Speaker 1: 0:02

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, giving me a little piece of your day. Hopefully it helps it go a little better, gives you something to look forward to, maybe for a few minutes, with somebody Spouse, parents, children, friends, coworkers. For those of y'all that continue to support the podcast, tell others about it, thank y'all so much. For those of y'all that leave encouraging words online or in person, thank you so much. And for those of y'all that pray for the podcast and for me, thank you so much. Very, very grateful.

Speaker 1: 1:10

We moved the chicks to the bigger pen. I think I told you all that that was quite entertaining. They were not impressed but they seem quite happy now. And I'm going to tell a little on my wife right now. These ducks that we got earlier in the year, that she's wanted for years. She's quite entertained with them and at some point I'm going to have to build a duck pond because there's a pothole in our dirt road and she keeps filling it up with water for these ducks to play on. We're going to end up needing a bridge to get out of the driveway, to go over this pothole that keeps growing. I don't know what we're going to do about that.

Speaker 1: 2:06

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 and forgiveness. Thank you for all the blessings you bestow upon us. Father, forgive us our lack of gratitude. Forgive us our selfishness, our pride, our greed, our lust. Help us to seek you, father, in your kingdom first, to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength, to love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to store up for ourselves treasures in heaven, father, where rust and moth don't destroy, and to not chase after the treasures of this world. Watch over those who are hurting, who are alone and scared. Help us to care for the widow and the orphan, the poor and the needy. Give us the opportunity each day to share a cup of water with a child in your name, and help us to act on it. Help us not to be distracted by the enticements of this world. Father, protect us from the evil one. And God, my words here. Father, please, in your Son's name, we pray Amen. Have you made time for your Bible for God made time to pray today. Have you made that the center of your day, or are we just kind of shoving God in the spaces when we get a chance? Is he our first goal each day or our last resort? Are we really focused on growing closer to God each day and doing His will, however long he has left us here? You know my whole life.

Speaker 1: 4:56

I have been told by people, from parents to teachers to ministers, that, god, if you're still here on this earth, god's got a purpose for you. And the older I've gotten, I think there's really two reasons that God leaves us on this earth. One is because we're not where he wants us to be yet as far as our faith and our maturity, and he's leaving us here a little bit longer in the hopes that we actually wake up and mature a little bit and become more useful to him. And the other is that we are useful to him and that he needs us to do something, wants us to do something. Not need in the sense that he couldn't get somebody else to do it, folks, but need in the sense that it's what's best for us and it's accomplishing his will.

Speaker 1: 6:06

And I'm sure that some of y'all out there would say, well, that's probably a little bit of both is true for a lot of people, and you may be right, probably are. But don't we want to work toward the point where, more and more, it's not that we're being left here because there's something so missing in us that we need to mature, we need to strengthen our faith? But don't we want to work to the point where, if God's leaving us here, it's because we're effective for Him, for His will, right? Not that there's some deficiency in us, as much as that. There's some benefit that we can give to others, helping them grow closer to Christ, not because we're such of a detractor or a weakness for Christianity, but because we help it to grow.

Speaker 1: 7:10

And I know that's a real complicated subject. You start talking about somebody like David, who obviously had so many faults and yet was still a man after God's own heart. You talk about God telling us that he shows his strength through our weakness, right? So I get it's a little bit of a complicated topic, but wouldn't we want to try and do better and better the longer we're here, whatever that entailed? And how can we possibly do that if we're not spending time with God each day. How can we make our marriage better, our family stronger, our church stronger, our community, our schools stronger, our nation, our state? How can we make any of those things stronger, better, if we're not making ourselves better, stronger, spending more time with God?

Speaker 1: 8:07

Just a thought and if you're married folks, does your spouse know it? Or are you just two separate people living in the house, paying the bills together, feeding the kids together? Are you the center of each other's world, outside of God and Jesus Christ? Or are you just lukewarm and indifferent and you're ready to make excuses about why you don't have time or energy for your spouse, especially when you're giving so much time and energy to sports phones, tvs, books, music, workouts, friends, parents. Right, you don't have time for this person that you told God you were going to love forever, that you claimed was the most important person in the entire world to you ever. You don't have time and energy for them, but you do for all these other people and things. That dog won't hunt folks, as I've heard people that I grew up with say before State constitutions, we'll see how many we get through. Today we are going to start with uh-oh, it went away. I think this is where we left off last time. I'm not sure. Forgive me if it's not Constitution of Delaware 1776.

Speaker 1: 9:33

I want you all to notice a couple things when we're going through here. There's a couple of patterns that you'll see, which makes sense, because a lot of these were within a year or two of themselves being crafted and it was the same environment, right? So it makes sense that they would be similar. One thing you'll see is this concept of separation of power. You will see that if somebody is serving in one position or one capacity, they really don't want them. Well, they made it impossible for them to serve in another capacity. And you'll see it right.

