. Amen. Submission. Submission in its proper context, not abuse, but willing order and trust. Yes. So that word submit is such a... Americans struggle with that. Anybody in the West struggles with that because we default to the dark stuff. But there's submission to healthy leadership and healthy bosses, healthy supervisors, healthy CEOs. There are a lot of good people out there doing good things. And
I learned the hard way. I can rage against the machine and stay down here, or I can make a hand. and get up here. Every job I ever had outside of ministry, I got promotions all the time. Because I went in there and my dad taught me well on this, go make a hand. Go make a hand. Your job is to make him or her successful. And when I operated that way, there was blessing that came with that. I didn't even realize I was operating in a spiritual biblical principle, but it worked.
Say that, go make a hand, explain that again, because I think I interrupted you earlier when you were about to do that. The submission piece, submitting, the idea to go make a hand means you go do your best for them. They're paying you fair, you know, sometimes, most of the time, fair. You're for hire. And you said yes to the job. So now you have a responsibility to make them successful. Yes. Because if you will make them successful, Nine times out of ten, they'll
make you successful. What a lesson that is for our younger generation right now. It's kind of gotten lost. Oh, it's kind of gotten lost. Yeah. Like I just got a job, you know, just doing this for now, you know, biding my time. But the whole, that's part of America is making your company successful. Isn't it interesting when you meet somebody who's found joy in what they're doing and in your mind, you're thinking, God, that's not like what I'd consider a great job, but they
make it amazing. That's right. There's this girl who works at Planet Fitness in Bernie. I don't even know her name. I see her every couple of days, me and Annette. That girl has got life. And Annette asked her, are you the manager here? And she goes, no, I'm just one of them. She acts like a manager. She'll be a manager. Absolutely. In fact, she should have got promoted along.
She should be running that place. Because whenever all of the other kids are over there on their phones, ignoring you when you walk in, she's out there cleaning machines, cleaning the bathrooms. Straight up, man. She's doing it. And what will happen, somebody will see that. There'll be somebody who goes to that gym and says, I'm going to hire her. I don't even know what her skill set is. But if she'll apply that to anything, she'll
be successful. As someone who has hired over 800 people in my life, and you've hired a lot yourself. And fired a lot. Oh, absolutely. That is truly the secret to success, man. You're looking for the people who've got that. You don't even have to have all the skill set for the job, but
you got that. You're in like Flynn. You know what was important to me, and you're so right, when I was looking at this list, and the reason I am is because I've seen how our culture has so moved away from this and where we value, I even wrote this down, things that we value now. See if I put that into something. I wrote, I'm writing this young man, this young guy going
into ministry. Choose the forgotten biblical virtues, humility, contentment, forgiveness, meekness, patience, purity, over likes, clicks, views, followers, popularity, and influence culture. Because that seems to be what's garnering the attention now. And it is. But it's a short game. It is a very short game. Can you imagine being an influencer and you're just killing it? And then one bad bauble, and it's over. Immediately. You're done. Immediately. I've seen it happen
over and over and over again. I've watched it, and these people are destroyed. This is the reason why I never even want to do video for podcasts. Okay, explain that. That's interesting. This would look really cool. People listening want to know. Because, well, I'm a big theater of the mind guy, and that's why I love ears to hear. When listening to a podcast, you are building an image. You're using your brain. Your brain is building an image of what we're wearing, what
we're looking like, whatever. Maybe it's more subconscious than anything. You're not looking at us. You're not looking at this sign on the wall. You're not looking at the lighting. All of that distracts completely from what is being said. The subtleness of the human voice is, this is what I've done my entire life since I was 13 years old, to be able to, even the way I process our sound is meant for you listening in earbuds above anything else. It works pretty well in
the car too. This is how you can really communicate. We are so bad at listening. Our listening experience is so bad that 95, myself included, 95 % of people watch a movie with captions on. We went to that screening of Young Washington, it didn't have captions. I'm like, uh -oh. It's like watching The Chosen without captions. Yes, and you know what happened? We got dialed in. We got focused. Not for a second was I distracted by someone rustling with a candy wrap or anything. I was
like, I was in it. I was completely focused. That's the long game. That is the long game. Video, the YouTube pastors, they got a lot of... There was a lot more good looking. It's fun to watch them. Then they edit. And by the way, it's very dishonest when you see like a short and it jumps from left to right, from left to right, because they're cutting stuff out. What I just said, I love silence on a podcast. Give me three, four seconds of silence. You know what happens?
