Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey folks, this is Jesse Cope, back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are doing well, wherever y'all are, whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do appreciate y'all joining me and giving me a little bit of your time, a little piece of your day, a little piece of your day. Hopefully y'all get some extra tools for your toolbox and hopefully it helps our country even just a little bit. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast with others, tell others about it, thank you so much. I'm very grateful for that. For those of y'all who continue to offer words of encouragement, prayer support. Thank you very much. Prayer support. Thank you Very much.

Speaker 1: 1:11

Not a lot on the homestead. I actually used some pears off the tree to make a pie the other day. It was pretty good actually. Of course, I guess, if you put enough cinnamon and sugar in anything, almost had to cook them for a long time. They were pretty hard, but it's pretty good. Once you got it cooked down, I was pleased with that. We have some more to harvest off of that one tree.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Thank you, lord. I think that's it, father. Thank you for today. Thank you for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ, and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love, mercy, grace, forgiveness of our sins through the merit of your Son, jesus Christ. Mercy, grace, forgiveness of our sins through the merit of your son, jesus Christ. Forgive us, father, those sins, the ones we admit and the ones we don't, because we try and hide them or because we don't even know about them. Forgive us the ones we go back to time and time and time again. Forgive us our pride, our vanity. Forgive us for fearing men instead of you and going along with what the world says and what men say instead of you, father, help us, father, please, to seek you and your kingdom and your righteousness first. Help us to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Especially, father, often on the days of the mundane, the valleys, where we feel weighed down by anxieties, pressures, fears, doubts. Be with us, father, please. Draw close to us, draw close to those who are brokenhearted for whatever reason, those who are brokenhearted for whatever reason broken marriages, broken families, lost children, lost spouses, lost friends or family waiting, waiting on healing, waiting on love, waiting on a spouse, waiting on children. Draw close to them, father. Draw close to us all. Help us to feel your presence, to know that you're there, to know that we can trust you with our souls and that this world is only temporary, that it's not our home and that when it's over, we get to come spend eternity with you, father, where there's no more tears, no more sorrow, no more sadness, but joy, love, peace, comfort, timeless, comfort, timeless. Be with our country, lord. Be with the nations of all those who are listening across the world in different places. Help us to elect men who rule in fear of you. Guide our nation and our hearts back to you, father. Guide my words here in your son's name, we pray Amen.

Speaker 1: 4:55

Have you read your Bible? Today, I saw there's a gentleman online that I follow A priest or friar, I'm not sure about the terminology out of the UK actually and he made this comment talking about people looking for a church and reading the Bible, strengthening their faith. And I try and offer it on here most days. Folks, but if you really want to grow close to somebody right, we know this on a human level then we have to spend time with them, and so if you really want to develop that faith, you have to spend time with God. Right, read the Bible each day, even if just for a few minutes.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Come back in the evenings here on the podcast and join us for the scripture reading. Right? Just a few minutes almost always less than five minutes, almost always less than five minutes but read your Bible each day, pray each day, tell God what you're grateful for All the things he's blessed you with, asking for forgiveness for the sins that you've committed throughout the day or the ones that are weighing on your heart. Pray for those around you Spouse, parents, children, family, friends, co-workers, enemies and then pray for yourself, for your needs. Right, god knows what we need, but he likes to hear from us. So, and make that.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Folks. We've got to get to the point and I'm talking to myself here too. We've got to get to the point and I'm talking to myself here too. We've got to get to the point where, each day, that's our central focus, that's our primary goal. God first, everything else after that.

Speaker 1: 6:39

And the second thing on that list ought to be if you're married, your spouse, do you? Are you making sure that they know before you sit down on your fat rear end and watch sports or scroll your phone or go outside with your healthy rear end and body and work out for an hour or watch TV or whatever else that you're doing. Have you focused on your spouse first? Do you even know? Every once in a while we do a marriage podcast and we kind of go through some of the scriptures and the very clear roles and responsibilities defined in the scriptures for men and women. Do you even know what those are? Do you even know what you're supposed to be as a spouse? Read the Bible. See what God says. It's not confusing. Don't listen to other people. Go talk to God.