Speaker 1: 10:16

What a lot of people would do is when you see it here with a minister, and there's a couple instances where they talk about if you're serving as a minister or a clergy member, you can't serve as a representative or senator or any other official capacity, right? And a lot of people today would say, oh see, they didn't want a theocracy, which is true. But then they go a little further and they say they didn't want Christianity to have anything to do with the government, which is not true. What they didn't want is they didn't want the dangers of having the state and church combine, which had happened in so many places in Europe with some of the denominations there, and so they wanted to keep that separate. But you're also going to see it with other positions, like if you're serving as an officer in the Army or the Navy, if you're serving as a treasurer, treasurer or some other kind of secretary, then you can't serve as a senator and a representative, and you're going to see some a couple in one or two of the state constitutions a comment about how important the role of ministers was and that they didn't want to detract from their job of saving souls actually the way that one state constitution read it, and so this idea that this was all about keeping Christianity out of the government is completely false. What they really wanted to do is they wanted to make sure that there wasn't any overlap of responsibility. Right, if you were going to be in the Army and the Navy, they really needed you to focus on that. If you were going to be the state treasurer, they really needed you to focus on that. Not also be a representative or a senator? Right, because sometimes those roles might be conflicting. Same thing with a minister. If you were going to be a minister or clergyman. They really wanted you to focus on that.

Speaker 1: 12:23

So so kind of see that that separation that's one thing to look for as we're going through the state constitutions is the separation of power, separation of power. Another thing is this idea of religious freedom that no man should be compelled to join any particular church or go to any particular place of worship. That every man ought to be free by the dictates of their own conscience and how they worship God, where they worship, if they worship, right. But at the same time, you see that you're going to see in a number of these constitutions that the only people that were allowed to serve as leaders in the government were Christians and really particularly Protestants and so, but certainly those that established that declared faith in Jesus Christ, and so this is something that we really don't get.

Speaker 1: 13:33

I talked about it quite a bit on the last podcast. Individual religious freedom is in no way infringed by requiring that our institutions and our leaders be Christian and follow the principles of Christ. You can't have America if you don't have leaders in positions of authority in public life and institutions who are Christian. And again you're going to notice in a few of these they particularly say Protestant. That doesn't infringe at all on the ability of an individual person to have religious freedom. And then it really ties in. You're going to see that it ties in really well with Justice Joseph Story's commentaries on the Constitution, which we've talked about a number of times, and that First Amendment, the Establishment Clause, and his comment that it was the general sentiment, almost the universal sentiment, of that founding generation that Christianity ought to be helped as much by the state as possible, as long as it didn't infringe on those individual, the conscience of an individual person. I didn't say that very well, but hopefully that made sense. So just kind of look for some of those things as we're going through.

Speaker 1: 15:09

This is Delaware 1776. This is 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, I state your name will bear true allegiance to the Delaware State, submit to its Constitution and laws and do not act wittingly whereby thy freedom thereof may be prejudiced, and also make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit 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 Right. So you see here, just in this first one in Delaware, that not only you've got to admit that Jesus Christ is the only son of God in order to serve in any official capacity, and you've got to remember, while we're going through these, that at this time, when they wrote the federal constitution, they were leaving the majority of the powers with the states, and this was a huge one. The states had already discussed what they wanted to happen as far as the relationship with God and Jesus Christ and positions of authority, and so the federal government wasn't going to step in and take that power away because it didn't belong to the federal government. It had already been addressed by the states in their constitutions. And so this is a great example here in Delaware, 1776.

Speaker 1: 17:44

If you want to serve, you don't have to believe in God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as a citizen of Delaware, but if you want to serve in any office or place of trust, you're going to have to acknowledge, you're going to have to be a Christian, you're going to have to follow Jesus Christ, you're going to have to acknowledge God, the Father, jesus Christ, the Son and the Holy Spirit. You're going to have to acknowledge that the Bible was given by divine inspiration, by God. And here's this part. So this is the same Constitution. That was Article 22. This is Article 29. There shall be no establishment of any one religious sect in this state in preference to another, and no clergyman or preacher of the gospel of any denomination shall be capable of holding any civil office, any civil, once in this state, or of being a member of either of the branches of the legislature while they continue in the exercise of the pastoral function. And so if you're going to serve, you can't be an active clergy member. And that goes right back to.

Speaker 1: 19:08

This is the heart of the difference between Europe and Great Britain in particular, and America. They didn't want the state and the church mixing as far as authority went. They didn't want individuals serving in both capacities, where they got to the point where everybody had to belong to a certain denomination or they were going to be imprisoned, tortured or had their property confiscated. But they very much acknowledged God and His Son, jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as the highest authority. See, that's two completely different things and we don't really understand that today. We like to pretend that we do, but you can tell by the way that we act that we don't.

Speaker 1: 20:06

Man-made religion, denomination controlling government is a bad thing. Our founders didn't want that. It ends. It just never works out well. But acknowledging the principles of God and Jesus Christ in our public life is literally what has made America phenomenal throughout its history. Every time we get closer to those principles, we get better. Every time we get farther away, we get worse. So we'll move on to others. Some of these are going to be pretty fast because they don't have a lot Not all of the state constitutions. I think Georgia or New Hampshire, I can't remember right now. They don't all have something about God and Jesus Christ, but quite a few of them do. God bless y'all. God bless your families. God bless your marriages. God bless America. We'll talk to y'all again real soon, looking forward to it.