People go, what? What's happening? You know, one of my favorite moments in Korea and the Keeper is when the Amazon guy showed up. And Phoebe goes into a wild bark. To me, that's life, man. You just invited us into your house. As a listener, I'm now in your home laughing because Phoebe's losing her mind over the prime guy. That's why I never edit anything. I never edit anything out. There's no penalty against it. I was talking to one of our people at church, who, Damonette
had said, oh, Adam will do it. Like she wants to do a podcast. Adam will do it. Go talk to Adam. That's my girl. Wendy, lovely woman. And she has a really good idea. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. And I said, do you think in video? She says, no, I don't think so. I said, good. And I took her down the path. And she's a storyteller. She wants to tell stories. And I'm so excited about helping her, getting her
set up. Oh, clearly. These are the things that when podcasting started, This was the appeal. The appeal was not slickness. The appeal was, it was, hey, that's just some dude who's talking into a microphone. Doesn't even really sound all that great, but he's just telling his story, which some would call a soliloquy. It was the Don and Drew, the young couple who lives in a
farmhouse in Minnesota. It was Michael Butler, the rock and roll geek who was drinking three long necks after a bad gig where nobody showed up. I mean, that's what it was. And of course money came in and everyone thinks they have to professionalize, but it's not. That's why. I mean, you and I are both like, cause we're audio freaks, like what am I hearing? What does that sound? But at the same time it's like, oh, that's just life. That's just, hey, we're in a church.
We could have done this at your house. We might've got a bark out of Phoebe, but other than that, you're going to get pure studio sound. I like the mess because life is messy. Amen. It is. Embrace it. And video is... Yeah, I like watching Joe Rogan, and then I can see President Trump sitting there. That's interesting. But newsflash, 90 % of what people are watching on YouTube happens with the screen off in their pocket. They're listening to it. I was going to say, it's usually
me driving down the road. Exactly. Doing something else. Exactly. And too, isn't it different when you're watching? It turns. I'm not saying this for everybody, but sometimes when Annette and I watch a podcast, it feels like we're just watching TV again. It's almost entertainment as opposed to, am I deeply thinking about this? Is this going into me without distractions? So I don't know, just thinking in terms of just the dynamic
of it. We bought cameras, we were going to do, and we did like three of them and I hated them. And Annette was like, it was torture for her. She's a girl. Because all the distractions. How do I look? What is the shot like? And then I got to have a producer in here. We can't just do what we're doing in the middle of construction and just go, hey, just hit record, man. Let's just do it. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's important for people to hear. Yeah.
There may be people listening going, man, I've wanted to do a podcast, but I can't afford cameras in a studio and don't need it. Closets are great. There's a website I set up, hyperlocalpodcast .com, hyperlocalpodcast .com. You go there and there's my list of how you get started. You can get started for about, you know, 75 bucks. Man, that's great. Yeah. I've had that for a long time. You know, I'm looking forward to in the near future saying, we'll put that in the show
notes. Oh, this is coming. This is coming. I know. Tell a little bit, because we're getting there. We're making steps. We're getting ready. We're actually going to have a website. We're gonna have a little newsletter that reminds people that we're gonna do something. We're gonna have proper show notes. We're gonna have an actual way for you to send us feedback because this right here, this is a long -term project and I see it going beyond once a week. I agree. I'm
with you. I see it happening. I feel the progress and I feel the taps. I feel the God taps saying something's good here. Yeah, I'm in bro. I love that brother. Whatever we need to do to help people and that's our hearts. to lift up and encourage people and inspire them to grab hold of more than what they're enjoying right now. Because there's such a, even though the world's insane and there's chaos, there's so much good. And we want people to hear that. We want people
to know that. And we will do that again next week. We get to do this. We'll see you on Wednesday, everybody. This, this is a chance we did not miss This is life, we get to do this