Speaker 1: 7:38

And just as an aside here, folks, if you are looking for a church, the simplest way go to a church. Do they preach out of the Bible? Does the pastor talk out of the Bible every Sunday or are they just up there kind of extemporaneously winging it off the cuff of their own thoughts or human wisdom? The cuff of their own thoughts or human wisdom? Find a church that goes to the Bible every day. And it does not matter what the denomination is, folks. You can have some denominations where most of that particular denomination is way off the railroad tracks, but every once in a while you'll find a really good one. And vice versa, you can have one that is mostly on the railroad tracks and doing the right thing. And every once in a while you're going to find a really bad one. Find one that preaches Christ and Christ crucified. And if you go to a place and they tell you that if you don't belong to their little church, their little denomination whether it's Catholic or Protestant or whatever else Orthodox if they're telling you that in order to receive salvation you have to belong to their church, they're adding things to God's word. Go find it. I challenge you to find that anywhere. And some of them are going to tell you well, our church is the only true church. No, there's no denomination mentioned in the Bible, not one single one. The thief on the cross had no denomination. Jesus Christ had no denomination. The apostles had no denomination. Get a little fired up about that, folks, when people start to add burdens like that. But again, it's so important. That's why it's so important to read the Word every day.

Speaker 1: 9:37

All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about Samuel Adams. We talk often about John Adams, john Quincy Adams. I stumbled across a quote today, actually a couple of quotes. The first one isn't by John Adams. We're going to start with that. It's by Horace Greeley, if I can find it real quick, and I'm pulling a couple of these quotes today, particularly out of the Patriots Bible edited by Dr Richard Lee. You can find them a bunch of places.

Speaker 1: 10:14

I might actually pull some more out of America's God and Country Encyclopedia quotations. There's some online resources. Avalon Project out of Yale is pretty good, depending on what you're looking at. The presidential project Online it's pretty good. There was another one that I wanted to tell you all about and I cannot remember. I think it's called foundersorg. Maybe I need to look that up, but that's a good one too. But these three hard copy resources America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotes by William J Federer, the Patriots Bible edited by Dr Richard Lee and the Founders Bible by the Wall Builder Association Phenomenal resources. I talk about them every so often. I really actually talk about them quite often. I just haven't in the last couple months We've been in different places, but they do a great job of tying, of showing how tied our nation is to God and Jesus Christ, and that's why we're struggling so much today, because we've ignored that tie. So this first quote by Horace Greeley he was one of our great newspaper men of the 19th century.

Speaker 1: 11:27

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. We all want liberty. We claim we want liberty. Right, we claim that we want, we claim that we want that. That's our goal. Right, a lot of people do. Some mean it, some don't. Some don't even know what they mean. Right, a lot of people do. Some mean it, some don't. Some don't even know what they mean. Right, because liberty isn't the ability to just do whatever the heck we want to do, whenever we want to do it, however we want to do it. Liberty is freedom to do what we want to do, so long as it doesn't hurt those around us. Right, and that's a difference. But the goal of Republican governments is liberty.

Speaker 1: 12:08

Benjamin Rush talked about that. I think it was Benjamin Rush. That's a whole different ballgame than democracy. But if we want liberty, if we want the ability to live our lives in the way that we see fit, we've got to have morality. I think Winthrop, again, was the man that said you know, we're either going to be ruled by the Bible or the bayonet. The more we want to self-rule right, the more we want to govern our own lives, the more self-control we have to have. The less self-control we have, the more we're going to be ruled by a dictator. And so if we want liberty, we've got to have morality, we've got to be able to control ourselves right, which we can't do today, which is exactly why we're losing liberty. Well, okay, so we're losing liberty because we're not a moral and virtuous people anymore. So why are we not a moral and virtuous people?

Speaker 1: 13:04

Horace Greeley tells us right here you can't have morality without faith. And if you know anything about Horace Greeley, you know he was talking about Christianity, as were the overwhelming, almost universal majority of our great leaders and founders, especially early on. In our nation. This was born a Christian nation. In our nation. This was born a Christian nation. They weren't talking about Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or Mother Natureism or atheism or even Judaism. They were talking about Christianity. So if you want liberty, you've got to have morality. If you want morality, you've got to have Jesus Christ, sam Adams, right. What do we know about Sam Adams? What do you all know about Sam Adams? If somebody came up and asked you about Sam Adams right now, what could you tell them? Well, if you don't know much, sam Adams is considered the father of the American Revolution, so somebody that might be good for us to know a thing or two about, maybe just a little bit more than we know about a particular pop singer or NBA player or NFL player or the most viral online personality.

Speaker 1: 14:34

He instigated the Boston Tea Party, signed the Declaration of Independence, called for the first Continental Congress and served as a member of Congress until 1781. Helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution, served as Lieutenant Governor under John Hancock, was later Governor of Massachusetts. Helped form the Committees of Correspondence. That's a huge one, folks. We need to do some podcasts on that at some time. The Committees of Correspondence really helped bring the colonies together prior to the Revolution and today we really need something like that desperately. And maybe there is something like that already out there and they're just kind of keeping it under wraps, but we really need not associated with either party. We need some correspondence between the states that exclude the federal government, between patriots and people, especially people that have any kind of talent for leadership and who truly love our country and therefore love her founding, faith and principles.

