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 and whatever part of the day you're in. True to appreciate y'all joining me, giving me a little bit of your time, a little piece of your day. Hopefully you'll get something out of it. Add some tools to your toolbox. Hopefully it'll help our country turn back to God and Jesus Christ, even if just a little bit. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast and tell others about it, thank y'all so much. Very grateful for that. For those of y'all that continue to give me words of encouragement, thank y'all as well. Very grateful for that. For those of y'all that continue to give me words of encouragement, thank y'all as well. I'm very grateful for that. And for those of y'all that offer prayers for the podcast and for me, incredibly grateful also. Thank you, homestead.

Speaker 1: 1:00

Not a lot, not a lot. We got some sprinkles yesterday, but not even enough to get the steps or the porch completely covered, so just a little tease. But it was enough to drop the temperature a few degrees, which was nice. I know this is probably some of y'all. This is going to be a thing and some it's not. But if you're a pumpkin spice fan in the fall Starbucks which I have my own issues with Starbucks these days based on their morality or virtue or lack thereof, but in years past I have always been a big fan of their pumpkin spice latte. I haven't gotten one in a while again because of my own hesitation about supporting them. But they started serving them again recently, which is kind of exciting and sad all at the same time. But, good Lord, it's hard to enjoy stuff in the fall when the temperature outside is about enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. It just doesn't feel quite right that that's not a huge concern for the majority of people in the world, but there's something about trying to enjoy fall tastes and smells and scents. That's awful hard to do when it definitely feels like summer.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Father, thank you for today. Thank you for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ, and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love. Thank you for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ, and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love, mercy, forgiveness, grace. Thank you for all the many blessings you bestow upon us, all the resources you've given us, the people in our lives, different seasons. Forgive us, lord, forgive us our lack of gratitude. Forgive us our selfishness, our pride, our greed, our unbelief. Forgive us for wanting to go our own way instead of following you. Be with our nation. Be with the nations of all those around the world who listen. Help all of us to turn back to you and your son, jesus Christ. Help us to help those that have less than we do. Help us to seek you and your kingdom and your righteousness first, to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength to love our neighbors as ourselves. Strengthen our marriages, strengthen our faith. Be with our leaders. Help them to rule in fear of you. Father, thy kingdom, come and guide my words here. Father, please, in your son's name, we pray Amen. And Father, watch over those who listen to and share the podcast. Be with them and their families, guide them, bless them, surround us with your angels. Father, in your son's name, we pray Amen.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Have you made time to read your Bible today, to spend some time with God? I can't harp on this enough, folks. It's why I talk about it each day. One of the main reasons we're in the mess we're in today is because we have become a Bible-illiterate society, and maybe you think well, what difference does it make if I read my Bible? You know outside, obviously of to yourself, but the more of us that read our Bible each day and look to God each day and understand the Word, even if just a little bit better folks, it's not like we're going to—no person is ever going to understand the Bible completely, but we can either get a little closer to God and Jesus Christ or a little closer to the devil, and every day we spend reading the word of God, we're going to get a little bit closer to God and Jesus Christ. So make time. Find some time. Five minutes, even just five minutes. Folks Come back here on the podcast in the evenings and join us when we do the scripture reading. I'm not the best reader in the world. I get that If you can survive that. But come back. It's usually three minutes, five minutes tops. I don't think we've ever had a segment maybe one segment go over five minutes.

Speaker 1: 6:09

Make some time to pray Again, even if just for a few minutes. Tell God thank you for something, ask his forgiveness and his help overcoming some shortcoming in your life Right, some sin in your life. Pray for those around you, pray for yourself, pray for your country. Just a few minutes A couple times a day. Even. Do it in the morning when you first wake up. Do it in the evening right before you go to bed. Even if you read the Bible for five minutes and prayed twice a day for five minutes, that's still 15 minutes out of your entire day. Folks Develop the habit, just like anything else, just like working out. Right, If you're overweight, you don't go out and start to try and run five miles. You go out and you walk a quarter mile, walk a half mile Tops and then you start to increase as you're able.

Speaker 1: 7:11

If you're married, are you making your spouse your top priority each day? Had an interesting comment from somebody that I happen to know is not married recently online, somebody that I've talked to over the years, and they made the comment which is so true that we need to look when we're looking for a spouse. We need to look for those godly traits in that spouse, like you need to pay attention. And Benjamin Franklin said something I haven't read this quote a long time and I'm paraphrasing a little bit because I don't have it right in front of me but he said we need to keep our eyes wide open before marriage and half closed. After marriage Right, and what he obviously meant is after marriage you want to give your spouse a little grace Right, but before marriage, you want to make sure that you find a spouse who wants to follow God and whose second priority each day is you, before books or TV or movies or phones or sports or workouts, or children or parents or anything else other than God. You're their second priority right, and look at the way they act, look at the fruits of their actions.

Speaker 1: 8:23

Folks, if you're looking for a spouse, read through the Bible and see how a spouse is actually supposed to interact right, talk to this person about it. Good Lord, don't go into marriage blind, not having ever talked about it, especially sex, because theoretically although most of us don't seem to adhere to this today you're not supposed to have sex as a Christian before you get married. And, folks, if you did, that's fine, there's forgiveness for it. It's going to cause some heartache, I guarantee you. That's one thing that we don't understand today. We can have eternal forgiveness for sins, but that doesn't negate the earthly consequences of those sins. Right, if you cheat on your spouse, you can have forgiveness through God, but that doesn't mean that you're not going to have to pay the price, pay the consequences, for those actions here on earth. So you know this idea, right? You hear, I can't even believe I'm about to say this, but you're not going to take your spouse, your future spouse, for a test drive to see if sex works right. That's not how it goes. But you can talk to them about these principles, do you like? Is your goal to adhere to these principles laid out? And I had this question the other day on mine. Okay, what are you talking about specifically?

Speaker 1: 9:42

And this goes back to why we need to read the Bible each day. We don't even know where to look. You go to Ephesians 5. Ephesians 5. Go to Ephesians 5. Go to 1 Corinthians 5. Go to Ephesians 5. Go to 1 Corinthians 7. Go to 1 Peter 3. Go to Titus 2. Read through the Song of Solomon. Those are just some places to start. Folks Go in there and talk.

Speaker 1: 10:07

If you're looking for a spouse and you find somebody and y'all are starting to talk seriously about that, don't hope that things are going to work out in that area. Talk to each other about those specific verses, about the roles and responsibilities of a husband in a marriage, of a wife in a marriage. Don't just go along and make the vow rashly, folks, and then pay the price later on. It's a hard price to pay. Talk to each other. How much better to find that you're the one of you doesn't want to follow their roles and responsibilities and get out. I went way longer on that, apparently. I needed to talk about that some today. So those places again in the Bible go to Ephesians 5, 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3, titus 2, thong of Solomon. Look at those. Talk to each other about those.

Speaker 1: 11:12

If you think you've found somebody you want to spend the rest of your earthly life with, think you've found somebody you want to spend the rest of your earthly life with. It's a long time folks Way longer than you're going to have a job or have children in your house or your parents are going to be around, have a career, any of that stuff. So one thing that's been on my mind. It stays on my mind quite a bit honestly, but I don't know if dichotomy is the right word here. I wish that my grandmother or my mother were sitting here beside me right now because they could tell me.

Speaker 1: 11:48

But there's something that we don't understand today in America about the First Amendment and about religious freedom, individual religious freedom and what our founders were really talking about in the First Amendment the ability of an individual citizen to choose to worship the one true God, the Father of Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, right, or to worship no God, which is really just worshiping the state, right. Everybody worships something, folks, even the atheists. They worship either evolution or the state, right, everybody worships something. It's just a matter of what you choose. Is it the one true god? Is it a false god? Is it evolution? Is it the state? Is it Islam? Is it Buddhism, hinduism, right? Mother Nature-ism, satan? Everybody worships something, folks. I guess you could make the argument, for some people, even just self worship of self.

Speaker 1: 12:53

The First Amendment, that idea of religious freedom, of freedom from persecution by the state, including the state-run churches, of which there were multiple different ones in Europe. That's what our founders were trying to get at. They knew that you couldn't force a man to a particular faith or not to a particular faith. It had to be their own conscience and it had to be freedom of that conscience for them to choose which way they were going to go right. However and this is the part that we really don't get today, mostly because we just don't want to, because we've become so good at worshiping false gods and we like that, that we don't want to acknowledge the second half of this, which is what our founders understood.