Speaker 1: 16:11

So this committee just a little bit here. There's a brief blip on it. It was originally formed in Boston and had three goals. The first goal was to delineate the rights of colonists. As men, you know, what rights do we have as citizens? What are our God-given rights, which? This job is pretty easy for us already, because our founders laid that out. We just need to remember it. We've forgotten it.

Speaker 1: 16:38

What are our rights as men? How are these rights being violated? The list is long, folks, but one of the best examples, one of our most important fights, is education. We don't have God-centered, bible-centered education today. Our children aren't being taught the truth. They aren't being taught God and Jesus Christ and the Bible God and Jesus Christ in the Bible and you can't teach them. It's not only that they aren't being taught, it's that they can't be taught in a school, and probably even a simpler one than that that I should have thought of to start with is the right to life Abortion. We've had 60 million, over 60 million of our fellow citizens denied the right to life, so that would be one example of how our rights are being violated today. And then we need to publicize these and talk about these and make sure that people know them. There's different ways. Do it in person is the best, obviously, but you know, social media X seems to be a pretty good place to go these days. Not a whole lot of what they call the legacy media is very helpful, the mainstream media, but anywhere where you can spread the truth and talk about what's going on amongst the states.

Speaker 1: 18:22

He wrote the Rights of the Colonists in 1772. This is a little excerpt out of it, the right to freedom being the gift of the Almighty. The rights of the colonists as Christians may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institution of the great lawgiver and the head of the Christian church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament. I've only got a minute. We're going to come back. We're going to spend a few days on Samuel Adams folks, but there's two things that pop into my head Our founders.

Speaker 1: 18:59

There's two things that we don't understand today, that you see in this quote. One this was a Christian nation almost universally. That's the background, that was their framework, their worldview. And if we don't have a citizenry that are following the principles of Christ and that want those principles of Christ enacted in our courts, our constitution, our laws and they were, they were Don't let anybody tell you that they weren't at the beginning, they were. We talk about that a lot on this podcast. But if we don't have that, then we can't have America. We can't have America where you have some combination of Christian and Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or atheist. It's not going to work. You've got to have Christians running the country and the principles of Christ involved in our public institutions, laws, constitutions.

Speaker 1: 20:02

The other thing here is he talks about you know how do you want to understand what's the best way to understand this? It's to read the Bible. We talk about this every day on the podcast. You really want to know what your rights are as an American citizen, as a Christian, you have to read the Bible. He's talking about particularly the New Testament here.

Speaker 1: 20:22

Why is that such a big deal? Because there seem to be so many quoteunquote Christians today that are trying to tell you that you need to belong to a particular denomination that that's going to give you assurance of salvation, and sadly, a lot of these people are coming from a denomination that fought really hard for a long time not to allow the common man to read the Bible. Why is that important? I'm going to go a little over here today because our founders knew that they lived, that they escaped their ancestors, previous generations right there. They escaped from the old world from Europe under the thumb of that combination of state and church. That was a political, man-made combination Either the state exerting influence to where the government tortured and murdered and imprisoned anyone that went away from that particular church, or the government just did it on their own. But that combination where you have a government that just wants one denomination and if you don't follow that denomination you're going to either be put in prison or your property confiscated, all of your estate, you're going to be tortured, right, your family's going to be destitute.

Speaker 1: 21:52

And our founders, they knew this, they knew what they were trying to get away from and they knew how important it was to be able to read the Bible, because they had had to fight that institution for so long for the ability to read the Bible on their own. And we just throw it away like trash. Today we don't spend any time on it, we don't read it and we certainly don't treasure it as something that people had to give their lives for just for us to be able to read each day. For us to be able to read each day. Don't let anybody tell you that you have to belong to a particular domination in order to receive salvation the only way for salvation, for you to have salvation is through Jesus Christ. And don't downplay the importance and the historical relevance of understanding that a lot of people that tell you that you have to belong to that denomination are often the very same, that that's the same denomination that tried to keep people from having the Bible in their hands to begin with. There are other denominations that do it, folks, but but, but that's a big one.

Speaker 1: 23:08

Read your Bible every day, know what it says, listen to our founders, like Sam Adams. You want to know what your rights are. You want to know what they should be as men, as Christians. Read your Bible every day, all right, god bless y'all. God bless your families. God bless your marriages. God bless America. We'll talk to y'all again real soon, folks Looking forward to it.