Speaker 1: 13:46

America was set up as a Christian republic and we're going to go through some of these state constitutions and you're going to see this without doubt, not to mention so many other pieces of evidence that we've gone through over the years. But they understood that in order for America to function, the people as a whole had to follow the principles of Christ. And here's the kicker folks, not just in their private life but almost more importantly, in their public life, their private life, but almost more importantly in their public life as a nation, in our institutions, in our positions of power and authority, in our courts, in our laws. If we didn't follow the principles of Christ publicly in those spheres really big time education right we were going to fail. And we are today. That's exactly why we're failing. And they understood that those two sides of the same coin could both be true at the same time. Just because the nation followed the principles of Christ that in no way infringed upon the individual religious liberty of a person in their own home, just because, for example, you have a public education system centered around the Bible that teaches the principles of Christ, the Ten Commandments, and makes the Bible part of each class, that is not forcing a child or their parents to ascribe to the Christian faith. And so this First Amendment, when it says that you know we're not going to. I wish I had that in front of me. I should have got that. Anyway, I don't. You know we're not going to. I wish I had that in front of me, I should have got that. Anyway, I don't.

Speaker 1: 15:46

The First Amendment wasn't written to keep Christianity out of the public sphere. The First Amendment was written specifically to keep the federal government from identifying a particular Christian denomination as their favorite and forcing everyone to become part of that particular denomination. That's the key. That's what happened in Europe. A state would choose a particular favorite, whether it was Roman Catholic or some other version, and they would say everybody has to belong to this and if you don't, we're going to put you in prison. We're going to take all of your property. We're going to put you in prison. We're going to take all of your property. We're going to torture you. Right, you have to belong, and our founders didn't want that. But that's not the same thing at all as trying to kick Christianity out of the general principles of Christ, out of public life.

Speaker 1: 16:35

And so what we're going to do over the next couple of days is we're going to go back and look at these original state constitutions, because that's another piece of this puzzle that we don't understand today is the founders, when they wrote this federal constitution, there were already a number of state constitutions in place that spoke specifically about about the state's relationship with faith, and so the federal government didn't want to come in and start stepping on toes and taking power away from those states. The states had already covered the subject, they were taking care of it, and it wasn't the federal government's role, it wasn't their responsibility. So the only thing they put in there and you've got to remember Fisher Ames, the guy that actually crafted, worded this establishment clause is the same guy that said that the Bible ought to be the primary textbook Not just a textbook, but the primary textbook in our schools, schools. And so you have to have a pretty twisted mentality to think that the guy that actually wrote the establishment clause in one breath should say that the Bible should be the primary textbook in all of our schools and, in the same breath, mean, in his wording of the first amendment, that Jesus Christ should have no place in any of our public life. Right?

Speaker 1: 18:07

So we're going to start and go through this, and I guess the first thing is I wonder how many of us, off the top of our head, could say what the 13 original colonies were. Right, I'll give you a second to kind of think and go through your head there. How many can you name? I'll give you a second to kind of think and go through your head there. How many can you name? Because I'm betting most of us would actually struggle which is sad with naming the 13 original colonies and states, right, new Hampshire, massachusetts, rhode Island, connecticut, new York, new Jersey, pennsylvania, delaware, maryland, virginia, north Carolina, south Carolina and Georgia, right. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go through a few of these, and I think I'm going to start with I forgot which one I think we're going to start. So I'm pulling this off of the Avalon Project. By the way, it's a great website online. It's run by Yale Don't let that intimidate you or scare you off and they have a lot of the original documents, historical documents of our country, posted online where you can go through and look at them.

Speaker 1: 19:32

So we're going to start with Delaware. Just because that's the first one I ran into, I don't know how much time we have left Oof, not a lot. I'll read one little blip out of Delaware, because I have it here right in front of me, or I did so. This is out of Article 22. Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house or appointed to any office or place of trust, before taking his seat or entering upon the execution of his office, shall take the following oath or affirmation if conscientiously scrupulous of taking an oath to writ, I state your name will bear true allegiance to the Delaware State, submit to its constitution and laws and do not act wittingly whereby the freedom thereof may be prejudiced, and also make and subscribe the following declaration I state your name, do profess faith in God, the Father, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost one. God blessed forevermore, and I do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration. And all officers shall also take an oath of office.

Speaker 1: 20:50

We'll come back to this. That's just a start. 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.